Ghouls

sheaf of shit. It tells us nothing.”

“Well, like I said, it’s not official till the M.E. has a look. But nine times out of ten—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Now the blurs seemed to be congregating, their shapes merged together as a shadowed, gray mass.

A voice cracked out of the woods like a pistol shot. “Chief Bard! Over here!”

“They’ve found something,” Bard muttered. “Come on.”

Kurt followed Bard about ten yards down the access road. Then they turned and marched directly into the forest, wending a long, irregular path through the trees. Gray shirts and faces turned as they approached. The search assignment formed a rough circle around a red-haired, red-mustached officer who knelt before a bare spot on the ground. Behind him stood Lieutenant D. Choate, the county F.O.D., a lean, melancholic figure with graying short hair. His shirt was white, not gray, and he wore a hat with gold gilding on the brim, while the others wore no hats at all. He looked down as if viewing something long dead.

“What is it?” Bard asked, shouldering in.

Choate handed Bard a plastic envelope sealed with yellow evidence tape. Inside was a black plastic cylinder an inch wide, with a silver knob on it.

Bard looked at it crookedly. “A fucking speed loader.” Then, to Kurt: “Did Swaggert use speed loaders?”

Kurt answered with a dejected nod. “I’m not sure what brand, but he did use them. He was always complaining about the release. Said it’d probably get him killed someday.”

“Maybe it did.”

“And, Chief,” Choate said, pointing down. “Dead brass.”

“How many?” Kurt asked.

“Six.”

Kurt looked down. By the red-haired man’s right foot were six empty pistol cartridges. The red-haired man (R. Elliot TSD, according to his poorly aligned name tag) picked up one of the cartridges very carefully with forceps and passed it to Bard.

“Plus P’s,” Elliot said.

Then Choate: “Is that the kind of ammo Swaggert loaded?”

Both Kurt and Bard squinted at the silver casing. On the flanged end, stamped in tiny letters around the dented cap, they saw: …S&W…38SPL + P.

“Yeah,” Bard answered. “These are his loads, for sure. Semijacketed hollow points. We all carry them.”

The search team exchanged vapid looks and silence. Someone coughed. Elliot took the forceps from Bard, then one by one dropped each cartridge into a separate plastic envelope. He said, “It’s about fifty yards from here to the spot where the hand was found.”

“And we have to assume,” said the lieutenant, “that Officer Swaggert was moving into the woods.”

“Swaggert was right-handed,” Kurt said.

The lieutenant adjusted his hat. “Of course. And it was his right hand that was found in the road.”

“Then unless someone jerked it from him,” Bard edged in, “Swaggert’s piece has to be somewhere between here and the road. It fucking has to be.”

“Line up” came the lieutenant’s next order. “I want it tight, shoulder to shoulder. We’ll find this thing or else.”

Now the search had direction. The men formed a wall of gray, standing so close that the sides of their arms touched. They stooped down and advanced slowly toward the point where the hand was found, parting only to skirt trees. An inch at a time they combed the forest floor in a lateral line. Eyes held fast to the ground. Fingers pushed through wet leaves and pine needles and mulched soil. Some of the men actually crawled along on hands and knees.

In a minute, Kurt and the cop next to him shouted “Here!” at the same time. Instantly the men broke from the search line and drew together into another huddled circle.

The pistol lay half covered by leaves, and it seemed partly pushed into the ground, as if stepped on. It was a Smith & Wesson model 10, with a four-inch barrel and worn walnut grips. Swaggert’s service revolver.

Kurt stepped back to make way. Elliot squeezed through the crowd, slipping his hands into a pair of acetate gloves. He picked up the weapon carefully by the top of its frame.

“Open it,” the lieutenant said.

Elliot pushed the gridded cylinder latch with the eraser end of a pencil. The cylinder slid open with an oiled click, and out fell six more cartridges, all of which had been fired.

««—»»

“It still tells us nothing,” Bard was saying several hours later at the station. Kurt sat opposite him, in his favorite fold-down metal chair, next to the burned-out coffeepot. Shortly after they’d found Swaggert’s pistol, the county lieutenant had terminated the search. He’d concluded that Swaggert was dead, and that his body had been transported out of the vicinity. Extending the search limits, he deduced, would’ve been a waste of county time and money.

Kurt was staring out the window, only half listening to Bard. “What’s that, Chief?”

“I said, it still tells us nothing, at least nothing important. We find the motherfucker’s hand, and we find his piece, and we find some loads. What’s all that tell us? Not a goddamned thing, that’s what… We can only guess what happened.”

Kurt lounged back against the chair. “Okay, what’s your guess?

“My guess…shit. All right, here’s what I think happened. Swaggert’s driving down the Route and he spots a suspicious vehicle—probably a pickup truck full of hippies or something— and it’s got something big and bulky in the back, like maybe a coffin. Whatever it is, there’s just something not right about the vehicle, so Swaggert chases the fuckers, pedal to the metal, and he winds up losing control and dumps the cruiser in the gulch, okay? He climbs out of the car and sees the pickup turning into entrance number 2—hell, it’s only a couple hundred yards from where he crashed; he could see taillights turning at that distance, easy. Anyway, Swaggert’s a hellion, and he’s hot, so he runs into the woods, hoping to cut the truck off at the access road. He opens fire on the dudes in the truck, and they fire back and they kill him. They get scared ’cause they just smoked a cop, so they dump the coffin and scram. Later a dog or something comes along and fucks with Drucker’s corpse, bites Swaggert’s hand off, and drags him away. So there’s my guess.”

Kurt immediately bent over in his chair, honking laughter. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, huh, Chief? Yes, sir, ‘dudes’ in a pickup truck. I’ll bet you went to school for years to think of that.”

“Well, fuck you then, smart boy. You got all the brains, you tell me what happened.”

“We’ll never know unless we find Swaggert’s body, and we’ll never find his body unless we search.”

Bard scowled. “You heard the duck. The search is over.”

“Belleau Wood has got to be searched. Not just some of it. All of it. Merkel’s field, too.”

Bombast lightened Bard’s eyes, his turn to laugh. “Do you know how big Belleau Wood is? Do you know how long it would take to cover it all? Hell, some of the woods back there are so thick you probably couldn’t get through them with a machete. If the county doesn’t think a second search is practical, then there ain’t gonna be a second search.”

“Fine,” Kurt said. “So I guess we can just sit back and forget it ever happened. Somebody out there means business, Chief. Digging up coffins, abducting crippled girls, and wasting veteran cops isn’t my idea of Friday night out with the boys.”

“You bitch like my fucking mother.”

Kurt was pricked by a sudden chill, the one facet of all this that bothered him most. “And you’re not even considering the scariest part. If this was some greenhorn fresh out of the academy I’d almost understand. But we’re not talking about green. We’re talking about Swaggert. ”

“Big deal. Any cop can fuck up.”

“Swaggert was the best pistol shot I ever saw. You tell me how he managed to pop twelve caps at something and miss twelve times.”