Deep Without Pity

Deep Without Pity
By Lewis Shiner
Distributed under Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
His eyes were open and his head bobbed around at an impossible angle. He was sitting in about forty feet of water, stone dead, one arm pinned between the rocks. As best I could tell, he had been dead when he landed there. The mud and ooze around him were as serene and smooth as he was.
The cop who was assisting me swam over and made a palms up gesture. I shrugged back at him and began to work the body loose. The corpse had only one leg, and as I worked I wondered what he had been doing in the lake. I got the arm free and kicked toward the quicksilver surface above me. The body turned bloated and heavy when I broke water with it, and it took three of us to load it into the police launch.
I dried off and got a coke out of the cooler. It was getting to be another Texas scorcher, and the sunlight bouncing off the surface of the lake felt like it had needles in it. My mouth was dry from breathing canned air and the carbonation burned like fire. Winslow, from the sheriff's office, sat down next to me. "I appreciate this, Dan," he said.
"No problem." Sam Winslow and I had grown up together about twenty miles outside Austin in a little town called Coupland. We'd fought a lot as kids, and there were still plenty of differences in our politics and educations. But being on the police and fire rescue squad had brought me closer to him again, and I was glad of it. A private detective needs all the friends he can get. "What do you make of it?" I asked him.
"Accidental drowning, looks like." I raised an eyebrow but didn't say anything. "He's got a bump on the head that could have come off a rock. We'll see what the coroner says."
"Any idea who he is?"
Winslow shook his head. He'd gained weight in his face recently and his jowls vibrated with the gesture. "No one-legged men on the missing persons list. Looks like it could be a war wound, maybe. Worth a try sending the prints to Washington."
Sailboats like scraps of paper blew across the lake. Winslow turned to the driver of the boat. "Let's get the meat to the freezer."
A burst of static and a chattering voice made me jump. Winslow went to answer the call, and I leaned over the rail and looked at the water. My reflection came back at me--stocky, tan, with a head of short sandy hair that had receded half way up my skull. I looked my age, and it was getting to where that was no bargain any more. A few gulls darted over me, complaining in harsh, strident voices. "You're a long way from the ocean," I said, looking up at them. "You better take what you can get."
Winslow came back, not bothering to hide his excitement. "You can forget nature boy over there," he said, nodding to the corpse. "We got real news on our hands. I hope you didn't have anything planned for the rest of the afternoon."
Winslow was my ride back to Austin, which meant I was along for the duration of whatever emergency had come up. "You know I don't. C'mon, spill it."
"They just found Jason King," Winslow said, and his eyes shifted to a big house above us, over the lake. "He's been murdered."
?
II
The current fad was for sex scandals, so Austin had found Jason King. His story was the usual thing--a not-too-competent secretary who claimed she was kept on for immoral reasons. King was a County Commissioner, which in Texas is a big legislative job, so the papers had been getting all the mileage they could out of it for the last week. Now it looked like it had caught up with King in a very big way.
Ed McCarthy had been waiting for us in the squad car while the boat was out. His baby blue uniform was drenched with sweat, and his dark glasses glinted at me evilly. "How was the swim, gumshoe?" he said.
"Not bad, flatfoot," I answered. Ed grinned and I grinned and we all got in the car.
Winslow leaned back and said, "That's the trouble with you guys. You watch too much TV."
The car took off with a huge billow of dust and we shot down the gravel roads with the siren cranking. Winslow had gone quiet, and I knew he was thinking about the case. Jason King was a hot item, and Winslow was just starting to realize how carefully he was going to have to watch his step. One mistake and he was a scapegoat, both for the sheriff and the people at the capitol.