The Spy's Little Zonbi by Cole Alpaugh Page B

wouldn’t pass on this opportunity to spout something truly depraved.
    Limp finally spoke. “Do you think you could kill a person and not get all crazy about it?”

Chapter 6
    C rashing through the briars and sticker bushes, Chase beat a path in the direction of the voices of police and firemen and the smell of a decomposing body.
    Limp was swearing behind him, swatting at dive-bombing deer flies with karate chops. His soft felt fedora, snatched from his head by a low branch, was now the victim of his unwillingness to backtrack. It was hot, with the humidity that comes with stagnant air trapped between the Chesapeake and the Atlantic, and Limp continued his rueful monologue over having acknowledged his friggin’ pager in the first place.
    Chase had overheard Limp’s side of the conversation after they’d pulled up to the 7-Eleven payphone.
    â€œ No.”
    â€œ Absolutely not.”
    â€œ You can’t order me.”
    â€œ Okay, so you can order me, but it doesn’t mean I’m doing it.”
    â€œ I don’t care.”
    â€œ You are such a bitch, Mack.”
    â€œ You can’t call me that.”
    â€œ You will not.”
    â€œ I’m not going.”
    Slamming the payphone receiver, Limp bumped past Chase in an angry flourish of Old Spice. “Dead people smell gets all over your clothes. I hate it. Get in the damned car.”
    â€œ A dead body?”
    â€œ Mack said it came across the scanner as a possible suicide. But it was called in as a black male, so you never know.”
    â€œ Never know what?”
    â€œ Sometimes the Klan boys get carried away in that particular neighborhood. And this one’s hanging from a tree.”
    â€œ Jesus.”
    â€œ Alcohol and rednecks are a bad mix, Pie, even though they keep finding each other.”
    â€œ I’m hoping that when you asked if I could kill someone and not get all crazy about it has nothing to do with this.”
    â€œ You reckon the Klan has expanded its membership ranks to include wonderfully refined and sexually omnivorous men such as myself? I’d look like a fat ghost in Klan sheets. Imagine the Halloween fun.”
    â€œ Sexually omnivorous?”
    Limp barely drove forty on the highway out to the small town of Hebron. Loaded Purdue trucks blasted by, leaving tiny white feathers like snow flurries in their wake.
    Limp’s complaints stopped as they parted the last of the underbrush to find a group of uniformed men chatting quietly among themselves, heads mostly tilted upward.
    â€œ Well, look there.” Limp gasped for breath, pointing up to the slowly rotating corpse at the end of what appeared to be the type of nylon rope used for hanging laundry. The suicide—or whatever this was—explained the underpants and t-shirts scattered around the yard they’d cut through.
    â€œ Doesn’t look right,” Chase whispered to Limp as they joined a semicircle of a dozen police and firemen. They were apparently waiting for a hardy volunteer to climb up and cut the man down. The tree was nearly as dead as the dangling man, and there was no chance of maneuvering a ladder truck back through the dense woods. The man’s naked toes were maybe fifteen feet off the ground.
    â€œ It’s because he’s filled up with gas,” said one of the town cops, who stood next to Chase scribbling in a small black notebook with a pencil nub. “Makes his features all out of whack.”
    â€œ See how he’s bloated?” Limp’s breath was hot in Chase’s ear. Radios crackled around them, competing with the noise of buzzing flies. “You think it smells bad now, wait until they pop him.” A fireman nodded in agreement.
    As if on cue, a young fireman in rubber boots and turnout gear tromped through the brush toward the group, hauling an eight-foot fireman’s hook. It was the kind of tool used to pull ceiling material down to get at hot