17 A Wanted Man

‘There is.’
    ‘Did you step in it?’
    ‘We had to. We had to make sure the guy was dead.’
    ‘What did you touch?’
    ‘Just his wrist and his neck, looking for a pulse.’
    Sorenson squatted down and opened up her pear-shaped shoulder bag. She took out plastic booties, to cover her shoes, and latex gloves, to cover her hands, and a camera. She put one foot in the sticky puddle and opened the bunker’s door. One hinge squealed, and one hinge moaned. The two sounds together made a kind of banshee wail. She put the other foot in the puddle.
    ‘There’s a light inside,’ Goodman said.
    She found the switch. It operated a caged bulb on the ceiling. Old cage, old bulb. Maybe two hundred watts. Clear glass. It gave a bright, harsh, shadowless light. She saw the stumps of two fat old pipes coming up through the floor, maybe ten feet apart. Both pipes were about a foot wide, and both of them had once been painted smooth institutional green, but they were now chipped and scaly with rust. Both of them were open at the top, and both of them terminated with wide flanges, where bolted joints had once been made. A municipal system, long disassembled. Sorenson guessed for many years ground water had come up through one pipe and had been boosted onward through the other, horizontal and underground, to a water tower somewhere close by. But then one day the pumps had started sucking on dry rock honeycombs, and it had been time for a new hole. Irrigation, population, and indoor plumbing. Sorenson had read her briefing papers. Two and a half trillion gallons of ground water a year, more than anywhere except Texas and California.
    She moved on.
    Apart from the water pipes there was old grit on the floor, and a heavy-duty electrical panel on one wall, several generations old, and a faded diagram on another wall, showing the nature and purpose of the hydraulic equipment that had once connected one green stump to the other. And that was it, in terms of permanent infrastructure.
    The non-permanent infrastructure was the dead guy, and his blood. He was on his back, with his elbows and knees bent like a cartoon sketch of a man dancing an old-fashioned number. His face was covered in blood, and his midsection was covered in blood, and he was lying in a lake of blood. He was maybe forty years old, although it was hard to judge. He was wearing a green winter coat, cotton canvas padded and insulated with something, not old, but not new either. The coat was not zipped or buttoned. It was open, over a grey sweater and a cream checked shirt. Both sweater and shirt looked worn and dirty. Both sweater and shirt had been tugged out of the guy’s waistband, and then they had been pulled up past his ribcage.
    He had two knife wounds. The first was a lateral slash across his forehead an inch above his eyes. The second was a ragged stab wound in the right side of his midsection, about level with his navel. Most of the blood had come from the second wound. It had welled out. The guy’s navel looked like a thimble full of drying paint.
    Sorenson said, ‘How do you see it, sheriff?’
    From outside the door Goodman said, ‘They nicked him in the forehead to blind him. A sheet of blood came down in his eyes. That’s an old knife-fighting trick. Which is why I thought of them as professionals. And from that point on it was easy. They pulled up his shirt and stuck the knife up under his ribs. And jerked it around. But not quite enough. It took him a few minutes to die.’
    Sorenson nodded to herself. Hence all the blood. The guy’s heart had kept on pumping, valiantly but fruitlessly.
    She asked, ‘Do you know who he is?’
    ‘Never saw him before.’
    ‘Why did they pull up his shirt?’
    ‘Because they’re professionals. They didn’t want the blade to snag.’
    ‘I agree,’ Sorenson said. ‘It must have been a long knife, don’t you think? To get up into his thorax from there?’
    ‘Eight or nine inches, maybe.’
    ‘Did the eyewitness see a knife?’
    ‘He didn’t say so. But you can ask him yourself. He’s waiting in the deputy’s car. Keeping warm.’
    Sorenson asked, ‘Why didn’t they use a gun? A silenced .22 would be more typical, if this is a professional hit.’
    ‘Still loud, in an enclosed space.’
    ‘Pretty far from anywhere.’
    ‘Then I don’t know why they didn’t,’ Goodman said.
    Sorenson used her camera and took photographs, zooming out wide for context, zooming in tight for details. She asked,