Powder Burn by Carl Hiaasen

Appel said cheerfully. “I’ll put this face back so you can see what he looks like.” He replaced the cap of the skull on the brain, tugging the scalp into place. Then he pulled the skin up, tightening the facial features. Meadows now saw that the victim was a young man, probably a Latin. The face was narrow and bore a grubby trace of a mustache.
    “I don’t know him,” Meadows said. “He wasn’t one of the men I saw.”
    Appel shrugged. “I’m not surprised.” He asked Meadows about the shootout in the Grove.
    “I’d rather not,” the architect replied. “Nelson can tell you what happened. Where is he anyway?”
    “He called to say he couldn’t make it,” Appel said. “He mentioned that your girlfriend got killed.”
    “An old friend. Just the way it happened…I’m still upset about it. I still don’t feel much like talking. The only reason I came down here was Nelson. He said this might be the guy who did all the shooting, but it isn’t.”
    Appel peeled off his gloves. “I’m sorry about your friend. Nelson said you got shot up, too.”
    “In the leg. It’s getting better.”
    “That’s good,” Appel said. “That’s very good.”
    Appel was trying to be friendly. Meadows liked him. He wondered why anyone would become a coroner. He was intrigued by Appel’s nonchalance.
    “How did this one die?”
    “Same old tricks,” said Appel.
    With a bare hand—that was the first thing Meadows noticed—Appel grabbed the corpse by the hair and lifted the head off the block of wood under the neck. He turned it on its side and pointed to a dime-sized hole, dead center in the back of the skull. “There. Bingo.”
    Meadows winced. “Why?”
    “Take a wild guess.” Appel sighed. “Shit, I get these guys in here every week. Latin male, late twenties, early thirties. Single bullet wound in the back of the head. No ID, no family, no friends. Takes us weeks to trace them. This one’s a Colombian. A Juan Doe, and he’ll probably be buried that way. He’s an illegal. Do you know what they found on the body? Three thousand bucks.”
    “That’s a lot of money to be carrying around.”
    “He also had a gram of coke and a Cartier watch. The guy had great taste in jewelry but bad taste in the company he kept.”
    Meadows took a breath and stepped closer. He studied the face again. “No, I really haven’t seen him before.”
    “Were the men in the cars Cuban or Colombian?”
    “I don’t know. They were Latin…well, dark-skinned. I just don’t know. They were yelling at each other in Spanish, but there was so much happening.” Meadows flashed on the scene again, just as in his dreams: the noise, the smoke, the screams, then dizziness. The cops had said ten or eleven seconds were all it took.
    “You want to look at a Cuban?” Appel asked.
    “Another drug murder?”
    “Yep. Came in this morning.” Appel went to another table. The corpse was in a heavy black body bag. The words Metro Fire Rescue were stenciled in red near the feet.
    “A stinker,” Appel warned as he unzipped the bag. “Better hold your nose on this one.”
    Meadows fumbled for a handkerchief and mashed it over his mouth. The corpse was ghastly: bloated, greenish, fetid. The clothes were torn, and the flesh of the abdomen was shredded and white.
    “Sharks,” Appel explained. “They found this one off Cape Florida. Three clowns from New Jersey were out dolphin fishing on a charter boat. They trolled right over the body and snagged it. Pulled an outrigger down, and they fought it for fifteen minutes before they realized it wasn’t fighting back.”
    “God, I couldn’t possibly tell you if I knew that guy or not,” Meadows said, fighting waves of nausea.
    “He’s been out there three weeks,” Appel said. “He died the same way as the Colombian: thirty-two semiautomatic in the back of the head.” The medical examiner zipped the bag up. “You know what’s interesting, though, is that this one got beat up