Free Bonegrinder by John Lutz

coolness of his half-filled beer mug. “Not today, anyway. Not accordin’ to the weather bureau.”
    “In the middle of a financial boom,” Bonifield said with contempt, “an’ you two’re talkin’ about the weather.”
    “Lotta farmers around here ain’t havin’ a financial boom,” Wintone said. “Weather’s about all they talk about.” He wished Bonifield would leave, go to one of those prettier places he’d mentioned.
    “Things other’n crops is growin’ just fine here,” Bonifield said. “Like, every business in an’ around Colver. Or ain’t you noticed?”
    “It’ll calm down,” Wintone said.
    “Maybe not. Maybe it ain’t even peaked out yet.”
    “You want another beer before you go?” Mully asked Bonifield, by way of invitation to leave.
    “Nope.” Bonifield held firm on his stool.
    Wintone didn’t want to go back to his office, or outside into the heat. Earlier the heat had made him nauseous; there seemed to be a dusty, noxious film over everything in Colver that needed a steady, cool rain to wash it away. So Wintone had come here, to Mully’s, where it was cool without the sealed confinement of his small, air-conditioned office.
    But in Mully’s he’d found Bonifield. Maybe the old man had sought refuge here like Wintone. Even Bonifield could get too much of the press, who were congregated mostly at the modern, air-conditioned lounges of the larger motels toward the main highway. Prettier places.
    When his beer was almost finished, Wintone decided he would drive along the lake road, then up beyond Lynn Cove where woven green vines and saplings grew on dark, moist ground that sloped gradually out into the lake. There the water lay motionless and thick with algae, thick with the pungent, wild scent of dying and growing. And near the lake were steep, wooded bluffs, with bent cedar clinging to their faces, pale juttings of rock like bones forced through flesh. Two days ago a woman had been lost in that area for half a day, and just when everyone was becoming really alarmed she had stumbled onto a road by accident and followed it until she was picked up by a State Patrol car. She was found less than a hundred yards from where she had left her husband in their parked car.
    It would be good to keep the patrol car and himself highly visible to the outsiders in the area, Wintone thought, to show some representation of local law.
    As Wintone was walking toward the door, Frank Turper entered. His dark eyes, recessed in glistening pads of flesh, glinted dully as if he’d been drinking before his arrival at Mully’s. “You seen them outa town papers come in the mayor’s mail today?” he asked Wintone.
    “Not yet.”
    “You oughta see some of the drawin’s of how Bonegrinder might look. Half-lizard, half-man—that sorta thing. Give you pause to think.”
    “Pausin’ to think ain’t a bad idea,” Wintone said, and walked past Turper and out the door.
    Wintone got into the patrol car, quickly started the engine and turned the air conditioner on high. Absently he pulled the automatic shift lever back and drove slowly toward the beckoning green hills. Heat waves rose in shimmering vapors from the patrol car’s flat metal hood.
    As he drove, Wintone noticed the surprisingly large number of people on the street despite the heat. Few of them were local. Most carried cameras, fishing equipment or picnic paraphernalia.
    It will all fade away soon, Wintone assured himself. When the north shore gets rebuilt and the Bonegrinder thing becomes just another half-interesting bit of Ozark folklore. Eventually things will be as they were.
    But a worm of doubt, like a restless silver thread, had begun to burrow into Wintone’s mind.
    Once changed, did things ever return to the way they were?

ELEVEN
    B ILL P ETERSON ENTERED THE kitchen through the connecting door to the garage.
    He’d been bent over the long wooden bench he’d constructed along one wall, where he often went in the evenings to work