Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4)

by Nick Pirog

  “You aren’t from around here?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “It wasn’t a fire. There used to be a grocery store there, but then some guy came in and shot up the place.”

  “And five people died?”

  He nodded, then sighed. I could tell he knew at least a couple of them. Heck, in such a small town, he probably knew all five.

  I asked, “What was the name of the place?”

  “Save-More.”

  Chapter Five

  The next day was May 31st.

  The two women who cleaned the house were there for close to six hours the previous day. With the layers of dust gone, the cobwebs cleared, the tile floor scrubbed, the carpets vacuumed, the windows cleaned, and the electricity, gas, and water working, the house was a stark contrast from when I first entered just a day and a half earlier. The house had been hit with a defibrillator. Brought back from the dead.

  Just like me.

  I’d put the clean sheets on the bed but I slept fitfully. Finally, at around 3:00 in the morning, I gave up.

  Part of the reason I couldn’t sleep was my aching ribs. The other part was that I couldn’t turn my brain off. My brain was a dog with a bone, the bone being the five people murdered four years earlier.

  What happened? Who did it? Did they catch them? Had they already made it into a Dateline Saturday Night Mystery?

  For the first time, maybe ever, I wished I had a fancy iPhone. I could have learned every detail about the murders. I did the next best thing, which was to call my sister. France was seven hours ahead, and I caught Lacy on a break from painting.

  “Hey, Fat-ass,” she answered.

  I laughed. I’d kept Lacy well apprised of my weight gain.

  “What are you up to?” she asked.

  “Just hanging out at my farm.”

  “Your farm?”

  I spent the next twenty minutes bringing her up to speed. She couldn’t believe it and asked, “That farm was still in the family?”

  “Apparently.”

  Lacy had only met Harold a handful of times. She came back to the States for two weeks the past October, and we went to visit him several times at the nursing home. Like me, she fell in love with him and even considered moving back home with Caleb so she could spend more time with him. He was the only living relative we had left. She was crushed when she found out he died, and she nearly jumped on the first flight out. I had to convince her flying back wouldn’t do him any good. And it wouldn’t do me any good. She’d relented.

  “So I fell out of a tree yesterday,” I told her.

  When my sister thinks something is funny, she goes into a giggle fit, and the idea of me falling out of a tree to my near death sent her reeling. Once composed, she excitedly told me she sold one of her paintings for twenty grand and that she and Caleb were trying for a baby. “So when those days come around,” she said, “Caleb and I screw like bunnies.”

  I begged her to stop telling me about her sex life, and in turn, she began describing it in graphic detail.

  I said, “I’m two seconds away from climbing that tree and doing a swan dive.”

  She laughed, and I told her why I really called. I asked her if she could look something up on the computer for me.

  She huffed, but agreed.

  “Search ‘Save-More murders.’”

  “Holy shit,” she quipped a moment later. “This happened there? I didn’t think that kind of stuff happened in small towns.”

  “Me neither.”

  She found an article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and read it to me.

  The short of it was:

  October 9th, 2012, a disgruntled ex-employee went to the Save-More right before closing. The manager, who had fired the guy two weeks earlier, was checking out the last of the customers. The killer forced his six victims to the back of the store at gunpoint, all of which was caught on the surveillance cameras. He then ushered them into the back freezer bay where, unfortunately, there were no cameras. But it wasn’t hard to figure out what happened. The enraged ex-employee shot all six of them, killing five. The manhunt for the killer didn’t last long. He was found in his car on the side of the road with a hole in his temple. He’d committed suicide.

  I asked Lacy if she could tell me a bit more about the killer, but she said she had a meeting she needed to get to.

  I finally fell asleep an hour later.

  The first time I tried to cut through the chain with the bolt cutters, the flexing of my arms sent a shockwave through my ribs so violent that I nearly vomited. I wouldn’t have tried a second time, but my first attempt cut a nice groove into both sides of the chain and it wouldn’t take much to finish the job.

  I planted my feet, situated the bolt cutters in the grooves, and clasped the handles together. The chain split, then rattled against the door.

  Holding my ribs with one arm, I gingerly pried the barn doors open.

  A wave of musk washed over me before diffusing into the warm sunshine. I waited a few seconds, then stepped inside.

  The afternoon sun shone through foggy windows high in the steepled ceiling, illuminating the dirt floor and many brittle stacks of baled hay.

  “Hedwig!” I shouted. “Where are you?”

  I listened for the rustle I heard the previous day but was rewarded with silence.

  There was a ladder lying on the ground and I hefted it up and leaned it against the ledge of the wooden loft. If there were any owls, the loft would be where they built their nest.

  I started up the ladder, climbing until my stomach was level with the hay-covered loft floor. A moment later, the rustling I heard the previous day returned. There was something moving through the hay. And whatever it was, rat, mouse, possum, or tiger, it was headed right toward me.

  My body tensed.

  A breath later, it wiggled its way out of the hay two inches from my chest.

  I screamed.

  Even worse, I leaned backward.

  I could feel the ladder pull off the ledge and begin moving backward with me. I let go of the ladder and jumped. I over rotated and hit the ground. On my left side. Again.

  “Oh, God.”

  My eyes welled with tears.

  I lay there for a long minute praying for death to take me into its warm embrace. The pain was so fierce it took my brain a couple minutes to reload the video of the creature that surprised me.

  A little piglet.

  “How did you even get up there?” I muttered, leaning down to pick up the ladder with a groan.

  I replaced the ladder and started climbing.

  Each step was a battle.

  Pain vs. Piglet.

  Once I reached the loft, I called out, “Come here, little piglet.”

  I pulled myself up and onto the loft, which was one of the most painful experiences of my life. And remember, I was attacked by a pack of wolves. And shot. And drowned. And fell out of a fucking tree.

  I stood up, the angled roof hovering just overhead, and started searching the hay for my attacker. At the far back of the barn, I noticed a large lump. I eased forward. It was a pig. A full-grown pig, pinkish white with black markings. I only saw the piglet for a moment, but it had the same coloring.

  I gave the pig a slight shake.

  She was dead.

  After a decade of solving murders, tracking serial killers, and reinvestigating cold cases, my brain was wired to seek answers. You see a dead body and you backtrack. How did it get there? And why?

  The pig must have wandered over from one of the neighboring farms. Maybe she left on purpose, maybe by accident. She was pregnant, her motherly instinct told her to seek shelter. She found entrance to the barn through some opening. Somehow, she made it up to the loft. Then she gave birth to a piglet. I only saw the piglet for a moment, but it didn’t appear to have just been born. It was a baby, but not an infant. It was about the size of my sister’s pug Baxter when he was six months old. So five, maybe six pound
s.

  As for the mother pig, I tried to narrow down her time of death. She wasn’t bloated, which meant the putrefaction process was yet to start. That’s when the bacteria and enzymes still alive in a body began to break it down. The bacteria were what caused the awful smelling gas people attributed to death. That usually started around the end of the second day, ergo, Miss Piggy had been dead less than forty-eight hours. How much less, I couldn’t be certain, though the little piglet was a good indication. A baby piglet couldn’t survive too long without food. Certainly not much longer than a day.

  The case solved, I turned on my heel.

  “Hey, little piglet,” I called out. “I know you’re hungry.”

  I got down on all fours, moving my hands through the hay.

  “I know you haven’t eaten in a while. And I bet you’re thirsty.”

  I crawled another couple steps.

  There was a rustling.

  A head popped up.

  “There you are,” I said, grinning. Then my face fell. The piglet that surprised me was pink with black markings. This piglet was tan with black markings.

  “There are two of you!”

  As if on cue, five feet away, the other piglet popped its head out.

  It took me five minutes of crawling through the hay before I caught both of them.

  “Okay, are there any more of you? Because I’m running out of hands.”

  If there were more, I was going to have to come back for them.

  I made it to town in ten minutes.

  Pink, who was anatomically a little girl, sat on my lap, while Tan, who anatomically had a tiny little piglet pecker, thrashed about in the backseat.

  I drove past the vet clinic the previous day, and I screeched into one of the parking spots out front. I grabbed the two piglets and pushed through the door. There was an empty reception desk with a vase of flowers and a small bell. My hands full with the piglets, I hit the bell three times with my elbow.

  “Just a second!” a woman shouted.

  A moment later, she emerged. She was petite with blond hair. She was wearing a blue shirt, jeans, and a white lab coat. I put her in her late twenties, early thirties. She was straight out of central casting: Attractive Country Veterinarian. For a moment, I nearly forgot I was holding two little pigs.

  “Look at you guys,” she said, her eyes lighting up.

  “I found them in the loft of my barn.”

  She ignored me and felt both piglets’ noses, then looked into their eyes. Only then did she appear to realize there was a fourth mammal in the room.

  “The loft?” she asked, glancing up. Her eyes were the color of honey. “How did they get up into the loft?”

  “Their mother was up there. I think she must have given birth to them up there?”

  “How did she get up there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Where is the sow now?”

  “Sow?”

  She sighed. “The mom.”

  “Oh. She’s dead.”

  “No wonder they’re so dehydrated.”

  She took Tan from my arms and said, “Follow me.”

  I followed her through a hall and into an examination room. She set Tan on a small metal table, grabbed a stethoscope, and gave him a quick examination. Then she stuck a thermometer up his rump, which he didn’t like one bit—SQUEAL!—and I was reminded I was due for my first prostate exam.

  She went through the same rigmarole with Pink, who was remarkably unfazed by the piece of glass in her rear.

  “They’re different colors,” I said.

  The vet raised her eyebrows and said, “You picked up on that, did you?”

  Her sarcasm took me by surprise.

  “I did.”

  She fought down a smile.

  I said, “The girl is the same color as the mom, but the boy is totally different.”

  She glanced at me for a long second. “Sorry, sometimes I forget not everyone is from here.”

  “I forgive you.”

  She rolled her eyes, then explained that a pig’s litter can have piglets with all sorts of different colorings and markings. The sow (female pig) and boar (male pig) are usually different breeds, and the piglets may look like one or both parents. “Odds are the boar was an Oxford Sandy and Black.”

  “A what?”

  “Oxford Sandy and Black. A breed of pig.”

  “Like a German shepherd?”

  “If that helps you,” she said, a dimple surfacing for a breath before disappearing back to the depths.

  Gina who?

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s get these kiddos some food.”

  She disappeared into the back and left me with the piglets. Both sat on the table staring at me with their large brown eyes.

  “What?”

  They didn’t answer.

  The vet returned with two bottles. She handed one to me.

  “I never got your name,” I said.

  “Sarah.”

  She nodded at the bottle and said, “Just gently—”

  Without prompting, Pink sucked the nipple into her mouth and begin suckling.

  Sarah said, “You’re a natural.”

  “I nursed until I was nine.”

  She cut her eyes at me, then finally cracked a smile.

  A second dimple surfaced.

  Here we go again.

  “Good girl,” I coaxed, turning my attention back to Pink. She suckled away, her little jaw moving up and down.

  “That’s a good boy,” Sarah cooed to Tan.

  The two piglets sucked the bottles dry, and I asked, “Can they have another one?”

  “Not right now. They could have gone a day or more without food, so we don’t want to overwhelm their systems. You can feed them again in a few hours.”

  “Me?” I scoffed. “What do you mean?” I had assumed I would leave the piglets with her.

  “When you take them home.”

  “But they’re not my pigs.”

  “Then go find out whose pigs they are and give them back. Any farmer out here will be happy to take them.”

  My brow furrowed. “And what will they do with them?”

  “Depends. Breed ‘em, eat ‘em, or sell ‘em. There isn’t much else.”

  “But—”

  She looked at me.

  “Okay, I guess I can take them.”

  She told me she could give me enough formula for the next two days, but I would have to go to the feed and supply store to pick up more. Then she told me about some website I should visit so I could read all about how to care for them.

  “I don’t have the internet.”

  “Even on your phone?”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed, her third by my count, and said, “Okay, I’ll print some stuff out for you. Meet me up front.”

  Five minutes later, she met me at the reception desk with a ream of printed pages. She put them in a bag with the formula, then rang me up for the visit. All of $40.

  I said, “It’s got to be more than that.”

  “First-timer’s discount.”

  I set the piglets down and reached for my wallet.

  I groaned.

  In all the piglet hullabaloo, I nearly forgot I was lucky I wasn’t paralyzed.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Sarah asked.

  “I fell out of a tree.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then I fell off a ladder.”

  She fought back a smile. “Really?”

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “Want me to take a look?”

  “Uh, I’m a human.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  I can be annoying.

  “Do you want me to take a look or not?”

  “Yes, please.”

  She came around the counter and asked, “Where does it hurt?”

  “My whole left side, butt, ribs, and shoulder.”

  She ushered me out of the lobby and a few feet into the hall. Then she said, �
�Okay, pull down your pants.”

  I raised my eyebrows and said, “Isn’t that second visit sort of stuff?”

  She gazed at me. I knew the look. It was the I wish I had access to a time machine so I could go back and never have met this guy look.

  “Sorry.” I unbuttoned my pants and pushed my jeans down halfway. On my right quadriceps, a half inch below where my boxer briefs ended, there was a nickel-sized area of dimpled skin. There was a similar scar on my left shoulder.

  Bullets will do that.

  Sarah cast her eyes to the scar, but said nothing. She checked the bruise on my butt and thigh, then said, “Now, lift your shirt.”

  Err.

  “What now?” she said, throwing up her hands.

  “It’s just, I’m kind of chunky right now.”

  She forced down a smile.

  I think I was growing on her.

  That happens sometimes.

  “Just lift your shirt.”

  I did.

  She prodded my ribs.

  “Yowee!”

  “Are you always like this?”

  “I think I might have PTSD.”

  “I think you have brain damage.”

  I laughed, which hurt, but appeared to make Sarah happy.

  After another minute of pressing, prodding, and overall pain infliction, she said, “Well, first off, for falling out of a tree and falling off a ladder, you are incredibly lucky. It’s probably a good thing you’re, as you say, ‘a little chunky.’”

  “I’m joining Weight Watchers.”

  “Good for you,” she said, then rolled her eyes.

  Three sighs, two eye rolls.

  “Anyhow, like I was saying, you might have a couple hairline fractures in your ribs, but there isn’t much you can do for that except grin and bear it for six weeks.”

  “Six weeks?”

  She walked around the counter and pushed through the door. She returned thirty seconds later with a Ziploc bag containing a handful of white pills.

  “This is Hydrocodone. It should help alleviate some of the pain and help you get some sleep.”

  It wasn’t quite as powerful as Percocet, but it would do the trick.

  I thanked her and asked, “What do I owe you for it?”