Free The Narrows by Ronald Malfi Page B

nothing but a pit of dust.
    Now, standing in Porter Conroy’s east field in the middle of the night, Ben once more questioned the choices that had caused him to remain in Stillwater, presiding over some farmer’s dead livestock. Sighing, he unhooked the flashlight from his Sam Browne belt and clicked it on. A few steps behind him, he could hear the labored respiration of Porter Conroy and Officer Eddie La Pointe. At the crest of the hill, Ben paused and ran the beam of the flashlight along the expansive field. He could see nothing but black piles of cow shit and swampy pools of rainwater, each one reflecting the stars. Against the horizon, brought into stark relief only when lightning struck, Porter Conroy’s barn loomed like Noah’s ark, the white-shingled cupola like the dome of a space shuttle. Ben cursed silently.
    Porter sidled up beside him, reeking of booze and days-old sweat. He was an anemic fellow with a nose like the periscope of a submarine and skin as roughly textured as burlap. At least Porter had been forward thinking enough to slip into a fleece-lined dungaree jacket.
    “Where?” Ben said.
    Porter pointed beyond the crest of the hill. In a voice that sounded very much like a sinner confessing to a priest, Porter said, “Just over the hill. I first came across ’em less than an hour ago. I figure it’s some kind of animal did it.”
    Ben scratched one ear. “Did you hear any noises, any commotion?”
    “Not a sound,” Porter told him. “For an animal to do something like that, you’d think you’d hear something, right?”
    “You’d think,” Ben agreed.
    Eddie La Pointe appeared beside Ben’s other elbow. The officer had the green, sallow skin of someone chronically seasick. He glanced at Ben with large, beseeching eyes. He looked tired and very young. “Do you smell that?”
    Ben nodded. “I do.”
    “What is that?”
    Without responding, Ben Journell walked to the top of the hill then swiped the beam of his flashlight back and forth across Porter’s east field. Whitish lumps appeared in the searchlight’s beam, humping out of the grass like great mounds of sand. Ben counted eight of them before Porter and Eddie joined him at the top of the hill, their combined respiration forming clouds of vapor in the frigid air.
    “There they are,” Porter said, disgust evident in his voice.
    “How many in all?”
    “Christ,” said Porter. “All of ’em.”
    “I mean, how many is that?”
    “Thirteen.”
    Scanning the field again, Ben quickly recounted. “Where are the others?”
    “In the barn.”
    Ben frowned. “Whatever did this got into the barn, too?”
    “Yeah, Ben,” Porter said. “Bold little cuss, whatever it was.”
    Ben went over to the first whitish heap rising out of the field, Eddie and Porter following close at his heels. The whitish heap was one of Porter Conroy’s Holsteins, keeled over dead on its side. Its mottled white hide looked incongruous lying in the black, wet grass. Ben’s flashlight illuminated the massive piebald flank first. He was surprised to find no wounds along the cow’s body that would have been common in an animal attack. A muddy, congealed jelly that at first looked like it could be blood coated the Holstein’s rear, but on closer inspection—and getting a whiff of the stuff—Ben realized it was feces. He traced the flashlight’s beam along the flank to the neck and saw that the white hair of its throat was fully exposed. Thin red crescents, like a series of curved puncture wounds, scaled the length of its throat, the depth and severity of which could not have been fatal.
    Finally shining the light onto the cow’s head, Ben saw that it had been twisted in such a fashion that allowed him to see the open mouth ringed in foam, the snot-webbed portals of its cavernous nostrils, and one glazed, soupy, tar-colored eye rolled back in its socket. A pencil-thin rivulet of dark blood snaked out of one ear.
    Ben frowned and said, “I don’t see any