LITMIR.BIZ

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had facilitated and accelerated decomposition. The stench was much worse here than in the rest of the hut.

      The suffocating heat and the stink had the power of two quick punches to the gut. I backed quickly out of the room, into the hall, simultaneously gasping for a cleaner breath and struggling to repress the urge to vomit.

      Although I hadn’t brought the foil-sealed towelettes for this purpose, I ripped open one of them and tore two strips from it. The moistened paper had a lemony fragrance. I rolled the saturated strips into dripping wads and plugged my nostrils with them.

      Breathing through my mouth, I couldn’t smell the decomposing corpse. When I reentered the room, I gagged again, anyway.

      I could have cut the shoelace that secured the top of the shroud —the one at the foot had broken the previous night—and rolled the body out of its wrapping. The thought of the dead man tumbling across the floor, as if animated again, convinced me to approach the problem with a different solution.

      Reluctantly, I knelt at the head of the corpse. I propped the flashlight against it in such a way as to best illuminate my work.

      I snipped the shoelace and tossed it aside. The scissors were sharp enough to trim through all three layers of rolled sheeting at once. I cut with patience and care, repulsed by the possibility of gouging the dead man.

      As the fabric fell away to both sides of the body, the face came into view first. I realized too late that if I had started from the bottom, I would have had to open the shroud only as far as the neck, to see his wound, and could have avoided this hideous sight.

      Time and the ungodly heat had done their nasty work. The face—upside down to me—was bloated, darker than it had been when last I had seen it, and marbled with green. The mouth had sagged open. Thin cataracts of milky fluid had formed over both eyes, although I could still discern the delineation between the whites and irises.

      As I reached across the dead man’s face to cut the shroud away from his chest, he licked my wrist.

      I cried out in shock and disgust, reared back, and dropped the scissors.

      From the cadaver’s sagging mouth exploded a squirming black mass, a creature so strange in this context that I didn’t realize what it must be until it fully extracted itself. On Robertson’s dead face, the thing reared up on its four back legs and raked the air with its forelegs. Tarantula.

      Moving too quickly to give it a chance to bite, I backhanded the spider. It tumbled across the floor, sprang to its feet, and scurried into a far corner.

      When I picked up the fallen scissors, my hand shook so badly that I gave the air a vigorous trimming before I was able to steady myself.

      Concerned that more critters might have crawled into the bottom of the shroud to explore the fragrant contents, I resumed my work on the sheet with nervous care. I exposed the body to the waist without encountering another eight-legged forager.

      In my startled reaction to the tarantula, I had blown the plug out of my right nostril. When the residue of lemony fluid evaporated, I could smell the body again, though not at full strength because I continued to breathe through my mouth.

      Glancing toward the corner into which the spider had retreated, I discovered that it wasn’t there anymore.

      I searched anxiously for a moment. Then, in spite of the poor light, I saw the hairy beast just to the left of the corner, three feet off the floor, slowly ascending the pink wall.

      Too shaky and too pressed for time to unbutton the dead man’s shirt as I’d done in my apartment, I tore it open, popping buttons. One of them snapped off my face, and the others bounced across the floor.

      When I pressed from my mind the inhibiting image of my mother with a pistol to her breast, I was able to focus the flashlight on the wound. Steeling myself to examine it closely, I saw why it had seemed strange to me.

      I propped the flashlight against the body again and tore open three foil-wrapped towelettes. I sandwiched them into one thick pad and gently swabbed away the obscuring custardy ooze that had seeped from the wound.

      The bullet had pierced a tattoo on Robertson’s chest, directly over his heart. This black rectangle was the same size and shape as the meditation card that I had found in his wallet. In the center of the rectangle were three red hieroglyphs.

      Bleary-eyed, nervous, strung out on caffeine, I couldn’t quickly make sense of the design when it was upside down.

      As I shifted from behind Robertson’s head to his side, those dead eyes seemed to move, tracking me under the semiopaque, milky cataracts.

      When I checked on the tarantula, it had vanished from the farther wall. With the flashlight, I located it on the ceiling, working its way toward me. It froze in the direct light.

      I turned the beam on the tattoo and discovered that the three red hieroglyphs were actually three letters of the alphabet in a script with flourishes. F ... O ... The third had been partially torn away by the bullet, but I was certain that it had been an L.

      FOL. Not a word. An acronym. Thanks to Shamus Cocobolo, I knew what it meant: Father of Lies.

      Robertson had worn the name of his dark lord over his heart.

      Three letters: FOL. Three others, encountered elsewhere, and recently ...

      Suddenly I could see Officer Simon Varner vividly in memory: behind the wheel of the department cruiser in the parking lot at the bowling alley, leaning toward the open window, his face sweet enough to qualify him as the host of a children’s TV program, his heavy-lidded eyes like those of a sleepy bear, his burly forearm resting on the driver’s door, the “gang tattoo” that he claimed embarrassed him. Nothing as elaborate as Robertson’s tattoo, no similarity of style whatsoever. No black rectangle inlaid with fancy red script. Just another acronym in black block letters: D ... something. Maybe DOP.

      Did Officer Simon Varner, of the Pico Mundo Police Department, wear the name of this same master on his left arm?

      If Robertson’s tattoo marked him with one of the devil’s many names, then Simon Varner’s put him in the same club.

      Names for the devil raced through my mind: Satan, Lucifer, Old Scratch, Beelzebub, Father of Evil, His Satanic Majesty, Apollyon, Belial ...

      I couldn’t think of the words that would explain the acronym on Varner’s arm, but I had no doubt that I had identified Robertson’s kill buddy.

      At the bowling alley, there had been no bodachs around Varner as there had been, at times, around Robertson. If I’d seen him with bodachs in attendance, I might have realized what a monster he was.

      Because they might take fingerprints, I hurriedly gathered the scraps of foil that had wrapped the towelettes and shoved them in a pocket of my jeans. I grabbed the scissors, stood, swept the ceiling with the flashlight, and found the tarantula directly overhead.

      Tarantulas are timid. They do not stalk human beings.

      I sprinted from the room, heard the spider drop to the floor with a soft but solid fleshy sound, slammed the door between us, and wiped prints off the knob with the tail of my T-shirt, then off the front door, too, as I left.

      Because tarantulas are timid and because I believe there are no coincidences, I raced to the Chevy, threw the scissors and flashlight in the shopping bag, started the engine, and stomped the accelerator. I exited the grounds of the Church of the Whispering Comet with a shriek of tortured rubber, kicking up a spray of sand and crumbled blacktop, eager to reach the state highway before being surrounded by legions of tarantulas, an army of coyotes, and a slithering swarm of rattlesnakes all functioning in concert.

       CHAPTER 56

      NOT DOP. POD. PRINCE OF DARKNESS. THE source of Simon Varner’s tattooed acronym, POD, occurred

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