“There is a fossil bed here,” he declared, “that I could publish on for the rest of my life.”
Thom’s tendency was to become worked up about every dig he supervised, but he’d never claimed he could spend the rest of his life on a single one.
“Of course, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow, but wait till you see what I’ve found. You’ll feel like a boy in a toy shop!”
Alexa shuffles on the dance floor with the seven others we’re traveling with. Her long black hair is coated in sweat and Costa Rican grime. She smiles and for a moment I can believe she is carefree, despite all our running and fear.
She keeps her distance from a short Indian man who is spinning in circles with his arms extended and eyes closed. A big, almost toothless grin spreads on his wrinkled old face. He’s definitely had a few shots of guaro too many.
I picked up the seven others between here and San Antonio to bring us to nine. Makes us easier to mask. Harder to scrye. Now we look like just a bunch of nobodies heading to the gap, leisurely. Not in a beeline. Nothing that will call attention to our pursuers.
“How long have we had this one?” I asked, shivering in the morgue’s chill.
“Two days,” the white-coat guy said. I didn’t know his name. I try to remember the lab people and support staff, but turnover’s too high. This line of work burns people out faster than a crematorium on overtime.
“What did you leave it that long for?” I said, annoyed. “Waiting for the killer to turn himself in?”
“We were waiting for the ghost to show up,” he said.
I shook my head in disgust. “Look, when someone’s been murdered, they want us on the case. If their ghost doesn’t turn up in twenty-four hours, that’s because it can’t.”
That was the problem. If a ghost complains that it’s just been murdered, it can help us by describing the killer, or at least telling us about its enemies. Investigating a murder without a ghost is much harder. The slashing was the third this month, all without ghosts, and the eighth this year. Or was it the ninth?
Hell, when you lose count of the corpses, you know you’re losing.
Links mentioned: The Fix
Disarming and cruel. Two words could sum up Allison’s smile, and that’s all he had left of her. Her smile hid right behind his eyes, pushing at his brain like a tumor — that angled, curt, and thick-lipped smile. Even the day before she left, they seemed collectively twined together, a seamless mass of flesh, two shadows of one body. Now he was alone with a gun in his lap.
She felt polarized with excitement and fatigue, and her hot eyes suddenly brimmed with tears as they scanned the room, at the dusty wine bottles in the rack in the corner. At the tiny T.V. on the nightstand, at the refrigerator magnets; little cartoon pigs holding scraps of coupons and phone numbers. Finally, at the window, half-closed blinds revealing only the Toyota’s front wheels resting on the parking lot, five feet higher and right outside.
Something dripped under the car. Steadily. Almost – a trickle. If that was oil she had a hell of a problem.
We ate things on dares too. A particular favorite was the larvae of a winged beetle called the Huhu Bug. These grubs grow to about the size of your thumb and they eat dead wood so they taste almost exactly like peanut butter doesn’t.
I always liked to fry mine first, having seen a friend run around screaming with one of these blind maggots attached to his lip with its wood munching mandibles when he tried to eat one raw.
They weren’t even trying to be quiet now. The idea of keeping it down had become a joke, a sort of high-decibel sotto voce. Ian felt red rage bubbling up within him, and hammered on the door with the flat of his hand. “Come on, you assholes, cut it out! I need to get some sleep here.” More pounding, hard enough to hurt now. “Would you please just keep it down, or so help me God, I’m coming in there and I’m going to kick your asses!”
There was no laughter now. No noise. No profanity. Just silence. Ian hit the door once more, mainly out of momentum. His hand made a weak, wet noise, a soft slapping sound. He drew it back, suddenly unsure of what to do next. Keep pounding? Go back to bed? Wait?
A sound came from the other side of the door then, a quiet, rasping noise accompanied by whispers and titters. It took Ian a moment to realize that it was the sound of the chain being pulled off the door on the other side of the wall. The noise from the street seemed to vanish. The door in front of him loomed larger, brighter, and more threatening. Suddenly, he was acutely aware of the weakness of his situation, of why a middle-aged man in his underwear should not threaten multiple obnoxious drunks in the middle of the night.
Remember Veteran’s Day, Nov 11.
We crawled forward. My hand pressed on a face jutting from the mud. I turned away and forced myself not to vomit.
A shell ruptured the earth nearby. Mud hammered over me. I bit my tongue to stop myself screaming. I rubbed the mud from my face.
When I could see again, I realised my men were no longer in sight. Panic took me. “Wait,” I whispered. “Wait.”
No one answered.