Free Shades: Eight Tales of Terror by D Nathan Hilliard Page B

shells and stared at them for a moment before looking back at the body with a frown on his lean face.
    “Something wrong, Les?”
    “Not wrong,” the deputy grumbled, and examined the body again, “so much as odd.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, this shotgun has been fired once. One shell spent and the other still ready to use. Now if you look, you can see Luther took a bullet through the arm here and got grazed on the side here.”
    “Uh huh. So?”
    “So…” Les stared at the floor in thought. “It looks like the trooper got two shots off at Luther here. Luther got one shot off himself. Then he comes back here sometime yesterday afternoon or evening and takes a short hop with a shorter rope. But look at this…”
    Les handed the spent shell over to the Sheriff.
    “…this is bird shot. Now I sure wouldn’t want to get hit by it, but it ain’t exactly lethal unless it’s pretty close range. Close enough a trained state trooper should have shot a lot straighter than he did before Luthor pulled the trigger.”
    “You’re assuming the trooper shot first.”
    “Maybe so.” The deputy looked back at the hanging corpse with a frown, “But if he didn’t, then Luther didn’t make a killing shot and retreated under fire. If that happened, it means the trooper may still be alive here on the island somewhere.”
    “You think it’s likely? If he was alive, he should have either left the island, or at least yelled at us when we circled it.”
    “I doubt he’s alive,” Les mused, “but we better hurry and check.”
    “Yeah,” Carl sighed, “I figured we would find his body here, or not at all…what with Luther ha ving all night to dispose of it. But since things didn’t turn out that way, we better get a move on. It’s going to be getting dark soon, and we can come back and finish up here by lantern light.”
     
    ***
     
    Forty minutes later, the search concluded.
    “Well, shit. ” Carl tilted back his hat and stared at the body impaled on the tree. “I guess that settles that. Y’know Pete, if you keep that up you’re gonna strain something.”
    The sheriff held the beam of his flashlight on the corpse while he glanced over at the younger deputy. Pete straightened from his sec ond bout of vomiting in one day and looked apologetically back at his boss. Carl couldn’t exactly blame the kid, the scene was pretty horrific, but he felt it was always best to show coolness under pressure for the new recruits. Still, he felt thankful to have the cigarettes to settle his own stomach.
    Killing the trooper must have caused Luther to work up an appetite.
    The half nude body hung impaled on a jagged, broken off branch protruding about three feet from the trunk of the tree. Carl tried to imagine how the madman had done this, especially since the branch sat about seven feet up the trunk. And the effort required to drive even a sharp object like the thick branch through the man’s back so it came out his chest must have been impressive. At least it meant the poor man had already been dead when Luther started tearing bites out of his legs… there were large chunks missing from the thighs, and he had stripped them to the bone from the knees down. But that bothered Carl in its own way as well.
    It took a savage to consume another human being…but eating him raw?
    The sheriff started to think Luther Cole must have been more animal than man by the time he died.
    He turned his attention back to the tree, where his other deputy now glared up at the corpse with folded arms. His cigarette clenched in his teeth, Les Patterson glowered at the body as if personally offended by it.
    “Hey, Les?” the sheriff queried. “Was he a friend of yours?”
    “Huh?” T he deputy jerked himself out of his scowling reverie and looked at the sheriff. “Oh…no…that’s not the problem.”
    “So what is?”
    Les looked back up at the body for a second, then down at the trooper’s pistol he retrieved from the ground nearby.