Chapter 7 #2
"Lividity on the back. He was on his back after he died, long enough for it to set.
" I ran my gloved hand along his shoulder.
The bone moved the way a dead man's bone moves and not the way a man's bone moves who's been broken.
"No fractures in the collarbone. None in the upper ribs that I can feel. "
The pen kept up.
"Collarbone is spelled with two ls, cowboy."
"I can spell collarbone, Ranger." He hit the word like he was reaching for something to put between us.
"Just making sure."
"Mm."
The slacks came off easier than the shirt. They carried mud and gravel embedded in the fabric at the seat and along the backs of the legs, and I stopped and examined it.
The skin on the back and thighs was scraped down to the meat in long horizontal stripes that ran from the shoulders to the heels. Some of the stripes had asphalt ground into them. Some had stones. One had a piece of glass.
"Drag marks," I said. "Top to bottom. He went a long way. Somebody had him roped at the ankles and pulled him behind a vehicle. Write that down."
The pen moved. Slower this time.
"Whoever did this took their time," Ransom said. He didn't look up from the page. "I've done it the fast way. Hour, hour and a half, you can clean a man off the road and have a beer with your friends by sundown."
I stopped cutting.
"This wasn't the fast way," he said. "Whoever did this wanted him to feel every yard."
"You speaking professionally?"
"I'm helping you with your case file, Ranger." He clicked the pen. "What's next?"
I lifted the right ankle. The skin was scored deep all the way around in a band about an inch wide.
"Ligature mark, ankle. About an inch. Goes all the way around. Tore the skin where the rope bit. This wasn't restraint. This was the attachment point."
"The what?"
"The place they tied the rope to drag him." I didn't look up. "Write attachment point. I'll know what I meant."
I went to the head and tilted it gently. The wound was at the base of the skull, where the bone met the spine. Small, neat, no soot, no stippling.
"Gunshot wound, base of the skull. Nine millimeter or thereabouts. No exit." I waited for the pen to catch up.
"Bullet's still in there. No powder burns. Coward didn't even have the guts to stand over the man he shot execution style."
The pen wrote.
I set the head back down and stayed there a second with my fingers in the dead man's hair.
"There's almost no blood from this wound.
None on the shirt, none in the hair, none on the skin around it.
If his heart had been pumping when somebody put this bullet in him, this whole table would be a mess. It isn't."
I let that sit a moment.
"He was already dead when they shot him."
The pen stopped. "What's the point of shooting a dead man?"
I looked over. Ransom held the pen above the page and looked at me, not at the notebook. Between us was a corpse with its slacks gone and its skin in stripes. "Why would you do it?"
His eyes dropped to the body and went cold. "To send a message. That's the only reason to draw out a kill like this. Question is, to who?"
"To you."
His eyes snapped back to mine.
"Or to your people, at least," I clarified, walking around the body.
"So, who out there has a bone to pick with Pae Saco Ranch?
One worth killing for?" I looked back down at the body.
"In my experience, there's only two things you kill for.
First one's money. Easy one. Clean. All you've got to do in that case is follow the money.
If that's the case, we'll need to pull bank records, but I got a feeling if I do, I'll see cash deposits matching withdrawals from Pae Saco's account. Will I?"
He glared at me. "Do I look like a fucking accountant to you?"
I eyed him up and down real slow and appreciatively. "No, cowboy. You don't."
"Anyway, if he was in our pocket, why would we kill him?"
"I never said you did, darlin'. I'm saying whoever did this did it because he's in your pocket.
Pae Saco is the motive, or something to do with it.
So, aside from all the killing and burying and horse raising you boys're doing up there, what else have you got up to?
What's sitting in the courts that someone might object to? "
Ransom didn't answer me. The muscle in his jaw moved once. He was looking at the notebook like he could read the word off the page, and the word wasn't on the page. If he knew anything about the rest of it, he wasn't going to make it easy.
I sighed and picked up the scalpel.
The skin opened too easily. The smell that came up out of him was a different smell than the one that had been in the room, and I breathed through the mask and didn't gag and didn't, by God, look up.
I drew the rest of the Y down the chest and across the belly. The fat layer was yellow and thick. Castillo had eaten well in his life, and he'd eaten right up to the end of it.
Behind me, the pen had stopped.
I didn't turn. I kept cutting.
After a moment, a slow, deliberate breath came through the nose behind me. Then another. Then the pen started again.
"You alright back there?"
"I'm writing."
"That's not what I asked."
"Keep your mind on the body, Ranger."
"Which one?"
The pen stopped again. The silence behind me sharpened. I kept the scalpel moving. This was not the time to be thinking about a man being inside me, not when I was elbow deep in another man, and not in the fun way.
I worked the rib spreaders in. The bone gave the way it always gave, a dull, final sound, and I set them and cranked. The chest opened. Lungs, heart. Nothing that changed the story.
I kept going down.
The stomach was distended and the wrong color and heavier than it looked when I lifted it out two-handed and set it on the metal tray. A thread of pink fluid followed and pooled on the steel.
"Stomach's full," I said. "He ate big a couple hours before he died."
"Big how?"
"We're about to find out."
I cut it open.
The smell that came up off it was sweet and sour at once, thick, a fermented version of what he'd put in his mouth. I blinked tears out from behind the mask and held my breath until I could trust myself.
"Well," I said.
Ransom set the notebook down on the counter and came around the table.
I'd been hoping he wouldn't.
He stopped at my left shoulder and watched while I sorted through the contents. Rice. Beans. A piece of pork the size of my thumb. Something that had been a tortilla once. French fries. More french fries. And a whole fried green chile, barely chewed.
"Pork, rice, beans, french fries, tortilla." I dropped the words a half-octave below where I'd meant to. "And what looks like a whole fried green chile."
He didn't move.
"You writing this down, Ransom?"
"Notebook's on the counter, Ranger."
"Then go pick it up."
"In a minute."
Something cold went up the back of my neck. I didn't move my hands. I couldn't. They were red to the wrists and the elbows of the apron, and the closest clean surface was the man standing six inches off my left shoulder.
"He ate a fucking Billy burrito," Ransom said.
"Come again?"
"At Rattlesnake Rex's. Bonney Ranch and Billy the Kid Dinner Theater.
It's the challenge burrito on the menu. They put your picture on the wall if you finish the whole thing.
" He looked down at Castillo's stomach, at the tray, at the hand I had resting on the edge of the table because I had nowhere clean to put it. "Most people can't."
"Judge Castillo could."
"Looks that way."
"Write the name," I said. "Rex Rawlins. R-A-W-L-I-N-S."
He didn't move.
"Ransom."
"I know how to spell Rawlins."
"Then go get the notebook."
He didn't go get the notebook.
He turned his head. He was a quarter-inch from my ear when he did it, and his breath landed on the side of my neck before he spoke.
"Don't make me regret not killing you yesterday."
I turned my head.
He was right there. Hat off, somewhere, I hadn't seen him take it off. Two days of stubble dotted his jaw, and his lips were pale and chapped.
What came out was, "I am up to my armpits in dead judge, Ransom. Do not look at me like you want to fuck me."
"Would you let me?" he asked, deadpan.
"Ransom…"
"Bet you would." He smirked, and the expression was mean. "Bet if I got my dick out right now, you'd forget all about the judge."
"Maybe. If I wasn't fucking wearing him."
He looked back down at the body like he'd forgotten it was there, then he looked around the room, eyes landing on the sink on the other side.
"Don't," I said, because if he started giving me orders, I wasn't entirely convinced I'd be able to resist, and there was a county sheriff somewhere nearby.
"Why not?"
I covered the open stomach with an absorbent towel and yanked off my gloves, stepping out of Ransom's reach. "'Cause you're gonna buy me dinner first."
He blinked rapidly. "You serious?"
"I got a mean hankering for a burrito."
He squinted at me. "You're joking."
"Do I look like I'm joking, darlin'?" I tossed the gloves in the trash and pulled on a fresh pair. "You're gonna take me to dinner and a show tonight out at Bonney Ranch. Then we'll see about round two of what we started during the monsoon."
He stared at me for a moment, like he wasn't sure I was serious. Then he set the notebook down on the counter and said, "I need to make a call. I'll give you some space to finish up."
He pulled the door shut behind him on the way out. The latch was the same loose latch the sheriff had wrestled with on the way in, and it didn't quite catch. The door drifted open an inch and stayed there.
I looked at it. I looked at the body. I looked back at the door.
I let it stay open and went back to the body.
Through the gap in the door, I could hear his boots on the gravel, moving away from the building, then stopping.
I knew exactly where he was. Fifteen feet off the corner of the truck, where he could see anyone coming up the access road and nobody from the funeral home windows could see him.
His hat was probably tipped low, phone to his ear.
Ten to one he was calling back to the ranch to update Rafe. I'd bet my life on it.
"... Rex's place, yeah..."
Ransom's voice came through the gap. "... I know..." A long pause. Long enough for Rafe to do the talking. "... we're going there now..."
I picked up the curved needle and threaded it. I missed the eye twice and got it on the third try, and I told myself it was the latex on my fingers, and I told myself it was the latex on my fingers a second time so I wouldn't have to admit it was the man on the other side of the door.
There was another pause, longer than the first.
"... I'll handle it."
The line went dead. His boots moved once on the gravel as he settled his weight, and then they didn't move again.
I set the needle down on the steel.
Lawyers said I'll handle it. Assassins said I'll handle it. I'd been a Ranger for years, and I'd never met a third kind of man who said I'll handle it in that tone of voice. Ransom didn't have a law degree.
I stood there a moment with my gloved hands resting on the edge of the table. The hot part was admitting it. The hot part was that the man who had just almost put his lips on mine over a corpse stood on the other side of a cinderblock wall right this minute and arranged another one.
That was the moment I knew I'd let him do it.
To Rex. To anyone he wanted, if he came back through that door looking the way he'd looked an hour ago and put a hand on me.
I'd let him do it and I'd watch him do it and I wouldn't ask the question a Ranger was supposed to ask.
I'd known it on the ridge yesterday when he'd put a gun on me and I hadn't reached for mine.
I'd known it when he caught my elbow at the tailgate and I didn't look at the place his hand had been because I was afraid of what my face would do.
And I knew it now, with my hands red to the wrists and a man on the other side of the wall saying I'll handle it.
Then I picked the needle back up and started closing the Y.
The stitches were neat enough, but they weren't pretty. Roy Castillo deserved better than this. He deserved a real morgue and a real medical examiner and a real Ranger working a real case file, and what he'd gotten was me.
When I was done, I peeled off the gloves and tossed them in the bin. The mask came off after. I washed my hands at the sink. The water ran rust-brown for a long time before it cleared, and I scrubbed up to the elbows, anyway.
I covered him with a sheet from one of the carts. Wheeled the gurney over to one of the refrigerated drawers, slid him in, and labeled it in pen to make sure they didn't forget who was in there.
I picked up the notebook from the counter on my way out.
The heat hit me like a fist when I stepped outside. I pulled my hat off, wiped the sweat from my forehead, and put it back on.
Ransom stood by the truck with his phone in his hand. He looked up when the door opened, then slipped the phone into his pocket. His face was unreadable.
I walked over.
"You call the ranch?"
"Yeah."
"What'd you tell them?"
"That Castillo ate at Rex's place before he died. That we need to go look at the wall."
I nodded.
"Y'all got any beef with Rawlins?"
He looked at me. His eyes held mine a full second longer than he'd held them yesterday on any horse on any ridge. "You'll have to ask Rafe about that."
"Reckon I will when we get back."
"You know Rex owns half the county, right?" he said. "Sheriff, mayor, three county commissioners. Walk in there asking questions, you better be ready for what comes back."
I pulled the passenger door open and climbed in. The notebook in my back pocket pressed against the seat.
"Then I guess we'll find out," I said.