The Skin Gods Read Free Page A

precariously on a discarded paint can. The can was inches from Jessica’s right foot.
     
     
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
     
     
Cold flames in his eyes. “I said ‘You first, bitch. ’ ”
     
     
Jessica kicked the can. At that moment, the look on Trey Tarver’s face said it all. His expression was not unlike that of Wile E. Coyote at the moment the hapless cartoon character realizes the cliff is no longer beneath him. Trey crumpled to the ground like wet origami, on the way down smacking his head on the edge of the Dumpster.
     
     
Jessica looked at his eyes. Or, more accurately, the whites of his eyes. Trey Tarver was out cold.
     
     
Oops.
     
     
Jessica rolled him over just as a pair of detectives from the Fugitive Squad finally arrived on the scene. No one had seen anything and, even if they had, Trey Tarver didn’t exactly have a big fan club in the department. One of the detectives tossed her a pair of handcuffs.
     
     
“Oh yeah,” Jessica said to her unconscious suspect. “We gonna do some bidness.” She clicked the cuffs shut on his wrists. “Bitch.”
     
     
    * * *
THERE IS A time for police officers, after a successful hunt, when they decelerate from the chase, when they assess the operation, congratulate each other, grade their performance, brake. It is a time when morale is at its peak. They went where the darkness was and emerged into the light.
     
     
They gathered at the Melrose Diner, a twenty-four-hour spoon on Snyder Avenue.
     
     
They had taken down two very bad people. There was no loss of life, and the only serious injury came to someone who deserved it. The good news was that the shooting, as far as they could tell, was clean.
     
     
Jessica had been a police officer for eight years. She was in uniform for the first four, followed by a stint on the Auto Unit, a division of the city’s Major Case Squad. In April of this year she had joined the Homicide Unit. In that short time she had seen her share of horrors. There was the young Latina woman murdered in a vacant lot in Northern Liberties, rolled into a rug, put on top of a car, and dumped in Fairmount Park. There was the case of the young man lured into the park by three of his classmates only to be robbed and beaten to death. And there was the Rosary Killer case.
     
     
Jessica wasn’t the first or only woman in the unit, but anytime someone new joins a small, tightly knit squad in the department there is the requisite distrust, the unspoken probationary period. Her father had been a legend in the department, but those were shoes to fill, not walk in.
     
     
After her incident debriefing, Jessica entered the diner. Immediately the four detectives who were already there— Tony Park, Eric Chavez, Nick Palladino, and a patched-up John Shepherd— got up from their stools, put their hands against the wall, and assumed the position in tribute.
     
     
Jessica had to laugh.
     
     
She was in.
     
     
     
    3
SHE IS HARD TO LOOK AT NOW. HER SKIN IS NO LONGER PERFECT, but rather torn silk. The blood pools around her head, nearly black in the dim light thrown from the trunk lid.
     
     
I look around the parking area. We are alone, just a few feet from the Schuylkill River. Water laps the dock— the eternal meter of the city.
     
     
I take the money and put it into the fold of the newspaper. I toss the newspaper onto the girl in the trunk of the car, then slam the lid.
     
     
Poor Marion.
     
     
She really was pretty. She had about her a certain freckled charm that reminded me of Tuesday Weld in High Time.
     
     
Before we left the motel, I cleaned the room, tore up the room receipt, and flushed it down the toilet. There had been no mop, no bucket. When you shoot on a shoestring, you make do.
     
     
She stares up at me now, her eyes no longer blue. She may have been pretty, she may have been someone’s idea of perfection, but for all she was, she was no Angel.
     
     
The house lights are down, the screen flickers