Bonegrinder Read Online Free Page A

over.”
    “How about that dive over there?” The man extended his arm from the car to point toward Mully’s.
    “No carry-out liquor there, nor hard liquor at all,” Wintone said, “only bottle beer in mugs.”
    “Bottle beer in mugs …” the driver repeated as if in disbelief. The sports car suddenly seemed to drop six inches and the engine hummed louder as it sped away. It occurred to Wintone that there was no speed limit posted anywhere in Colver except where the little-traveled alternate highway cut through the town’s center.
    When Wintone arrived at Doc Amis’s, he noticed that the twice-lightning-struck, huge cottonwood tree that shaded the low brick building looked as if it might be dying from the drought. Its leaves appeared wilted and had taken on a dull brownish hue out near the ends of the long branches.
    Doc Amis’s nurse and receptionist, Sarah Ledbetter, didn’t look up as Wintone entered. A thin, almost skinny, woman with close-cropped blond hair, pretty in an intense way, she was busy at her desk entering something in a large black-bound record book, and her hands were unsteady. When she did glance up and saw Wintone in the small, comfortable anteroom, she smiled and laid the pen in the crease of the open book’s binding.
    “Didn’t hear you come in, Billy.”
    “Didn’t make much noise.”
    She gave him a flickering up-and-down glance with almost a mother’s concern in wide blue eyes that were penetrating in their sensitivity. “You look worn down.”
    “Worn down’s what I am. Doc keepin’ you busy, Sarah?”
    “Busier’n I wanted to be today.”
    Wintone smiled a bit of sadness and nodded. He was at ease in Sarah’s company. They had gone together for over a year when they were in their teens, when touching each other had been a bona fide black-sky sin instead of something like shaking hands the way it was now. Wintone sometimes wondered which attitude was worse.
    A horizontal frown-line appeared on Sarah’s forehead, softened but stayed when she stopped frowning and looked up at Wintone. “I haven’t seen anything as bad as that boy for a long time.” She had spent three years as an RN in Kansas City after nursing school, and Wintone was surprised to see her upset. But then a person’s capacity to endure a sight like the boy’s remains probably lessened if the senses weren’t kept dulled by frequent similar sights. Wintone could understand that; he remembered the dead return gaze from the back of Joe James’s pickup truck and almost shivered.
    A door behind and to the left of Sarah opened, and Doc Amis came into the anteroom and nodded a hello to Wintone. The doctor was a tall, hawk-nosed man in his late sixties, very erect and very gray. It seemed that every year he got some straighter in the back and some grayer, but never older.
    “That boy looks like he’s been put through a threshing machine,” the doctor said. “What happened to him?”
    Wintone crossed hamlike forearms. “Somethin’ attacked him down at Big Water Lake.”
    “Something big, judging by the slashes and tooth marks.”
    “What do you figure it was? Pack of dogs?”
    “Not dogs. Something bigger. Hard to say just what.”
    “What was the cause of death, Doc?”
    Doc Amis snorted. “Take your pick, Sheriff. Without going into unpleasant details, it could have been anything from shock to loss of blood.”
    “The men who got there right after it happened said the boy told them somethin’ came up out of the lake after him while he was fishin’.”
    Sarah, who had been intently following the conversation, looked questioningly at Wintone.
    “Could it have been a bear?” Wintone asked Doc Amis.
    “No bears around here.”
    “Cougar?”
    “Definitely not. I’ve seen the work of cougar on a man. All I can say, Billy, is whatever it was had the tools to do more damage than a cougar. It’s hard for me to believe the boy could have lived long enough to tell anybody anything, but it