Smokescreen

Scrawny, blue-lipped, the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth a dark exploded purple, he looked like something an archeologist might find in the burial room of a pyramid, surrounded by his stuffed wives and pets, bedizened with his favorite jewels. Ray took a golden engraved cigarette case out of his coat pocket, his thumb depressing the latch, and opened it with a flick of his wrist. He maneuvered the butt of a smoke between his lips, breathing a sigh of relief through the unlit filter; he had a bad habit, but nobody could tell him it didn’t help him deal with finding dead bodies in the woods. Calmed by the friend he’d come to rely on, he slipped the cigarette case back in its place, taking a moment to read the three engravings on the front: Edward Jensen, 20 Years of Service, The Best Detective in Maryland.

A wrinkled hand shot in from of him, a lighter clenched in its fist. Ray’s partner, an angry and tough old bastard named Bobby, had worked with Ray’s father; he had been assigned to show Ray the ropes before his own retirement in the coming winter. After working for 20 years with Ray’s father Bobby was well aware that Edward and his son shared a passion for cigarettes; lighting smokes had become as much of a hobby for him as smoking was for them. Ray nodded to his partner and stuck his neck forward, placing the tip of his smoke in the flame, taking a deep breath, relaxed further by the smoke dancing down his throat and frolicking in his lungs. A forensic photographer on the other side of the corpse coughed loudly, a cough expelled not out of necessity but to send a message, his eyes fixed on Ray’s. Blowing smoke in the photographer’s direction, Ray reached up to scratch his brow, using his middle finger exclusively.

A discovery made by a kid and his friends or a group of campers every couple of days, finding a body in the woods was par for the course in the past week. Ray desperately wanted to be outside of his crime-scene stockade, an evil area defined by the mocking yellow tape the local police had used to seal off the area. It wasn’t the idea of death that bothered Ray, it was the idea of fresh death, arriving at a murder just as the flies descended on the corpse, a ritual of death that disgusted Ray beyond measure. Fueled by thoughts of the finer aspects of decomposition, Ray ducked under the tape and left the flies to their work. The body wasn’t going anywhere; the bodies never went anywhere.