Enter Softly by Jones Tyler

Author:Jones, Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dark Room Press
Published: 2021-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

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Shaw stayed on the street long after Robby and the other officers had left. He stood with his back against the brick building and stared at the place in the road where Terry had died. A small crew had come and cleaned up the blood, and there was now a darker patch of asphalt where the body had been. Cleaner. No one driving down this block would ever know a man had been decapitated there.

​He waited until the sky brightened a little and walked to the other side of the street. To the place where Sean said he had seen the person in the long coat. Shaw didn’t know what he was looking for, but he usually didn’t. The things that were out of place had a way of jumping out at him. He once told Anne that certain details seemed to detach from the backdrop and hover before him. Robby called it his “radar,” but Shaw always thought of it as instinct. A subconscious awareness of the order of things and recognition of when they had been disrupted.

​Even in a place as chaotic as the street, there was a secret order to everything.

​Shaw stood against the building where the person in the coat would have been, and he tried to imagine Terry standing in the street, yelling. With that one streetlamp out, the perp would have felt hidden, emboldened maybe.

​The motive for the killing would come later, but it was the decapitation that Shaw couldn’t stop thinking about. Along with the fact that the head itself was missing.

​A trophy. A goddamn trophy is what it was. And Shaw didn’t like the echoes of serial killers who kept pieces of their victims stored in fridges, freezers, and bathtubs full of acid. Shrines and altars.

​To take a head, though. That was probably the biggest, and therefore hardest removable piece of the human body to hide. You can put a finger in your pocket. A tongue can be hidden inside a fist. But something as big as a head draws attention.

​As he thought about it, Shaw put both hands to his own head to judge the size, the weight. He imagined it separated from his neck, leaking blood and fluid, all personality and sense of who he was absolutely drained from the face.

Where does someone go with that kind of trophy? What do they do with it?

He’d seen the murdered and dismembered body of a man, and what bothered him the most was the part he didn’t see.

​Shaw stood staring at the street until he got dizzy. He reached into his coat for another cigarette, made a mental reminder to buy a pack on the way home, and held a hand to his stomach as it growled. He needed to eat something, get some coffee. His eyes burned even more, but he didn’t think he’d be sleeping much when he got home. Calls like this wound his brain up and sent it spinning for days.

​With the cigarette clenched between his teeth, Shaw put his hands in his pockets and walked east until he came to the crosswalk.

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