Denton - 01 - Dead Folks' Blues by Steven Womack

know, I think he was still breathing when I first saw him.”
    “Probably,” she said as we entered her office. “The stuff doesn’t kill you immediately.”
    She walked behind her desk, tossed the folder onto the ever-present pile. “Want to hear a good one?”
    “Sure,” I said. The smile on her face was a wicked, naughty one.
    “He’d just had sex,” she said, almost with a note of triumph in her voice. “Ten, maybe fifteen minutes before he died.”
    My jaw dropped. “How can you tell?”
    She raised her right index finger, her voice a bad imitation of Major Strasser telling Victor Laszlo he wasn’t going
anywhere
.
    “We haff ways of makink you talk.”
    “Marsh, that’s not funny.”
    “Hey,” she continued, “the guy went out in a blaze of glory. Besides, you know what they taught us in stiff school, don’t you?”
    “Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.”
    “Rigor mortis,” she said, grinning from ear to ear, “is just an all-over hard-on.”

I knew I should head out to Green Hills and see Rachel. She sounded desperate on the answering machine. But I wasn’t ready.
    Besides, I was starving. The heat seemed even more intense after leaving the icy cold morgue. Between the temperature and my empty insides, a full-tilt blood sugar crash was on its way.
    I crossed the river and snaked my way over to Main Street. The city changed complexion almost immediately. Downtown Nashville could be any urban city in America: skyscrapers, government buildings, plazas, bus transfer points. But cross the river, less than a mile, and you’re in the middle of instant funky. That’s my side of the river now, the working class, blue collar, slowly gentrifying side. No
cluster homes
, a great euphemism for ghettoes for the rich, no $80,000 condos, no upscale shopping malls. Just old homes, neighborhood bars and restaurants, and people who chug beer out of cans on their front porches. It was a daily and endless source of fascination to me.
    Quite a change from my married days out in yuppie, upscale Green Hills. Personally speaking, it’s no great loss. Besides, the smoking Ford would have been dreadfully out of place among the Mercedes-Benzes and the Jags.
    Around the bend in front of East High School, Main Street becomes Gallatin Road. A couple of miles farther out, there’s a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant with the best damn Szechuan chicken that’s ever cleared this boy’s sinuses. I pulled into the parking lot next to a twenty-year-old rustedout pickup truck with a pair of pit bulls chained in the back. They looked at me with either curiosity or hunger; I didn’t get close enough to check which.
    I’d pulled my jacket off by now, rolled up my sleeves, and decided to live with the drenching sweats soaking through my white shirt. My stomach rumbled at the aroma floating gently toward the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
    “Why doan you twy somepeen else?” Mrs. Lee barked as I smiled across the counter at her. I hadn’t even ordered yet, but she knew.
    “And pass up the best Szechuan chicken this side of Shanghai?” I said. “No way.”
    “You wooden know Shanghai if it came up behind you and bit you on da butt!” She scraped a hand across her sweaty forehead, then whipped the green ticket behind to her daughter, a midteens Asian beauty that I’d been lusting after ever since I moved to this part of town. Hmmmm, maybe it’s not the chicken I keep coming back for.…
    She must have signaled to her husband to fix my order Extra Fierce. Maybe she wanted to wean me from my predictability. But as soon as I bit into the chicken, my whole face started sweating like the textbook throes of passion. I could feel the epidermis at the roof of my mouth coming loose. Every breath drawn in through my nose came from a flamethrower. It was exquisite. I took a couple of the fatter pieces of chicken, dipped them in a glass of water to get most of the pepper off, then wrapped them in a napkin and stuck them in my pocket. I