Snippet #3 from Here Lies a Wicked Man

GOD WAS IN A STINGY MOOD THE DAY HE MADE Sheriff Wesley Ringhoffer, Booker decided. On the tired side of thirty, the sheriff stood roughly five-six in his elevated boots, gleaming Colt revolver hanging nearly to his kneecap. Shock of red hair, beakish nose, stiff military strut—fill his pockets with rocks and he might weigh in at a hundred and forty. Booker wondered why he didn’t carry a gun more suitable to his size, but was smart enough not to wonder out loud.

“Shoot the body,” the sheriff said quietly.

Booker had seen the sheriff around and had heard tales of Ringhoffer’s rigid enforcement of Grammon County temperance laws. This was the first time they’d met. A shame the encounter couldn’t have been less irksome. In Booker’s experience, it made sense to stay on the agreeable side of the law.

“That’s not Chuck,” Emaline shouted, pointing at the lumpy form Pup had dragged from the lake. “That’s not even human. Some kind of early Halloween prank made up to scare little kids.”

Terrible enough to scare big, strapping, middle-aged men, Booker thought. In months to come, the monstrosity would likely pop up in his dreams, all ooze and lake rot and waxy, bloated fat. But it was human, all right. He didn’t want to think about that.

He’d pushed Death aside some months ago, when the doctor talked of long-term convalescence. “Hogwash,” Booker had insisted. Yet riding home from the hospital, he wondered if the bullet was a nudge from God. Later, he decided it was only fear that’d goosed him, fear that life might suddenly stop before he’d finally begun to live. Anyway, God had better things to do than concern Himself with one aging corporate investigator.

Now, seeing the Reaper’s work in this sleepy community set Booker’s repaired heart to painfully thumping.