McNulty covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and wiped his eyes. Bad smells always made his eyes water. The cause for bad smells like this usually made him cry. Once you’ve smelled a dead person you never forget it. The odors of rotting flesh and voided bowels stay on your clothes and up your nose for days. He scanned the room for clues of where the bodies were hidden. Because a smell like this, he’d bet a pound to a pinch of shit there was more than one.
Rifle range targets shaped like charging men were thumbtacked to the walls. The bullet groupings on some of them were pretty good but the rest were abysmal. A blind man with a blow dart could have been more successful. There were miniature Stars and Stripes and canvas-unit pendants for the 101st Airborne and 1st Battalion 25th Marines pinned between the targets. Al Pacino and Robert De Niro stared down from a movie poster for Heat. There was no other furniture big enough to hide the bodies. There was no carpet or rug to cover a hatch in the floor. The smell wasn’t coming from the bedroom.
McNulty stood next to the table and removed the handkerchief. He took a couple of tentative sniffs, then followed his nose away from the door and the gun locker and the wall decorations. It wasn’t until he neared the side window that he noticed the window was wide open. The smell wasn’t inside the room it was coming through the window.
He leaned out through the opening and found what he hadn’t found inside the cabin, a heavy wooden hatch covering a raised stone circle. A disused well perhaps. Or a charnel pit.
McNulty didn’t go back out the front door, but instead climbed through the window. Bad thoughts ran through his head like half-forgotten nightmares. Body parts and stolen girls and a sex chain that had posed as massage parlors. Northern X. This felt worse than that. He didn’t understand the links yet, but he couldn’t get the van and the mattress and the children’s home out of his mind. He stepped away from the cabin and stood over the disused well.
The thrumming traffic overhead sounded like distant thunder. The silence in the clearing was thick and heavy, and as muffled as walking in snow. He listened for Billy Bob coming out of the workshop but there was no sound. The hatch was old and rotting and didn’t have hinges or a padlock. It was just an old wooden door cut into a circle and laid over the well.
He stood for a moment to compose himself, then reached down and grabbed the crumbling edge. His fingers sank into the wood and he had to find a stronger place to hold. He raised the edge a few inches then slid it off the opening. The well had been blocked six feet down by a landslide, and it was almost full. The smell made him gag. The sight forced him to stand up and step back.
Billy Bob was like a brick wall behind him. “Yep. That’s where we keep ‘em.”
TWENTY-TWO
Two cars sped down the road to the junkyard and screamed into the turnaround before skidding to a stop. The cloud of dust blotted everything out as it drifted across the clearing and turned the carnival floats into ghosts. The engines were turned off and car doors slammed. When the dust settled four men stood abreast like gunslingers waiting to draw. The person they looked ready to draw against was Vince McNulty.
Billy Bob stepped aside. McNulty slowed his breathing. The dust drifted away, leaving the contents of the well clear for all to see. Billy Bob turned to the group. “He wants to put me in the movies.”
Nobody spoke for a few minutes. McNulty had nothing good to say so he said nothing. Billy Bob grinned. The tall skinny guy second from the left took a step forward, placing him as the leader. He glanced at McNulty’s car then looked at McNulty. He still didn’t speak. McNulty racked his brains for a way out of this. Silence is deadly. It breeds confrontation. Best way to diffuse a situation like this is to start a conversation. People rarely shoot a person they’re talking to.
“You the panel beater or the panel beater’s boss?”
The leader took another step forward. “For the dent in the roof you ain’t got?”
McNulty kept the anger that was building out of his voice. “It’s not my dent I’m asking about.”
Tall Skinny put his hands on his hips. “Maybe not. But you go poking your nose where it ain’t wanted and dents is what you’re gonna get.”
The other three men spread out to give McNulty no way to his car. He gave them a cursory once-over and calculated body shape and weight. They were anything but medium height and medium build. Throw in Tall Skinny and Billy Bob, and you had every body shape going except the one McNulty was looking for. There was no red van, either. What had been going on here was much worse. He nodded toward Billy Bob.
“You don’t see him in the movies then?”
Tall Skinny tilted his head while he considered McNulty. “My brother might be slow but he ain’t dumb.”
McNulty could have made an argument for that but kept quiet.
“He can smell a rat from a thousand paces.”
McNulty jerked a thumb at the pit. “Not surprised, considering
