Cut to the Bone

by Jefferson Bass

  When Decker was two steps in, the foyer lit up as brightly as if a camera flash had just fired in the next room, and the house shuddered from the concussion of the flashbang—the stun grenade—that E.J. had thrown through the rear window, right on cue.

  Without even having to think, Decker began mentally ticking off the seconds: one Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . If the suspect had been within ten feet of the stun grenade, the flash and the concussion would have blinded and stunned him, and Decker would have five seconds or so to find him and overpower him.

  Three Mississippi. Decker risked a quick look through the doorway where the flashbang had gone off, then withdrew his head swiftly, so he wouldn’t be exposed during the split second it took his brain to process the images his eyes had captured.

  Four Mississippi. He’d glimpsed a wall-sized entertainment center filling one wall, the big TV shattered by the flashbang. Shredded curtains dangling beside the missing window. Five Mississippi. A human figure—a man!— sitting in a recliner in the center of the room. At six Mississippi, Decker made his move. “Police! Don’t move!” he shouted, pivoting into the doorway, the H&K up and trained on the seated figure.

  Seven Mississippi: The fist of God slammed into Decker, knocking him back, hurling him across the foyer, slamming him against the front wall. Stunned but still running on reflex, he reset his mental stopwatch: One Mississippi, two Mississippi . . . The cadence seemed slow and irregular, he noticed with an odd, detached objectivity, as if he were somehow outside himself as well as inside. Gradually he became aware of a second voice in his head—this one his as well—shrieking, What the hell? Why did E.J. use two flashbangs instead of one? Then: Shit. That wasn’t a flashbang. That wasn’t us. That was him. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, struggling to piece the fragments into a picture that would explain why he was lying here in a heap against the wall. Either the flashbang hadn’t fully incapacitated the guy—had it landed behind him? Did the recliner shield him? Or Decker had screwed it up—counting too slow, moving too slow, giving the guy time to recover? Time to recover and do what, though? Had he fired a weapon? Was Decker shot—thrown across the room by a bullet or a shotgun blast slamming into his vest? No, not a shot, he realized. A blast. An explosion. But what—a grenade? Not the flashbang, but a real one, a frag? “Fall back, fall back,” Decker shouted. “Take cover.”

  He took inventory: I’m alive. I can see. He wiggled fingers. Toes. Everything seemed to be there, unless he was already feeling phantom pain in missing limbs. He glanced down, saw arms and legs where they belonged, still attached. A chunk of splintered wood, three inches long and a quarter-inch thick, jutted from his right deltoid. Decker reached across with his left arm—not easy to do, as bulky and confining as the flak jacket was—and gave an exploratory tug. A flash of pain seared his shoulder, but the wood slid out, wet and shiny with blood.

  Decker heard more words, muffled and faint, and he realized these were coming from outside his own head, not inside. “Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” It was Fireplug, crouching against the foyer’s inside wall. “Hang on—I’m coming to get you.” Decker held up a hand to stop him, but Fireplug was already scuttling across the room, and Decker felt strong hands gripping the shoulder straps of his vest, then felt himself being dragged backward, back toward the front door. “Holy fuck,” Decker heard Fireplug say. Just before the wall blocked his view, Decker managed to turn his head and catch a quick glimpse through the doorway and into the room beyond.

  “Holy fuck,” Decker echoed.

  The man was still seated in the recliner, arms dangling. The man no longer had hands. The man no longer had a head.

  The woman was screaming—again, or still? Decker didn’t know which. Her shrieks filled the air, piercing the smoke that clouded the rooms, piercing the haze that clouded Decker’s brain.

  DECKER WINCED AS HE eased his butt onto the low wall at the end of the garage, leaning back gingerly against the suspect’s house. Inside, the bloodcurdling shrieks continued—emanating, E.J. had reported, from a pair of stereo speakers. A goddamn recording, Decker had realized the moment E.J. had relayed this information. A trick. A trap. A lure. And Decker had gobbled down the bait, the hook, the line, and the sinker. In the distance, as if answering the screams, two sirens—no, three—wailed louder as they approached.

  Decker took inventory of his aches. Ringing ears. A couple sore ribs, cracked or possibly broken; maybe a mild concussion, too. And an oozing puncture wound in his right deltoid, where the sliver of splintered wood had burrowed into him. One of the sirens was probably an ambulance, but Decker was damned if he’d leave the scene except under his own steam, with his own team. The bomb squad was on the way, too, or would be soon, but they moved slow; Kevin’s team had even more crap to carry than the SWAT team did.

  God, he thought suddenly, almost sick with fear. Kev. Please not Kev. Please let Kev be off today.

  THE BOMB SQUAD’S TRUCK lumbered into the driveway. Decker stood, and the instant he saw the driver’s face—his brother Kev’s face—he knew that his prayer had been ignored.

  The truck lurched to a stop and Kevin Decker—“Boomer,” to his bomb-squad colleagues, “Kev” to his big brother Brian—leaped out and ran to him. “Jesus, Bry, you okay?” Before Decker could answer, Boomer wrapped him in a hug. Decker grunted from the pain in his ribs, and Boomer released him. “Shit, you’re hurt?”

  “It’s nothing. Bruised ribs. But my head hurts like a sonofabitch.”

  Kev sniffed Deck’s face and hair. “Bang head, I bet,” he said.

  “I don’t remember whacking it on anything.”

  “Not a banged head,” said Kev. “Bang head. I get it all the time.”

  “What the hell’s bang head?”

  “A nitroglycerin headache,” Boomer explained. “Means the device was dynamite. Nitroglycerin—the explosive in dynamite?—makes blood vessels dilate. You can get a headache just from handling the stuff, absorbing it through the skin. The fumes are the worst, though—they go up your nose, into the capillaries, and straight to your brain.” He frowned at the house. “Guess that means I’ve got a vise-clamp headache with my name on it waiting for me in there, too, huh?” He looked back at Decker. “God, I’m glad you got out okay. Sounds like a close one.”

  “Closer than I liked.”

  From inside the bomb-squad truck came a series of short, sharp barks. Kevin’s head snapped around. “Izzy. Quiet,” he commanded. The barks were replaced by high-pitched whines. “Izzy.” Izzy, named after a character on Miami Vice, was Boomer’s dog, a big German shepherd whose job—whose passion; whose very reason for living—was sniffing out explosives. Until recently, the bomb squad had relied mainly on a robot, which sounded great but worked like crap, always getting stuck or running out of battery power, requiring somebody to go in and retrieve it. The robot was so unreliable, in fact, that Decker’s SWAT team—the ones generally tapped to go fetch the malfunctioning machine—had acquired a nickname that was all too accurate: the “Robot Rescue Team.” Decker generally hated seeing the robot get hauled out and sent in; today, though, he would welcome it.

  “You starting with R2D2?” he said hopefully.

  “Nah. If there’s already debris, the robot would get snagged for sure. Faster and better to go right in with Izzy.”

  “How’s his nose today?”

  “Awesome. As always.”

  Decker gave Kev’s shoulder a squeeze. “Y’all be careful in there.”

  Kev nodded reflexively, but he didn’t answer, and Decker noticed that his brother looked distracted, as if he were listening to something other than the words of brotherly love and caution. “Is it true? The guy’s still sitting in there?” Decker nodded. “Head blown off? No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Good,” snapped Boomer, with a vehemence that surprised Decker. “I just wish he’d died slower. Sick son of a bitch.” />
  “Hey, now,” Decker said. “Don’t make it personal. Forget about me; forget about him. Just do your job. What’s that thing you’re always saying, about how the dog knows when you’re off kilter?”

  “What, ‘The dog is only as good as the handler’?”

  “No, the other thing you’re always saying.”

  “Oh, you mean ‘Shit flows down the leash’?”

  Deck nodded. “Yeah. That. You stay focused in there, so Izzy can, too.”

  SHIT FLOWS DOWN THE leash. The words were stuck in Decker’s mind now, replaying like a broken record. Like a premonition. Or maybe, he preferred to think, like a mantra, a message he was sending to Kev via brother-bond ESP.

  He pictured the dog sniffing its way around the walls of the foyer and toward the blasted den; pictured Kev casting furtive glances over his shoulder at the headless, handless corpse slumped in the La-Z-Boy. Shit flows down the leash, bro, he messaged. Keep your head in the game.

  Decker couldn’t stand it. Ducking under the crime-scene tape Fireplug had stretched across the front sidewalk, he climbed the stairs and positioned himself in the open front door. The interior still reeked of explosives, though the smoke had dissipated. Boomer and Izzy had made it halfway across the foyer by now, working their way along the front wall of the house, when suddenly the dog’s head snapped up and he stood on his hind legs, his front paws on the wall, his nose homing in on something. Decker leaned in and saw a dark smear on the wall. Blood, Decker thought, touching his shoulder. My blood. Did the dog know the blood was Decker’s? Could he smell the kinship with Kevin? Hell, yeah, he thought. Blood brothers. Brother’s blood. Thicker than water. For sure he knows it’s mine. “Leave it,” he heard Kev say, saw Kev give the leash a twitch. “Keep working.” The dog resumed snuffling, following the baseboard around the room, to the doorway of the den. “Good boy,” Kev praised. “Good work.”

  The dog disappeared through the doorway, into the den, and Kev followed, a leash-length behind. The den would be a bigger challenge for them to check and clear, Decker knew. For one thing, it was a bigger, more complex room, with chairs and tables and lamps and other mangled furniture, plus the smells and soot from the SWAT team’s flash grenade and the dead guy’s dynamite. Then there was the stink of the dead guy himself—seared flesh and vaporized hair and leaked-out shit and piss—not to mention the creepy presence of the guy, too. Despite the lack of eyes, or even a head, for crissakes, Decker somehow imagined the dead guy watching, tracking Boomer and Izzy as they made their way along the wall. “Check,” Decker heard his brother say in a low voice every few seconds, and even at a distance—even through the residual ringing in his ears—Decker could hear the strain in his brother’s voice. C’mon, Kev, he messaged. Focus.

  Suddenly he heard the dog yelp with pain and fear—fear, from a creature trained to hurl himself without hesitation at a 250-pound thug. A split-second later, he heard Boomer shout, “No!” Decker braced for a blast, but there was none; only shrieks from both the dog and the man.

  Ignoring protocol, Decker raced into the house and across the foyer, skidding around the corner and into the den. There he saw a surreal nightmare unfolding. Kev and Izzy were on the far side of the room, near some kind of splintered cage of wood and wire. Rearing up on his hind legs like a horse, the dog was thrashing wildly, whipping his head back and forth, struggling to shake something off his snout. A snake, realized Decker. A huge fucking snake! The triangle of the reptile’s head was like some awful reflection of the dog’s own angular head; the long, thick body disappeared beneath the edge of the broken cage. “No!” Deck heard Kevin scream again over the dog’s howls. “Izzy!” As Decker lunged across the room to help, he saw Boomer drop to his knees, hands scrabbling up the back of the snake, tugging at the neck, then—desperate to free the terrified dog—grabbing hold of the jaws themselves. He had just managed to pry the reptile loose when the dog—finally free to fight back—bit blindly, the powerful jaws closing on Boomer’s right hand. Now it was Boomer howling, first as the bones of his right hand snapped, then as the fangs of the snake sought and found his left wrist, piercing the pale skin and then the ropy blue vein. The vein that carried blood up Kev’s arm and into his lungs.

  As Decker reached his brother’s side, he saw the knotty glands at the base of the snake’s head pulsing—once, twice, three times. “Kevin!” shouted Decker. “No!” Now it was Decker grabbing the snake’s jaws, prying ferociously, ripping tendons and ligaments with the force of his fear and fury. Gripping the reptile’s head with both hands, he smashed it to the floor, again and again and again, reducing it to a bloody, bony pulp.

  On the floor beside him, the dog began to convulse, blood foaming from his mouth and nose, and Decker saw his brother lift the dog and clasp it to his chest, sobbing. “Izzy,” Kev gasped. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, Izzy, I’m so, so sorry.”

  Then—as if stricken with guilt at his failure to repay the dog’s devotion with diligence and vigilance and safekeeping; as if the two were joined by bonds even stronger than family—Decker’s brother began to froth blood as well. Decker watched, paralyzed and helpless, as his younger brother toppled forward onto the twitching body of the dog.

  Death crawls up the leash.

  CHAPTER 42

  Brockton

  I WAS RUNNING OVERTIME in my four o’clock Human Origins class, delivering a lecture on evolutionary changes in the human skull. “How many of you have seen the Coneheads, on Saturday Night Live?” I asked. Half the three hundred students raised their hands. “In another twenty thousand years,” I said, “if the cranium keeps getting taller and narrower, you and I will look just like the Coneheads.” The students were still laughing when a uniformed KPD officer came through the double doors at the back of the auditorium. Most anthropology courses were taught in the small, shabby classrooms in Stadium Hall, but the three big intro classes—Human Origins, Archaeology, and Cultural Anthropology—required a bigger venue, which I’d found in McClung Museum, a pleasant quarter-mile walk from the stadium.

  The officer, a patrolman named Maddox, had been assigned to watch my back until Satterfield was safely in custody. Another officer was watching Kathleen, and a third was keeping tabs on Jeff. “So our brains have gotten bigger,” I continued, “as our jaws have gotten smaller—because our jaws have gotten smaller, in fact. Thirty-two used to be the normal number of teeth for adults, but as a species, we’re gradually losing our third molars, our wisdom teeth. So if you don’t have wisdom teeth, it doesn’t mean you’re dumb; it actually means just the opposite—it means you’re more highly evolved than some moron with a mouthful of teeth.” From the back of the auditorium, Maddox beckoned to me.

  “Excuse me, class,” I said, trying to sound lighthearted. “It appears that the long arm of the law has finally caught up with me.” Heads swiveled, faces curious. “Y’all start counting your teeth. If you’ve had any pulled, or lost any, count those, too.” I beckoned to a girl seated in the front row. “Rebecca? Would you come up to the board and take a tally for us? In this sample of three hundred humans, how many have thirty-two teeth, and how many have only twenty-eight? What’s the breakdown, by number and by percentage?” As I started up the aisle, I saw students tooth counting—some using the tongue-probe method, others running a fingertip inside their mouths.

  Maddox led me out of the auditorium and into the hallway. I searched his expression for some hint of what he had to say. “What’s up, Officer?”

  “Got some news,” he said in a low voice. He glanced around the wide hallway, which was empty but exposed. “But let’s go someplace a little less public.” I took him down a narrow side hallway that led to the museum’s offices, stopping in a corner that offered privacy, as well as a good view of anyone approaching from either direction.

  “From the look on your face,” I said, “whatever the news is, it isn’t good.”

  “Some of it’s good, some b
ad. The good news is, the SWAT team went in, and the suspect’s dead.” The words sent a flood of feelings coursing through me: blessed relief, grim satisfaction, and guilt.

  Suddenly my heart clenched as I realized just how bad the bad news might be. “Dear God,” I said, clutching his arm. “Has something happened to Kathleen? Or Jeff?”

  He shook his head. “No, no, nothing like that,” he assured me. “But the scene turned into a total cluster-fuck, if you’ll pardon my language. Sumbitch had the place booby-trapped—that, or he ate a stick of dynamite. Blew his own damn head off. Nearly took the SWAT team out with him.”

  “That’s awful.”

  He made a face. “That ain’t the bad part. The SWAT guys are okay. But there was some kind of damn snake loose in the house, too—rattlesnake or cobra or who the hell knows what. Bomb-squad guy was in there with his dog, sniffing for more explosives. Damn snake bit the dog. Handler, too. Dead, both of ’em. Died quicker’n you can say Jack Robinson.”

  “God in heaven. What kind of monster keeps killing even after he’s dead?” Maddox shook his head in sorrow and bafflement. “Do you know if my family knows about what’s happened at the scene? My wife and my son? If they don’t, I’d rather be the one to tell them. In person.”

  Maddox radioed the officers who were keeping watch over Kathleen and Jeff. “No sir, they don’t know it yet. Your wife’s in a meeting, and your boy’s at cross-country practice.”

  I nodded gratefully. “Could you relay a message to them? Ask them to be home by six?” He nodded. “And Officer? Please make sure they know I’m fine.”

  I didn’t feel fine; I felt like I might be sick. But it seemed important to say it—to my family, and to myself. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

  CHAPTER 43