Burning Angel (Dave Robicheaux 8)

”Lighten up, Streak.“

”That's exactly what Clete Purcel says.“

”Cluster fuck? No kidding?“ she said, and grinned. Twenty minutes later two divers, wearing wet suits and air tanks and surgical gloves over their hands, sawed loose the tangle of mono-filament fish line that had been wrapped around and crisscrossed over the submerged body and threaded through a daisy chain of junkyard iron. They held the body by the arms and dragged it heavily onto the bank, the decomposed buttocks sliding through the reeds like a collapsed putty-colored balloon.

A young television newsman, his camera whirring, suddenly took his face away from his viewer and gagged.

”Excuse me,“ he said, embarrassed, his hand pinched over his mouth.

Then he turned aside and vomited.

The divers laid the body front-down on a black plastic sheet. The backs of the thighs were pulsating with leeches. One of the divers walked away, took a cigarette from a uniformed deputy's mouth, and smoked it, his back turned toward us.

The pathologist was a tall white-haired man who wore a bow tie, suspenders, and a wide-brimmed straw hat with a thin black ribbon around the crown.

”I wonder why they didn't eviscerate him while they were at it,“ he said.

The body was nude. The fingers and thumbs of both hands had been snipped off cleanly at the joints, perhaps with bolt cutters. The head had been sawed off an inch above the collarbones.

Helen bit a hangnail off her thumb. ”What do you think?“ she said.

”Look at the size. How many guys that big end up as floaters?“ I said.

Even in death and the gray stages of decomposition that take place under water in the tropics, the network of muscles in the shoulders and back and hips was that of a powerful, sinewy man, someone whose frame was wired together by years of calisthenics, humping ninety-pound packs in the bush, jolting against a parachute harness while the steel pot razors down on the nose.

I stretched a pair of white surgical gloves over my hands and knelt by the body. I tried to hold my breath, but the odor seemed to cling to my skin like damp wool, an all-enveloping hybrid stench that's like a salty tangle of seaweed and fish eggs drying on hot sand and pork gone green with putrefaction.

”You don't have to do that, Dave,“ the pathologist said. ”I'll have him apart by five o'clock.“

”I'm just checking for a bullet wound, Doc,“ I said.

I fitted both hands under the torso and flipped the body on its back

”Oh shit,“ a newsman said.

”Maybe the guy was having a female implant put in,“ a uniformed deputy said.

”Shut up, asshole,“ Helen said.

There was a single wound above the groin area. It had been cored out by a fish eel, whose head was embedded deep in the flesh while the tail flipped in the air like a silver whip.

”You might look for a nine-millimeter, Doc,“ I said.

”You know this guy?“ he asked.

”My guess is his name was Jack,“ I said.

Helen brushed at his thigh with a piece of folded cardboard. ”Here's a tattoo his friends missed,“ she said.

It was a faded green, red, and gold Marine Corps globe and anchor imposed upon a cone-shaped open parachute.

”The poor dumb fuck didn't even know who he was on a skivvy run,“ Helen said.

Helen's therapist had asked her one of those questions for which an honest answer is seemingly disingenuous or so self-revealing that you don't wish to inhabit your own skin for a while.

My dreams seemed continuous, beginning with the first moments of sleep and ending at dawn, but the props and central characters always remained the same.

I stand at a brass-railed mahogany bar on a pink evening in the Philippines, the palm fronds in the courtyard waving slightly in the breeze. I knock back a shot glass of Beam and chase it with San Miguel on the side, rest my forearms on the coolness of the wood and wait for the rush, which, like an old friend, never disappoints, which always lasers straight to the nerve endings at the base of the brain and fills the glands and loins and the sealed corridors of memory with light and finally gives ease to the constricted and fearful heart.