Page 25 of Ransom
"I'll be in the office doing paperwork. You need anything, holler."
He left before I could answer.
The latch caught behind him, and the room got quiet except for the hum of the overhead light and the flies that had followed us inside. The mask the sheriff had brought was thin paper, and it smelled like dust. I looped it over my ears and pulled it up. It cut about a third of the smell. The other two-thirds I was just going to have to live with.
I pulled on the apron. The gloves were a size too small. I worked my fingers in until the latex pulled tight across the webbing of my thumbs, and across the room Ransom watched me do it. I let him. I took my time with the second glove.
When I looked up, he'd moved his eyes to the body.
"My captain thinks I'm taking time off," I said to the body, not to Ransom.
I picked up the scalpel and turned it over. The blade was lighter than it ought to have been. They always were, the first time you picked one up after a while away.
"Third one of these I've done without a morgue, judge. The first two were on cases I was supposed to be working. This oneisn't on any case file in any state. So whatever you tell me, you're telling a man who isn't here." I looked at the body's still face. "I figure that's about the best deal you've gotten in a while."
I pulled the small leather notebook out of my back pocket and the pen from inside it and held them out to Ransom without looking at him.
"What?"
"Take it."
"I'm not your secretary, Ranger."
"You are today, darlin'."
The word landed in the quiet room the way I wanted it to land. Better, even. His head came up like I'd put a hand on the back of his neck. The flush started at his collar and crawled up under the two days of stubble, and he couldn't stop it from getting to his ears. He looked at the wall behind me a second too long before he could look back at my face.
"You don't get to call me that," he said. The growl was there. Underneath it was something thinner.
"Why not? Afraid you might grow to like it?"
"I don't like it."
"Mm." I let that sit. "Whatever you say, darlin'."
The flush got worse. He flipped me off and reached across the body to take the notebook out of my hand, and his fingers were not as steady as they had been a minute ago. He flipped the notebook open, clicked the pen once, and stood there with the notebook on his thigh like he'd been doing it his whole life. He wouldn't look up from the page.
"Go," he said.
I pulled the scissors from the tackle box and started on the clothes. The shirt came away in pieces. Two days in the heat had done unpleasant things to the fabric.
"White dress shirt, black slacks. No jacket, no shoes, no wallet. Soiled with mud and what looks like road debris. Oil stain on the back of the shirt. He didn't die clean."
The pen scratched. "You always dictate this slowly?" Ransom said.
"Only when somebody's worth taking my time over."
"You talking to the judge?"
"Sure," I said. "Let's say that."
The shirt peeled away, and I got my first real look at what the heat and time had done to him. I'd seen worse. Not by much.
"Lividity on the back. He was on his back after he died, long enough for it to set." I ran my gloved hand along his shoulder. The bone moved the way a dead man's bone moves and not the way a man's bone moves who's been broken. "No fractures in the collarbone. None in the upper ribs that I can feel."
The pen kept up.
"Collarbone is spelled with two ls, cowboy."
