Lonesome Animals Read Online Free PDF

as a donation, declared the death a suicide.
    Truax’s was not unlike most reservation crimes. Here, justice was less a blindfolded woman weighing a man’s virtues against his sin than a poor shot occasionally firing a round into a fistfight to remind those brawling she could, if inclined.
    â€œI told you I ain’t working,” Strawl said.
    Truax spit into his sink basin and ran some water into it. “If it was plain murder, Dice’d stick to shaming us Sundays with the Methodists and invest in cemetery plots. It’s not killings they got objections concerning. It’s killings with style.”
    â€œThis fellow have a flair for it?”
    â€œThinks they put corpses in museums, far as I can tell. See for yourself.”
    Truax opened the metal door to the locker. The room went white in degrees as he set a match to each hanging lantern. Blood from the slaughter room adjacent had worked under the wall. The cold room smelled like meat and metal. The light irritated dust motes into the air. A steer lowed in the corral across the street. Otherwise, it was silent aside from the ticking of the flames in each lamp.
    The body lay on three two-by-eights that rested across a pair of metal carts. It was facedown and blue, not the tinge a white
person turns, but the darker hue of Indian flesh in rigor mortis. The sternum had been sawed, not broken with an axe. The killer had then painstakingly sliced tracks for the ribs with what looked to be a razor and pulled them through the back flesh until they resembled nothing more than angels’ wings. The scapula blades added to the effect, though no angel or its carcass was likely to be found with skin strips and the attached fat dangling into its empty body cavity like guttered candlewax or strands of colored sinew dangling from its wounds like frayed denim.
    â€œWho found him?” Strawl asked.
    â€œMills. Tied his horse to the hardware rail and there he was.”
    â€œHe around?”
    Truax shook his head. “Skidding logs with the Canucks.”
    Strawl’s cigarette was out. He patted his shirt, then pulled a leather bag from the pocket and a paper loose from its package. He sprinkled tobacco into the folded papers and twisted the smoke, found his matches, then set both on the metal counter.
    â€œThere a gut pile?”
    Truax shook his head.
    â€œAny blood at all?”
    â€œJust where the body laid.”
    â€œHow come you know all this?”
    â€œLike everyone else, I came running when Mills hollered.”
    Strawl nodded.
    â€œWhy at the hardware?”
    â€œI don’t know. Seems to me him laid out like a turkey on a platter’s more to the point.”
    Strawl examined the bottoms of the man’s feet and his ankles and wrists. He’d not been bound or beaten. An incision above each ankle had emptied his femoral arteries. Dried blood knotted each shut. Another slit had opened the jugular and drained the
skull. Each cut was clean and stitched with needle and thread. The victim had been hit in the temple with something sharp enough to tear his cheek to the bone and blunt enough to drive a dime-sized skull fragment into the only organ the killer didn’t relieve him of. A spade point was Strawl’s best guess. It wasn’t an unusual weapon on the reservation; guns made noise and knives required close range and probably some acquaintance. A shovel would at least provide the advantage of surprise.
    The blow may not have killed the man. Skull fractures rarely took lives and those that did took time. The brain might have hemorrhaged, but bleeders generally took a number of blows. The man’s eyeballs were shot with blood as if he may have been strangled, but Strawl found no ligature marks.
    He examined the body for an hour, then stepped from the locker back into the store. Truax continued to grind meat, the wheel squeaking each turn. Strawl considered the delicate cuts on the body: no skips, no slashes