James Smith - Hybrid

No response.

“If anybody’s in there, you’d better come out now before I blow a hole through you.”

He reached for the knob, slowly twisted it, then gave a shove and stepped inside. The flashlight beam moved across the room until it reached a steel table where a sheet covered the shape of a body. He’d never seen a dead body, not one up close anyway except for his grandmother’s. His Mama didn’t let him linger over it though. His Grandma looked so different from his last visit at the nursing home. Caked makeup had smothered her face and the corners of her lips bore the likeness of a smile, but he’d never remembered seeing her smile before. He took his hand off his pistol and advanced to the table. Using only the tips of his index finger and thumb, he pulled the top of the sheet away.

Dieter held his breath as footsteps approached the prep table. He suddenly heard a roar.

Jesus Christ Almighty!

The words were so loud that he jerked his head up and bumped it against the top of his steel tomb.

Dammit .

The door to the room slammed shut and the rush of footsteps faded down the hallway.

Silence.

The closet door opened and then the refrigerated slab was finally being yanked out. “Get me out of here,” Dieter growled, his words echoing as if inside a cave.

“You okay, Doc?” Josh began rubbing Dieter’s shoulders.

He was too frozen to carry on polite conversation.

“Stay here and warm up,” Josh said. “I’ll make sure the cruiser’s gone.”

While Josh investigated, Dieter rolled off the steel table and paced rapidly, his arms locked across his chest massaging his shoulders. Gradually, his shivering subsided and his anger was replaced by a crazy sense of achievement, like a schoolboy who had pulled off a prank. He moved toward the prep table just as Josh returned. The green sheet was bunched around the cadaver’s head. He grasped the top of the sheet and pulled it down, then cringed and turned away. Against the victim’s shoulder lay a half-eaten head. The face was covered in swirls of burgundy and black surrounding dark caverns where once loomed eyes.

As Josh watched from behind, Dieter used his penlight to examine the excavated throat, a jumble of slashed arteries and veins, minced cartilage, and a shredded windpipe. The odor of decomposing flesh arose—rotting, yet a certain sweetness mingled with it. The stench of death, a haunting blend of sweet and rancid. The neck had been chewed away, gnawed down to the cervical spine. He strained to look, holding the penlight into the open wound. Teeth marks were whittled on the ivory surface of the bone.

He pulled the sheet farther down and revealed the rest of the torso covered with lacerations and dried blood. The naked chest was carved with penetrating scratches.

“Do you see anything resembling a stab wound, Doc?”

“Nothing.” Dieter held the light closer and pointed to a wide abrasion about six inches long under the cadaver’s left nipple. He looked at Josh, who was nodding with recognition.

“No question about it,” Josh said. “Four evenly spaced claw-marks. See how they dug in beneath the skin. Must be almost an inch.” He held up his curled fingers and raked at the air. “But that ain’t near deep or wide enough for a bear. Only one creature scrapes and claws with a pattern like that, partner.”

Dieter pointed the light to a clear bite mark with evidence of fang penetration just below the neck at the upper edge of the clavicle. He made a fist and formed the familiar goalposts with his fingers. The width looked identical to that found on the llama carcass.

“What about these pockmarks? Look at them. How can a wolf do that?”

Josh bent low to examine the tiny gouges that covered the decaying face. “My guess is that’s the work of ravens. They can’t rip open a carcass, so they let the wolves do the hard labor. I’ve always thought those birds a hell of a lot smarter than the coyotes and eagles that can only come across a kill by chance. Ravens follow wolves around like a whore after a sailor. They work as a team. The wolves do the hunting while the birds do the spotting.”

They had spent too much time and were pressing their luck. Dieter placed the sheet back over the corpse, leaving it crumpled over the body with the head partly exposed, exactly the way the deputy had left it. “I think we’ve seen enough.”

Josh nodded and they moved quickly back through the building. Dieter checked along the way to make sure nothing was out of place before they exited into the dark toward the pickup.

When they headed back to Josh’s ranch, Dieter’s mind raced with thoughts of how narrow their escape.

“You okay, Doc?”

“Just thinking… it would be a good idea if we kept in touch.”

“You got my number?”

Dieter reached into his pocket to grab Mrs. Manning’s business card to write on. He found his keys, a ballpoint pen and spare change. But the card was gone.

MollySchoonover knew him as soon as he walked into the General Store that morning—the tall man with a wild patch of hair dangling like a bird’s nest from his sharp boney chin. A wide-brimmed straw hat hid his eyes as he moved with elbows splayed out and hands jammed inside deep pockets. An overseer, too high and mighty to touch the merchandise.

She had talked the Judge into driving up to Colter to shop. Although September hadn’t yet arrived—Labor Day was coming soon—signs of an early fall abounded. Golden aspen peppered the green forests along with the fire-red maples. The air had that distinctive chill even in the middle of a sunny day. Before long, the summer onslaught of park tourists would disappear in time with the first snows of the season.

Three women wearing dresses to their ankles accompanied old man Loudermilk. The entire family moved together as if tethered, whispering to one another and paying no heed to other customers; all tuned into themselves. She never quite determined what went on with that peculiar family. She remembered Dieter mentioning the colt delivery at their place and wished he’d learned more about them to share with her. The rumors about the family were rampant, but she made it a point to give little if any credence to gossip about families that were different. God knows she and the Judge were different in their own ways. To be fair, she’d heard favorable accounts of the Loudermilk family as well, favorable accounts suggesting they were good people despite their quirks. They not only worked a ranch, but did odd jobs on the side. The women were outstanding seamstresses, she’d heard, who made wedding dresses, curtains and the like and that they worked at reasonable rates to boot. Given the miserable state of the drapes throughout her house, it crossed Molly’s mind that maybe she should politely inquire about their services.

Joseph Vincent Loudermilk pointed at something on a shelf occasionally, and one of the women would pick off a box or can or bag and drop it into the basket that another pushed along the aisle. The two younger women each had their hair braided into a strand that wobbled below their waist as they strolled.

Molly leaned down to the Judge in his wheelchair and whispered. “Do you remember the story on the Loudermilks over there?”

He looked up. After a pause and a nod, he said, “Sure. He s-sued the Helena newspaper a few years back b-because of the story they did on them. Best just to avoid them, Molly.”

The Judge rarely said that sort of thing about anyone and people never spoke an unkind word about the Judge. Everyone admired the Honorable Bradford Schoonover and how well he managed to get about. A judge in the Eighteenth Judicial District of Montana for sixteen years, he was best known for his fairness in the courtroom and his eloquence in putting into words the reasons for rendering his verdicts.