Disciple of the Dog by R. Scott Bakker

Author:R. Scott Bakker
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Thrillers, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9780765321909
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2010-10-15T03:30:42.526000+00:00

Track Eight

SHRINKAGE

Friday...

Breakfast was tasty and numb. Circumstances have caught me being glib or flip too many times for this latest twist to rattle me all that much. A go-figure attitude was about as chastised as I could get.

Besides, like I told you, I already knew that Jennifer Bonjour was dead.

But Molly seemed about a pubic hair away from devastation. That’s the thing about youth: your hopes fly high when you lack the ballast of experience. Life has a way of stuffing our pockets with sand. Of course she had her catechism of low expectations like the rest of us, that sense of superstitious doom that prevents people from celebrating the purchase of lottery tickets. But at some profound level she had thought that everything ruly-truly would unfold according to fantastic plan. That Jennifer Bonjour would be found bruised and dehydrated, that some unassuming villain would be apprehended, and that her hair-raising story would vault Molly Modano into the heights of print celebrity. Yet one more Barbie-doll Ordeal welded into the public imagination.

Now here she was: ambition meets the mortician.

“How could the doctor tell?” she asked.

“Tell what?”

“That her fingers had been cut from her after she was dead.”

“Not sure. Something to do with the way the tissue sheers? I know that blood settles in the body when the heart stops ... Maybe the cut was blood free.”

She frowned at her bacon. “We don’t know it was her, though ... Not for sure.”

“Molls ...”

She continued eating in silence. I thought about all the things I could say, all the pearls of cynical wisdom I could shuck from my brain. But I could tell she was hurting for real, and not simply because of this latest macabre turn. Last night she had sought comfort in my arms, and my fear was that she had caught a whiff of the reaper. They always do, sooner or later. If it wasn’t my wrists, it was my look. I was a man with one too many scars.

So, I waited until she finished her eggs, then tossed the folder I had brought. It whisked to a stop before her.

“What’s this?”

“I want you to read to me.” Truth is, I would have asked her to read it to me no matter what, but since she so obviously required some kind of distraction, I told myself this was the reason all along.

“Huh?”

“A copy of Anson Williams’s statement to Nolen.”

The Framer Compound looked like a Star Trek convention. About two dozen people milled about and beneath the giant willows out front, all of them dressed in variations of the same uniforms I had seen on my first visit. The women outnumbered the men by about two to one, which made me wonder whether Jennifer might have found herself on the wrong point of a love triangle. The ages were almost uniformly young, but the ethnic and racial diversity would have put an after-school special to shame.

I must have arrived between classes.

I cranked my stereo to garner attention—some vintage Iron Maiden. Most everyone paused mid-polite-conversation to glance at me as I rattled by.

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