Free Beneath the Bones by Tim Waggoner Page A

hyperventilating.
    “I need someone to keep me apprised of Joanne’s progress. Someone who’ll tell me everything — and who will of course keep our arrangement secret from the good Sheriff. Do that for me, and the pain will go away. It won’t even be a memory.”
    Ronnie wanted to tell Marshall yes, wanted to cry out that he’d do anything, anything at all, if Marshall would stop the pain. But Marshall Cross didn’t understand who he was dealing with. Ronnie lived a life of complete control: ordered, regulated, sterilized … as germ-free, contact-free, and disturbance-free as it was possible for a human being to get. Ronnie wanted to say yes and end the agony, but he wanted to do right by Sheriff Talon even more.
    And he understood control.
    And so he fought to ignore the pain that held him in its blazing grip, and he managed to gasp out a single word.
    “Nuh … No.”
    Marshall’s gaze filled with regret. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ronnie. I truly do. I’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this.”
    Ronnie felt that odd pressure inside his head again, and suddenly as if a switch had been thrown somewhere inside his brain, the pain ceased. The sudden absence of sensation was so startling that he drew in a gasping breath. He stood stunned for a moment, not quite able to bring himself to believe it was really over.
    And it wasn’t.
    His hands were ungloved, his face unmasked, and he stood naked in the morning sun. But his skin wasn’t completely exposed to the air. He was covered with thick, foul-smelling, brownish-green muck, and with horror he realized he was slathered in feces. And that wasn’t the whole of it. Wriggling white things that could only be maggots crawled in and out of the filth, and Ronnie could feel them writhe against his skin. He held his breath to keep from inhaling the stench, and he squeezed his eyes shut to keep the maggots from getting at his eyes. He tried not to think of the millions … no,
billions
of germs that were crawling all over him right now, furiously seeking a way to get inside his body where they could begin to multiply.
    The pain had been agonizing, but Ronnie could deal with pain. After all, it was just a sensation, and sensations could be ignored. But
this
… this was too much for him. He started shuddering and couldn’t stop. Tears streamed from the corners of his eyes, their moisture doing little wash the muck from his face. The camera, which he hadn’t realized he was still holding, slipped from his fingers and fell to the ground. Seconds later, Ronnie was down on his hands and knees. Another few seconds after that, he whispered a single word.
    It turned out Ronnie had been wrong about Marshall Cross. He’d known precisely what sort of man he’d been dealing with.

CHAPTER SIX
    Joanne found Debbie standing behind the counter, wiping her eyes with a handful of napkins. She tried not to think about everything Debbie might’ve touched on her way inside — the front door handle, the counter, who knew what else — and the evidence she might’ve destroyed by doing so. Instead, she walked over to the counter and sat on a stool directly in front of Debbie.
    “You okay?”
    Debbie dabbed at her eyes one more time before nodding.
    “Tell me what else happened last night,” she said.
“Please.”
    Joanne knew she shouldn’t, that she should first question Debbie about what had happened here at the café so that her memory wouldn’t be compromised. She would undoubtedly interpret what happened here at the café differently once she learned about the murder. Maybe only in some small, unimportant ways, but maybe in some major ones. It was a mistake, and Joanne knew it, but she decided to tell Debbie what she wanted to know. The woman had suffered so much over the years, and Joanne couldn’t bring herself to add to that suffering, even if only for a few moments.
    She thought Debbie might start crying again as she listened to the details of last night’s murder, but