Poker Night

Here I am once again, sitting in the dark by myself. Mr. Johnson should be home within the next twenty minutes and I can already feel the adrenaline pumping in my veins from the thrill of the hunt, It’s already half way through. This hunt did not begin tonight, I’ve been planning it the past month. I’ve been following Rick Johnson around for that time and know his schedule by heart, although I have it written down with me. I started by finding a neighborhood I liked, something sleepy where the people hardly ever go out or bother one another. The kind of neighborhood where the guy living next to you could be on vacation for two weeks and you wouldn’t even realize it. I watched these houses, studied them. I made a list of the ones that would be easiest and quickest to break into. Rick’s house is perfect, first floor windows with the old latches that you can jimmy open with a screwdriver, usually has his blinds drawn, he has a dog which would normally be a problem but it’s a little thing. A shih tzu I think. Rick’s also perfect because he’s young, in his late twenties or early thirties, there’s no point in hunting if the prey is too easy to kill. Shooting fish in a barrel doesn’t interest me. The past couple weeks I’d been following him around and finding breaks in his schedule. Times at night where I know he will be out for a certain amount of time, enough for me to get into his house and be waiting for him. It’s Thursday night and he has a mixed martial arts class, which should have just gotten out.
I parked my car a block away about an hour ago, and walked the rest of the way here with my backpack full of supplies. After walking into Rick’s backyard inconspicuously, I quickly jimmied the window open and slid in and then promptly shut it making sure the exterior didn’t look anything like it shouldn’t to his neighbors. The dog was easy to take care of, he or she didn’t even fear me. Just picked it up, consoled it with a dog treat and then smothered it with a pillow. I put it into a heavy-duty trash bag, tied it and set it aside to worry about later.
In my backpack I had:
A roll of painters plastic, which is used to keep paint or any other liquids from getting onto floors or parts of walls it’s not supposed to.
A few zip ties to restrain Rick after I subdue him.
Duct tape to hold up the plastic.
A full body painter’s suit, to keep any un-wanted fluids off of my street clothes.
A razor blade for cutting.
A saw that can cut through bone.
A bottle of bleach for cleanup.
A rag along with a bottle of homemade chloroform.
And of course, plenty of heavy-duty trash bags.
Chloroform can be bought, but I’d rather not be put onto some list somewhere viewed by officers of the law. But it can be made with a process involving bleach and acetone and I have plenty premade with me. Headlights are coming from down the street and I take out the rag and get ready to soak it in the chloroform but not until I have to, this isn’t something you want getting soaked into your skin. I hear Rick’s garage door opening and I poise myself by the door, preparing the rag and setting the now closed bottle at a safe distance. It’s nice that Rick has an attached garage; it will make disposing of his remains a lot easier and safer. All this time I had not just been killing a dog and waiting in darkness, I took the time I had to line the floor, walls, and ceiling in his bathroom with plastic. Being neat is very important when it comes to this game.
The car is pulling in and I am ready to pounce on Rick and take him down before he has a chance to think about fighting back. The mechanism to the garage door begins again and the door leading into the house opens, before he has a chance to flip on the light switch I pounce. I grip the back of his head with my left hand very tightly and press the rag over his face like my life depends on it, because it does. He struggled for a second or two, but it was more confusion than anything. Within seconds he is on the floor and I am restraining him with zip ties, around the ankles, just above the knees, wrists put behind his back, and once he gets a few breaths of real air I tape his mouth shut. I don’t want him dead right now; I want him fully aware for the next process.
I have a few minutes before he begins to come to and then a few more until his mind is fully functional. I dump him in the bathtub and begin suiting up in the painter’s garb. After making sure my entire body is covered, I take the razor blade and cut his clothes off leaving his exposed flesh just waiting for my knife. I stuff his clothes into a trash bag, setting aside the keys to his car for later. This is about the time when he starts blinking again, I take out my knife, saw, and bleach, setting them on the toilet seat within reach and within sight of Rick. By now he is breathing very fast through his nostrils, looking around the room that now appears plastic and foreign.
“Hi Rick. It’s nice to finally meet you. I won’t go into any long explanations or reasons for why I’m doing this to you. Just know that I’m going to kill you, and I’ve put a lot of thought into it.”
A lot of grunting noises, heavy breathing, and panicked looks came next while I dragged my knife across his carotid artery, ear to ear as they say. The blood always spurts out like a hose at a first while the heart is pumping furiously, but then it slows down to a leak. After about a minute of excruciating pain Rick Johnson was no longer among the living. This is the part where you start to feel godlike, this is the climax, and everything else is foreplay and cleanup.
After their heart stops beating, it’s important to perform CPR on the corpse, this sort of manually makes the heart pump more blood out of the wound. I do this until the blood flow is almost not present. After doing I move Rick’s head out of the way of the drain and pour some bleach down there to keep the smell to a minimum for now. A lot more will be used later.
Now comes the part of the game that separates people who are caught from people who get away with killing another human being. Next I have to prepare the body for disposal. It’s a long and messy process that I have become accustomed to. I take the saw and go from top to bottom, starting with detaching the head from the body. This takes about ten minutes and after it’s a clean cut I double bag it in trash bags. Always double bag body parts, you don’t want a leaky bag to give you away near the end of the game. The rest of the cuts I make are at the armpits, the elbows, the upper legs, and finally the knees. I pair up appendages in bags and leave the torso in one bag to itself. This whole process takes about an hour to an hour and a half. By the end of all this I’m left with a bloody bathtub, bloody plastic, and a large pile of trash bags.
Now that I’m done with making Rick’s corpse easier to transport, I have to work on cleaning up and get ready to dump the body. I pour more bleach into the tub as I let the water run, If I didn’t do this then a terrible stench would surface after a few days. I thoroughly clean out the tub, putting any bits too big for the drain into a trash bag. After I’m satisfied with how clean the bathtub is I work on tearing down, placing the plastic on the walls and floor into trash bags. Finally I remove the painter’s suit and put it and any tools that came into contact with Rick into trash bags as well. Grabbing Rick’s keys I head out to the garage and pop the trunk in his car. I line the trunk with plastic just in case I get any leaks in the bags, I don’t think I will but being safe never hurts. I load Rick and rest of his demise into the trunk, and then give the house another once over. I gather all my things, putting them into my backpack when I realize I somehow almost forgot the bag with the dog in it. That would have been disastrous. Everything looks untouched, I make sure I lock the window I came in through.
After pulling the car out of the garage and shutting the garage door I drive down the road, passing my car as if it were just some stranger’s. The feeling you have while driving with a dead body and killing instruments in your trunk I imagine is a similar but magnified feeling that someone might have driving while smoking a joint or transporting drugs. That’s the only way I can make it relatable. You drive exactly the speed limit, make complete stops every time, every car looks like a cop car. You get the idea. I drive about an hour away and stop at a fast food restaurant that has been closed for a couple hours. Restaurants with a lot of consistent business have their dumpsters emptied at the beginning of every day, so I can trust that Rick’s body will be on it’s way to the dump tomorrow morning. Luckily there is enough room for all of the bags or else I would have made a second trip to unload the remaining evidence. After disposing of all the bags and the plastic I make certain that there aren’t any stains left behind in the trunk and there aren’t any. Driving back I’m still careful of my driving, I don’t want to get pulled over in someone else’s car.
Finally I arrive back at Rick’s house and park the car in the garage. Again, I give the house another look to make certain I didn’t leave anything behind that could be linked to me. Just to be safe I do some quick vacuuming with a vacuum cleaner I find in a closet and then wipe down any place that I may have touched. I walk out the front door, grabbing the knob with my shirtsleeve and then make sure it’s locked. I walk down to my car parked a block away. It’s about another hour long trip for me and I’m back at my house where I take off all the clothes I wore for the murder and immediately throw them in the wash, they didn’t have any blood on them thanks to the painters suit but I worry that there might be a fiber of his hair or something like that on them. After doing that I take a long hot shower playing the events of the evening over and over again in my head. After toweling off and admiring myself in the mirror for a few minutes I walk into the bedroom and slide into bed with my wife.
“How was poker night, John?”
“Eh, it was so so. Had some terrible luck.” I say adding a slight drunken tone to my voice.
“It’s probably because you have such a horrible poker face, I can always tell when you’re hiding something.” She says giving me a quick peck on the lips.
“Well nobody knows me like you do honey.”