Page 1 of Shrapnel

1

Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, Welcome to My Darkside

Faded paint fleckedoff the fiberglass statue. With every passing moment, his crime scene was being contaminated by lead-infused bubble gum pink flakes of paint. He dragged on his cigarette and squinted through the exhaled smoke.

About four feet tall it was supposed to be an ice cream cone. Age had not been kind to Mr. Swirly. His swirled vanilla head, at one point a white reminiscent of soft serve, had been sunburnt into a dingy yellow. Rather than making him nostalgic for childhood, it just reminded him of a dog hiking his leg in the snow. Two wide eyes stared back at him. The eyebrows were long gone, leaving Mr. Swirly with a permanently, horrifyingly surprised expression.

With lips spread in a sycophantic smile, Mr. Swirly was the creepiest fucking thing he had ever seen.

And he was currently standing over a dead body.

His dead body, and Mr. Swirly, found a back alley as their final resting place. The kind of place that was a cold opening for a crime show. Hodges felt the urge to slip off a pair of sunglasses and drop some poorly apropos quip that was just this side of inappropriate. Fade to black.Dun dun.Roll the credits.

But Hodges wasn’t on a syndicated crime show. He was just a poorly paid public servant trying to ignore the way a fiberglass children’s statue would undoubtedly haunt his nightmares.

Pulling on his cigarette, he let the tobacco fill his mouth and lungs. If he listened carefully, he could hear the carcinogens infuse into the tissue of his lungs. Good. One less day to deal with this bullshit.

“Hey,” he called over his shoulder to his partner. “What’s that thing where a painting looks like its eyes are following you?”

“Ravine,” Alan answered eagerly. “Humans tend to perceive objects as real. The visual information that defines near and far points is unaffected which makes it look like the eyes are following you.”

Hodges would never get over the way Alan spoke about humans as if he wasn’t one. Still, the kid was bright. He took a lot of the workload off Hodges.

Dragging his eyes off Mr. Swirly, he turned back to the body.

Alan was kneeling over the guy, black latex gloves on his hands and head cocked as he took in the scene. This was his process. Alan took in the scene looked at every angle, then, and only then, did he begin writing his notes. The method took an indeterminable amount of time. It would probably bother Hodges if he gave a damn. About anything.

Letting the cigarette hang from his lips, he stuffed his hands in his pockets. He forgot gloves again.

The stiff looked to be in his forties. An unassuming kind of man, death had yet to ravage his body. There was no bloating and very little insect activity. Nothing unusual about his clothes either—jeans and a t-shirt, perfectly normal for fall in the Southwest. The one sneaker he was wearing was off-brand, the kind of sneaker his dad would wear to mow the lawn in the wee hours of a weekend morning.

Strangely enough, there was no blood. In fact, Hodges couldn’t see any kind of wound at all. The dead guy’s clothes were rumpled, one sleeve was torn, but otherwise intact.

What Hodgescouldsee was the general fuckery of his face. Red welts marred the man’s jaw and mouth, turning the skin into an angry field of swollen pustules. At one point they had wept, leaving a shiny viscous fluid behind. The crime scene photographer's lens flashed over and over, the LED bulb illuminating the horror on the guy’s face.

Kneeling, he pulled one of the closed eyelids up. The vessels in his eyes had blown, so much so that the white pupils looked black with the blood pooling in the jelly of his eyes.

“What do you think?” Alan asked rhetorically. He didn’t actually care what Hodges thought. “Looks like some kind of inhalant. Paint?”

Hodges didn’t answer. He began digging through the man’s pockets.

“Probable drug addict. Overdid it. Popped his lungs and died,” Alan said, bored that yet another case would be labeled an accidental death. Alan was jonesing for a homicide fix.

Hodges found what he was looking for. With two fingers he worked the leather wallet out of the dead guy’s back pocket.

“Sneaker,” he said distractedly, opening the bi-fold and rummaging through the contents.

“What?”

“If it was an accidental overdose, where is his other sneaker? They don’t just get up and walk off.”

While Alan gaped and went back over the scene, Hodges looked at the driver’s license he pulled out of the worn leather wallet. According to the laminated plastic driver’s license, Jude Andrews was 43 years old, 5’9” tall, and weighed 230 lbs. He lived locally and was an organ donor.

“Maybe someone stole his shoe?” Alan prompted. “Another user.”

Hodges glared up at his young partner. “Users don’t stealonebargain brand sneaker. They have some standards.”

Besides his ID, Andrews had $27 and a concealed carry permit. While Hodges looked at the last date on his Coffee Club punch card, his eyes drifted back to the address on the ID. It was familiar to him.