The Killer Is Dying by James Sallis Read Free Book Online

The bike was a prize, a forty-year-old aluminum-frame Schwinn in mint condition that had involved a series of complicated trades originating at a vintage bicycle site and spilling through several others.
    Over by a tree, three birds with long hooked beaks like thorns raucously did their thing. One repeatedly stepped away, then raced back in with wings spread and head low as though it were flying. Another mainly squawked and jabbered, looking around the way people do when they’re making a spectacle of themselves and need to see if anyone’s watching. The third just looked confused.
    Two men sat in a car nearby, the driver slouched, the other upright, both facing forward, one of them speaking. When the car started up, all three birds froze for a moment. When it pulled away, off the parking lot and past them, the two aggressive birds flew off, leaving the third beneath the tree.

 
     
    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    THING IS, you don’t forget the first kill. Bodies are messy things. And after that kill, he never looked at bodies the same—not a woman’s, not those he turned and walked away from, not his own.
    They had fascinated him from childhood. All that wet, heavy stuffing, kidneys, stomachs, bladders of various sorts and sizes, miles of plumbing, pints of blood, the whole of it held in by a bag of skin scarcely thicker than a grape’s. How tentative it was, how tenuous a balance. The tiniest well-placed tear, a wandering virus, and it all—in agonizing months, or in an instant—came undone.
    Someone had given him, as a child, a Book of the Body . The pages were cut into horizontal strips, and as you brought the strips over one by one, a person appeared piecemeal before you: spine, organs, muscles, vasculature, flesh. He couldn’t put the book down, and soon went looking for others. By the time he was twelve he knew systems and diseases better than he knew his classmates’ names, would walk the schoolyard or sit on the hard gym bleachers with bones and body regions ( tibia , humerus , peritoneum , sclera ) tumbling about in his head. Teachers and parents alike assumed him to be among the rare ones who find direction early in life. At age seventeen he entered college on full scholarship, declaring premed. Two years later he was drinking beer for breakfast as he looked out at rain in mangrove trees and tried not to think about the blisters on his feet. Another jungle there: rich growths of fungus.
    They’d gone through the village twice. No dugouts or tunnels they could find, and no evidence of anyone having lived there recently. It was abandoned, only a pig and a few birds dead in the cage remaining as evidence of the generations raised here. Christian had come around the last hut and was almost to the trees when the kid, not more than ten or twelve, sprinted out of them with a swing blade raised over his head. Without thinking, in a single motion, he swung the M-14 around on its strap and shot. The kid exploded—like a dropped watermelon. “Full of gas,” one of the older guys told him. “They get that way, from malnutrition, from eating grass because that’s all there is. Boy was next door to dead before you ever laid eyes on him.” As they moved back into the jungle, he looked up and saw birds circling above the trees. Carrion crows would be first, then others, thrushes, tree swifts, greenfinches, coming to feed on the insects drawn first to the carnage itself, then to the droppings of the birds.
    Still awake, he turned his head toward the window, exposing his right ear so that the drip from the tub in the bathroom sounded even louder. The faucet, made of silver-colored plastic, had split, and the drip came not from the tip, but from where the faucet joined the tub; a bell shape of rust and mineral deposits showed it had been that way awhile.
    He wasn’t accustomed to not knowing what to do.
    He was a planner, an engineer at heart, he supposed, not a creative filament anywhere within him. He thrived on order, on