“If we need something, she gets it, but she don’t waste money. Not like Lucy, who could buy China.”
“You always stick up for the Big Chief, don’t you? But not like you stick up for me, baby.” Shandy fondles him.
“I think I’m going to throw up.” Lucy’s voice.
And Shandy walks inside the cooler to get a good look at what’s inside. The cold air blowing is audible through Benton’s speakers.
And a camera in the bay picks up Lucious sliding behind the wheel of his hearse.
“She a murder?” Shandy asks about the latest delivery, then looks at another pouched body in a corner. “I want to know about the kid.”
Lucious rumbles away in his hearse, the bay door loudly clanking shut behind him, sounding like a car wreck.
“Natural causes,” Marino says. “Old Oriental woman. Eighty-five or something.”
“How come she got sent here if she died of natural causes?”
“Because the coroner wanted to send her in. Why? Hell if I know. The Doc just said for me to be here. Hell if I know. Sounds like a cut-and-dried heart attack to me. I’m getting a whiff of something.” He makes a face.
“Let’s look,” Shandy says. “Come on. Just a quick peek.”
Benton watches them on-screen, watches Marino unzip the pouch and Shandy recoil in disgust, jump back, cover her nose and mouth.
“What you deserve.” Lucy’s voice as she zooms in on the body: decomposing, bloated by gases, the abdomen turning green. Benton knows that odor all too well, a putrid stench unlike any other that clings to the air and the roof of your mouth.
“Shit,” Marino complains, zipping up the pouch. “She’s probably been lying around for days and the damn Beaufort County coroner didn’t want to fool with her. Got a noseful, did you?” He laughs at Shandy. “And you thought my job was a piece of cake.”
Shandy moves closer to the small black pouched body parked in a corner all by itself. She stands very still, staring down at it.
“Don’t do it.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear, but she’s talking to Marino’s image on the screen.
“Bet I knows what’s in this little bag,” Shandy says, and it’s hard to hear her.
Marino steps outside the cooler. “Out, Shandy. Now.”
“Whatcha gonna do? Lock me in here? Come on, Pete. Open up this little bag. I know it’s that dead boy you and that funeral creep were just talking about. I heard all about that boy on the news. So he’s still here. How come? Poor little thing all alone and cold in a refrigerator.”
“He’s lost it,” Benton says. “Completely lost it.”
“You don’t want to see that,” Marino says to her, walking back inside the cooler.
“Why not? That little boy found at Hilton Head. The one all over the news,” she repeats herself. “I knew it. Why’s he still here? They know who did it?” She holds her position by the little black pouch on its gurney.
“We don’t know a damn thing. That’s why he’s still here. Come on.” He motions to her, and it’s difficult to hear both of them.
“Let me see him.”
“Don’t do it.” Lucy’s voice, talking to Marino’s image on the screen. “Don’t fuck yourself, Marino.”
“You don’t want to,” he says to Shandy.
“I can handle it. I got a right to see him, because you’re not supposed to have secrets. That’s our rule. So prove right now you don’t keep secrets from me.” She can’t take her eyes off the pouch.
“Nope. With stuff like this, the secret rule don’t count.”
“Oh, yes it does. Better hurry, I’m turning as cold as a dead body in here.”
“Because if the Doc ever found out…”
“There you go again. Scared of her like she fucking owns you. What’s so bad you don’t think I can handle it?” Shandy says furiously, almost screaming as she holds herself because of the cold. “I bet he doesn’t stink as bad as that old lady.”
“He’s been skinned and his eyeballs are gone,” Marino tells her.
“Oh, no,” Benton says, rubbing his face.
Shandy exclaims, “Don’t mess with me! Don’t you dare joke with me! You let me see him right now! I’m sick and tired of you always turning into a damn wimp when
“Nothing funny about it, you got that right. What goes on in this place ain’t no joke. I keep trying to tell you that. You got no idea what I deal with.”
“Well, isn’t that something. To think your Big Chief would do something like that. Skinning a little kid and cutting out his eyes. You always said she treats the dead real nice.” Hatefully. “Sounds like a Nazi to me. They used to skin people and make lampshades.”
“Sometimes the only way you can tell if darkish or reddish areas are really bruises is to look at the underside of the skin so you can make sure what you’re looking at is broken blood vessels — in other words, bruises or what we call contusions — instead of it being from livor mortis,” Marino pontificates.
“This is unreal.” Lucy sounds in Benton’s ear. “So now he’s the chief medical examiner.”
“Not unreal,” Benton says. “Massively insecure. Threatened. Resentful. Overcompensating and decompensating. I don’t know what’s going on with him.”
“You and Aunt Kay are what’s going on with him.”
“From what?” Shandy stares at the little black pouch.
“From when your circulation stops, and the blood settles and can make your skin look red in places. Can look a whole lot like fresh bruises. And there can be other reasons for things that look like injuries, what we call postmortem artifacts. It’s complicated,” Marino says with self-importance. “So to make sure, you peel back the skin, you know, with a scalpel”—he makes swift cutting motions in the air—“to see the underside of it, and in this case, they were bruises, all right. The little guy’s covered with them from head to toe.”
“But why would you take out his eyeballs?”
“Further study, looking for more hemorrhages like you find in shaking baby syndrome, things like that. Same with his brain. It’s fixed in formalin in a bucket, not here but at a medical school where they do special studies.”
“Oh my God. His brain’s in a bucket?”
“It’s just what we do. Fixing it in this chemical so it don’t decompose and can be looked at better. Sort of like embalming.”
“You sure know a lot. You should be the doctor around here, not
All this inside the cooler, the door wide open.
“I’ve been doing this practically longer than you’re old,” Marino says. “Sure, I could’ve been a doctor, but who the hell wants to go to school that long? Who’d want to be her, either? She’s got no life. Nobody but dead people.”
“I want to see him,” Shandy demands.
“Damn, don’t know what it is,” Marino says. “Can’t be inside a damn cooler without dying for a cigarette.”
She digs in a pocket of the leather vest under her gown, pulls out a pack, a lighter. “I can’t believe someone would do that to a little kid. I have to see him. I’m here, so show me.” She lights up two cigarettes and they smoke.
“Manipulative, borderline,” Benton says. “He’s picked real trouble this time.”
Marino rolls out the tray, rolls it out of the cooler.
Unzipping the pouch. Plastic rustling. Lucy zooms in tight on Shandy blowing out smoke, staring wide-eyed at the dead little boy.
An emaciated little body sliced in neat straight lines from chin to genitals, from shoulders to hands, from hips to toes, his chest open like a hollowed-out watermelon. His organs are gone. His skin is reflected back from his body and spread out in flaps that reveal scores of dark purple hemorrhages of varying ages and severity, and tears and fractures to cartilage and bone. His eyes are empty holes, and through them is the inside of his skull.
Shandy screams, “I hate that woman! I hate her! How could she do this to him! Gutted and skinned like a
