Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel - Страница 6

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He checked his watch. Home Depot would be closing in an hour, but Satterfield figured an hour was plenty of time. It wouldn’t take him long to find just the right tool for the job, if Home Depot had it. Satterfield was a man who believed in having the right tool for the job, whether the job was cutting up a corpse or eviscerating an adversary.

* * *

Frowning, he hung the ax back on its pegs — the blade was too tall, the arc of the edge too shallow — and continued down the aisle. Next he picked up a maul, a wood-splitting tool whose wedge-shaped head was like a cross between an ax and a sledgehammer. The tool’s heft was good, promising to strike with tremendous force, but again, the cutting edge lacked the curvature he was seeking. Satterfield took the sketch from his pocket and compared it with the edge of the maul. Could I file it down? he wondered. Reshape it? Probably not, he decided. It’d take forever, even with a bench grinder. He was mildly disappointed, but he was also intrigued; the puzzle — the quest — was challenging and invigorating, and solving it would be hugely satisfying: it would redouble his adversary’s frustration, and underscore Satterfield’s superior intellect.

“Help you, hon?” The question caught Satterfield by surprise. He looked over his shoulder at the questioner, a middle-aged woman in an orange Home Depot apron. Stoop-shouldered and beaten-down looking, she fell somewhere on the spectrum between mousy and hard-bitten. She clearly had never been pretty, and now her face was drooping and folding in on itself, as if she were already losing teeth. He caught a whiff of stale cigarette smoke coming from her, which explained her leathery skin and ashen hue. Satterfield found her not merely unappealing but actively repellent, not that he was shopping for anything but a tool here anyhow.

“No thanks. Just looking.” He turned back toward the display, folding the sketch and replacing it in his pocket, then drifted back toward the axes.

“Gotcha some trees need cuttin’?” she persisted. Christ, he thought, is she working on commission? Trying for Employee of the Month? “We got chain saws, too, next aisle over.”

“No trees,” he said flatly. He glanced over his shoulder again — she was still there — and then he slowly turned to face her. “No trees,” he repeated, cocking his head slightly, as if something about the word itself suddenly struck him. With a slight smile he added, “Just… limbs.”

“Oh, you’re prunin’. How thick are the limbs?”

“Not very,” he said. His eyes drifted from her face to her shoulder and then down her arm, and he reached out and took hold of her left wrist, encircling it completely with his thumb and middle finger. Startled, she yanked her arm, but he had a firm grip. She opened her mouth to protest — maybe even to yell — but he bore down hard, pressing his thumb into the bony side of her wrist, and all she could do was gasp now, her eyes darting in panic, the way the rabbit’s had. “Not thick at all,” he said, smiling, raising her arm for a closer look. “Probably about like this. Maybe not quite so skinny.” He turned her forearm this way and that, examining it from various angles, still bearing down on the bone. Finally he let off, though her wrist remained firmly in his grip. “What do you recommend?”

She cleared her throat. “Well, if you’re just cutting branches,” she said, her voice strained and trembling, “a lopper might be what you want.” She pointed her free hand toward the wall at the end of the aisle. Satterfield noticed that the hand was quaking; he liked that. He raised his eyes to study her face — her eyes downcast, her posture cringing, like a chained dog about to be beaten — and then he glanced in the direction she was pointing. When he saw the assortment of long-handled pruning tools there, he released her and walked wordlessly to the wall. The woman scuttled away, rubbing her wrist, keeping a wary watch over her shoulder.

Satterfield took one of the tools from the wall and spread the handles, causing the metal jaws to gape; then, as he squeezed the handles, the jaws clamped shut. The cutting blade looked powerful and wickedly sharp, but the edge was all wrong — straight as a ruler — and he frowned and hung the tool back on the wall. He was turning to go when he noticed that there was more than one type of lopper. The one he’d inspected and rejected was an “anvil lopper,” according to the shelf tag. Satterfield puzzled over the name for a moment, then noticed that the cutting blade — the straight, sharp-edged blade that wouldn’t serve his purpose — closed against a lower jaw that was broad and flat, like a small steel chopping block. Like a little anvil, he realized. Hanging beside the anvil lopper, though, was another lopper — with a different name, a different design, and a different cutting action. This one was a “bypass lopper,” and it cut scissor fashion — the edges of the two blades sliding past one another as the handles were squeezed together. The blades weren’t straight like scissor blades, he noticed, with growing excitement. The tool’s lower jaw was blunt edged and concave, to encircle and support a branch from beneath as the upper jaw — the sharp-edged, steeply curved, convex upper jaw — sliced into the limb from above.

The bypass lopper came in three sizes. The biggest had handles as long as Satterfield’s arm; in addition, the jaws incorporated a cam to compound the handles’ leverage, multiply their force. Satterfield took the tool down from its pegs and opened and closed the handles a few times. He nodded approvingly at the metallic friction he felt; at the precision and power with which the edges slid past one another.

A selection of rakes and hoes hung on the wall a few feet away, and Satterfield walked toward them, the lopper in one hand, swaying beside his right leg. The handles of the rakes were about an inch in diameter: about the thickness of his thumb, he noticed when he held up a hand to compare. Taking a step backward, he spread the handles of the lopper wide and fitted the jaws around the wooden shaft of a rake. He closed the handles slowly, feeling for resistance — just as he’d done earlier, with the hole punch — as the concave jaw hugged the wood and the sharp edge began to bite into the layers of grain. Once the edges were well seated, he gave a smooth squeeze. The rake’s handle snapped with a dry pop, the amputated portion clattering to the floor as a razor-thin smile etched Satterfield’s face.

He took a step to his right. The hoes had heavier-duty handles: hickory, by the look of it, and nearly twice as thick as the rake handles. Satterfield opened the handles wide and worked the jaws around one of the handles. The blade cut easily at first, but the going got tougher fast, the steel handles of the lopper bending under the strain as he bore down. Just as Satterfield feared the handles might buckle, the hoe’s shaft snapped. The cut piece clattered on the concrete floor with a resonant, musical note, like the ring of a baseball bat colliding with a fastball. Satterfield bent and picked up the severed piece, studying the cross section closely. The cut was clean, but when he held the wood so that the ceiling lights raked across the end at a low angle, he could discern the cut marks, a myriad of ridges and valleys etched in the wood as the jaws had bitten through it. The marks were steeply curved, approximating “the arc of a circle 3.5 inches in diameter.”

Pocketing the piece of wood, Satterfield headed for the front of the store to check out. On the way home, he’d stop at Kroger, whose meat department sold big beef bones for soup, or for dogs. More tests were needed, but so far he had a good feeling about the bypass lopper.

He found a checkout lane with no line, and slid the tool across the stainless-steel counter. The young man working the register said, “Is that it for you today?”

“Only thing I need,” said Satterfield, but then he added, “Whoa, wait, I take that back. One more thing.” He backtracked two steps, to the end cap at the entrance to the checkout lane, and snagged a fat, striated roll of shrink-wrapped silver-gray tape. He stood it on edge and rolled it toward the scanner as if it were a thick slice from a bowling ball. With a broad smile and a worldly wink, Satterfield said, “A man can never have too much duct tape, can he, now?”

CHAPTER 5

Brockton

Tyler shook sweat from his face, like a wet dog, spattering the ashen ankles of the corpse he and I were carrying toward the pig barn. “Hang on a second,” he said.

I stopped. “You need to set him down, Mr. Yoga Super-Athlete?”

“Naw. I just need to get the sweat and sunscreen out of my eyes.” He shrugged his shoulders and craned his head from side to side, rubbing his face on the sleeves of his T-shirt — like a dog pawing at itchy eyes. The movement made the sagging body sway from side to side, like a guy sleeping in a hammock, except there was no hammock. And the sleeping guy wasn’t ever going to wake up. “Okay, that’s better.”

As we resumed walking, I heard a familiar buzzing. A small squadron of blowflies materialized and began circling the corpse.

“Amazing,” said Tyler. “Those guys can smell death a mile away. Hell, you don’t even have to kick the bucket — just swing your toe toward the bucket — and bzzt, they’re all over you.” He grimaced and sputtered, spitting out a fly that had strayed into his mouth. “Hey, you little bugger, get out of there. I’m not quite dead yet.”

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