Sixkill

'Fuck him,' she said.

18

THE ER DOCTOR who had worked on Dawn Lopata when they brought her in was a young guy named Cristalli. I talked with him in an examining room near the triage desk.

'She was dead when she got here,' he said. 'We tried, why wouldn't we? But she was unresponsive.'

'Which is medical speak for dead,' I said.

'Just like discomfort,' he said, 'is medical speak for pain.'

'You have a thought about what killed her?' I said.

'I'm not the ME,' he said. 'But we see a lot of death from trauma coming through here, and I'd say she was strangled.'

'You have a theory as to how?'

'Ligature,' he said.

'How long before she would have lost consciousness?' I said.

'Ten, fifteen seconds,' he said.

'And death?'

'Minutes,' Dr. Cristalli said.

'So you'd need to keep the pressure on even after the vic loses consciousness,' I said.

'If it's death you're after,' he said.

'So can it happen accidentally?' I said.

'Sure. We regularly get people who strangle themselves playing choking games, usually masturbatory.'

'You can tell?' I said.

'That it was masturbatory?'

'Yeah,' I said.

'It's usually pretty obvious at the death scene,' Dr. Cristalli said.

'It is?' I said. 'Like how . . . Never mind.'

'Never mind?' Cristalli said.

'I can guess, and it's all I want to do,' I said.

'Anyway,' Cristalli said. 'In this case, EMTs told me there was no sign of it.'

'She was fully dressed,' I said. 'Lying on her back on the bed.'

'That's what they told me,' he said.

'Presumably she'd been having sex,' I said. 'Odd that she'd be fully dressed.'

'I didn't check,' Cristalli said. 'Once it was clear that she wasn't coming back, she became a problem for the ME.'

'So you don't know if she was having sex or not,' I said.

'Nope,' he said. 'But there are a couple things about that, and I admit I wouldn't have registered it. One, she wasn't wearing a bra.'

'Not everyone does,' I said.

'Nurses insist that she would have.'

'Well-endowed?' I said.

'Excessively, I would say, but it is, I suppose, a matter of personal preference.'

'What's the other thing?' I said.

'Her underpants were on backward.'

'Backward,' I said. 'I'm not sure I could tell.'

'That's what they told me,' he said.

I nodded. We were quiet. Outside the exam room, a stretcher came in and stopped at the desk.

'Somebody dressed her,' I said.

'The thought occurred,' he said.

Zebulon Sixkill V

The deal was, Pat Calhoun said, 'I take care of the money. You take care of the football.'

Zebulon nodded.