Bone Hunter Read Online Free PDF

through the crowd, recording reactions like a high-speed camera. People turned from Sherbrooke to us. “Dead?” they gasped, like a many-headed creature with a hundred shuffling feet and two hundred voices, “He can’t be dead. I just saw him yesterday,” and “Was he ill?” and “What did he die of?”
    I wanted to know that myself.
    The crowd churned toward Sherbrooke, splitting around the tables laid with coffee to get a closer look at what was happening, their babbled questioning growing to an information-hungry growl. One man stood still, budding off the back of the flowing throng like a new creature coming into life, his behavior so singularly different that he drew my focus. He opened his mouth and barked, “About time you got that son of a bitch!”
    The crowd turned to see who had spoken, opening a corridor down the middle of the room like the Red Sea parting for Moses. I peered sharply toward the man, trying to see his eyes past the glare of overhead lights reflected on a pair of glasses as thick as Coke bottle bottoms. He was built like a truck tire, with shoulders any footballer would be proud of and graying hair cut so short it was almost invisible. He wore a faded pine green T-shirt and chino pants so old they would no longer hold a crease. I slithered around the back of the crowd until I was close enough to read his name badge. MAGRITTE, it read—just the one name in smaller print—and in large type below it, EARTHWORM. His port of call—a junior college somewhere in California—had been struck out with a ballpoint pen, and handwritten below that was simply “Unaffiliated, God Damn It.”
    Matching the dramatic flair of Earthworm Magritte, Dan Sherbrooke boomed, “It figures you’d say something like that, Worm!”
    Earthworm Magritte jabbed his glasses up his broad nose
with one short, thick finger. “Aw, hell, Dan, it’s a bummer when someone leaves the game. But shock-shock, he lived, he died. Move on. It’s not the end of the universe; it’s just one less thorn in your hide. More room for you to win the Golden Jawbone Award next time. But I suppose you gotta get dramatic and give us some homily on what a great man he was. That’s cool. Get on with it.” He offered these comments with no apparent contempt, only bald, if somewhat loud, statement of opinion.
    In the ensuing silence, Sherbrooke rolled his head back until he could sight Magritte down his nose. Slowly, he spread one hand across his rubbery chest. When all eyes were on him, he uttered, “I am in a state of grief. A colleague has fallen.”
    Magritte shrugged his thick shoulders. “Aw, the hell you say. A bullshit artist has gone splot in his own manure.”
    Now Sherbrooke evinced anger. “I don’t think you know what you’re saying,” he tolled, his voice rounding like a southern preacher’s. “We’re talking about a man who has been murdered! ”
    The sharp, inquisitive eyes of two or three hundred paleontologists flicked from Sherbrooke back to Magritte, and I swung my head back too, just one more member of the Greek chorus playing Ping-Pong tournament spectator as the two major actors volleyed lines. I was thinking, This is getting ludicrous, but the look on Magritte’s face stopped me. His large, thick-lipped mouth hung wide, and his sandy eyebrows had flown up above his impenetrable glasses. “It actually happened?” he gasped.
    Sherbrooke pointed to me. “Ask her,” he intoned. All heads swiveled my way.
    I glanced desperately around for Officer Raymond, but he had faded back into the crowd. “Me?” I blurted. “Well, sure, I stayed at his house last night, but—”
    “You see?” Sherbrooke bellowed, then turned and walked
away. On that nonsensical note, the Greek chorus mercifully broke up into a gaggle of clacking tongues and scanning eyes. Leaving good old me turning in the breeze, caught being unusual in a roomful of people who have made their life’s work that of studying—nay, scrucinizing—