Walkers Read Free Page B

belly bouncing, and a
glowing cigarette-lighter held up in his hand. He handed it to the medical
examiner, and the medical examiner immediately touched it against the eel’s raw
neck.
    There was a sharp sizzle, a sickly
odour of burning; then the eel’s jaws clamped convulsively tight and bit away
the whole of the policeman’s upper lip and nostril, dropping on to the ground
in a sudden spurt of blood. The policeman let out a tight, choked shriek, his
upper teeth hideously exposed, and Lieutenant Ortega had to wrestle him down
against the sand.
    ‘Plasma!’ the medical examiner
shouted. ‘And you!’ he ordered the injured policeman’s partner. ‘Take that head
and cut the damn thing in half, and get your buddy’s face out of its mouth!’
    It took the medics less than five
busy minutes to bandage the policeman’s face and set him up on to a plasma
drip, to reduce the effects of shock. While they worked, the policeman’s
partner manhandled a pair of bolt-cutters out of the trunk of his patrol-car,
and nudged the eel’s head around on the sand so that he could position it
between the blades. He tried twice to cut it in half, but both times the head
slipped out. Then Gil came forward and rested the head against the toe of his
shoe, so that it wouldn’t roll away. There was a sharp, crisp crunch, and the
eel’s skull was chopped apart. The medical examiner stooped down and extracted
the bloody rag of flesh that the creature had wrenched away from the
policeman’s face.
    ‘I want that bastard in a plastic bag,’
he told Detective Morris. ‘Head, tail, and anything else you can find.’
    Lieutenant Ortega looked at his
watch. ‘It’s almost seven. Let’s get this beach cordoned off. Warburg – call
for some back-up. I want a digging detail. If those eels killed that girl, I
want them dug out and destroyed. I want the coastguard alerted, too.
    They’ll probably want to put up a
temporary ban on swimming. Morris, you go along with the M. E. I want the
fastest post mortem in the history of the world.’
    ‘Is there anything that we can do?’
asked Henry.
    Lieutenant Ortega stared at Henry as
if he had never seen him before. ‘You? Oh, you can go home. Give your name and
address to Detective Morris here, he’ll come and talk to you later. And,
please, don’t leave the area, not until you’ve made your statement. And don’t
talk to the newspapers or the television. This is one of those situations that
causes panic, you understand me? I’d rather we kept the whole thing quiet, just
for now.’
    Henry said to Gil and Susan, ‘That’s
it. I guess we can leave.’
    Susan was very pale. ‘I think I’m
going to faint,’ she said.
    ‘Sit down for a moment,’ Henry told
her. ‘Put your head down between your knees.’
    While they waited for Susan to
recover, Henry looked across the beach at the body of the girl they had found.
From where he was crouching, next to Susan, he was unable to see the gaping
cavity of her stomach; the girl could have been lying serene and naked in the
mist, waiting for the sun to break through. She was really quite beautiful,
Henry thought to himself, and somehow that made her death seem even more
horrifying.
    ‘I’m all right now,’ said Susan. She
tried to get up, and Gil gave her his arm.
    Henry was watching the medics lift
the girl’s body off the beach, and zipper it up in a body-bag. Against the
mist, the figures looked like an Oriental shadow-play. ‘I never saw anything
like that before in my whole life,’ he said. ‘Those eels – did you ever see
anything like that? And I used to be married to an oceanographer.’
    They walked up the beach together.
When they reached the boardwalk, Henry suggested, ‘Come and have a drink.
That’s my cottage, right over there. I expect you could use something to settle
your nerves.’
    ‘I think I want to get home, thank
you,’ said Susan. She glanced back down at the beach and her eyes were staring
with repressed