The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [7]
Thigpen shrugged again, rubbed at his nose. “You got that right,” he said.
Slowly Unc let the stick touch the ground, then turned toward where the body was across the road. “Tommy,” he said, “looks like we got a messy one here.”
Yandle looked at Unc, then at me. His eyebrows were all knotted, his jaw working.
I only shrugged. I said, “Guess he wants to talk to your backup.”
Unc turned back to Thigpen, leaned the stick against the hood of the cruiser, and shook hands with him.
“Leland,” Thigpen said, “I just followed this call. I’m backup for Doug, so don’t you start with me. You know that.”
He was smiling now, a gold cap on one of his two front teeth. He was skinny, pale except for his left arm, the farmer’s tan. He had the same creases in the uniform, even had the same mustache, though his was grizzly, gray and brown and a little long on the edges.
“Mr. Dillard,” Yandle said. He was still too loud. “We have procedures as set down by the County Sheriff’s Department as regards responding units, and those procedures, when violated, place any investigation in serious jeopardy—”
“Back this way,” Unc said to Tommy, and turned.
But I was right there, in front of him now he’d turned to usher this Thigpen to the body.
Police work, I thought. Nothing to do with me.
His stick hit my boot, and he stopped, looked up. Here I was again, two of me there in his sunglasses.
“Huger?” he said.
I said, “You’re not losing me this easy.”
Past him I could see Tommy Thigpen, now with his arms crossed, his head tilted, looking at me, at Unc. And I knew behind me was Yandle, behind him Ravenel, then everybody else, all those orange-capped South-of-Broaders standing now, dusting off their butts from sitting in the weeds all this while, waiting to see, just like me, what was going to happen.
It wasn’t going to happen without me.
Unc put his free hand to my shoulder yet again. “You probably think I’m hoping your momma’s going to show up here any second, don’t you?” He squeezed hard, and I felt again how skinny I was, how nothing I was out here with everyone looking on at the two of us. “But since you haven’t called her yet, I don’t suppose she’ll be coming anytime soon. Now, ain’t that right?”
I looked down. “Yessir,” I said.
This was how long we’d been with each other: long enough for him to know I wouldn’t be calling this in to my mom, who’d throw a fit one way or the other. And long enough for me to know I couldn’t lie to him.
“One thing,” Unc said, and I looked at him. “One thing. This is a murder. Not a party. Not a field trip.”
His mouth was just a thin line, his jaw clenched.
“Yessir,” I said.
He nodded.
The smell had gone worse.
It’d been almost an hour since we were first back here to the body, and some flies had started in. Before, that smell’d been dark red and metal. Now it was something like a whiff of pluff mud up off the marsh.
But what hit me most was how still this all was, and I felt myself in some way ugly for being alive, for moving up to it with Unc and these two deputies. Behind us and looking over all our shoulders was a string of lawyers and doctors and such, eager for a look again at a body, all this movement, all of us alive.
Nothing had changed at all from when we’d first been back here. It was a body. It had hardly any head, its hands skinned. It had on fatigues, held a gun, and just lay there, but for the flies picking at the head and hands.
Thigpen stepped up beside the top of the body, squatted, moved his head back and forth, looking at the weeds there.
“Quite a wound,” Thigpen said. “Not enough blood behind him and in the weeds here for a wound that big.” He paused, leaned in close. “And them hands. Shit.” He reached toward the shoulder, and I could see a tattoo coming out from under Thigpen’s short sleeve: the word JUNIOR, homemade.
“We’ll leave all deductions to the crime-scene task force, Deputy Thigpen,” Yandle said. He had a notepad out, a silver pen he’d taken from his front shirt