Out of Body Read Online Free PDF Page A

Quarter like the back of his hand—the clubs, the bars, the strip joints. Shops and their owners. And the everyday work force: portrait sketchers, palm readers and card readers, folks who hung out with bags of gravedust, rodent droppings and chicken feet in their pockets; dancers, singers, musicians, pushers, pimps, pavement princesses, pickpockets and crackheads—both the zombies and those who still had a few gray cells left to fry.
    There was a lot of humanity existing on the very edge, people with rich or crazy histories, and often crazier here-and-nows.
    “When will we know exactly how the vic died?” Fisher asked. “If it was before or after the gator?”
    “The autopsy should be going on now, if Blades got to it.”
    Fisher grinned with half of his mouth. “Blades is a first-rate M.E. I still say he chose the profession to fit his name.” He made a note about the autopsy in his notebook.
    “I don’t think you’ll risk asking him about that one again—if you ever see him.” Archer jotted several more lines on his board.
    “It’s not my fault if he doesn’t have a sense of humor,” Fisher said, and had a mental image of the tall, stooped man with his cadaverous face. “What’s your best guess on this woman?”
    “She’s dead.”
    “Ha-ha.”
    “Let’s get back to where we were,” Archer said. “You weren’t finished spilling your guts when the press conference came on.”
    “I wasn’t spilling my guts.”
    “Seemed to me like you had a lot to say.”
    Fisher let it go. “You ever see gators in the river?”
    “Nope. Heard of one a time or two.”
    “I don’t believe it.” But Fisher supposed they could get there somehow. “I guess Katrina could have caused just about anything.” The hurricane continued to get blamed for most things and it was often guilty.
    Archer began a fresh round of pacing back and forth, picking up crime scene photos from his desk in one direction and peering at them through slitted eyelids; dropping the grisly images of Shirley Cooper down again on his return. The body looked as if it had been in an outsize blender. He had held the photos up for Fisher to see when her name was mentioned on TV a while earlier.
    “You could have been going to say just about anything.” The detective hadn’t forgotten his previous line of questioning. “What would you have said if you hadn’t found out we had a body?”
    “I didn’t think about a body at all. Not one way or the other. Did I know I was going to walk in here in time to watch a press conference and hear about a bunch of missing women?”
    Archer scowled. “The chief couldn’t wait to get in front of the cameras.”
    After another detective had interrupted them to tell Archer to turn on the TV, Fisher had watched Chief Beauchamp’s press conference. He learned the case was Archer’s and that he’d begged off being on camera, not that reporters wouldn’t get to him soon enough. And that was the burr up Archer’s ass.
    “You know the press will be all over this like white on rice. That’s why you’re so mad. There’s probably a posse of ’em hanging outside right now. And the calls are going to start. Get used to it.”
    “Now you’re a mind reader,” Archer said through his teeth.
    “I know you,” Fisher told him. “I know they rode you like a rented mule in the Cassidy case and you’re still sore from it.” Benton Cassidy, a rich, spoiled kid with a father who could hire any hotshot lawyer for sale, had almost walked even though everyone was convinced he’d killed his young stepmother and the son she’d had by Cassidy’s father.
    “Cassidy’s going to rot in his cage until he croaks,” Fisher went on. “Your side won in the end.”
    Archer grimaced. He lifted a slim, frosted glass bottle of Bong Vodka out of his bottom desk drawer and pulled twopaper cups from a dispenser on the wall beside his personal water cooler.
    “Every crime’s public property now.” Vodka gurgled into the