Thorn in My Side Read Online Free PDF Page B

here to talk to me or my brother?”
    The detective was obviously not in the mood to be questioned. “Could you please stand, Mr. Edgerton?”
    “Which one?” we asked in unison. I could feel a bead of sweat roll down my back. And then another bead roll down Kirk’s.
    Suddenly, Jensen jammed his hand into my armpit and jerked us up from the chair. He spun us around, and we had to reach out to keep from smashing face-first into the cubicle.
    “Oh God,” I prayed as I felt my arm being jerked behind my back. There was the metallic clinking of handcuffs.
    “Screw you, pig!” Kirk’s hand flew into the air in his John Travolta move. Jensen reached for Kirk’s wrist, but Kirk was taller. “I want a lawyer!”
    “You want me to add resisting to the charge, too?” Jensen pressed Kirk’s face into the wall. “Give me a reason, asshole. Just give me a reason.”
    “Officer,” I tried. “I’m not resisting—”
    Jensen kicked me in the back of the knee, and I crumpled to the ground. Kirk fell on top of me.
    “No!” he screamed. “It’s not fair!”
    “Neither is what you did to that woman.” Jensen’s knee dug into my back as he clamped the cuff around Kirk’s wrist. “You beat her down like a dog in the street,” he mumbled. “What kind of animal are you?”
    “It wasn’t me!” Kirk screamed. “It was my brother!”

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Chang and Ang Bunker are perhaps the most famous conjoined twins in history. Called “Siamese twins” because they hailed from Siam, they worked in a traveling circus most of their lives. Having made their fortune as a freak show, they retired to Tennessee, where they farmed the land by day and tended to their wives and families by night.
    Yes, they had wives and families. Chang and his wife had ten children. Ang and his wife had eleven. Because their wives—who, by the way, were sisters—did not get along, the two men had separate households. Three nights would be spent in Chang’s marital bed, and then the next three nights would be spent in Ang’s. They were gentlemen farmers. Respected citizens. Their sons fought for the Confederacy, which, while not exactly laudable, had some tinge of honor.
    The twins died on the same day. Chang succumbed to pneumonia during a long January night. The next morning, Ang woke to find his brother dead. His wife and children heard his cries of grief and came to comfort him. A doctor was sent for. The plan was to separate the two, but Ang refused. He would not be parted from his brother.
    He died a few hours later.
    Today, the surgery to separate the two men could be performed in a few hours. Doctors would refer to them as xiphopagus twins, joined at the sternum by a tiny piece of cartilage and sharing a liver with two independently functioning halves. The liver is a remarkable organ, the closest thing to a salamander that the human body has. Slice it into pieces and it will grow back as one.
    The adorable Hensel girls are craniopagus twins, meaning they are joined at the head but, for the most part, have two separately developed bodies.
    The more reclusive Gaylon brothers are omphalo-schiopagus twins, with four arms, four legs, and fused abdomens. They live in the embrace of their loving family, which consists of nine brothers and sisters.
    Kirk and I are thoraco-omphalopagus twins. We are fused from the upper chest to the lower chest. We share a heart. A liver. Part of the digestive system. We are also, to my knowledge, the only conjoined twins in the American penal system.
    Aggravated assault. Rape. Murder. It was hard to quibble with any of these charges once they showed the crime scene photos. Poor Mindy Connor. The police photographer’s flash was even more harsh than the xenon parking lot lights of the Pink Pony. She was not a pretty girl. Nor was she a girl. Forty-three years old. She’d lost custody of her children five years ago because she preferred the needle to the demands of motherhood. Her father said she was