by C.G. Banks
man’s left shoulder, closest to the darkened store fronts. When the guy noticed him coming up he slowed and began to turn around. That’s when Lance let him have it with the empty beer bottle full across the forehead. It exploded in a blast of noise and glass and the guy went down hard against the bakery wall and then flat to the concrete. Lance quickly bent down and pulled him by the armpits into the closest dark alcove. He fumbled the man’s wallet out of his back pocket and, taking nothing, inserted a piece of paper with a single word scratched crudely on it in red ink: WEAK. Then he’d walked a roundabout way home and gone straight to bed.
And that hadn’t been the only time either. And not just men. Shit, when you got right down to it, women needed it most of all, and he’d taught a good many lesson in his day. Mostly to the dregs of society, the waitresses and hookers and sluts. If they had it coming, that’s just how it was.
Lance Aimes turned over on his back in the humid room, and as the dreams continued a smile slowly spread across his face.
There was Max Shells, seven years now in the grave. The guy never had a stomach for business and after the split old Max had crumbled like a stale cookie. He’d finally pulled the plug in the shop of the used car lot he’d been scraping by on with the rusty .22 that had belonged to his grandfather. It hadn’t meant much though. Lance hadn’t wasted any tears, shit, he’d seen the news, he knew how shitty Life was to most people. It was sink or swim and if you didn’t swim the outcome was swift. He still thought about the fear and isolation he’d seen on Max’s face that last time though. It was really enough to make you think.
The memories rolled on in snippets, these scenes, these little remembrances, trailing along the paths of his thoughts like smoke signals, keeping him sharp, never letting him forget the wolves at the door.
He rolled out of bed around 9:30 with a hangover. He’d forgotten to set the alarm and the clouds nullified any chance of the early morning sun waking him. The rain continued to pop briskly on the roof and patio and he cursed silently, getting up to stoke the coffee pot and jump in the shower, reading himself for the next several hours’ paperwork. Then it was a jaunt over to Jefferson’s across town and it didn’t appear the weather would be doing him any favors. By 10:30 the weatherman was howling about “The Big One.” People being warned to evacuate in response to the expected storm surge. Fucking hell, he thought. It was sure to tear a hole in his schedule but he wasn’t leaving. Damn weather goons usually couldn’t get an afternoon shower right and their successes with hurricanes were even more suspect. Let ‘em run, he thought. He had things to do.
But right before he left he ducked into the living room and hid the skull. It was damn foolish, leaving it out like that all night, but there was nothing he could do about it now. If anybody had seen it they’d be trespassing anyway, and from a distance, especially through the sliding glass door, it’d be practically impossible to tell if it was real or not. He grabbed it off the mantle and crossed the room, opened a cabinet underneath the bookshelf and pushed it far back, behind the picture albums and Santa candy bowl.
Then he was out the door and gone.
He wasn’t back by 6 pm when the torrential rain and wind started.
And he wasn’t back by 8:40 when the power went out for good.
Two day later saw Biloxi in chaos. Camille, in her short violent life, had attained a legacy that would stretch darkly into coming decades, eclipsing all those before her and literally setting a high water mark for all those yet to come. Because only rarely do hurricanes achieve her juggernaut status. The monster had blasted ashore just before dark with sustained winds nearing 200 miles an hour, with gusts recorded in some locations as high as 230. Centuries’ old mansions had been reduced to scattered piles of lumber and uprooted oaks. Much that was left of more modern constructions proved no more than inundated foundations cleared of everything they’d held. Straw had been driven through telephone poles; signs become deadly missiles. And the most dreaded thing, the storm surge, had pushed inland like a great black tongue, engulfing everything less than 27 feet above sea level. It roared in and swallowed, and what had gone before, for all practical purposes, simply ceased to exist at all.
The bodies began piling up. Some were found in the tops of trees, drowned, others trapped beneath tangles of waterlogged debris. But, and this was not something the local authorities spoke publicly of, or for that matter, even privately, that was not all. As the days wore on bodies been turning up bearing signs of foul play. Not murder exactly, but hideous implications regardless. It became a bit uneasy common practice to find corpses minus fingers. Usually ring fingers…
It was toward the end of the first week that Lance Aimes’ body was found. It came in a shiny black body bag and was left on the gurney just inside the morgue until Harould Smithfield, one of a handful of outside coroners, got around to it. Autopsies had to be performed on a large number of the bodies, especially any that bore signs of violence not born of the storm. Mr. Aimes’ body was one of the batch that made for arduous days.
After a standing lunch, Smithfield got around to the body on the gurney. He pulled the sheet away and did a point-by-point examination. The ring finger was missing and that was surely a sign of foul play, but something about the look of the corpse demanded further attention. Because this one did not appear to have drowned. The skin was missing that tell-tale pallor, and the body was not overtly bloated. Also the fingernails (or at least the nine left) were milky white, not the black usually found in drowning victims. He bent closer, using his fingers to run along either side of the dead man’s head.
There. A massive contusion on the left posterior side. Smithfield could feel a few floating pieces of skull just below the hematoma. This man had been killed by a blow to the head. From behind. He was already willing to bet there wouldn’t be a hint of water in the lungs. He looked down at the butchered hand. Musta been a hell of a rock, he thought.
Regardless, dead was dead.
And work was work. Smithfield produced the fabric cutters and went to work on the ragged shirt first. It came away easily and there were no further signs of violence to the body on either the neck or torso. That one blow had probably been the end all. Smithfield steeled himself for the part of the job he really hated: going through the pockets. It was the last thing the dead ever had to say for themselves.
As he reached inside he felt something. Several somethings, in fact. His pulse quickened as he gathered them together and pulled them free of the dead man’s pocket. Immediately he threw the bundle down and backed away from the table. “Oh you filthy bastard,” he whispered. He put his hand over his mouth and tried hard but when the laughter began he could do nothing to stop it. Other curious heads came to inquire, and as they stood in the room, looking at the doctor who was now in a paroxysm of hysterical, gut-wrenching heaves, all he could do was hold his stomach and point, tears streaming down his face.
On the table in front of him were four severed fingers, three of them still bearing large diamond rings. “Goddamn vulture got a taste of his own medicine,” the doctor managed before the laughter pulled him down again.
