the decent thing to do.”
“And that's it?” I said. “No wedding rings? No teddy bears today?”
“No.” He gave the word a note of finality and shot me a hard glare to go with it.
“So you do take bribes,” Chunk said. “But only when it's the decent thing to do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just then.”
After we took custody of the dead girl and had her packaged up for a real autopsy, we sent Hernandez on his way to finish his route.
Chunk and I walked along the perimeter of the Scar, toward the decontamination showers, passing under a big white sign with bold-faced red letters printed on it that read: SAN ANTONIO POLICE DEPARTMENT PERSONNEL ONLY-ALL OTHERS EXIT GENERAL DECON AT FRONT GATE.
On the way, Chunk said: “We've still got some time left on our shift. You want to follow our girl out to the Arsenal Morgue and see if anybody there knows her?”
“Might as well.”
Off to our right, the Scar dappled like a river delta in the sunset. Back before the outbreak, before anybody in San Antonio had ever heard of H2N2, and when we believed the news when they said the next killer flu would come out of rural China, or the chicken markets of Vietnam, the Scar was slated to be a fancy hillside community called Scarborough Terrace. It was seven hundred acres of high dollar property nestled into the bowl formed by three hills, one of the jewels of the Texas Hill Country.
When it became obvious we were going to have more bodies than graveyards, the city councilman who owned this land got the bright idea to sell it to FEMA for an extravagant profit, blocking bids from cheaper sites in the process. It was a classic example of the San Antonio Shuffle, local graft at its finest, corruption elevated to an art form.
Now, instead of high dollar homes, the Scar has been stripped of every single scrap of vegetation and terraced up the hillsides in giant stair steps. Big reticulated earth movers and trenching equipment and death wagons crisscross it continuously, and the caramel-colored ground is always wet from the disinfectant trucks that spray jets of foamy blue liquid onto the fresh grave troughs.
At night, the process continues under the glare of truck-mounted floodlights. If you're of such a mind, you can lean against the sheds where the locker rooms are and listen to the sound of heavy, diesel-powered machinery coughing and belching and ripping into the earth to make room for the dead and almost convince yourself that you're used to it.
I've done that.
“You okay?” Chunk asked, as we waited our turn to be sprayed down with disinfectant.
“Fine,” I said. “Just feeling a little worn thin.”
Chapter 2
Chunk's real name is Reginald Dempsey.
He was my partner on Homicide for a little over three years, but we had been friends for a lot longer than that. We were classmates back in the Academy, and we both worked deep nights, the dog watch shift, on North Patrol back when we were patrol officers. He was the first officer out with me the night I had to shoot a schizophrenic man who tried to slice his mother's belly open with a ten inch butcher's knife, even though he had to come from four districts away to do it, and he stood as one of my husband's groomsmen on my wedding day. I loved Chunk. At 6 ft 4 in and about 280 lbs, he was my jolly black giant, my overprotective big brother.
When I came out of the women's locker room and went outside to the front of the Scar's administrative building, Chunk was waiting for me. He was dressed in a shiny gray shirt that made his shoulders look like the front end of a Buick. His white gauze face mask covered his face below the eyes, but I could still tell he was wearing a cat-with-the-canary grin. When he smiles like that, his whole face lights up.
He was reading one of my Vogue magazines.
When I got close enough to him, I could smell cigarette smoke.
“You've been smoking,” I said.
He gave me an innocent look. Who, me?
Cigarettes are one of those things you can't get anymore unless you trade for them on the black market, and I'd made my opinions about the black market clear to him many times before that.
He started to tell me about it, but I stopped him. “Don't bother,” I said. “I don't want to hear it.”
“Don't ask, don't tell, eh?”
“Something like that.”
He smiled.
“That's my magazine,” I said.
He showed me the page he was looking at. It was an article called “How to Feel Good About Yourself Naked.” The girl in the picture was wearing a low rise black thong and a smile. She'd obviously never had a baby.
“This thing's better than Playboy,” he said. “Got more pictures of naked women in it, anyway.”
“Give me that.” I snatched it from him. He laughed as I stuck it back in my purse.
“I can't believe a woman's really got to worry about stuff like that. I mean, look at that gal in the picture. She ain't got as much of a trunk as a brother likes to see, but she ain't got nothing to be ashamed of neither.”
“It's a confidence thing,” I told him. “You wouldn't understand.”
“You mean, on account of me being such a suave devil?”
My laugh sounded like a derisive snort, which was intentional.
“I'll tell you what I don't understand,” he said. “I don't understand why women got to torture themselves with articles that are supposed to make them feel good, but show pictures of some skinny lingerie model who obviously doesn't look like any of the women who are gonna be reading the damn magazine. It shouldn't be that hard, you know? I guarantee you, you give me some candlelight and a little Luther Vandross on the CD player and I can make any woman feel good about herself naked.”
“Sure, Chunk,” I said, turning and walking for my car. “I'm sure you can.”
“Hey,” he said, suddenly concerned. The protective big brother bit he'd given me since we were cadets at the Academy together colored his voice. “Are you okay? You been acting a little off all day.”
“Sure,” I said. “I'm fine.”
He stopped me, a hand the size of a dinner plate on my shoulder. “Really,” he said. “You okay?”
“I'm fine,” I said, and tried to make my smile reassuring, though I'm sure it didn't counter the agitation in my voice. “Really. It's just-I've got a lot on my mind. Connie, mostly.”
Connie's my little girl, five years old going on 30. She was going to turn six in less than a week, but her life wasn't that of a regular six year old. She was growing up in a city under quarantine, the specter of the most dangerous influenza virus ever recorded looming over her life like the very shadow of Death himself. She used to have friends, playmates, but some of them died, and the ones that are still alive she is prohibited from playing with. She wore a brave face to the world, but she was always scared, just old enough to understand that things were bad, but not old enough to understand why. And her mother, the person who should have been there to protect her, to chase away the fears, spent nearly fourteen hours a day burying corpses in the Scar, counting their toe tags for posterity.
Chunk didn't bother with the predictable garbage about how one day Connie would understand, about how one day all of this death would be a bad dream. He had more substance than that.
“Come on,” he said gently, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Let's get this done.”
We drove from the Scar to the Arsenal Street Morgue on empty roads. Fuel shortages had made it so that you could only get around if you had access to city gas or the limited amount that found its way onto the black market. In the first few months of the quarantine, seeing the streets lined with car after car that had been abandoned wherever they ran out of gas was surreal. Now, they were just part of the scenery.
We left the wealthy neighborhoods that surrounded the Scar, palatial homes built into the sides of low- domed, heavily-wooded hills, and entered a land of run down streets, vacant businesses, and hollowed out
