“This him?” Jimmy asked.
Stuart gestured to the locker’s handle. “Be my guest.”
Jimmy reached for the handle but stopped short before his fingers touched the metal. He glanced to Stuart, to the purple latex gloves he wore, and with a smirk of self-admiration, he slipped the cuff of his jacket over his hand. “Can’t be too careful.”
He opened the door and rolled out the retractable table.
The corpse had already been packaged in a black body bag for its trip to the Hewitt County Medical Center, where it would await cremation if nothing came up on a fingerprint check, or if nobody claimed the body.
Still using his jacket cuff, Jimmy took hold of the zipper and opened the top third. With a final glance at Stuart, he reached up with both hands and parted the two halves of the bag to reveal a bloodless stump where the man’s head should’ve been.
“Holy Christ!” he yelled.
He snapped his hands back and leapt away.
“Son of a bitch!”
When Jimmy looked up, he saw that Stuart had cracked a grin for the first time since their meeting.
“Real hilarious, asshole! I thought you said his ticker crapped out?”
“It did,” Stuart laughed. “After he got hit by a truck.”
“Damn!”
“Hey, at least we don’t need to wait for the dental x-rays.”
Jimmy shook his head, still squirming from the surprise like a snake trying to work itself out of an old skin.
Stuart’s smile faded as he glanced at his watch, then to the door. “Okay, let’s get this over with. We’re pushing the limit here.”
He placed the manila folder he’d grabbed on the dead man’s chest, flipping it open. A second later, he produced an ink tray from the pocket of his lab coat.
Jimmy lingered at a distance for another moment, then moved forward again. He gave a fleeting glance to the shredded mess of torn muscle and broken bones in the bag—all that remained of the cadaver’s neck—then refocused his attention on Stuart as he held up the man’s right arm and dabbed his blue-gray fingers on the ink-soaked felt of the tray. The top form in the stack of papers Stuart had opened contained two rows of sequential square boxes, each labeled for the digits of the human hand. Starting with the row marked “Right,” he pressed the man’s fingers into the appropriate spaces one at a time, rolling them from side to side to transfer their impressions. He then repeated the procedure for the left hand, all except for the smallest finger.
For that box, he dabbed his own left pinky in the ink and rolled it on the paper.
He took the original fingerprinting sheet out of the file—the one Doc. Harrington had done when the Sheriff first brought the corpse in, Jimmy guessed—and crumpled it into a wad, using it to wipe away the excess ink from his hand. Once finished, he stuffed the soiled paper in his pocket, slipped the new form into the file, and gathered up the folder.
“I still say it should be your print on that paper,” he commented. “This was your plan, after all.”
“I got a record,” Jimmy said. “You don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s my end of it… Your turn.”
Jimmy reached into his back pocket, extracting a sandwich-size Zip-Loc baggy and a dirt-flecked pair of pruning sheers.
He met Stuart’s eyes… then looked to the cadaver’s left hand.
To the smallest finger.
His heart hesitated in his chest as his hands moved forward, positioning the tool’s cutting edge between the first and middle knuckle. Then, after one last glance at Stuart, he squeezed down on the sheer’s handle with both hands as hard and as fast as he could.
Shick!
Stuart grimaced as Jimmy lifted the severed digit from the table, holding it between thumb and forefinger.
“You really gonna eat that thing?” Stuart asked.
“I ain’t gonna eat it,” Jimmy corrected as he slipped the finger into the Zip-Loc bag. “I’m going to do like we talked about and just… chew it a little.”
“This is nuts,” Stuart said.
Jimmy eyed him. “Hey, we’re in this together, man. Don’t start getting fidgety on me! Just keep thinking about that old lady who burned herself with the coffee from McDonalds. What’d she get for her lawsuit… a million? Two million?”
“Actually, I think it came closer to three.”
“Exactly! Now imagine what a big-ass chain like Smokey’s will have to shell out when I find a human finger in my food!” He clapped his hands together. “Hot damn, boy! Even split fifty-fifty we’ll both be rolling in it! I’ll make sure a couple of guys from the worksite are with to see me spit it out. Then those patty-flipping pricks will have to pay through the roof for emotional stress.”
Stuart’s expression remained as serious as ever, but Jimmy noticed a renewed gleam of determination in his eyes at the mention of the money. “Just remember to cook it,” the kid said. “You gotta simmer it in the chili for at least three hours at 180 degrees so the spices will permeate the flesh. That’ll give any prosecutor in the country an uphill battle to prove it wasn’t in the mix from the start. Especially since Smokey’s meat supplier just got busted for hiring illegals. I Googled the case settlement last week and…”
Jimmy shook his head and laughed.
“What?” Stuart asked.
“Nothing,” Jimmy answered, heading for the door. “I just knew hanging out with a nerd like you would pay off eventually.”
3.
Jimmy waited three days, just like they’d planned, allowing the police time to do a fingerprint check on the Mexican, and when no word came from Stuart to abort the mission, he drove to work on the forth morning with the finger in a Styrofoam cooler full of ice on the passenger seat.
With the lid on, the white rectangular box hardly looked worth the three dollar price tag. Because he knew what lay inside it, however, Jimmy couldn’t help seeing the container as something secret, something important, and for part of the drive from the Shell station, he imagined himself as a character on one of those TV medical dramas transporting an urgently needed donor organ.
He arrived at the job site just after nine, coming to a stop amid the larger pick-ups and SUVs of the regular work crew. Construction had been suspended for the last few days due to the rain, but today the steel skeleton of the new Park Street mini-mall bustled with activity.
Before getting out, he peeked in on the finger. It lay in the Zip-Loc bag like a half-curled worm. Smiling, he closed the cooler’s lid and got out of the car.
The ground remained soft and moist from the recent rainfall, and Jimmy’s feet made loud smacking sounds in the mud as he walked to the construction company’s mobile office. He noticed Tom Ryder, the foreman, talking with two of the subcontractors working the same site, animatedly clapping them on the back as he always did during conversations, acting like a father congratulating his sons on a well-played little league game. Jimmy ducked into the trailer to clock in before the man spotted him.
He found Jeff Densi, the lead mason, out by what would become the entrance to the mall’s parking lot. Jeff crouched beside his brother, Roy, near the first of two walls that divided the lot from the sidewalk, and when seen side by side, the two looked like the working-Joe equivalent of Laurel and Hardy.
Jimmy waved hello as the men looked up.
Jeff had been kneeling alongside the guide wires that outlined the wall’s base, and he stood up as Jimmy approached, maneuvering his bulk with ease. He returned the greeting eagerly enough, but his features appeared grim. “You’re a half hour late, Cooley. What gives?”