Robert Walker - Scalpers

"Why? Why bother?"

"They'll know we're still at large!"

"It doesn't matter what they know or think they know. He, our great god, will protect us if they come near us."

Then the noise of approaching men frightened them off and they were forced to leave Mrs. Jimenez where she lay. Deep in the dark shadows was the girl, hiding, fearful, stunned and in shock, and suddenly terrified into running again when something in the dark beside her moved and reached out a skeletal hand to her. She only saw the hand and the eyes, deep in their sockets, staring up at her as if they were lying on the ground.

She ran back toward what she thought was the hospital, but her mind was out of control, and she wandered the wrong way.

Lionel Morton Silbey the Third lay in a dung heap of his own making at the end of the alley where he'd taken up residence since October of the previous year. He hadn't long been a resident of Orlando, or of Florida, but he liked it so far and believed he would make it his permanent home, permanent, at least, until his Maker should call for his infernal, inebriated soul. God forbid it should be as put-upon as his physical self all these years. First it was by the pain of a loss so great that to this day his heart might burst if he allowed an hour's sober thought to it, the loss of Chrissy, the only child of a marriage destroyed by Chrissy's disease, a brave little three-and-half-month-old child which asked only for life, but instead got a cruel, painful affliction Silbey could not any longer pronounce.

Where his woman was, he had no idea. The city he once called home, he had a vague inkling to be St. Louis. As to his parents, he'd washed their memories from his mind with a conscious flow of booze.

But Lionel had fallen on hard times here in Florida. He hadn't enough money to stay drunk, and people here, they didn't treat a man like him as they did in St. Louis. Here, the weather was kind to an alcoholic—but the people weren't. They made him go to the mission if he begged for handouts. Police arrested him every other night. Only the man that gave him the job of cleaning his kitchen, the Chinaman, gave him what he needed. The Chinaman understood Lionel and paid him in booze, which was all he wanted. It was a proper good bargain, as the British would say in that Limey talk of theirs, a bloody good wage for a bloody good job....

Lionel's thoughts were interrupted where he slept at the back of Chung Fat's Chop Suey House behind some cans when he heard a woman's muffled cry. He groggily straightened up, but froze when his bleary eyes focused on some odd commotion going on. He saw through the space between Chung Fat's trash cans what appeared to be a family. There was the tall, strong, straight-backed father, his arms tightly around the neck of the mother, who was far shorter and fatter. Then, down about their knees, was the little kid, playing around some boxes with what appeared to be two toy swords. The sight, dim and dark as it was in the poor light, and within the limited confines of a drunken eye, brought a phantom tear to the old man's eye. The sight made him think of little Chrissy, reason and eternal excuse for his own living death. These dancing figures before his eyes, this family, this was a taunting, hellish thing that God, in his infinite and mysterious wisdom, tortured a weak and lonely man with.

Lionel then saw the little kid, a boy from the look of him (yet there was something not boyish at all in his movements, his clothes looking like a shaggy-dog costume), pounce on the mother. He was kicking her violently as the father raced after a second child, a terrified little girl who gave him the slip, dropping into a recess just down from where Lionel was, trying to work her way back, closer. The violence terrified Lionel, and yet he could not tear his eyes away, wondering if the family were real or imagined, and wondering what, if anything, the boy might do next. He was soon rewarded with a ghastly show as the ugly child sat over the woman's head and began to carve away at her scalp, her scalp!

Lionel heard the woman's last words repeat themselves in his brain, "My baby."

The boy's sword was really a large knife! Lionel's thinned blood chilled at the next instant as if coagulating in his veins when, with the father returning, the boy jumped up and down on the woman's carcass, holding her hair up for approval.

Lionel reeled from the shock of what he was witness to. He questioned his senses, yet he had only just begun to drink this night, and had been nearly sober only two hours before. Was this a horror playing out in the real world, or something his fevered brain had prepared just for the third-generation Silbey, who'd had a great-grandfather who'd been a Confederate general?

He feared to glance again, yet he prayed and half-believed that another look at the awful scene would reveal that it had all been a delirious hallucination brought on by all the alcohol of a troubled life.

Taking a deep breath and closing his eyes in an attempt to banish the sight, Lionel looked out to where he'd seen the mutilation of the mother by the father and son. He was confident nothing, no one, would be there when he looked again.

But it was not to be so.

The two males worked over the corpse, trying, it seemed, to pry something further from it, or drag it away with them.

Lionel, sickened, filled with fear, wondering if he were deranged beyond all help now, still could not take his eyes off the horror before him. God, he felt alone ... and afraid. And if he felt so, what about the little girl, inching closer in the darkness, still unaware of Lionel?

If the murdering pair saw the girl or Lionel, they'd come for them, rip them open with their knives for some senseless end. Now Lionel saw that the boy was not a boy, but a very small man, a devilish gnome of some sort, perhaps a dwarf.

Shaken badly, Lionel lay back down, fearing to breathe, fearing to make a sound, fearing even to drink what remained of his Black Label. Then they were gone, hearing some commotion at the other end of the alleyway, and he thought that perhaps it was safe, though perhaps not. He then recalled the hiding girl, so like his Chrissy, so alone and unreachable ... for he knew he could not help her. Still, he looked for her and found she had moved even closer and had seen the horror as he had. He reached out a hand to her, to touch her, to determine if it were all a bad dream, when suddenly their eyes met and she got up and ran and ran....

Lionel wondered if he'd ever know if all this madness were real or not. He lay back, wanting only for sleep to overtake him. He lay this way for hours, waiting desperately for the Florida sun to return and blanket his alley with light; to burn away all the ugly sights from his mind, to show him that it had all been a most hideous nightmare brought on by his inebriated brain.

But when the light finally came, Lionel dared look to where the gnome and the other man had scalped the woman and he saw something large and bloody and attracting flies by the hundreds, and he realized the sun wasn't going to wash it away or burn it from his sight. He brought his knees together and huddled there, and he couldn't bring himself to take one step from his home behind the restaurant, which wouldn't open for hours. He needed a drink and saw his bottle, nearly full. He began slowly to drain it in an attempt to blot out the events of the night before and what lay out there, not twelve yards from him. He would talk to Mr. Chung Fat. He would tell him. He might know what do....

ELEVEN

Dean and Sid, despite the discomfort of having had very little sleep and the grandiose notion that one day they would chuck M.E. work for the ideal, high-paying work of an ordinary doctor, became so intensely involved in what had apparently occurred at Park's apartment that no one, no amount of money could have pulled them from the lab this night. So intense had their investigation become that neither man even knew that it was light out. But both knew that Park had been murdered by the Scalping Crew, even though it had appeared as if Peggy Carson had, in self-defense, killed Park, who'd been made to look the part of a mass murderer. They had more than enough evidence to prove it.