Tonton by Billy Kring

Author:Billy Kring [Kring, Billy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Billy Kring
Published: 2015-12-12T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

John and Randall cruised to the far west side of the city near Highway 27 and drove through an open ranch gate into an overgrown field. They followed the trail to a large grove of trees where a small wisp of white smoke emanated from its center like a finger pointed at the sky.

A single police vehicle was there, and John parked beside it, then the two detectives walked the rest of the way on foot into the cluster of trees.

The shade was dense under the heavy tree canopy, but there was little undergrowth and that made progress to the fire easy enough.

Randall sniffed and said, “You get a whiff of that?”

John said, “Yeah. Smells like pork.” Thirty yards further, they reached a clearing the size of a large room. A police officer stood to one side, with two big-eyed boys about twelve or thirteen years old.

Randall said, “You seeing this?” He indicated the area in front of them. Tree trunks surrounding the clearing showed crude paintings done in red, black, and white. Dozens of human-shaped stick figures and effigies made of tied-together twigs hung from low limbs. A live rattlesnake, its head painted red, was nailed through its body to a stump. A smoldering campfire was centered in the clearing, which was blanketed several inches deep with dead leaves.

The policeman pointed at a large aluminum cooking pot, like those used to cook crayfish, which sat some six feet from the fire. Faint steam rose from it, and the policeman said, “You need to see that. I took it off the fire.” Randall and John crossed the leaf-covered ground and looked in the open pot.

A human head floated just below the foam-laced surface of oily water the color of weak tea. Most of the flesh was gone, lying dissolved like soft sediment in the bottom of the pot. The eyes bulged slightly from their sockets and were entirely white, resembling poached eggs. Some flesh still remained on the skull and clung to it like tiny shreds of raw fish on a fishbone.

A palm-sized portion of the scalp was attached, and long red hair wafted back and forth in the water on slow, invisible currents. John imagined crimson seaweed in a murky ocean.

John’s phone rang. Hunter. He said, “Hey.”

Hunter said, “Are you somewhere we can meet?”

“At a crime scene, but you can come out here if you want.”

“Andre and Ariel are with me.”

“Bring ‘em.” He gave Hunter the location and hung up, then looked in the pot one more time before joining the others at the perimeter.

Randall said, “I’ll call Handley.”

John looked around at the markings on the trees and the effigies hanging from limbs, “Call the Haitian priest, Young Anson, too. We’ll see what he thinks about this.”

They made the calls, then marked the area and photographed everything in situ for the record. When they finished, John and Randall joined the officer, a man named Johnson, and the young boys. One of them, the boy with dark hair said, “We’re not under arrest, are we? The policeman said we weren’t.

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