Dominion by Fred Saberhagen (spiritual books to read TXT) 📗

ageless countenance of the dead man certainly did look paler than most faces Joe had seen, but he had thought that might be only an effect of the lights. Now he bent closer, trying for a better look at the throat. The head of the victim had sagged forward, but now Joe could make out the wide wound compressed under the gray-stubbled chin.

   On the shabby shirt collar, just one blood spot was visible, of a size that might have resulted from a nick while shaving.

   Standing just behind Joe, Charley Snider cleared his throat.  “See, the uniformed people who were first on the scene didn’t just call for a meatwagon and load ’im in. They looked him over a little first, and what they saw struck ’em as odd.” Charley paused. “I been alerting some of the uniformed people around here on what to look for.”

   “Oh. So there’ve been more like this?”

   “Three or four. I think enough to make a pattern. The people downtown don’t agree with me, not yet anyway. They say people are always getting cut up, there’re always stiffs in alleys. Well, shit, I know that. They can’t see the pattern. I can see it, though.”

   Joe had only briefly removed his gaze from the body, and now he was again studying it intently.  “What sort of pattern? No blood spilled around—what else? ”

   “Some of ‘em, I got to admit, showed a little more blood than this man does. But not the amount there should be. And there’s always multiple wounds, including the cut throat, made with something very sharp. All derelicts, like this guy. When I mention the lack of blood to the M.E.’s people, they scratch their heads and say yeah I guess you’re right. Nobody wants to see the pattern, though. Nobody wants to see a bunch of Skid Row stiffs starting to make the news media, especially when there’s no suspects in sight.”

   Joe shifted his lithe frame forward a little, now squatting close beside the corpse.  “Okay if I touch? ”

   “Okay.” Charley’s voice was neutral, waiting.

   The clothes, Joe thought, were just about what you would expect to find on a stiff lying in this alley—old, mismatched, ragged. Maybe they were a little cleaner than you would have expected—or maybe, again,

that appearance was due to the purity of the light. Despite the evident violence of the victim’s taking off, he did not appear to have fouled himself from bowels or bladder. The smell of cheap wine came from the body, as seemed only appropriate. But, Joe noted, the smell was of wine only. Absent was the usual inimitable death-on-Skid-Row blend of wine and old sweat and helpless excretions and defeat, as if someone had accidentally left open a nearby door that led down to some anteroom of hell.

   Earlier Joe had noted without surprise that there were a number of small holes in the victim’s shirt and trousers both. Now he discovered that through a number of these holes he could see wounds: small sharp

cuts, red and raw but almost bloodless.

   Joe sat back on his heels, puffing out his breath. That a man should have been killed in this alley was hardly a surprise. Though most winos were harmless, on streets like this there were always a few people about who would kill for a dime, for an argument, for the last mouthful of muscatel. But this was different. Obviously calculated, somehow arranged. And Charley had said that there were others.

   Sighing, Joe got to his feet. He ran a muscular hand, not the same hand that he had used to touch the body, slowly through his unruly sandy hair. “He was killed somewhere else,” he offered at last. “All the

blood spilled somewhere else. And then … ”

   “I figured out that much,” said Charley patiently. “Then—?”

   “Then he was … dressed in these clothes, I guess, and dumped here. Holes made in the clothes, to match the holes in him? I dunno. Dumped here, anyway, with the idea that one more stiff in this neighborhood wasn’t going to get a whole lot of attention.”

   “This lad’s been living on the street around here for quite a while,” said Charley, anticipating Joe’s next question. “I managed to get a make on him from a couple of the other winos. ‘Dusty’, they called him.” Snider made an economical gesture, which was understood by the two patrolmen. They started hoisting the star of the show out of his spotlit corner and onto a rubber-sheeted stretcher on wheels that waited nearby. The body had stiffened. It was going to make the trip in a comic posture, rump sticking up.

   “Why’d you bring me here, though?” Joe asked as the spotlights were turned off, one after the other. “Were there pawn tickets on him?” Joe was already sure that he wasn’t being brought in on the case by reason of his current official specialty. Charley’s summons had come to him over the phone, a personal request very informal and completely outside of channels. And still very much unexplained.

   “I just thought I’d let you have a look, man,” said Charley now. He and Joe had each started to wrap up one of the portable spotlights on its own cable, while the working uniforms were busy trundling their loaded stretcher on around the corner of wall, into the stagey glare of the streetlight that shone there from the alley’s mouth.

   There sounded a faint burst of demonic laughter, probably from the beer joint that had to be somewhere behind one of these walls.

   “Okay, “ said Joe.  “I’ve had a look. But I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I’ve told you I don’t know him.”

   “Never said you might know him, man.” Charley’s face, dark in dark, was hard to see. His cigarette glowed in his moving fingers as he wound cable.  “And I’m not sayin’ you have to do nothing. I’m just offering you a look at