When I got home one night, Donna told me that Cheryl had rung and invited us over to her and JR’s place for dinner the next night. ‘Who else is going?’ I asked.
‘Cheryl thought you’d want to know that. She said Chance and a couple of Cheryl’s girlfriends and that’s it.’
‘Give her a ring back and tell her we’ll be there.’
We rocked up about 7 pm. Cheryl had roast beef with all the goodies. Another great feed. Us fellers were yakking away. Sometimes we couldn’t hear ourselves over the girls’ cackling. After we’d finished, the girls took all the dishes and that out to the kitchen and Donna helped Cheryl with the washing up. JR, Chance and I disappeared down to his bunker and let off a few rounds. In between our shots, we’d sit on one of the lounges and he’d get drinks from the fridge he had down there.
Chance and JR were talking shop when Chance turned to me. ‘Caesar, do you know the spot on the body where coroners hardly ever look for puncture marks?’
‘Let me guess. The belly button.’
‘How’d you know that?’
‘I saw it on a TV show about three months ago.’
‘What show?’
‘I don’t know. Quincy, or something like that.’
‘They had that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I’ll be fucked. But it’s true. They hardly ever check belly buttons for a needle mark. That’s my favourite spot to put ’em. I used to have a problem getting it in there when the patient was squirming, but since you showed me that sleeper hold with the pressure point on the neck, it’s been a lot easier.’
He was talking about the artery and nerve on the left side of the neck. If you put your thumb and fore-finger in and pull them out and squeeze hard, it knocks a person out in eight or nine seconds. The longer you hold it, the longer they’re out. You’ve just got to watch that you don’t hold it too long and kill them.
The more high-profile people that Chance got rid of couldn’t just be dumped out at sea or put through the mincer. Their disappearances would have created too much of an uproar. The cops would have been all over it. So he had to make them look like accidents, or, his favourite, the injection of potassium chloride to make them look like heart attacks. Potassium chloride has been used in the States for lethal injections in death-row executions. The heart muscles just stop working, so it looks like a heart attack to investigators because it is a heart attack.
We got back to the topic of guns. Both JR and Chance knew more about how to pull a gun apart and put it back together than I did. I could do it, but not like them. I was just as good a shot, however, and we had a few competitions going until Cheryl came down the stairs saying the girls were getting bored.
When we went back up, Cheryl’s girlfriends weren’t too interested in what JR had to say. They were over at me and Chance wanting to know what outlaw bikers did and would we take ’em for a ride. Donna was quick to jump in, ‘Well, Chance might take you for a ride. But Caesar isn’t.’ Chance’s old lady jumped in just as quick. ‘And neither will Chance.’ So that shot the two girlfriends down.