Bonegrinder Read Online Free Page B

happens.”
    “And it’s not good when it happens,” Sarah said.
    Wintone caught the undertone of helpless compassion in her voice, wanted to ease her mind but didn’t know what to say. “See if you can do something with what’s left of him,
    Doc. I’ll be sending his folks in from Higgins’ to officially identify him.”
    “They know yet?”
    “On my way to tell ’em.”
    Doc Amis shot him a gray look of understanding. “Don’t let me keep you, Sheriff.”
    When Wintone stepped back out onto the street, the heat seemed to envelop him with an eager malice in a way that was strangely personal, as if the elements had conspired to infuriate him.
    He tried not to think of where he was going, what he had to do, tried not to think about the heat. From horizon to horizon the sky was a shimmering blue without a single cloud, and without a single hope of rain.

FOUR
    W INTONE WAITED IN THE tiny, knotty pine-paneled office of Higgins’ Motel while Lil Higgins went to see if the Larsens were in their cabin. The motel office was so cool that the abrupt change from the outside heat had brought a nauseous, hollow sensation to Wintone’s stomach. An oversized air conditioner mounted in the wall behind the wooden counter hummed powerfully, and Wintone heard the steady drip of condensation falling into a half-full yellow plastic bucket beneath the air conditioner. There were faint spatter marks on the paneling from when the water level in the bucket had gotten too high.
    The CB radio base unit on the desk was turned on, and somebody called Bulldog was laboriously giving somebody called Flatiron directions to a restaurant on the main highway. Wintone reached over and turned the unit off.
    On the motel desk were a number of wire holders containing maps and travel brochures. Wintone didn’t remember seeing them there before, and on the wall was a freshly painted sign with motel rules and a new and earlier check-out time. One of the knotty-pine walls was covered with dozens of photographs of both Lil and Luke Higgins smiling and holding up prize fish or large strings of smaller fish they’d caught. None of the fish had been pulled from the south end of the lake.
    Wintone hadn’t heard anyone approach, but the office door opened and the Larsens came in, fearful and eager. Lil gave Wintone a look that said she pitied everyone in the room and left them alone.
    Paul Larsen was a tall man with straight blond hair neatly cut and parted to the side as if it had been flipped there to disguise a receding hairline. He had fine, elongated features and agonized blue eyes. His wife Beth was a narrow-waisted, tiny woman with dark and deep eyes that seldom blinked. Wintone wished she didn’t have eyes like that.
    “Why don’t both of you sit down,” Wintone said.
    Beth Larsen sat in a chrome-armed vinyl chair, but Paul Larsen said he preferred to stand. He rested his hand on his seated wife’s thin shoulder, as if posing for a photograph.
    Willing the feeling part of his mind to be numb, Wintone told them what had happened.
    Paul Larsen did sit down then, as if he’d been heart-shot. Beth Larsen’s dark eyes went blank, rolled back, and she closed them and bowed her head, squeezing her slender hands together as if praying, squeezing both clasped hands between her whitened knees. Her thin body convulsed with her soft sobs, as if jolts of electricity were passing through her chair.
    “It’ll be necessary for one of you to drive on in to Colver,” Wintone said. “Make sure.”
    “I am sure,” Paul Larsen said in a flat voice. There was a stunned expression on his face, an almost-smile of a leer that he wasn’t aware of.
    Beth Larsen regained control first. “We’ll both go,” she said, reaching out a hand and touching her husband’s wrist.
    “Mrs. Higgins has offered to drive you,” Wintone said. “I think it’d be best.”
    Beth Larsen agreed. Her husband was still wherever he had gone inside himself.
    Wintone nodded to