White Lightning Read Online Free Page B

robust adolescent son lived two blocks over, near the heart of town, away from Holland’s work and its attendant smells. Still,
home
it was, according to the sign out front, and Slade wasdisinclined to raise the issue with the man in charge.
    “Marshal, you’ve come to see your colleague, I presume?” the undertaker said.
    “That is correct.” Something about the man caused Slade to speak more formally than usual.
    “You are aware that he was…badly used?”
    “I heard.”
    “I haven’t had a chance to work with him, you understand, since he arrived last night. It’s bound to be closed casket, I’m afraid.”
    “Thanks for the warning.”
    Mattson led him through one door, into a room with caskets on display, then through another to the undertaker’s workshop. There were two reclining customers on tables separated by a yard or so, both draped in sheets. The one on Slade’s right as he entered seemed to be a woman, from the shape.
    “Mrs. Wolinsky. Did you know her, Marshal?”
    “No.”
    “The grocer’s wife. Just thirty-one. Ironically, she choked on a Brussels sprout. And here…your fellow deputy.”
    Slade stood between the tables, facing Mattson on the other side of Tanner’s shrouded form. “All right,” he said.
    Mattson peeled back the sheet, from Tanner’s head down to his feet. As advertised, the corpse was nude and mutilated. Tanner had been scalped, his nose and lips removed. The carving on his chest and stomach might have had some pattern to it, once upon a time, but scavengers had done their part to make a mess of any symbols etched there. Moving on, the deputy had been emasculated and his feet were gone.
    “How much of this was done by men?” asked Slade.
    “Men or
a
man,” Mattson replied. “The scalping,obviously. There’s clean knife work all the way around the cranium, you see. The feet, of course. If they’d been chewed off—by coyotes, say—you wouldn’t see that neat transection of the ankle joint.”
    “Neat?”
    “As opposed to being gnawed and broken off. As to the rest, the wounds you see were first incised by hand, then drew the normal prairie scavengers.”
    “You wouldn’t know if he was dead before they started carving him, by any chance?”
    Frowning, the undertaker said, “You won’t appreciate it if I try to spare your feelings, I assume.”
    “Just give it to me straight.”
    “Retraction of the muscles on a deep cut indicate the victim was alive, as here,” said Mattson, pointing toward one side of Tanner’s ravaged chest. “In death, we see no elasticity.”
    “So this was torture, not just murder,” Slade replied.
    “I fear that your assessment is correct, Marshal.”
    “And nothing here to tell me whether it was done by Indians or white men?”
    “Um. Perhaps the feet,” said Mattson. “I confess my knowledge of the savages is incomplete, but I recall hearing from someone that they take the feet of victims slain in war, sometimes, to hobble their opponents in the afterlife. A crude preventative against postmortem haunting, as it were.”
    “Do you remember where you heard that?”
    “Not offhand. I’m sorry.”
    “Never mind,” Slade said. “It’s something, anyway.”
    “If you desire a bit more time with the departed…”
    “No. That’s plenty. Thank you.”
    Mattson drew the sheet back over Tanner, gently, almost reverently. It may have been an act for his sole benefit, butSlade appreciated it, regardless. He’d seen stiffs dumped into holes without a fare-thee-well, or left topside to feed the buzzards, and had ridden off from some himself.
    “Has someone told his family?”
    “No one has been in touch, as yet.”
    “He’s covered, though? I mean, the funeral?”
    “All settled, by the court,” Mattson replied.
    Suppose that it would be the same for me,
Slade thought, then put it out of mind. He didn’t like to dwell on death before a hunt, unless it was the other guy’s.
    “Okay, thanks for your time,” he said