Lost Echoes

54

A couple days later, the chief of police came home late at night, pretty worn out from what he liked to call a function, a goddamn cop fund-raiser where you had to smile, make some shitty uncomfortable speech; came home feeling stuffed and uncomfortable from a rubber-chicken dinner, some poisonous side dishes, came in the door loosening his belt, flicked on the light, and there, positioned upright on his couch like a fucking freelance contortionist or failed escape artist, legs coiled tightly under and behind him, hands tied so that the wire was cut near to the wristbones, propped there, glistening in the light, eyes milky, throat a big dark rip like an ugly second mouth in need of dentures, the first mouth sticking its tongue out at him, was this guy soaking water into the cushions, dripping more of it on the floor, stinking like an overthawed chunk of rib roast dipped in sewage.

It was the kid he and Pale had hung from the Wilkes’s boy’s light fixture. There was a cardboard sign around his neck. Newspaper and magazine letters had been cut and glued to the cardboard. It read: WE KNOW.

“What the fuck?”

Joey offered no response.