White Shadow by Ace Atkins

shoes in their hands, and the crazy men who sang Spanish songs to themselves on their jalopy bicycles. They drove and hugged the bay and finally found a quiet little spot where the Chamber of Commerce people had set out metal grills and picnic tables, where moms and dads and kiddies could roast weenies and sing campfire songs and old dad could light a pipe and take in that fine Florida sunshine.
    In that weak, daybreak light, Carl Walker shot those two wounded men in the back of the head and dropped them and the dead man in the trunk into the bay, watching them curve and skirt the edge of the rocks of the jetty like trash being flushed out in the toilet until they disappeared.
    He wiped off his seat and the door handle and dumped his .44 in the water and started to walk to a little tin-roof restaurant where a woman he sometimes fucked would make him a café con leche and rub his shoulders and perhaps give him a blow job until it was time to roll back to the Banana Docks and head back to the backwoods to fight crime and raise hell.

    DODGE WAS up at five a.m., showered and shaved and down to the morgue at Tampa General by six, smelling the queer smell of the dead and the perfumes that tried to hide the rot. It was a gentle, abrasive sweetness that sometimes made him send his suits out to the cleaners when the smell clung to his clothes and the soles of his shoes. There was no light down in the belly of the old hospital, just a few warehouse lamps over the cold slabs. Old Charlie was there, dissected and white as the sheet over his private parts, on the main porcelain table—drained of blood and fluids—a sample from his heart in a large vial. Dr. Story walked around Dodge and the body in a slow waltz of facts, holding his clipboard and drinking coffee from a paper cup, oblivious to the smell and the slight stickiness that gently held your shoes. Dodge moved over to Charlie Wall, holding a broken piece of baseball bat in his right hand and then looking down at the crushed skull of the Old Man.
    Wound on the neck severing major vascular tracks, larynx, and esophagus, and multiple lacerating wounds of the scalp, with depressed fracture of temporal and peristal bone, multiple hemorrhage of brain. Immediate cause of death from neck wound. Only two teeth remain. Both on the left side of the mandible.
    “By the time we conducted the autopsy, rigor was beginning to leave the body,” Story said, using a new unsharpened pencil to point to the massive opening under Charlie’s jaw. “The deep incised wound almost traversed, passing across the anterior portion of the neck measuring thirteen centimeters long. This wound passed through the carotid artery on both sides, completely severing them, severed the jugular veins, the larynx, and the upper portion of the esophagus. A portion of the larynx was lying free in the wound.”
    Dodge nodded. Story’s voice echoed off the china white tile. A drip-drip-drip sound came from another body on a stainless steel stretcher by the door. With only the two lights in the room, it still felt like night, and maybe a bit like winter. Even though Dodge had seen dozens of dead bodies, there was something about the butcher shop down here that made it all seem so damned natural to kill a person and slice him up.
    Story peered down at his clipboard and tucked the pencil behind his ear. “Blood alcohol level at .146 postmortem.”
    “Was this a fight?”
    Story looked at Dodge and shook his head. “There was no evidence of lines of hesitation about the edges of the wound on the neck. Whoever did this cut deep and hard and quick.”
    “What about a woman? Could a woman have done this?”
    “She would have to be one hell of a woman. Strong, you know.” Dodge reached into the plastic bag and gripped the broken-off fat part of the baseball bat. He looked back at Story, and Story nodded as Dodge fit the bat into the crushed part of Charlie Wall’s skull, a softness in his gray-black hair like that of