The Skin Gods Read Free Page B

to life. In the next few weeks the city of Philadelphia will hear a great deal about me. It will be said that I am a psychopath, a madman, an evil force from the soul of hell. As the bodies fall and the rivers run red, I will receive some horrendous reviews.
     
     
Don’t believe a word of it.
     
     
I wouldn’t hurt a fly.
     
     
     
    4
Six days later
     
     
SHE LOOKED COMPLETELY NORMAL. SOME MIGHT EVEN SAY friendly, in a doting, spinster-aunt sort of way. She stood five three and could not have weighed more than ninety-five pounds in her black spandex one-piece and pristine white Reeboks. She had short, brick-red hair and clear blue eyes. Her fingers were long and slender, her nails groomed and unpainted. She wore no jewelry.
     
     
To the outside world, she was a pleasant looking, physically fit woman nearing middle age.
     
     
For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne, she was a combination Lizzie Borden, Lucrezia Borgia, and Ma Barker, all wrapped up in a package resembling Mary Lou Retton.
     
     
“You can do better than that,” she said.
     
     
“What do you mean?” Byrne managed.
     
     
“The name you called me in your mind. You can do better than that.”
     
     
She is a witch, he thought. “What makes you think I called you a name?”
     
     
She laughed her shrill, Cruella De Vil laugh. Dogs three counties away cringed. “I’ve been at this almost twenty years, Detective,” she said. “I’ve been called every name in the book. I’ve been called names that aren’t even scheduled in the next book. I’ve been spat upon, swung upon, cursed in a dozen languages, including Apache. I’ve had voodoo dolls made in my likeness, novenas offered up for my painful demise. I assure you, there is no torture you could possibly conjure that has not been wished upon me.”
     
     
Byrne just stared. He had no idea he was that transparent. Some detective.
     
     
Kevin Byrne was two weeks into a twelve-week physical therapy program at HUP, the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been shot at close range in the basement of a house in Northeast Philadelphia on Easter Sunday. Although he was expected to make a full recovery, he had learned early on that phrases like full recovery usually involved a lot of wishful thinking.
     
     
The bullet, the one with his name on it, had lodged in his occipital lobe, approximately one centimeter from his brain stem. And even though there was no nerve involvement, and the damage was all vascular, he had endured nearly twelve hours of cranial surgery, six weeks of induced coma, and nearly two months in the hospital.
     
     
The offending slug was now encased in a small Lucite cube and sitting on his nightstand, a macabre trophy courtesy of the Homicide Unit.
     
     
The most serious damage came not from injury to his brain, but rather from the way his body had twisted on the way to the floor, an unnatural wrenching of the lower back. This move had caused damage to his sciatic nerve, the long nerve that runs from each side of the lower spine, through deep in the buttock and back of the thigh, and all the way down to the foot, connecting the spinal cord with the leg and foot muscles.
     
     
And while his laundry list of ailments was painful enough, the bullet he took to his head was a mere inconvenience compared with the pain generated by the sciatic nerve. Sometimes it felt like someone was running a carving knife up his right leg and across his lower back, stopping along the way to twist at various vertebrae.
     
     
He was free to return to duty as soon as the city doctors cleared him, and as soon as he felt ready. Until then, he was officially IOD: injured on duty. Full pay, no work, and a bottle of Early Times every week from the unit.
     
     
While his acute sciatica was about as much agony as he had ever endured, pain, as a way of life, was an old friend. He had tolerated fifteen years of savage migraine headaches, ever since the first time he had been shot and