Page 30 of Bone’s Choice

This was where I could breathe.

Where I could think.

Nobody talking.

Nobody asking me what the fuck we were going to do. Nobody looking at me because I was supposed to have the answer.

It was about the closest I ever got to completely shutting my mind off.

I passed Ma’s place.

Her car was parked out front and my eyes automatically moved to the house next door.

No SUV. Hazel wasn’t home. I kept going because that shouldn’t matter to me.

A few minutes later, I turned onto the main road toward Marshfield.

The dead man immediately came back to the front of my mind. Two fucking days and we knew almost exactly as much as we had when Taco opened the coffin.

A dead man had been delivered to our warehouse.

That was about it.

Hose had done what he could, but there were limits to what a club medic could tell us by looking at a decomposing body.

Male. Probably somewhere between forty and fifty. Dead four or five days, give or take. No wallet. No identification. Nothing in his pockets.

The condition of the body made it hard for Hose to tell exactly what had killed him, though he was pretty fucking confident the guy hadn’t died naturally.

Helpful.

Myth had gone straight back to Milwaukee with Jackson, and that hadn’t gotten us shit either. Nobody at the transfer dock knew what the hell he was talking about. Or claimed they didn’t.

The office had no record of a Grave Casket return. None.

No damaged coffin had been entered into the system. No return paperwork. No request from a funeral home. No customer complaint.

Nothing.

The casket might as well have appeared out of thin fucking air.

The guy Jackson described hadn’t been working the dock by the time Myth got there.

Nobody admitted knowing who he was, though that didn’t mean much.

A forty-something white guy with brown hair and a beard wasn’t exactly a unique description in Wisconsin. Half the fucking state fit it.

Jackson hadn’t remembered anything else useful.

He’d been told there was a return going back to Grave Casket, he’d accepted it, and he’d driven it to us.

Simple.

Except there wasn’t a damn thing simple about a dead man being delivered.

I rolled into Marshfield and stopped at a red light.

I planted one boot on the pavement and reached into the inside pocket of my cut to pull out a cigarette. I pulled one out, stuck it between my lips, and lit it.