Pietro almost glided down the sidewalk, everything about him neat and dark, a two-dimensional cutout of a man quickstepping past mailboxes and lawn ornaments. He drew stares, but not as many as you’d expect. He made noise, but not as much as he could’ve. He shouldered a huge black duffel, carried it more effortlessly than made any sense to a reasonable onlooker. He was making good time.
It used to be that clients would have him dropped right outside of a worksite, but with the advent of all those fancy, WiFi-enabled doorbell cameras, his handlers had decided it was safer for them to drop him off a few blocks away and have him walk the remaining distance. Any cameras at the worksite are sure to have been disabled by the time he arrives, but the Movers couldn’t be expected to do the same for every house on the street, and it was best practice not to have their transport vans be too easily associated with their workforce.
He was a block away from the client when a group of schoolchildren shouldered past him on the sidewalk. He smiled politely at them, stepped aside, and turned to continue on his way.
“Bald!”
Pietro paused, his smile widening a fraction, and swiveled to face the little girl who’d called out to him. The rest of her friends were up ahead, heedless. She was the only one of the group who’d clocked him.
“Pardon me?” His voice was soft and gentle. He liked talking to children. It was rare that he got the chance to talk to anyone.
“You’re so bald. Why?”
Pietro ran one gloved hand across his perfectly hairless scalp, then tapped the bare patch of flesh where his right eyebrow should’ve been. “You’ve got a good eye. I am more bald than most people.”
“You don’t even have eyelashes. Are you sick?”
“Very good! I don’t. Most people don’t even notice that part.” Pietro re-shouldered his bag. As much as he was enjoying the dialogue, he knew he was burning valuable time. “I’m not sick, thank you for asking. It’s just for my job.”
“You’re bald… for your job.” The girl screwed her mouth up at this, processing. “Why?”
“I’m a cleaner. An almost perfect one, really. And I wouldn’t be leaving things perfectly clean if I was dropping hairs and eyelashes all over the place, now would I?”
The girl took a second to consider this, then nodded sagely. “That makes sense.”
“Your friends are waiting for you.” Pietro nodded up at the group of children, now nearly a block up ahead. When the girl turned to look after them he hurried away, hustling off with his strange, soundless, frictionless gait.
He paused at the stoop of the Mark’s house and pressed his ear against the door, listening. After a precise mental 30 count he sniffed: good, no obvious stink yet, that’d buy him some breathing room. He added another rough twenty minutes to his predicted work window, and tested the latch. The door swung open, unlocked, and he stepped through the front of the townhome and into something resembling a slaughterhouse.
The body was gone, of course. Movers usually took care of that, or the Muscle, well before he or any other Mop would arrive, right before leaving the door unlocked for him. But the human body is more than just its frame: it contained, as Pietro was well aware at this point in his career, gallons and gallons of extra bits, many of which were smeared around this anonymous Mark’s conjoined kitchen-living room.
Not their neatest work, Pietro thought to himself as he opened his duffel. He unrolled the massive bag and it folded flat onto the carpet, displaying neatly arrayed rows of specialty equipment: his babies.
He slipped on a ventilator, retrieved a collapsible, high-powered steam cleaner that cost about as much as a new car, and got to work.
The gore never bothered Pietro. It hadn’t, not really, in his entire living memory. If he’d ever been allowed to talk to another Mop he’d have been quite interested to hear if this was true for them as well, or if he just had a particularly steady constitution.
The blood was already pretty much dried, and easy enough to scrape and steam off of the carpet and appliances and, aww, fridge magnets. The Mark had a family: one of the magnets featured the man, burly and grey, presenting trout to the camera, flanked on either side by two younger, yet equally huge, men, all with the same thick hair, the same heavy brow.
Pietro was unmoved by this, of course. Most Marks had families. Plus, it’s not like he’d been the one who’d--huh, look at that--popped the poor man’s ear off and somehow flung it behind the coffee maker.
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The scorch marks were harder to handle, and were more numerous than usual at this site. In nearly twenty years of this work, Pietro had never actually seen a Murder before, and was just as baffled as always as to what the hell all the burns were about. Blood makes sense: guns, knives, clubs, whatever they were killing these people with, that’d make plenty of blood. The burn marks, though, the big black streaks of ash and the scorched furniture, they were too sparse to be the product of, what would it even be, a flamethrower? That’d just burn the house down, surely. And that’s not even touching on the weirder remnants he sometimes came across: patches of frost caked on walls, wide impact craters on concrete floors. Once, in a previous Mark’s garage, he’d mopped blood up from beneath a VW Bug that had somehow been flipped completely upside down and crushed like a can.
Compared to that, this would be a pretty straightforward clean. Already done with steaming out most of the more visible stains on the carpet, Pietro retrieved his wetmop and returned to the kitchen to focus on the floors. He was only a few strokes in when the front door swung open.
“Hey, ok, listen, I know the game’s at five, but Bekah needed a lift to her hair thing at three, and that’s just down the street, so-” the huge figure sidling in through the front door stammered to a stop as his eyes met Pietro’s. They both froze.
“The fuck are you?” The man, one arm weighed down by a bag of groceries, kicked the door shut behind him, hard. His jaw was set. He looked immediately, violently suspicious.
“Cleaning service!” Pietro responded, voice as level and chipper as he could manage. He set his mop down and stepped toward the intruder, soft and steady. “Just here to tidy up. Did your father not mention I was coming by today?”
“How d’you know-”
“Oh, I just assumed. Your photo’s up on the fridge.”
The man blinked, reeling a bit. He set the bag down and glowered at Pietro. “This doesn’t make any sense. He wouldn’t… Dad?”
Pietro took a few steps closer, wincing at the sound of the man yelling. He hoped no neighbors could hear.
“Dad?! Where is he? Why isn’t he home? Who the fuck are-” The man’s gaze flicked from Pietro for just a moment, landed directly on the discarded mop, the clear bloodstains. Over the course of a moment he paled a shade, then reached for his waistband.
Pietro winced as pain lanced through his head, a sudden, obliterating migraine like a harpoon through his eye socket. His vision swam with odd, smudged colors, obscuring all but the figure of the man before him, whose motion suddenly accelerated, jerky and unnaturally fast.
He watched as the man whipped a sidearm out, yelled something unintelligible, and then, his vision inexplicably sliding back, like a camera panning up and out to capture the whole of the room, Pietro saw himself get shot in the face. He watched the man walk up to his body and unload, over and over, into his corpse. He witnessed his own last breath.
All of this sped up, too fast, played out before his eyes in much less than a second. Instinctively, Pietro ducked, stumbled forward, and reached out, triggering a spring-loaded mechanism on his forearm.
It took a moment for him to realize that he hadn’t, in fact, been shot and killed, as his vision returned to normal and the agony in his head was shunted away, sucked out in an instant. He blinked to see that the man hadn’t even managed to wrangle his gun out of his jeans. He was too busy staring down, goggle-eyed, at the hypodermic needle sticking from his forearm, at the thin wire and spring connecting it to Pietro’s wrist.
“What-” the man swallowed. “What’s in that?”
Pietro somehow found the strength to keep his voice steady, reassuring. “It’s just a sedative.”
“You killed him?” The man stumbled to one knee, eyes already losing focus. A fleck of froth formed on his lips. “You gonna- You killing me?”
“No, no. No. To both. No.” Pietro guided the man down to the floor, helped him prop himself against the wall. He reached up and slid his ventilator off his face, to show the man his smile. “It’s just a tranquilizer. Sorry, company policy for unexpected intruders, that’s all. You’ll wake up with a nasty headache, but nothing worse.”
The man’s head lolled. “Nnh. Kild him. Always said theyd- theyd gettim.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, please. Just relax.”
“Trank…quilizer?” The man looked at him pleadingly. A thin trickle of blood was creeping down out of one of his nostrils.
“Yes, of course. Just a tranquilizer. Promise.”
“Who… are you? Wgh- w…why?”
Pietro’s smile flickered. “Nobody. And it’s my job.”
Within a few seconds, the man was limp, and the house was quiet again.
Pietro gathered himself up, reflexively brushing off the knees of his pants. He stood still for a moment, took a deep, shuddering breath, and then produced a nondescript flip phone from his pocket and dialed a single number.
“Hello,” he said, after a single ring. “Yes, Mop 9. Terribly sorry, but we’ve got-”
He stole another glance at the man, suppressed another shudder.
“I’m compromised. No, I’m… No. I’m safe. But we’ll need another Mover back here. Yes. An additional fatality. I’ll handle the extra cleanup, shouldn’t affect our window. Yes. Right. Thank you.”
Pietro closed his phone. He allowed himself a few more seconds, to lean against the front door and breathe. An odd sound escaped his lips, something between a sob and a hiccup. Then he pulled his ventilator back on and went back to work.