Blood on the Corn Read online

  Blood on the Corn

  By S. A. Barton

  Copyright 2013 S. A. Barton

  He’s a big man, fat over slack muscle and sloppy, the kind who looks like he could have played football in high school but never had the discipline. He’s blubbering and stuttering, drool easing over the mound of his chin and falling among the meatball stains on his 10-year-old concert tee. The cop rolls his eyes and moves his coffee cup out of range of the man’s dirty, pasty mitts. The dirt isn’t dirt. It’s blood, dried and thick. Tacky in spots, crusted, gooped into forearm hair and matted into fat faded denim thighs.

  “I. I, I, I. I, split his hh. Head. Duh, duh, tar arn ih-in, by. Duh door. It wun’t my, my, mine. Duh-d-there b-by the do-oor. Br. Ains. Saw h-his brain.” The fat sloppy man reaches out at the cop. The cop moves his cup again, then realizes what the grey squidge under Big Man’s fingernails and on his sleeve must be. The cop’s eyes widen up and he’s awake for the first time since rolling out of bed.

  “Jesus. Hold up, Big Man. Sit.” He points the man back at his chair like a school principal stern-talking a kindergarten kid. Big Man sits down, just blubbering, no more words in him. “Hey, Jack. Call Alicia. Tell her to bring up swabs and bags for evidence. Lots of ‘em.” The tedious, boring part begins, and more questions. Big Man can’t add much, just the name of a bar on a mildly notorious street in a crappy part of Albuquerque. Big Man’s not just sloppy and a bit dumb, he’s half-drunk too. After swabs and questions they take him out anyway. In cuffs and leg chains. He did say he was a killer.

  In the alley, there’s the tire iron just like Big Man said. The cop stands over it, a little back, giving a no-name deputy room to photo and bag it. It’s got chunks of brain and scalp sliding off. No-name has to come back with another bag and a pair of tweezers and peck at the bits of head like a hungry chicken rooting bugs out of the grass.

  The cop stands, watching, hands behind back, until a different no-name shows up with his coffee. He’s not a cop until it’s hot in his hands. He sips, and he moves for the first time since taking his station. His head glides back and forth smooth, slow. The tire iron. The door. The brains. The blood. All here like Big Man said. All but the body. There’s no body.

  Big Man is a bit more together after the ride. “Oh thank God,” he says. “I didn’t kill him. Didn’t kill him after all. What do you think it was?” He looks at Coffee Cop, eyes kid-big, asking for forgiveness.

  “What what was?” Coffee Cop says, voice flat. The kid eyes blink, falter, renew with hope.

  “I thought it was brains. Comin out his head. But he’s gone. Must been—dunno, a hat? Dandruff. Can dandruff look like that? If it was real bad?”

  Coffee Cop snorts, sending ripples across the surface of the black coffee in the white paper cup. “Put him in holding. Dead or alive, odds are our victim didn’t go far.”

  Buh buh buh goes Big Man all the way back to the car. Rattling his cuffs, trying to shake off a bad dream. Coffee Cop watches the evidence crew sample and photograph and fuss until they get tired and go home. They go out, Coffee Cop’s partner comes in. Always on time at the last possible moment. He strolls up smooth and mellow, hippie reusable cup in hand oozing chamomile vapor.

  “Woke up and went to ground?” The cup of tea waves at the remnants of blood smeared over the cracked concrete.

  “Maybe. Or someone helped him.”

  “Him? That narrows it some.”

  “Suspect said ‘him’ back at the precinct.”

  “Hm. So who?” Chamomile sips hot tea, slurping.

  “No clue there. Unless this place is the clue.”

  “You try the door?”

  Coffee Cop smiles. “You read my mind.”

  “Always. Only way to find you most days. One time I’ll be too slow and you’ll get caught solo where you don’t want to be.”

  “Not today.” Coffee and Chamomile walk slow over to the little dumpster, chest high and green paint caked with black streaks of dried goo. There’s a skinny line of bright metal on the side, in with the rusty scratches, cut by the tire iron when Big Man picked it up.

  Chamomile Cop reaches through the warped wooden screenless screen door and knocks on the warped wooden inner door. He knocks twice, slow, heavy. It jerks unbalanced, wobbling around three loose hinges, and opens itself a crack. Erk-ek-eenk-nnk say the hinges. You can hear the rust flaking off.

  “Police,” says Coffee Cop. The word fits his lips like a glove—he and his partner have said it thousands of times before—but he feels silly saying it given who and what they’re seeking. Keeping up appearances. He says it loud but not too loud, like trying to be heard across the living room at a party.

  “May we enter,” Chamomile Cup says in the same tone, stating it as if it were not a question at all. Because it’s not, really.

  Coffee Cop snorts gently. Half a smile quirks up the corner of Chamomile Cop’s mouth. It doesn’t need to be said: you’re so prissy-polite / oh, screw you. Old, old partners and friends; a working machine with two parts adding up to three.

  Chamomile Cop makes a stiff index finger and points the door open with a jab at the white-weathered wood. The hinges complain again, louder, longer. The pair ease to the sides like curtains on a drawstring, pause, then Chamomile slides in past the screenless screen door frame, empty hand hovering over his lovingly oiled and broken-in leather holster. Behind him, Coffee waits, hand full of pistol tight against his jacket.

  “Miss,” Coffee hears Chamomile. “And miss. May I sit?” A chair scrapes the floor: stub-stub-stub, wood on wood. “My partner’s behind me by the door I passed by.”

  Coffee understands. He glides in and checks the unchecked room: A mattress, a nest of clothes. A closet with no door on that he peers into. Another nest of clothes. Half a tall boy on the milk crate end table, beer inside long gone flat in brown glass. Works in a shoebox behind the lamp: needles and spoons and lighters and tiny tight plastic bindles with twisted tops. Junkie girls, hooking from a one bedroom rat trap. Two for the price of one. No used rubbers or works on the floor, no food; clean dirty girls. Just not neat.

  There’s no talk coming from the main room. A quick peek in the bathroom: not clean, not filthy. Soap, razors; lots of cheap body wash and body spray in the flavors the commercials are pushing right now. The pistol disappears.

  Chamomile is sitting with his back to the entry as Coffee emerges. The two girls are nodded out, face down on the other side of the table. Barely breathing, but breathing—either they’re experienced junkies who know what they’re taking, or they’re lucky. Probably both; the tracks on their arms say they’ve been doing this for a few years. That much time in the junk game takes both to live through.

  Between the two on the table is a serving bowl. Cheap white stoneware with a generic blue stripe rim, lightly chipped. Between the seats they nod in is an empty chair. Chamomile is staring at the bowl, tapping his fingers slow, slooww. The William Tell Overture at half speed. Hi-Yo Silver.

  Coffee Cop lets his heels tap the loose old floorboards as he walks up. Here I am. He leans over Chamomile’s shoulder. The bowl is full of bright yellow corn. The corn is flecked with and resting in bright red blood. There’s a beat old wood handled spoon sticking out of it, has that mushy flat brown look of wood that’s washed and washed and washed and never quite gets to dry all the way through for months and years. Like it would ooze away muddy if you grabbed it, but it doesn’t. It’s just nasty moist that leaves a little brown shit stain on your fingers. The bowl of the spoon is dented and matte like plain aluminum, but it’s not; it’s good stainless steel with a million scratches too small to see indiv
idually. The blood is brighter than the metal and beaded and smeared; it’s fresh without a clot or speck of gore, just bright and vital around the sad silver metal and the squidgy old wood and the lively yellow kernels and the soft junkie snores. And the tap-tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap-tap of the William Tell Overture.

  “Fresh,” says Coffee.

  Chamomile reaches around to the side of the blood-corn bowl that he can’t see, gingerly feeling with long delicate fingers. He pulls out a syringe. The clear plastic is faintly clouded; it’s been reused a dozen, two dozen times, more. The needle is short; honed on something by hand more than once. Traces of red reach far up the barrel, farther than you’d expect if you knew what you were looking for. Too far for junkies. But if you were filling it