The Hundredth Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

HER!”
    “Jeremy,” I whispered, more to myself than the caller.
    “There once was a girl from NANTUCKET, you wore boots each time that you’d FUCK IT …”
    “Jeremy, dammit …”
    “But the men in the town, one by one were each drowned, in the poison that poured out by BUCKETS!” He switched back to my mother’s voice, solicitous. “It’s all right, Carson, Mommy’s here. You haven’t finished your spit. Is it cold? Can I warm it back up for you?” He made a hawking sound.
    “Jeremy, will you please stop “
    In the background I heard a door opening, followed by scuffling and a man cursing. My caller screamed, “NO! GO AWAY. It’s a PERSONAL CALL! I’m talking to MY PAST!”
    A loud crack turned to skittering, as if the phone had been dropped and kicked across the floor. Other voices joined in with grunts, cursing, sounds of struggle. I stood in my cool room and listened breathlessly as sweat poured from beneath my arms.
    His words became distant and I pictured men in white dragging him across the floor: “THE MURDER, CARSON! Tell me about it. There must be more than a MISSING HEAD, there’s always more. Did he take THEIR DICKS? Is he JAMMING SAUSAGES UP THEIR BUTTS UNTIL THEY SHOOT OUT THE NECK HOLE? Call me! You NEEEEEED ME AGAIN … “
    More sounds of scuffling. Then nothing.
    Channel 14’s affiliate in Montgomery must have picked up the beheading-in-the-park story, run it on the late news.
    Television was one of the few luxuries Jeremy was allowed, and he would have studied the story with a scholar’s focus. I blew out the candles and lay on the couch with my face in a pillow. Sleep, when it finally arrived, was paper thin and shot through with rats and the smell of burning silk.
    My alarm fired just past daybreak. I stumbled numbly into the Gulf and swam straight into the waves for a half mile, then turned and dragged myself back. I followed with a four-mile beach run that left me sweat soaked and cramp calved. After a grudging, almost angry, session with the weights, I began to see events with a clearer eye, and wrote off Jeremy’s call as an aberration; frighteningly resourceful, he’d somehow managed to get hold of a phone.
    But hadn’t I listened as it was taken from him? It wouldn’t happen a second time; the episode was over.
    I showered and ate a breakfast of cheese grits with andouille. My mood began to lift and I headed to work. Harry flipped a coin, and tails bought me autopsy duty. I had time before the cut, and headed to the criminalists’ offices, a science lab grafted to a computer store. Two white-jacketed technicians studied a toilet float as if it were the Grail. Another tapped a pencil against a Mason jar full of squirming bugs. Hembree sat beside a microscope drinking coffee.
    “We got a print hit on the headless man,” he said, picking up a sheet of paper.
    I made a drum-roll sound with my tongue. “And the winner is?”
    Hembree mimicked a cymbal crash. “One Jerrold Elton Nelson, aka L’il Jerry, aka Jerry Elton, aka Nelson Gerald aka Elton Jelson.”
    “A big list of aliases.”
    “A pissant list of priors,” he said, reading from the page. “Twenty-two years old. Eyes and hair are blue and brown wherever they are. Petty city and county raps for shoplifting, male prostitution, possession of stolen goods, possession of a couple joints. In March a woman charged him with borrowing eleven grand and not paying it back, charges later dropped.”
    “Hooker and a gigolo con artist? Guess his door swang both ways.” I said, turning away. Though the autopsy was an hour off, I planned to head to the ME’s office.
    “I almost forgot,” Hembree said as I was halfway out the door. “That bit last night with the petals and the streetlight was inspired, Carson, pure Sherlock. Squill’s got his head so far up his ass, he spies on his teeth from his throat. I loved how you pointed that out to him.”
    The morgue’s front desk was empty and my footsteps in the hall