Page 27 of Ransom
I eyed him up and down real slow and appreciatively. "No, cowboy. You don't."
"Anyway, if he was in our pocket, why would we kill him?"
"I never said you did, darlin'. I'm saying whoever did this did it because he's in your pocket. Pae Saco is the motive, or something to do with it. So, aside from all the killing and burying and horse raising you boys're doing up there, what else have you got up to? What's sitting in the courts that someone might object to?"
Ransom didn't answer me. The muscle in his jaw moved once. He was looking at the notebook like he could read the word off the page, and the word wasn't on the page. If he knew anything about the rest of it, he wasn't going to make it easy.
I sighed and picked up the scalpel.
The skin opened too easily. The smell that came up out of him was a different smell than the one that had been in the room, and I breathed through the mask and didn't gag and didn't, by God, look up.
I drew the rest of the Y down the chest and across the belly. The fat layer was yellow and thick. Castillo had eaten well in his life, and he'd eaten right up to the end of it.
Behind me, the pen had stopped.
I didn't turn. I kept cutting.
After a moment, a slow, deliberate breath came through the nose behind me. Then another. Then the pen started again.
"You alright back there?"
"I'm writing."
"That's not what I asked."
"Keep your mind on the body, Ranger."
"Which one?"
The pen stopped again. The silence behind me sharpened. I kept the scalpel moving. This was not the time to be thinking about a man being inside me, not when I was elbow deep in another man, and not in the fun way.
I worked the rib spreaders in. The bone gave the way it always gave, a dull, final sound, and I set them and cranked. The chest opened. Lungs, heart. Nothing that changed the story.
I kept going down.
The stomach was distended and the wrong color and heavier than it looked when I lifted it out two-handed and set it on the metal tray. A thread of pink fluid followed and pooled on the steel.
"Stomach's full," I said. "He ate big a couple hours before he died."
"Big how?"
"We're about to find out."
I cut it open.
The smell that came up off it was sweet and sour at once, thick, a fermented version of what he'd put in his mouth. I blinked tears out from behind the mask and held my breath until I could trust myself.
"Well," I said.
Ransom set the notebook down on the counter and came around the table.
I'd been hoping he wouldn't.
He stopped at my left shoulder and watched while I sorted through the contents. Rice. Beans. A piece of pork the size of my thumb. Something that had been a tortilla once. French fries. More french fries. And a whole fried green chile, barely chewed.
"Pork, rice, beans, french fries, tortilla." I dropped the words a half-octave below where I'd meant to. "And what looks like a whole fried green chile."
He didn't move.
