Meat me there.

This is a brilliant idea, if you're into murdering people. Kill them with meat! Feed the investigators the murder weapon! I wonder if it's ever been done - if anyone has ever been clubbed to death with a big ole' slab of frozen meat. I can imagine a conflict in a meat-packing facility and/or slaughterhouse could get ugly, fast. Of all workplaces, they probably have a respectable array of possible weapons there.

Scenario: Two guys work in a meat-packing plant. There's something shady going on: I'm seeing this taking place somewhere in Jersey, and there's mob connections all over the place. There's this new guy, and we'll call him Joe. Joe's this new guy at the plant, real good kid, smart and honest. Working to take care of his ill mother. He starts sniffing around and realizes that everyone around him is crooked, that some of these guys practically wrote the book on crime. He gets nervous and sort of flips open the phone book to look up the number for the local FBI office a few times, but is too scared to call. He's from New Jersey, there's not a kid that grows up in that state who doesn't know that the mob's not something you mess with. There was a mob hit in the parking lot of my school once - true story.

Anyway, so Joe's this real good kid who's a little too smart. He keeps his mouth shut for now, but his boss, this big rising star in one of the major families, he's a little nervous. So the boss takes one of his most trusted employees - Tony, we'll call him, because no mob story is complete without at least one Tony - the boss takes Tony aside and talks to him one day, man-to-man, we're-in-this-together. He puts his arm around Tony's shoulder and tells him, real serious like, that they've got to do something about Joe. This kid is too smart, he knows too much already. We've got to do something about this, you know what I'm saying?

So Tony's psyched about this. He's being trusted, because this is real important and if he does this right, he's gonna get more of that. More trust, more money, more girls: this is gonna be great for Tony.

Tony's not a dumb guy, either. So he doesn't try to scare Joe. Tony's elegant, he's refined. He's learned from the best. He's talking to Joe one day on their break and he brings something up. They're just sitting there out back on upside-down milk crates, both smoking, just leaning against the brick wall and half-heartedly waving away the flies and mosquitos, and Joe brings something up. He looks around, makes sure no one's around, and he says, "I think that the boss-mans into something." He says this real calmly. "I found-" he says, and then stops, looks around again. Acting like he's real nervous, right? "I found some stuff. Been hearing some stuff." Again he looks around, acting real nervous to be saying this. "Meet me here tonight," he tells Joe. "Meet me at two. No one'll be here then, and we can talk. Privately."

Joe buys right into it, because Joe knows something's not legit here. So he agrees to meet Tony that night, real trusting. So Joe goes home to his mom, makes her dinner and they watch some TV, a real normal night. He doesn't even let on that this is happening, Joe's a real smart kid. But he sets the alarm on his watch and leaves his house, just walks right out the front door, at about one-thirty, gets in his crappy car - it's a Nissan and the heat doesn't work so good, and the brakes squeak like a dying rat when it's raining, but it gets him to work on time most days - Joe gets in his car, and drives down to the plant. No one's there, but the door he uses every morning at nine AM is open. So Joe goes in and it's all dark, but he's not real scared. He used to be scared of the dark, terrified, until one time when he was six and went monster-hunting with his dad. They spent half the night searching under tables, in closets, in cabinets - didn't find a single monster. Anyway, Joe's dad died when he was fourteen but everytime it's dark Joe thinks of that, and it makes him feel good. Brave, even. He's no hero, but his dad, well - anyway, that doesn't matter so much. Joe never talked about his dad.

So Joe, this poor kid, goes looking in the dark for Tony, and kinda wishes he did have a flashlight, just so he could find him faster. He searches everywhere, and can't find Tony. He looks everywhere, even the bosses office - locked and empty. Finally, he's about to give up, and decides to check the big freezer, the one with the big sides of beef and huge shelves of chickens and slabs of pork hanging from the ceiling. Officially it's the Deep-Freeze Storage Unit, but everyone just calls it the Freezer. The light is on there, Joe sees as soon as he opens the door, so he walks in and lets the door shut behind him. You can't get locked in there, there's a safety mechanism that'll force the door open no matter what. And Tony's there, and Tony's waiting for him, and there's this look in Tony's eyes like nothing Joe's ever seen before, and it damn near makes him piss himself. Tony looks mad and crazy, like that guy with one arm who Joe saw every summer growing up, down the shore. Real crazy, just like that, only even worse, because Joe knows Tony, and this isn't him.

Tony doesn't even give Joe a second to react. He's been thinging about it all day and working himself up to it, past it, into a frenzy, and when Joe finally walks in it's like instinct, he just grabs one of the chickens off the shelf. These things are hard - they're frozen solid, way below freezing. It's forty degrees below freezing in there and these things sit for days like that, and they're like little bowling balls with legs stickin' out. Hard as rocks, but it still takes three hits to the back of his head before Joe goes down, and then Tony hits him a few more times just to be sure.

It's easy, from there. Real easy. There's a big incinerator that burns all the time, to keep up. They gotta do something with the rejects, the meat that's spoiling or gets contaminated and stuff, so they keep this big furnace blasting around the clock. The only hard part is getting the body - already a body, really - to the dump room. It's deadweight, and Joe's a small guy, but still a hundred fifty, sixty pounds of deadweight. Tony finally drops him on the conveyor belt and pushes the green button, watching it move toward the chute.

Once it's been done and he's sure it's done, Tony hits the stop button and the conveyor belt shudders to a stop and for a second the silence makes him uneasy. But this is big, and the boss is gonna be real happy, 'cause Tony did everything exactly the way it should be. They used to bury people in the dunes, he knew. They'd hit someone and then drive out down the shore, Asbury Park or somewhere, and bury them in the dunes. Then three weeks later some Shoobee would find a piece of cloth sticking out or something and Tony knew that was when it got bad, when the cops got called.

He smiled. This way, there was no clothing left, no weapon, no grave. Nothing but a chicken.

Note one: Sorry. I just got a little bit carried away there. Um...everyone occasionally gets carried away with a murder. You know how it is, right?
Note two: The thing about a mob hit in my school parking lot is, in fact, true. The guy actually used to live one house down from me and was a real dick. He dealt, he was in with the mob, and he abused his wife and kids (who I hated, too, but that's another story). They moved, no one heard from them, a few years ago they found him with a bullet in his head in his pickup truck. Granted, not the actual school parking lot, but in the American Legion parking lot which is, like, on school property.