Rigor Mortis
by Jeni Decker
WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE/ADULT THEMES)
~*~
1
The human body demurring to death is never pretty.
Rigor mortis had long ago set in and receded, great gouts of seeping fluid taking the place of the muscle fibers which had ratcheted shorter and shorter until fully contracted, eventually succumbing to the swell of decomposition.
"Oh, fuck me in the ass, she's oozing all over a real Persian rug. What a waste." The buxom bane of my existence hitched up her slacks and crouched next to the putrefying body.
I gnawed on my unlit cigar, still unaccustomed to the foul epithets that consistently slide from between the pretty lips of my secretary-cum-assistant-cum-stalker. Six months ago Carla Danning sauntered into my life, all tits, temperament and testicular torture, and she's been an invective-spewing shackle around my tackle ever since. Also, I have reason to believe that is not the name she was given at birth.
But let me introduce myself before we go any further.
My name is Declan Morneau - Dex for short. If I look in the mirror, what stares back is a long-haired heap of sinew and gristle with too few clients and too much drinking time on his hands. He's comfortable in his own skin, uncomfortable around anyone else's - tired, apathetic, and generally resigned to both due to his propensity toward circumspection.
As a consequence of the aforementioned lack of clients, I supplement my private detective work as a process server. Thanks to the generosity of our slave-owning forbearers, all citizens of these fine United States have the right to be duly informed of being summoned. Sounds good on paper, but you can't sprinkle powdered sugar on that steaming pile and expect it to go down any easier.
From as far back as I can remember, I've had this weird quirk where I see people and emotions in color. I have no idea why and frankly I don't care. Sometimes it helps me figure people out, sometimes it just confuses things.
Carla Danning is yellow. Which is interesting, since yellow is a universally accepted signal for caution. Sometimes she takes on an amber resonance, a bit of brown filters in just below the yellow, which to me indicates an underlying darkness. She's short of stature with an incongruously large presence and a tendency toward crassness at inopportune moments. It's hard to ignore the woman, even if you want to.
I squatted down next to Carla, my knees and ankles popping a painful symphony of regret.
"See these inconsistencies?" Carla fingered the knots at the base of the tassels running along the edge of the rug. "These are hand-knotted for sure. And the fringe isn't fixed with machine stitches."
That's the thing. Carla's smart, which was why I grudgingly agreed to hire her, despite the fact that I'd taken out two restraining orders on her in the past six months; restraining orders that had nothing to do with the questions I now have about her past.
The restraining orders had been much like spraying Raid at a scurrying cockroach; you know it isn't going to do much but at least you're making an effort to establish some boundaries. The background check - that's something else. A more direct assault, one I'm not so sure I can justify.
The heavy feet clomping through the front door are going to belong to Sergeant Lash, a squat sparkplug of a man, weeks from retirement. Lash is all meat with a bulldog square jaw, cleft chin and a bald head. He and I will go through the standard, "How'd you get in, Morneau?" followed by my typical response: "Door was open, Sarge. Had a lead on a client, landed me here."
