Ken Douglas - Ragged Man

It was water clear to Gundry that the man was dead. Maybe he had a wallet. Maybe he had money or a watch. Maybe his shoes would fit. Maybe. Only one way to find out. Scratching his head, chasing the lice, Gundry rose, unzipped his fly and urinated. Then he started toward the corpse.

He had been a dentist before he’d started to burn his brain cells. An easy and safe career. A tooth doctor didn’t have to tell a mother her child had died on the table. An easy job for an easy man. A man who loved children and life. However, unfortunately, somewhere along the line he started to drink and, as it happens so often, he found that later on down the line he couldn’t stop.

Now he was little more than human refuse. A bum always on the lookout for a drink. An ape-like man, who walked with his face to the ground in a kind of simian shuffle. And like an ape, he was constantly scratching at the lice and fleas that fed off him.

Pushing his long, stringy hair out of his eyes, he looked down at the man. “Dead,” he muttered. “Dead for sure.” With large, swollen hands, he flipped the corpse face down into the sand. Then he went through the pockets.

He found a wallet, opened it, saw money, then stuffed the wallet into his rear pocket. The shoes were too small, but he saw a watch. He started to pull it off when the dead man’s hand grabbed Gundry’s arm in a dead man’s grip.

Malcolm Gundry screamed, tried to jerk away, but the grip held. He pulled harder, but still the dead man held on. He kicked the corpse, but still it held on. Again he kicked, but to no avail. His weak heart started pumping more blood than it was used to. His head hurt and his arm, held in that devil grip, felt like it was being crushed. He was going to pass out. He was going to die. Then, all of a sudden, he was blinded by light as he felt a white hot stab of pain in the back of his neck. He jerked back, free. He screamed, grabbing the back of his neck, feeling the wetness of his own blood, but this time it was a scream of triumph. He ripped off the dead man’s watch, picked up the dead man’s knife, then shuffled off the beach in search of a drink as the wind picked up, blowing sand.

“ Let me get this straight,” Sheriff Sturgees said, “he attacked Judy and you ran him down?”

“ Yes,” Rick Gordon said.

“ Where’s the knife?”

“ It was here.”

“ Where did it go?”

“ Someone took it.” Rick raised his collar against the wind. He was a head taller than the portly sheriff, but he didn’t let that distract him. Many people, to their everlasting regret, misjudged the sheriff, finding it hard to accept such a keen mind in his short, overweight body.

“ Who?”

“ How should I know?” Rick met his stare head on.

“ Don’t get upset, I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“ It was probably taken by the same man that turned the body.”

“ Say again.”

“ The body was on its back.”

“ That’s right,” Judy said.

“ He was laying on his back,” J.P. chimed in, “and he had a knife. A Jim Bowie knife.”

“ How do you know it was a Bowie Knife?”

“ Captain Wolfe has one. I know what they look like.”

“ Wolfe Stewart,” the sheriff asked, “the captain of the all day fishing boat that runs between here and Palma?

“ Yeah, the captain of the Seawolf,” Judy said.

“ And Captain Wolfe has a Jim Bowie knife like the one I saw,” J.P. said. “He wears it in a knife holster tied to his leg.”

“ It’s called a scabbard,” Judy said.

“ All right,” the sheriff turned to Rick, “the man had a knife.”

“ And he meant Judy harm,” Rick said.

“ How do you know?”

“ He would have cut me, Sheriff. I know it. He would have cut me and killed me. I was helpless. I couldn’t move.”

“ He was gonna kill my mom.”

“ J.P., get away from there!”

“ I’m not gonna touch him, Mom.”

“ Now J.P.!”

J.P. moved away from the dead man.

The sheriff bent over the corpse. “No wallet and he had a watch.”

“ How can you tell?” Judy asked.

“ Look for yourself.” He pointed to a white ring set off by a deep outdoor tan around the dead man’s left wrist.

“ Wow, that’s police work, isn’t it?” J.P. said.

“ Sheriff, can we go now?” Judy asked. “I’d rather J.P. didn’t have to see this.”

“ He was a witness, but I guess we can do without him here. I’ll talk to you after I’m done. Why don’t you take your boy and wait up by the cars.”

“ Thanks,” Judy said, overcoming J.P.’s objections.

“ Okay,” the sheriff said, after they were out of earshot, “now let’s talk about the Jim Bowie knife that isn’t here.”

Two blocks away Mr. Jaspinder Singh was ringing up a pack of Marlboros when the customer asked him a question.

“ Do you know Rick Gordon?” The man asked like a policeman.

“ I am truly not knowing him.”

“ About six feet, green eyes, maybe hazel. Brown, wavy hair, probably cut a little too long. Got a scar behind his left ear, here.” Storm touched the spot with a finger. “Wife named Ann, a looker, just a little shorter than him, shoulder length hair, Barbie Doll looks, the original blue-eyed blond, you’d seen her, you’d remember. That’s what everyone says. You know anybody like that?”

“ Not that I can recall.”

“ I heard they come in here.”

“ Many people are certainly coming in here. I cannot be knowing each and every one. Why are you asking?”

“ My name’s Storm, Sam Storm. I’m a private investigator.”

“ That is a very private eye kind of name you are having, Mr. Storm.”

“ Yeah, well I’ve heard that before.”

“ What has this person been doing to cause your looking?”

“ He makes bootleg CDs.”

“ And for this you are coming here? My eleven-year-old son makes them on my computer, is he in trouble too?”

“ I work for the RIAA, the Recording Industry Association of America. They represent the music business and they’re mighty unhappy with Mr. Gordon. They’d like him to find a new line of work. As for your boy, if he’s just making them for himself, we don’t care.”

“ Why would anybody be buying something anybody can be making?”

“ The bootleggers are making collectable CDs now, with original packaging that’s hard to duplicate. The FBI busted someone in New Orleans last year, five agents, ten local cops and me. Quite a collar, but he wasn’t one of the big guys that started up the biz.”

“ Five FBI agents, how impressive. I guess the FBI hasn’t heard about what happened on September 11, 2001 or the war on terror. And ten local cops, that’s impressive too. I guess they don’t have murder, robbery or rape in New Orleans.” Jaspinder Singh snorted. “And now you’re thinking we have a dastardly criminal here in Tampico, pumping out these CDs.” Singh shook his head, what a sad excuse for a man this Sam Storm was.

“ No, I was following up a lead, that’s all. My brother-in-law thought he saw him up here last month. I thought I’d check it out.” That putz Herbie, Storm thought. This was the third time in as many years that he thought he’d sighted Gordon. Maybe he never should have shown him the pictures.

“ I am certainly sorry that I cannot be helping you. I do not know the man you are looking for,” he lied. Jaspinder Singh had heard enough-as far as he was concerned Rick Gordon had done nothing wrong. He would continue on the prudent course that he had set out for himself very early in life and mind his own business.

Sam Storm paid for his cigarettes with a twenty, pocketed his change and walked out the door, pausing for a second to check the magazine rack to see if there were any nudies. There weren’t.