“Why bother calling? I’ll just yell up through the heating duct.”
“Don’t forget,” she warned him. “You ever heard the line ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”
Forget? Phil nearly laughed. Yeah, like I’m gonna forget I have a date with you. “You needn’t worry, Ms. Ryder. In fact I’ll have my itinerary director mark it down on my calendar, posthaste.”
“Posthaste, my ass,” she came back. “Don’t stand me up.”
Jesus, she’s serious, Phil realized.
“And speaking of getting stood up, I think we’ve both been,” Susan said.
“What?”
“The chief. He’s really late.”
“You’re right,” Phil agreed when he noted the clock again. Chief Mullins was a lot of things—arrogant, biased, stubborn, crotchety. But there was one thing he wasn’t: late.
“He’s got a radio in that big land yacht of his, right?” Phil asked. “Try giving him a call.”
“Good idea.” Susan keyed her base station mike. “Two-zero-one, relay Signal 3 immediately.”
The only reply was static.
“Two-zero-one, do you copy?”
Nothing.
“Chief Mullins? Do you copy?”
Still, no reply.
“To hell with this,” Phil said and got up, grabbing the cruiser keys. “I’m gonna go look for him. Something’s not right here.” But before he made it to the back door, Susan called out, “Wait! He just came on line.”
Phil stepped quickly into the commo cove. Mullins’ voice, even more gravelly through the airwaves, was grumbling, “…yeah, Susan, I’m 10-20’d north on 154, just past Hockley’s Swamp…”
“We were getting a little worried. Are you all right? Do you need assistance?”
“You might say that—Christ. Is Phil still at the station?”
“Yeah, Chief, he’s right here.”
“Good. I want you to lock the place up and get out here,” Mullins directed. “But first, Susan, I want you to get several pairs of plastic gloves, some forceps, and a handful of evidence bags.” Static crackled through his next pause. “And tell Phil to bring a Signal 64 report.”
Holy shit, Phil thought.
Susan turned off the base station. Her face looked grim. “You heard him,” she said as she opened the small drawer they kept their evidence collection materials in.
Yeah, I heard him, all right. Phil then, just as grimly, went to the file cabinet and retrieved a Signal 64 form, otherwise known as a Uniform Jurisdictional Standard Report for Homicide.
««—»»
“What in the name of…”
Phil didn’t go to the trouble of finishing. In the name of what, exactly? What, he wondered in fragments. Could possibly. Describe. This?
Susan, standing right beside him, gaped down into the ragged ravine, while Mullins lingered several yards off, facing away. He looked on the verge of displacing his last meal into the woods.
If he hadn’t already.
The corpse glistened, scarlet hands locked in rigor. A few flies peppered the gore-sheened head; it took Phil a few solid moments of staring before he could even discern it as human. The chief, his bulbous face going pallid, was pointing to the flat front-right tire on his Caddy and explaining “…so just when I come around the bend, I get a blowout. Brand-new friggin’ tire, too. And anyway, I’m lugging the jack out of the trunk, I turn to take a spit in the ravine, and the first thing I see is that.”
Hell of a way to start the day, Phil thought. His stomach felt as though it were shrinking to something the size of a prune as he looked more closely. It was still early; the sun hadn’t yet cleared the ridge, which left them in dappled shade. This lent a strange purplish hue to the corpse’s glittery scarlet. At first Phil surmised that the body was merely nude and covered in blood, but when he stooped over, hands on knees, he realized it was something far worse than that.
“My God,” Susan croaked. “It looks like it’s been—”
“Skinned,” Phil finished. “And a humdinger of a job, too. This is some serious, calculated work here, Chief.”
“Tell me about it.”
The corpse lay in the ravine as if haphazardly dropped there, its arms and legs canted at impossible angles. Probably pushed out of a moving car, Phil guessed, though he pitied the poor chump who had to clean the car out afterward. Sinew, tendons, and even veins remained flawlessly intact along the flensed musculature. “Yeah,” Phil mumbled. “Somebody really did the job on this guy…if it even is a guy.”
This observation was pertinent; though the corpse appeared to possess a male frame, its obvious loss of genitalia left its gender in question. And there was no hair either—it had been scalped. What remained of its head grinned back liplessly at them, a crimson meaty lump.
“It’s a guy,” Mullins said. He pointed ten yards to his right. “Those ain’t a woman’s duds.”
Further along the ravine, Phil spotted clothing—a pair of men’s straight-leg jeans, a large flannel shirt, and a pair of decent-looking cowboy boots—strewn about as recklessly as the corpse. Then Susan, squinting, noticed something else.
“Is that a wallet lying there, too?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Mullins said. “That’s why I wanted you to bring gloves and evidence gear. Check it out.”
Both Phil and Susan slipped on pairs of polyvinyl evidence gloves, and approached the strewn garments. A braided wallet sat next to one of the boots. Susan knelt and, very gingerly, opened the wallet with a pair of Ballenger forceps. “No cash,” she discerned. “But—”
Just as gingerly, then, she slipped out something else.
“Driver’s license,” Phil noted. “Not surprising.”
Mullins, in spite of his obvious nausea, grew excited. “Ain’t that some luck? We got an instant ID.”
“It’s not luck, Chief,” Phil said. “This is a hit, and I’ll bet my next paycheck it’s drug-related.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Mullins testily asked.
“It’s protocol for dealers,” Susan told him. “They left the wallet on purpose.”
“Exactly,” Phil added and shook open an evidence bag. “Whoever did this wants the word to get around that this guy got whacked. I saw stuff like this every other day on Metro.”
“Jake Dustin Rhodes,” Susan read the name off the license. “Waynesville address.” Then she dropped the license into the bag.
“And I’ll bet another paycheck,” Phil went on, “that this guy’s got dope busts on his record.”
“You seem to know an awful lot,” Mullins grumbled. “I still don’t know what you’re driving at.”
Phil frowned. He kept forgetting that this wasn’t the city anymore. “This guy Rhodes is a cowboy, ten to one, and some other cowboys did this to him for moving on their turf. This is how dealers put the word out: deal on our territory, and this will happen to you.”
“That’s a hell of a way to leave a message,” Mullins commented.
“Yeah, but it always works.” Phil bagged the wallet next, and then he and Susan began putting the clothes into larger evidence bags. “On Metro, they’d do this all the time, decapitations, dismemberments, blow-torch jobs, then leave the body with the ID so word will get around. This guy was dealing dope on somebody else’s territory. And since they left the body within Crick City town limits, we can safely assume that the territory in question is Crick City itself.”
“Natter,” Mullins said.
“It’s a good bet, unless your previous intelligence is wrong.”
“It ain’t wrong. It all fits.” Mullins pulled out his bag of Red Man, grimaced, then put it back. “I’ll bet that sick, ugly fucker had one of his Creekers do this.”
“Let’s not jump the gun just yet. We still gotta check everything out. I could be wrong. I just doubt that I am.”
