Skull Duggery Read Online Free

much relieved that the smell (almost nonexistent) and the feel (like parchment) of the thing had been nowhere as bad as he’d expected. It was terrible to look at, all right, but then it wasn’t necessary for him to look very closely to set it on the burro’s back and quickly cover it with a tarpaulin, during which he did a great deal of squinting and eye-averting. Still, by the time he’d gotten the tarpaulin tied down, he could feel his stomach acting up.
    As soon as he had assured himself that what Nacho had seen the previous day was truly a body, he had used his cell phone to alert old Bustamente, the district medico legista. Bustamente had immediately driven in from Tlacolula and was now waiting impatiently-almost avidly, Sandoval thought unkindly-in the cemetery, at the door of the two-room concrete-block building, one room of which served as municipal tool and equipment storage, and the other as the village mortuary. Once the body was in the windowless mortuary room and on the ancient, enameled-iron embalming table, Bustamente had taken charge of it, a responsibility Sandoval was all too happy to relinquish.
    He had planned to remain there with the doctor, having steeled himself to do what he regarded as his duty. And indeed, he managed to last through the cutting away of the tattered clothing and even to assist in a gingerly fashion. But his resolution began to fade when the boots came off to reveal not the hide-like tissue that covered the rest of the body, but horrible, greasy skeleton feet: eaten-away bones held together by rotting ligaments. Still, Sandoval held his ground, despite the noises coming from his stomach.
    Not for long, however. When the leathery skin proved too tough for Bustamente’s scalpels, the doctor had gone grumbling into the storage room and emerged with a pair of heavy-duty pruning shears. “Ha, these should do the job,” he said, clacking them together and advancing on the corpse. That had been too much for Sandoval, who fled.
    He took the opportunity to walk the few blocks to his office in the municipal building to swallow a couple of spoonfuls of Pepto-Bismol and sit quietly with the shades down for twenty minutes to settle his stomach. It didn’t help much. Beyond even the revolting physical aspects that were bothering him, he just didn’t have a good feeling about this business. Maybe the corpse itself didn’t have a bad smell, but everything about it did.
    He remained in the office as long as he could, long enough to swallow another dose of the Pepto-Bismol. The second one did calm some of the roiling that was going on inside him, but it did little for his frame of mind. He returned with sinking heart and dragging step to the mortuary as Bustamente was just straightening up from the body, from which the entire front wall had been removed, so that it was wide open, like a picture in a medical book. On Bustamente’s face was a look of pinched satisfaction that struck terror into Sandoval’s heart. God help him, he’d known this was going to be trouble.
    “Well?” he said gruffly.
    “This man has been murdered,” Bustamente pronounced, relishing every word and speaking as if he were on the stand, somberly addressing the court as an expert witness. It was something the old fellow couldn’t have had the opportunity to say very often in his long tenure.
    “Murdered,” Sandoval repeated hollowly from the depths of his chest. It was exactly what he’d been praying not to hear. What had he done to deserve this? How could this be happening to him again? It was incredible: only two murders in the last half-century, and both of them during the one-year tenure of Flaviano Sandoval, whose stomach fluttered at the idea of looking at a corpse. It was unbelievable, unfair, not to be borne.
    However, once more he steeled himself to face the matter head-on, as the responsibilities of his position demanded. “What makes you think he was murdered?” He could hardly get the words