Flesh

were on the lawn in front of the apartment house. He took a step toward two young men, probably students. One wore a robe, the other wore only boxer shorts. Both men backed away. No wonder, Jake thought. I’m not in uniform, I’ve got this machete.

“I’m a policeman,” he called. “One of you guys call the fire department.”

“I already called,” said a brunette woman in pajamas. “I hope nobody’s in that car,” she said.

“Nobody alive,” Jake said.

“How’d it start?” asked the guy in the boxer shorts.

Jake shook his head. Then he turned away. The fire was still blazing. Several of the spectators from the other side of the street were inching forward for a better view.

When Jake rushed into the road, some of them backed off and one young couple turned and fled, the woman shrieking. Apparently, they had missed the news that he was a cop. Or couldn’t bring themselves to trust a guy, cop or not, who was running at them with a machete.

“Everybody stand clear,” Jake yelled. “The fire department is on its way.”

“Somebody’s in the car!” a man shouted, pointing.

“Get back,” Jake warned.

A woman turned away, hunched over, and vomited.

“Everybody move back, back to the sidewalk. There’ll be fire trucks coming in.”

One couple ignored his warning. They were standing over Jake’s gas can, frowning at it and muttering to each other. The girl wore a pajama shirt. The guy wore pajama pants. The girl crouched and reached toward the can.

Oh, shit, Jake thought. “Don’t touch that!” he snapped. “It’s evidence. The arsonist might’ve left prints.”

Clever, he thought.

Dumb asshole, why didn’t you put the can back in your trunk?

As the girl backed away, Jake slipped the blade of his machete through the can’s handle, raised it, and carried the can toward his car.

No point leaving the thing in sight. The fire boys might not be so easily fooled, and he would have a rough time trying to explain why he torched a vehicle with a suspect still inside.

The gas can and machete were locked safely in his trunk by the time he heard the sirens.

The firemen rushed the car with chemical extinguishers. Blasting flames out of the way, they pulled Roland’s carcass off the seat and dragged it into the road. Two firemen fogged it with their extinguishers, then left it there and joined those trying to knock down the car fire.

Jake looked at the corpse. It was still smoking. It was a charred, featureless hulk that hardly resembled a human being. If he hadn’t watched the body being removed from the car, Jake wouldn’t have been able to tell whether it was faceup or facedown. He knew it was faceup. But it had no face. Or ears. Or genitals. The surface was a black, cracked crust flecked with frothy white from the extinguishers. Fluids leaked from cracks in the crust.

When the honking blast of the extinguishers went quiet, Jake heard the sizzling sound that came from the body. It sounded like a rib roast.

It didn’t smell like one.

Jake stepped back, struggling not to vomit.

A fireman showed up and spread a blanket over the body.

Smoke rose from under the blanket.

Jake kept watch.

The fire was out, the car a smouldering ruin, by the time the coroner’s van arrived. The men stayed inside the van, smoking cigarettes, waiting, as instructed, for Applegate to show up.

Soon, Steve arrived in his Lincoln Continental. He climbed out, wearing a warm-up suit and carrying a doctor’s bag. He joined Jake. “What’s going on?”

“This is our man,” Jake said, nodding toward the covered corpse. “Earlier tonight, he killed a girl and tried to nail her roommate. He killed Rex Davidson. There’s a good chance he had our snake-thing up his back when he did it.”

“Oh, terrific,” Steve muttered. “Let me guess: you want a little on-the-scene exploratory surgery to determine whether it’s inside him.”

“Good guess,” Jake said.

“Shit.”

Steve went to the van and spoke to the men through its open window. They climbed out.

Wearing gloves, they uncovered the body and lifted it into a body bag. They zipped the bag. One man retrieved a gurney with folding legs from the rear of the van. They hoisted the bagged remains onto the gurney, rolled it to the van, and pushed it in.

“Is this a solo job?” Steve asked Jake. “Or do I get the pleasure of your company?”

“I’ll stick with you.”

“Good decision. Congratulations. Have a cigar.”

Once the cigars were lighted, Jake followed Steve into the rear of the van. He pulled the doors shut. The lights remained on. The smoke from the cigars drifted into vents in the ceiling.

Steve knelt on one side of the body bag, Jake at its end with his back to the doors. He drew his revolver.

“Yes,” Steve said. “I was about to suggest as much.”

“The thing’s probably dead,” Jake whispered. “If it’s in him at all.”

“If it remained between the spine and the epidermis, I would agree with you. But just suppose, when the situation heated up, it took a trip into this fellow’s stomach? It passed through Smeltzer’s stomach, so obviously it has no problem with the acids.”

“This guy must’ve cooked for fifteen minutes,” Jake pointed out.

Steve raised an eyebrow. “Charred on the outside, rare in the middle. That’s how I prefer my steaks.”

Jake squinted at Steve through his rising cigar smoke. “So if the thing went deep, it might be all right?”

“Very likely fit as a fiddle.”

Jake muttered, “Shit.”

Cigar clamped in his teeth, Steve opened his satchel and pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. He slid the zipper down the length of the body bag.

In spite of the van’s ventilation system and the aroma of the cigars, the stench that rose from the burnt corpse choked Jake. His eyes teared as he gagged, but he watched the bag’s opening and held his revolver steady.

Steve seemed unaffected. He bent over the remains. With the tip of a gloved finger, he prodded a blackened crater a few inches above the groin. “Was this fellow shot?” he asked, his words slurred by the cigar in his teeth.

“Just in the hand.”

“This might be the creature’s exit.”

“Couldn’t the fire have made that?”

Steve shrugged. He pushed with his finger. The charred surface in the center of the crater crumbled, and his finger went in deep. He wiggled it around. “Nope,” he said. He pulled his finger out.

Then he grabbed the far side of the body bag, lifted and pulled it toward him. The corpse rolled out, bumping facedown onto the gurney. Black flakes fell off it.

Jake switched the revolver to his left hand long enough to wipe his right hand dry on his trouser leg.

Steve spent a while looking at the back of the corpse. Then he took a scalpel from his satchel. He turned his eyes to the barrel of Jake’s revolver. “Try to miss my hands if we have a sudden visitor. They mean a lot to me.”

“What about that exit hole on the other side?”

“If that’s what it is.”

“Great.”