“Some folks just ain’t right”
I ignored her, ‘Some folks,’ I thought ‘Have to keep talking or they’ll jump right out of their skin.’ I wiped the sweat from my forehead with a dirty rag. It hadn’t started out dirty; digging is hard work. My forehead was streaked with pasty mud; add water I make my own sauce.
“What sort of monster could do this? Does he sleep pretty as you please? What kind of monster could he be?”
“Probably a woman” I said. I leaned against the shovel. The rest would be trowel work. It actually shut her up for a few.
The body didn’t look real, half in the dirt and half uncovered; like one of those modern works, posed in perpetual apprehension, the body language of the state of man. The exposed bone was pebble smooth, almost bluish in the harsh beam of a halogen flashlight, blushing out to gristle, rags of clothing, then dirt, stained dark here and there from my own sweat.
“What makes you think that?”
I started carefully etching around with the trowel.
“Why a woman, why would a woman do this.”
“I don’t know. I sort of meant because of a woman.”
“What does that mean?”
‘Some never shut the hell up,’ I thought. “Sex, money and Death all part of the same thing.”
I found the stone clutched in his right hand. “Ok, now you can call the cops.”
She opened and closed her mouth a few times then went back to the car for her cell. I pocketed the stone. Without it the ritual would never work. I fingered the sim card in my pocket; without it the cops would trace the call to a stolen cell from Jersey, a card I picked up at McLaren airport.
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