Free Blue Light by Walter Mosley

outward, and the flesh of her arms and legs had been torn open. The hands looked as if they had been lacerated by claws.
    Only the bottoms of her feet were left untouched.
    The head had been tossed in the corner. I was drawn to it. She was facing upward, but there was not much of a face. The maniac had destroyed her features and then discarded her.
    “It’s Phyllis,” Reggie said.
    His unexpected voice gave me such a fright that I jumped away and yelped.
    “What’s wrong with you, Reggie?”
    Ignoring my shock, he said, “I came looking for her. Nobody’d seen her in a while, and I just thought I’d look for her.”
    Reggie’s abilities, though still immature, were finding things and hiding. Ordé wanted to call him Scout, but Reggie liked his own name.
    “I came looking for her,” he said again.
    I couldn’t take my eyes off the remains of Phyllis Yamauchi. Her organs were spread out around the body on the dirty concrete floor. The dried blood had flowed out more or less evenly and made a kind of dark frame for the horrible sculpture.
    The body was a grisly enough sight, but it was the intent behind the murder that hit me so hard. The killer not only hated her, Phyllis, but also hated her flesh and bones and blood. He’d stripped away every vestige of humanity, leaving only a tattered lump of meat.
    I looked up at the ceiling, trying to blot the sight from my mind. All along the unpainted beams hung a chorus of pale spiders. Silent, spinning, waiting. They were unconcerned with the tableau on the floor. These spiders I used as beacons of sanity. Death was less to them than a spring breeze, certainly nothing compared to a frothy, juicy moth.
    “What should we do?” Reggie asked me.
    I had forgotten he was there.
    “Can you tell what happened by tasting her blood, like Ordé?”
    Reggie looked at me with big, frightened eyes.
    “Well, can you?”
    “Once Wanita cut her finger and I kissed it,” Reggie said.
    “Yeah?”
    “And I saw a big ship leaving the harbor. She saw that ship the day before with my mother, but I wasn’t there.”
    “So you can read blood,” I concluded.
    Reggie looked at the body and shook his head no. I understood. He might have been a god, but he was still only a boy.
    I searched the basement until I found a washer and dryer in a small room. I took a sheet from a basket in there and tore it into two cloths — one larger and one smaller. Then I went back to Phyllis’s body. Deep inside her chest cavity was still moist. I soaked up some of the blood in the smaller rag and then wrapped it in the larger one.
    A couple of blocks away Reggie asked, “Should we call the cops?”
    “Uh-uh, no, I don’t think so, kid. The police would just start looking for some maniac. They’d never believe what Phyllis was. They’d probably blame us. What we should do is go to Ordé and ask him what he thinks happened.”
    We walked on a ways. The sun was coming up, and even though I had the blood of a murdered woman in my pocket, I was struck by the dawn’s beauty. The wisps of black clouds made a grid over the orange light. There was an ancient hue to the light, something that had once known greatness. I could feel my heart and mind open up to the scrutiny of light. I felt the connection between the blood in my veins and the furnace above. I looked down after a while, seeing the afterimage of Sol in the sidewalk and passing lawns. I had walked off the sidewalk and into the street. My visions distracted me so much that I almost walked into the path of an oncoming car.
    “Why’d you come to me, Reggie?” I asked the boy, partly to get the answer and partly because I wanted to concentrate on the world around me.
    “Huh?”
    “Why’d you come to me? You could have gone to Eileen or even Ordé.”
    “Eileen would have been too scared, and I don’t know where Ordé lives. Anyway, I don’t like Ordé too much. He so weird, always tryin’ to make everything sound so big when it’s all just