Free Body of Truth by David L Lindsey Page A

had entered and looked above the door. It was number 4.
    Before knocking, he surveyed the courtyard once again. Mixed with the odor of musty stone was that of grilled onions and peppers and com tortillas. Beside each door that opened onto the courtyard was a single window, and though numbers 1 and 4 were dark, 3 and 2, partially hidden by the vegetation, were lighted. Haydon eased along the wall a little way near number 3, and though the window was open to the night heat, he heard no sounds coming from the inside. Across the way, however, the radio voice, now identifiable as that of an evangelical minister, was coming from the other open and lighted window, and Haydon could hear, too, the clinking of dishes and someone coughing.
    He went back around to Fossler’s door, but the silence of the small courtyard made him hesitate to knock. If Fossler wasn’t in, he didn’t want to draw attention to his own presence. Fossler’s room was dark, and Haydon doubted he was there. He reached down and tried the doorknob. It turned, and there was a soft click, a sound that made Haydon sweat. If Fossler had left, he would have locked the door. Haydon remembered Fossler saying that Lena and Baine knew where he was staying, and he remembered, too, that Fossler said he had moved several times. It seemed incredible to Haydon at this moment that he hadn’t asked Fossler why he had done that.
    He was holding the door knob, keeping the tension against the spring to keep it from clicking again as it moved back in place. He desperately missed his Beretta. Slowly rotating his wrist, he eased back the tension on the knob until the handle was in place. He stepped back against the wall and carefully, with outstretched arm pushed the door open into the room, while behind him, through the plantains, a chorus of tinny evangelical voices sang “Know, My Soul, Thy Full Salvation.”
    “Fossler,” he said, not loud, but loud enough. “Fossler.”
    As the door drifted open, Haydon saw in the glow of a powder-blue light that came from another window that fronted the street that the room was exactly that, one room. He stepped across the doorway and looked into the room from the opposite angle. The door was open all the way, flat against the inside wall so that no one could have been hiding behind it. Haydon stepped into the doorway and surveyed the room as best he could in the half-light, the foot of the single bed facing him and above it the window, to the right a partition that was supposed to hide a toilet and shower, and then to the right of that a table and two chairs and a closet without a door. Something was hanging in the closet. Haydon picked up his bag and stepped inside and closed the door. He put one knee on the unmade bed and reached up over the headboard and pulled closed the simple curtain. The window that looked out onto the courtyard was closed. The room was hot and smelled of mildew. Haydon moved cautiously to the table, sliding his feet on the floor to avoid tripping, and flipped on the light.
    The bulb must have been forty watts or less, but the jaundiced glow was bright enough to freeze Haydon to the spot. The room had been trashed. The bed covers were shoved up to the head of the bed in a dingy wad, one chair was turned over and the table askew. The shower curtain was ripped from most of its hooks, and for some reason the toilet tissue had been pulled from its roll and was strewn about the room in coiled, wormy strands that ended up in a pile at Haydon’s feet. Even in the bad light he could clearly distinguish the deep rubiginous stains soaked into the soiled gob of paper. Instinctively his eyes went straight to the sink, the filthy, chipped enamel draped with slobbers of bloodied water, and above it, the mirror tracked with blood spatters that climbed right up the wall. He wheeled around to the closet where a shirt was half torn from a hanger, and on the window curtains beside the closet was a bloody smear, an imprint of grasping