Mission Flats Read Online Free PDF

developed and less fashionable. Here there are only box-frame cabins built on short concrete piles. They rent by the week from Memorial Day to Labor Day, to working folks from Portland or Boston. To people from away. Sports, we call them, flatlanders – tourists, the lifeblood of this place.
    I made an effort to pay equal attention to the dwellings at both ends of the lake, not so much out of sympathy for the working stiffs, but because the little cabins were more likely to be broken into than the grander homes. The cabins attracted local kids looking for a place to party. A kid could get in with no more effort than it took to pop the hasp that held a padlock. A tire iron usually did the trick. So I checked them every few weeks, called the owner when there was a break-in, saw to it that broken hinges and window frames were repaired. I even picked up the beer bottles and marijuana roaches and condoms from cabin floors.
    The cabin where I found the body was the fourth I checked that morning.
    I might have driven right past it without getting out of the Bronco since it was plain from a distance that there was no damage to the exterior. The windows were covered with padlocked wooden shutters, the door was undamaged. But there was a smell, faint at first but overpowering as I got nearer – an acrid, ammoniac stench, the distinctive smell of decay. I’d smelled it before, usually on deer hit by cars on Route 2 or the Post Road. This might have been a large animal too, a deer or even a moose lying dead in the woods nearby. But this smell was unmistakably coming from the cabin, and I’d never known a moose to die in bed.
    I got a pry bar from the truck and popped open the door.
    Flies buzzed.
    The smell was overwhelming. The muscles in the wall of my throat clenched at the odor. I didn’t have a handkerchief to cover my nose as detectives do in movies, so I settled for burying my face in the crook of my elbow. Wheezing, I shined my flashlight about in the darkness.
    A pile of clothing on the floor resolved itself into a body. A man curled on his side. He wore only khaki shorts and a T-shirt. The bare legs were eggshell white with rose-marble highlights where the skin met the floor. Above the swollen legs, the T-shirt was rucked up to reveal a bloated white belly. A frizz of red hair ran up to the navel. The left eye looked toward me; the right was obliterated, in its place a cake of dried blood. Above that, tissue blossomed out of a trench in his scalp. The wood floor was stained with dried blood in a wide crescent radiating out from the shattered head. The stain appeared black in the flashlight beam. Near the head lay the left half of a pair of eyeglasses.
    The room began to turn. I breathed hard in the folds of my coat sleeve. The cabin was empty. Dresser drawers were ajar, the mattresses rolled up and tied with twine.
    I stepped forward. Near the body, a wallet. A crumpled wad of bills, maybe fifty dollars total, lay on the floor. I knelt and, using a ballpoint pen, teased open the wallet. It contained a five-point gold star impressed with the words ROBERT M. DANZIGER • ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY • SUSSEX COUNTY .

3
    The usual cant is that we are blasé about violence, that movies and TV inure us to it. Real violence and injury are not supposed to shock us because we have seen the hyperreality of movie violence. The truth is precisely the opposite. Filmic violence – all those bursting blood bags and death poses, all those actors holding their breath, all that artful realism – only increases the shock value of an actual corpse. The primal weirdness of a dead body, it turns out, is in its very reality – in its lumpish, implausible nearness.
    I was horrified by the body of Robert Danziger. It assaulted the senses. That glistening cleft in the scalp, the distended and discolored torso. The skin rubbery and taut over the swollen calves. The overpowering stink that hung like smoke in the sinuses. I made it to the woods a