Skin : the X-files Read Online Free PDF Page A

have had good aim.
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    Skin
    Mulder closed his eyes, massaging the ice-filled towel harder against the knot of muscle just below his lower gum line. He could still see the shovel flashing toward him, and the crazy glint in the Colombian’s eyes. A few inches higher, and the shovel would certainly have cracked his skull open. Mulder only wished his partner, Dana Scully, hadn’t cuffed the man so quickly after he had wrested the weapon away. A good, long scuffle would have given Mulder a chance to pay the Colombian back for the blow. And for the wild-goose chase that had led them to the deserted barn in the first place.
    Still, Mulder had to admit, it wasn’t entirely the Colombian’s fault that he and Scully had spent the last two weeks wandering through upstate New York on what should have been a DEA assignment. Carlos Sanchez couldn’t have known about the reports of mutilated livestock that had trickled in to the FBI over the past few months, or about the resulting case file that had been dropped on Mulder’s cluttered desk in the basement of the Hoover Building—partly because the case’s bizarre focus seemed to fit with Mulder ’s obsession with the unexplained, and partly because no other agent wanted to investigate a bunch of dead cows.
    Sanchez couldn’t have known about these things—
    because in truth, the case had had nothing to do with mutilated livestock. Mulder should have known from the beginning that the case had not been a bona fide 29

    THE X-FILES
    X-File. Thirty-two cows with scalpel wounds across their abdomens was a cliché, not a paranormal mystery.
    Mulder had not seen the clues until too late. When Scully had discovered evidence of old stitches beneath the wounds of the most recently mutilated cows, he should have begun to suspect something.
    Then, when he and Scully had determined that all the mutilated cattle had originated in the same breeding ranch just outside of Bogota, he should have made the final connection.
    But it wasn’t until he had stumbled into the abandoned barn on the back lot of Sanchez’s farm that he had realized the truth. He had stared at the eviscerated carcasses piled high in the center of the barn, and the bloody, sealed bags of white powder drying in the hay—and the lightbulb had finally gone on. Bandez had been using the cows to transport cocaine into the U.S.
    The abandoned barn was a drug depository, with distribution routes leading straight down I-95 into Manhattan.
    Before Mulder had finished digesting his discovery, Sanchez had come at him with the shovel. A minute later he had been lying on top of the Colombian in a pile of dried manure, while Scully made the arrest. He had nursed his aching jaw in silence during the winding ride back to the hotel, avoiding Scully’s eyes. He hadn’t needed to see her expression—he knew what she was thinking. Yet another debunked mystery, a mirage with reason at its core. Of course, it was her job to think that 30

    Skin
    way. That’s why she was there in the first place—to expose the scientific, rational truth behind Mulder’s supposed enigmas. Sometimes even her silence was as subtle as a shovel to his jaw.
    He heard the shower go on in the adjacent room and groaned, lifting himself back to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. His athletic, six-foot frame ached from a combination of exhaustion and frustration. He ran his free hand through his dark hair and tried to chase the fog out of his tired hazel eyes. It was almost time to leave. He and Scully had a long drive back to the air-field in Westchester, and if they were going to catch the last commercial flight back to Washington, they would have to break more than a few speed limits along the way. Of course, that was one of the perks of having federal plates and FBI badges. Somebody else handled the speeding tickets.
    Mulder removed the soggy towel from his jaw and let it drop to the ugly beige carpet. The cramped hotel room stared at him, four white