The Hermit Read Online Free PDF Page A

shadow sitting in the passenger’s seat and grasping the handle on the car’s ceiling. Lorenzo Pérez-Lúñigo is a doctor, a very average one at that, but he’s also the island’s only medical examiner. He’s not particularly good at his job, he’s just pompous and abnormally interested in corpses. An awful person. Erhard almost reported him to the police a few years back for abusing a corpse, but Bernal talked him out of it.
    – What happens in a taxi stays with the cabbie, as the saying goes.
    Bernal snorts. – Can we at least go inside?
    Erhard enters the living room, which is also the kitchen. He leans against the kitchen table and gestures for the vice police superintendent to do the same.
    – You still don’t have running water, Bernal says, looking at an empty bottle of cognac on the table.
    – Water is for turtles.
    – You live like a turtle, too. I’m getting a little concerned.
    – No need. I’ve done far worse.
    Bernal shrugs. – On the telephone you said that the dogs had bitten his face.
    – I said they’d eaten his face.
    – And they sat on top of the car? The dogs. And they were biting him?
    – Eating him. Yes, that’s what I saw.
    – And you’re sure of that? It was his face?
    – I saw his sideburns, I saw his hair. I saw his eyes.
    – Is it possible that you were tired?
    – I know what I saw.
    – Could it have been his back?
    – If he had eyes on his back.
    The superintendent smiles. – We can’t find his ring. It’s a very unique ring that’s worth nothing if one tried to sell it.
    – Who knows what those animals might have eaten?
    – We’ve shot everything that runs around on four legs out there. We’ve even shot a few dogs that weren’t feral. And Lorenzo has been wallowing in dog guts up to his elbows. No ring.
    – Then he’s in his element. But maybe they didn’t swallow it. Maybe it’s lying around somewhere. Who knows where dogs like that hide?
    – We would’ve found it then. We’ve searched the entire area. The problem is that everything that’s been inside the dogs for more than three or four hours is so dissolved we can’t tell what it is. Not the ring – we ought to be able to find that. And if the face was the last thing the dogs, um, ate, then we ought to have found it.
    – When did you get there?
    – We got there as fast as we could. The policeman glances down at the laminate floor, which is torn and fixed with duct tape. – They’re calling it a single-vehicle accident. He says it several times, as if it suddenly amazes him.
    Erhard is relieved, but afraid to show this relief to Bernal. He turns and arranges some random object on the kitchen table. – How long did it take? he says.
    – The man was already dead, of course. Like you said, it was New Year’s Eve.
    – So what’s the problem?
    – His family’s breathing down our necks. Love makes people unreasonable. They want something to put in the coffin. Not just rocks from Alejandro’s Trail. And the ring, the sister’s very focused on that.
    – Don’t try to mess with them. Especially Eleanor. Nothing good will come of that. He remembers the sister as she appears in a rearview mirror. She’s twice the man Bill Haji was.
    – That’s why we’re busting our asses here. A ring like that is pretty much, you know, his personality. I’d like to give the ring to his sister and tell her that he’s in the coffin. Not just what’s left of his shoes or his liver, which for some reason those devils never touched.
    Erhard doesn’t dare glance over at the shelf where the finger is lying inside a tin of Mokarabia 100 per cent Arabica coffee. – I can’t help you.
    Bernal peers around as if he wants to say more. His eyes rest for some time on the section of wall where the wallpaper is missing. The bare wood is visible there. Pale plywood marked by the carpenter’s scribbled notes. Erhard follows him to his car. Pérez-Lúñigo seems impatient.
    – If you hear that someone has found the