Upgunned Read Online Free

did.
    â€œI need you to photographically document her surgeries,” Clavius said. “Every stage of every procedure. I need to see inside her as much as possible. What do you think?”
    I was supposed to show no more adverse reaction than if he had just offered to open a door for me, which he had. So I nodded. Fine, good.
    He clapped me on the shoulder, a conspiratorial brother now. Then he offered the boon he knew I expected: “Do this thing, and a year from now, you will be famous, yourself.”
    There it was, and I didn’t have to sign in blood, or anything.
    *   *   *
    Now do this thing, and presumably, I got to live.
    The dead guy in the body bag was not Clavius, which I will admit was a flash-forward brought on by paranoia and my own retroactive guilt about getting jiggy with his recently discarded wife … even as he was probably dancing a similar mambo with my girlfriend-of-record.
    The dead guy in the body bag was Dominic Sharps, whose face I knew from TV whenever the news was about the Los Angeles Police Department. There was no mistaking his identity; even the news was in hi-def now. I was pretty sure that yesterday, Mr. Sharps had been breathing. His gray eyes were wide open and unseeing.
    â€œThat crap you see in the movies where the bereaved survivor honorably closes the eyes of the dead person with the gentle touch of two fingers or the palm of the hand? Total bullshit. Never happens.” My captor, Gun Guy, seemed proud of this knowledge.
    Dominic Sharps had not been dead for very long. His skin had gone waxy but there was no smell of rotting meat; not yet. His fingernails were white from the blood evacuation; lividity had probably begun on his back and buttocks. His eyes were starting to sink into their sockets. If this was the pre-rigor mortis state, he had only been dead a couple of hours.
    â€œWe’ve got to move before he stiffens up any more,” said my gunman. “Set up your lights. Professor, get your ass in here and finish what you started!”
    With his makeup and bronzer and hair plugs, the Professor didn’t seem that far away from corpse land, himself. He brought in a case full of cosmetics and I realized why Sharps looked so … odd. He had been partially made up already by the Professor, which accounted for the weird skin tone. Dead people first turn grayish, then slightly violet. Sharps’s dead flesh had the simulated glow of living tissue.
    â€œI want this lighting dead natural,” Gun Guy directed me, missing his own irony. “As though the only source is that lamp, right there. Fire it up.”
    The Professor fully unzipped the bag. The late Mr. Sharps was naked. The cosmetology was to be full body. Then he withdrew a thin metal rod about five inches long with one knobby end. It looked like a surgical tool.
    He must have seen my eyebrows go up.
    â€œThis is really inconvenient,” the Professor said in a reedy voice, almost introspective. “At the moment of death, an erection is natural. That has already subsided. Too bad we couldn’t get him sooner.”
    â€œI threw this together as fast as I could,” said Gun Guy with a snarl. “Get past it.”
    I think I fumbled my film load when I saw the Professor slide the rod into the dead man’s penis, as easily as you’d replace an oil dipstick.
    Now the naked, dead Dominic Sharps had a fake erection to go with his fake complexion, I thought, devoting the rest of my energy to not losing my mind, or gibbering, or bumbling my lips with one finger like an imbecile.
    Cognac was standing behind me, also naked except for the stockings and heels. She obviously spent a lot of spin class time keeping very fit.
    She squirted a generous amount of Astroglide onto her palms and moved past me, saying, “Excuse me, sweetie.”
    She greased up and squatted down after the bullyboys removed the body bag and patch-glued Dominic Sharps’s