Jonathan Nasaw - Twenty-Seven Bones

“Whereas the doctrine of literal transubstantiation, i.e., the wafer is the body of Christ; the wine is the blood, would be considered nonbizarre in a Catholic, but bizarre in an Ibo.” He checked the time again. “I hope that was some help. And please, feel free to call me if you change your mind or run into any problems. Patients leave and reenter therapy all the time-I assure you, I’d think more of you, not less, if you managed to overcome your resistance.”

Like I could care what you think of me, thought Lewis. “Can I get another prescription for Valium when I run out? They really saved my bacon the other-”

“I don’t prescribe for patients I’m not treating,” said Vogler, with evident satisfaction-apparently he wasn’t taking his dismissal as well as Lewis had first thought. “Oh, and I just remembered one more interesting fact about Delusional Disorder: out of the three hundred and ninety-five psychiatric disorders recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, Delusional Disorder is the only one that’s contagious.”

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Lewis in alarm.

“Sorry, time’s up,” said Vogler-by then he was practically oozing satisfaction. “Call my office for an appointment if you decide you need more Valium.”

If Pender had died in his sleep Sunday night, they’d have had to bury him with a grin and a hard-on. What had begun in the cramped Quonset and been interrupted by Pender’s turn at guard duty, ended in the spacious sleeping loft of the A-frame. At their age, they needed the leg and elbow room.

Dawson was gone when he awoke a little after ten-he’d neglected to set his alarm-but he could smell her scent everywhere. Madagascar jasmine, not from a perfume bottle but from the white blossoms she’d picked down by the lane and strewn across his bed and herself as she waited for him to return from guard duty the previous night. Blossoms they’d crushed under and between their bodies as they made love. He’d laughed, called her his flower child. You can take the girl out of the sixties, but you can’t take the sixties out of the girl, she told him.

The sky was overcast as Pender climbed the hill to the Crapaud. He assumed it was going to be another of those hit-and-run showers. On his way out of the Crapaud he encountered Dawson on her way in. Morning after the night before. Pender knew better than to let it get awkward. “Well helloooo, gorgeous,” he boomed.

“Sheesh, tell the world, why don’tcha,” said Dawson, Raggedy Ann blush circles blooming on her round cheeks. But she went up on tiptoe and kissed him as they brushed past each other in the doorway, and he knew he’d been right not to underplay it.

The rain held off for Pender’s commute, but the sky continued to darken. He parked the cruiser in the police lot behind Government Yard, entered the quadrangle through a stone archway overgrown with bougainvillea, and crossed the cobblestones to police headquarters.

Inside, there was a commotion in the lobby. People were scrambling around the lobby floor chasing little rolling limes the size of golf balls. The desk sergeant rushed by with a chair, set it down in the middle of the lobby, directly under the domed skylight. Another uniform helped a sobbing dark-skinned girl in a thin flower-patterned dress into the chair; when he caught sight of Pender he beckoned him over.

“Two more Machete Mon deadah in de lime grove,” he whispered, as somebody else gave the girl a glass of water. “She run all de way.”

“Where’s Chief Coffee?”

The officer looked around in surprise. “He was here a minute ago.”

Pender raced his cruiser full throttle up the dundo road leading into the rain forest. Layla Coffee’s makeshift crime lab van was parked next to the road. The sky was gray, verging on black; the grove looked like a tangled fairy-tale maze. “Julian?”

“Edgar?”

“Yeah.”

“Over here.”

Pender followed the voice, ducked under a low-hanging branch, saw Julian standing behind Layla, who was crouched beside a blanket where two bodies lay, one atop the other. Pender circled the crime scene at a distance, saw the machete in the male’s left hand, the female’s outstretched brown arm, the wrist stump, the severed hand. He kept circling, saw the revolver in the girl’s left hand. Too good to be true? “Please tell me this hasn’t been posed,” he called to Layla.

She was kneeling, with her head almost on the blanket, peering upward at the bullet wounds in the male’s lower right rib cage. “Trajectory looks about right,” she said. “Won’t know for sure ’til we get him on the slab.” Her accent was her mother’s-the pronunciation was pretty close to standard English, but the tune was definitely Caribbean. “Blanket under the wrist is soaked, ground under the blanket is soaked, and you can see the spray pattern across the blanket and onto the dirt, so this is where it happened. If there’s GSR on her hand, I’d be willin’ to-Oh Lord, here she comes.”

She being the rain, arriving not with a tentative pitter-patter, but a whoomp, as if the sky gods had overturned a giant bucket. Layla quickly pulled off her nylon windbreaker and covered as much of the bodies as she could, while Pender and Coffee raced to the van. Julian stayed behind to man the phone; Pender donned a hooded yellow SLPD slicker and raced back through the rain with his arms full.

For the second time in four days, Pender helped Layla set up a crime scene tent. “We have to stop meeting like this,” he called, over the roar of the driving rain. When they were done, he offered to look for footprints in the woods before it was too late.

She gave him a disposable Kodak in a yellow cardboard case and a pocketful of numbered plastic evidence markers. As he ducked out of the tent and into the storm, Pender heard sirens dopplering up the dundo road, barely audible over the sound of the rain.

Phil had slept poorly. Despite Emily’s reassurances, he couldn’t shake the idea that his younger wife might be phasing him out, grooming his replacement. The girl last night, for instance-by all rights her last breath should have been his, shouldn’t it?

He ran through the chronology again. There was the German woman last Three Kings Day-she’d been his. Then there was the debacle with Tex Wanger in August. He was to have been Emily’s, but the big man turned out to have had a violent and unseemly will to live. He had somehow managed to yank his bloody stump free of the restraints, battered at Phil with it, twisted his head away from Emily’s avid mouth, and died before they could restrain him again, his last breath wasted, dissipated into the still air of the cross chamber.

So Arena had represented Emily’s rain check, and Hokey Apgard, whom they hadn’t bothered to take to the cave, since her body was intended to be found, had breathed her last into Bennie’s mouth in the back of the van. So yes, the whore’s final breath should definitely have been Phil’s.

Equally troubling, for the first time in years Phil had been unable to arouse himself physically, before, during, or after the sacrifice. And to add insult to injury, he’d been reduced to sitting in the corner of the room chafing his flaccid old dick while his wife fucked the screaming bejesus out of the younger, handsomer Apgard, who’d stolen the dying breath that should have been his.

But Phil knew where the blame for his own impotence really lay. Something he’d feared for years was finally coming to pass: ten months without a dying breath, an infusion of eheha, and he was already starting to feel his age. If he didn’t replenish himself soon, he knew, he’d turn into an old man. An impotent old man-and for Phil, life after sex would hardly be worth living.