Raw Bone Read Online Free Page B

leather vest. He slid into the passenger seat—Constable Edward Radnicki.
    MacNeice gave him a detailed description of Byrne: fifty years old, give or take, five foot seven, mousy brown hair, brown eyes, approximately 130 pounds, skinny, heavy smoker, wearing a grey blazer, baggy denim jeans. “He lives a few blocks up Bay,” MacNeice said, handing him a note with Byrne’s name and address. “I want him watched until a warrant is served tomorrow morning. And, taking into account the clientele you can imagine frequenting the BTB, I’d like a report on anyone that looks out of the ordinary.”
    “No problem.” Radnicki jogged back to his vehicle.
    Back at Division, he found a message from Wallace that the necessary paperwork would be on MacNeice’s desk before morning.
    As he sat in his usual spot at the end of Marcello’s bar, it wasn’t to the body or the Block and Tackle Bar or William Byrne’s shaky performance that MacNeice’s thoughts turned. What came back was the moment in Cootes when the sun broke through and all the black tree trunks turned to zinc; even the smallest branches glistened silver-gold. It was early March and entirely possible that he wouldn’t see precisely that quality of light for another year. When it had happened, the sparrows around him paused and fluffed their feathers as if they’d noticed too.
    He recalled looking back at the bay through the rain as he and Aziz had driven away. Like tiny islands, the remnants of ice that had imprisoned the body lay forlorn, left to drift and dissolve in the brown water. The landscape forgets over time; the bay had already forgotten. MacNeice wouldn’t. The morning, the ice, the hand and buttock, the once-lovely, near-frozen woman had all found their way to the stack of shadows where they’d be waiting for him.While the zinc trees and the happy sparrows were no match for those shadows, he’d cling to them for a time.
    His mind drifted back to when he was twelve or so, taking Silver, his golden retriever, into the birch, spruce and pine forest for the first time, climbing over the pink and quartz-veined bedrock with its crispy lichen and blueberry bushes—the latter picked over by his mother or by black bears—to go skinny-dipping on the other side of the Georgian Bay island labelled D-25 by the government bureaucrats that had sold northern properties to the public in the 1950s.
    The secret beach he’d found was out of sight and earshot of the newly acquired rustic family cottage on the adjacent D-24, though if a beach required sand, there was none, just the mucky bottom of leaves and vegetation blown in from Georgian Bay.
    He’d stripped off, dumping his T-shirt and shorts on top of his underwear, socks and runners, and stepped slowly into the water, trying not to disturb the bottom. Not because he was squeamish, but so he could look for the schools of minnows that would dart about him like copper slivers.
    He wasn’t called Mac yet. That nickname was reserved for his father. The boy was known by his first name, Iain, which he hated, in part because most people couldn’t spell it.
    As he was floating on his back, a great blue heron flew low overhead to land nearby. Startled to see the boy, it flapped furiously to gain altitude, its shoulders rotating backwards, then it veered to the right and down the inlet. Feeling the wind from the wings wash over him, he felt more alive than he ever had before. The great bird’s belly feathers had been only three or four feet above him, its long legs, feet and talons thrust down toward him, like brakes, before tucking up as it escaped.
    He’d stood up, elated, straining to catch sight of the bird, but it had flown off in search ofa solitary place to spear fish. He’d climbed out of the water, walked past his clothes and into the forest. Lying down on a thick bed of star moss that blanketed a gulley between two granite shoulders, he’d put his hands behind his head and looked up at the canopy. He’d