dental work done here, Chris might be able to put a name to it. Eventually. Maybe.
Then there was the ten inches of industrial black plastic that had bound the hands of the body behind its back. It was quality stuff, not too unlike—but much better than—the plastic zip ties found all over ranches used to hold together fencing or for a thousand and one other purposes. That’s what he had thought at first when he saw it at Indian Bluffs, still wrapped around the skeletal wrists. But after he got a closer look, even snapped a few photos to puzzle over later, he knew better now.
These ties were made specifically for human hands. Double-cuff disposable restraints—something like zip cuffs or FlexiCuffs. Professional; either military or police, state or federal. Doc Hanson hadn’t been able to untie the plastic; fumbled at it with his surgical scissors. It had finally taken Chris a pair of tin snips to get it off the bone.
• • •
The sheriff lowered the papers, didn’t quite release them. He smiled. “Sure, Chris, sure, if that’s what we need to do, we’ll do it.” Then added, “What do you think happened out there?” He made a vague motion with the report, waving at an area past Chris’s head.
Chris looked at his boots, shuffled them. He’d known Sheriff Ross his whole life, and it still felt weird to be here, working withhim . . . for him. After he’d thrown four touchdowns against Pecos, the sheriff had come right down from the stands and walked straight and tall across the chewed-up, muddy field and shook his hand with that same high-wattage smile he had on now, bright beneath his silvered brush cut and unusual gray eyes. He’d grabbed Chris’s hand and clapped him on the back and said, “Helluva game, son, goddamn helluva game,” and then turned and smiled for the picture snapped for the
Murfee Daily
. Chris’s dad had stood to the side, waiting to congratulate him, until the sheriff was done.
The man across from Chris now looked no different from the man on that field or in that newspaper picture Chris had found in his dead father’s things—his dad nothing more than a blur in the background, out of frame and focus. Sheriff Stanford Ross seemed immune to time—impervious, impenetrable. Images of him would fade long before he would.
Like
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. As Chris and his dad had together watched Caroline Cherry wasting and dying in front of them, they’d retreated to their favorite books, and when Chris returned home he’d pulled them all out again, feeling the paper, bending back a creased corner here and there . . . remembering. It pissed Mel off to no end that those boxes of books were still stacked in the halls and the empty bedrooms, but he couldn’t quite get rid of them, didn’t have a place for them, not yet.
And Wilde’s
Dorian Gray
was one of them, his dad’s old Dell Classic, with Dorian’s ruined face on the cover. Chris was afraid if he looked too close now at all the tintypes on the walls he’d find an aged, ugly semblance of Sheriff Ross—one corrupted, wasted—standing with a rifle by the furred hump of a dead buffalo, or millingwith a crowd under a tree where a man swung in a slow arc over his own shadow and piss.
• • •
“To be honest, sir, I don’t know. Seems like a river killing, but more than that? I can’t say. Not yet, anyway. Too far from any main highway to be a transient thing or a dump-off, but . . . well, I’m pulling missing persons BOLOs from all over. It’s possible something will come up.” Or it won’t.
A
river killing
was Murfee shorthand for the killing of a Mexican—an undocumented worker or a drug or alien smuggler who’d crossed the Rio Grande. Still, Chris couldn’t bury that small, ugly hunch that it might be something else, something more complicated than that. It was far-fetched, but you were never going to find that empty bit of earth on Matty Bulger’s land just by passing it
Then there was the ten inches of industrial black plastic that had bound the hands of the body behind its back. It was quality stuff, not too unlike—but much better than—the plastic zip ties found all over ranches used to hold together fencing or for a thousand and one other purposes. That’s what he had thought at first when he saw it at Indian Bluffs, still wrapped around the skeletal wrists. But after he got a closer look, even snapped a few photos to puzzle over later, he knew better now.
These ties were made specifically for human hands. Double-cuff disposable restraints—something like zip cuffs or FlexiCuffs. Professional; either military or police, state or federal. Doc Hanson hadn’t been able to untie the plastic; fumbled at it with his surgical scissors. It had finally taken Chris a pair of tin snips to get it off the bone.
• • •
The sheriff lowered the papers, didn’t quite release them. He smiled. “Sure, Chris, sure, if that’s what we need to do, we’ll do it.” Then added, “What do you think happened out there?” He made a vague motion with the report, waving at an area past Chris’s head.
Chris looked at his boots, shuffled them. He’d known Sheriff Ross his whole life, and it still felt weird to be here, working withhim . . . for him. After he’d thrown four touchdowns against Pecos, the sheriff had come right down from the stands and walked straight and tall across the chewed-up, muddy field and shook his hand with that same high-wattage smile he had on now, bright beneath his silvered brush cut and unusual gray eyes. He’d grabbed Chris’s hand and clapped him on the back and said, “Helluva game, son, goddamn helluva game,” and then turned and smiled for the picture snapped for the
Murfee Daily
. Chris’s dad had stood to the side, waiting to congratulate him, until the sheriff was done.
The man across from Chris now looked no different from the man on that field or in that newspaper picture Chris had found in his dead father’s things—his dad nothing more than a blur in the background, out of frame and focus. Sheriff Stanford Ross seemed immune to time—impervious, impenetrable. Images of him would fade long before he would.
Like
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. As Chris and his dad had together watched Caroline Cherry wasting and dying in front of them, they’d retreated to their favorite books, and when Chris returned home he’d pulled them all out again, feeling the paper, bending back a creased corner here and there . . . remembering. It pissed Mel off to no end that those boxes of books were still stacked in the halls and the empty bedrooms, but he couldn’t quite get rid of them, didn’t have a place for them, not yet.
And Wilde’s
Dorian Gray
was one of them, his dad’s old Dell Classic, with Dorian’s ruined face on the cover. Chris was afraid if he looked too close now at all the tintypes on the walls he’d find an aged, ugly semblance of Sheriff Ross—one corrupted, wasted—standing with a rifle by the furred hump of a dead buffalo, or millingwith a crowd under a tree where a man swung in a slow arc over his own shadow and piss.
• • •
“To be honest, sir, I don’t know. Seems like a river killing, but more than that? I can’t say. Not yet, anyway. Too far from any main highway to be a transient thing or a dump-off, but . . . well, I’m pulling missing persons BOLOs from all over. It’s possible something will come up.” Or it won’t.
A
river killing
was Murfee shorthand for the killing of a Mexican—an undocumented worker or a drug or alien smuggler who’d crossed the Rio Grande. Still, Chris couldn’t bury that small, ugly hunch that it might be something else, something more complicated than that. It was far-fetched, but you were never going to find that empty bit of earth on Matty Bulger’s land just by passing it
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