100 Ways to Kill a Doctor Halloween Challenge

(my response to Dsnynutz's prompt)

RULES:

1. Sheldon/Penny - They can be platonic, romantic, smutty, Super Heroes/Villains, etc.

2. Leonard/Amy's death MAY occur anytime from the Pilot thru Season 9.

3. The death must be completed in a single chapter, although you are welcome to contribute as many different forms of death as you like as long as they are a chapter each.

4. The story must be no more than 1,500 words long.

5. Deadline is October 31, 2015.

Howard was watching reruns of Battlestar Galactica when his phone rang. He was relieved that one of his friends was finally calling. Honestly, now that they were all in relationships, they didn't do nearly as many fun things together as they used to.

The voice on the other end of the line said, "Howard, I need you to come over to Amy's apartment as soon as you can get here. Bring a shower curtain, a chainsaw and some bleach."

"Uh…" Howard's mind went blank with shock for a moment, then he relaxed. "Oh yeah, you had me going there for a while. Good one, Penny. It really sounded like you wanted me to help you hide a body."
"I introduced you to Bernadette. If it wasn't for me, you'd still be all alone instead of happily married. You owe me, Howard," Penny hissed.

Howard swallowed hard. "I can be there in twenty," he promised and hung up.

He gathered the items Penny asked for, with a few modifications. A chainsaw would be too messy, so he bundled up his mom's diamond-bladed knife set. She may have bought them off the Home Shopping Network, but they used to cut through her brisket like it was butter. He also grabbed a bottle of enzyme-based cleaner instead of bleach. Feeling queasy, he made use of the bottle of ipecac that his mother had kept in the medicine cabinet since he was an infant. The stuff may have been almost thirty years old, but it still worked. He felt better once he had emptied the contents of his stomach. He washed his face and hands, grabbed a box of latex cleaning gloves from under the sink, and headed over to Amy's place.

"What took you so long?" Penny demanded as she let him in.

"Hey, it took some time to get everything…" he trailed off as he saw Amy lying face down on the floor of the kitchen. There was a small pool of blood under her head.

"What the frak did you do, Penny?" he whispered.

"I didn't mean to… at least, I think I didn't. I don't know, I was just so mad at her. She was telling me how she broke into Sheldon's office again."

"Again?" Howard asked in surprise.

Penny nodded. "She did it a couple of years ago, to rub her scent all over everything he uses," she said with a grimace. "Before she used her armpits, but since he still doesn't like to touch her, she did it again, this time with her…" She made a vague notion toward her crotch.

Howard's eyes widened. "You're kidding me. I'm a perv, and even I think that's disgusting. But did you really have to kill her?"

"Her purse was lying there on the counter," she said. "I just picked it up and swung it. Looks like she lied about having a coffee can full of coins inside just to take to the bank. She must have kept it for some sort of protection. I used to play softball, so I naturally just shifted my weight and followed through, even when the purse was a lot heavier than I was expecting. It hit her face, and there was this terrible noise…"

"And that's when you called me?" Howard asked.

"Not exactly," Penny said.

He followed her gaze over to the living room, and that was when he dropped his armful of clean-up supplies. Leonard lay in the middle of the room, gagged, blindfolded, and with his hands and feet tied behind his back in a way that looked excruciatingly uncomfortable.

"I don't understand," he said in a small voice.

"I called Leonard first," she said. "He showed up without any of the things I asked for. He said I'd have to turn myself in, and then he started talking about conjugal visits in prison like it turned him on, and that was when I lost it."

Howard took a deep breath. "He's the only witness?"

"Yeah," she whispered. "But I just couldn't bring myself to… you know."

Howard bent over his kit. He retrieved a long, thin-bladed knife from the knife block and walked over to Leonard. "Hey, buddy, lie still. I'm gonna have you out of here in a jiffy," he said. He picked up the knife, took a deep breath, and drove it at an upward angle from the base of Leonard's neck up into his skull. Leonard convulsed once and then sagged lifeless in his bonds.

"It had to be done," Howard muttered to himself. He was glad he had used the ipecac earlier though.

He turned back to Penny, who was very pale. "You called the right person," he said. "No one else in our group has managed to get away with as many illegal acts as I have without even being taken in for questioning. No one ever found out that I was the one who drove the Mars rover into a ditch, or stole the model jet propulsion engine, or installed that wireless remote camera above your shower, or dug up that topless scene from that horror movie that you did…"

"What?" Penny cried, lunging toward him.

Howard held up his hands defensively, still holding the knife. "Hey, hey, that was all in the past. I'm a reformed man now. Happily married, like you said. I just killed your boyfriend for you. You'd think you'd give a break for that at least."

"All right, fine," Penny grumbled. "But now we have two dead bodies. What are we going to do?"

"Simple," Howard said, putting down the knife and wrestling his phone out of his skin-tight pants. "I have a cousin who owns a fishing boat."

Disposing of the bodies was almost too easy. Howard mopped up the blood with his enzymatic cleaner, explaining to Penny that TV always showed people using bleach because they wanted criminals to use the wrong thing. "The problem is, the police are way too overworked to assign CSI's to every case. All we have to do is make it look like Leonard and Amy ran off together, and their case will get shoved to the bottom of a pile on a desk somewhere."

Wrapped up in plastic, Leonard and Amy's bodies looked just like trash, and Penny and Howard shoved the bundle out of the window and then loaded it into the trunk of Penny's car. An hour and a half later, they were on Howard's cousin's boat. It stank like rotting fish, which Howard explained was actually a good thing.

"This is a working fishing boat, so it always smells, it's always blood stained, and it's got hoses to wash down the decks," he pointed out as Penny carefully steered the boat out of the marina. An hour later, they arrived at a reef where dozens of sharks prowled the waters. They tossed body parts overboard as they cruised past the reef. Soon, triangular fins could be seen breaching the water as they fought over the unexpected bounty. They tossed the bloody shower curtain and knife into deeper waters a few miles distant, then headed back to shore.

"Once I get home, I'll hack Leonard and Amy's phones and credit cards," Howard said. "I can make it look like they've been having a secret affair for months. No one will ever know."

And no one ever did.