Sparkle Read Free

have to think about Sparkle Cleaners as a business. He preferred to consider it occupational therapy for his younger brother, the only thing that could keep Eddie content and on an even keel.
    Now Joe had to look at this beautiful dark house in the rain and fight off the urge to think of it as a place that had recently held a prosperous, alive—maybe even happy—family.
    A perfectly crummy way to start another perfectly crummy day.
    Joe and Eddie were partners. In the six years the Jones brothers had run Sparkle Cleaners, they’d managed to snag a decent percentage of the market in Seattle’s homicide and suicide cleanup business. Business had its ups and downs, but fortunately there wasn’t much competition.
    And Sparkle offered one thing that no one else could: Eddie.
    Joe was aware that most people who knew about the brothers’ specialized area of cleaning expertise—the coroner’s office, the police, and the rest—felt a little sorry for them. But he also knew that they all agreed: regardless of Eddie’s disability, he could make a nasty mess go away like nobody else. Time and again, the response to one of Eddie’s cleanups was the same: “It’s like nothing bad ever happened here.”
    And the next time someone blew out their brains, Sparkle Cleaners would get the call.
    At one time Sparkle had been a regular janitorial business, doing mostly high-end residential jobs. But ever since the first request came in to clean up something bloody—the owner of one of the houses they serviced had shot himself in the chest—Eddie had refused to do anything else.
    It had taken Joe quite a while and a lot of headaches to figure out the program. The last thing he’d wanted was to get into the blood-and-guts business. Eddie, though, despite his severe difficulties communicating with most people, knew exactly how to get through to his older brother. He had made his wishes perfectly, unrelentingly clear.
    Once Joe finally yielded and agreed to make crime scene cleanups their specialty, things seemed to ease up a bit for the brothers. The six-day OSHA certification course had been a real challenge for Eddie, but he’d given it everything he had. Joe was relieved to find out that they could get by fine with the equipment they already owned. The main difference, really, was that they could no longer simply dump their garbage. But they passed along the cost of biohazard disposal to the customer, and they could easily bill four or five times what they could charge for ordinary cleaning. All in all, a great deal.
    Once Joe had lugged all the gear up onto the house’s big porch, he went back out to the van and opened Eddie’s door. Eddie sat quietly, hands resting in his lap, looking straight ahead.
    “Okay, bro,” Joe said. “Time to come get suited up. You ready to go to work?”
    Eddie was more than ready. He was eager.
    “Uh-huh,” he said. “Okay.”
    He silently followed Joe up the stairs and waited patiently as Joe unbagged a fresh hazmat coverall. Eddie mechanically pulled it on outside on the covered porch.
    Like Joe, Eddie Jones couldn’t remember much about his childhood even if he’d wanted to. There was one thing, though, and just like Joe’s memory, it came to him over and over again—his mom’s blood.
    There was nothing else in the memory, only the blood. Eddie remembered how much of it there was. How rich and earthy it smelled, leaving a slight metallic tang at the back of his tongue. How it started wet, seeming to waver and writhe as its slick crimson dulled to sticky plum, and then crusted over until it was nearly black.
    Eddie could only watch as his mom’s blood changed from something alive to something hard, cold, and dead. Unlike Joe’s, Eddie’s memory didn’t leave him feeling good or bad. In fact, the memory had a way of recementing the fact that he usually didn’t feel much at all.
    All he could do was watch his own emotions harden and die along with the blood, until he was utterly