Hawk Moon by Ed Gorman

suppose."
    "All right if we go inside?" said one of the two uniformed men on the trailer's front steps.
    "That's what we got the search warrant for, wasn't it?" Gibbs said.
    "Well, uh, yeah, I guess so."
    "Then go the hell in."
    They went the hell in.
    Lights came on in the dirty windows.
    The small trailer rocked and tilted under the assault of their weight.
    Gibbs glared at me. "Who is this guy?"
    "A friend of mine."
    He glared at me a little more. "Oh yeah, that federal guy. Personally, they always gave me a pain in the ass."
    I laughed. "Gee, and I imagine they were just thrilled about working with you, too."
    He smiled. "I was about the crankiest bastard they ever saw. Worked a couple of kidnappings with those stuck-up sonsofbitches and gave them hell every chance I got."
    He put his hand out. "But that don't mean that every one of you is a stupid sonofabitch."
    I shook his hand. "Right. Take me — I'm probably not a stupid sonofabitch now, am I?"
    With a perfectly straight face, he said, "Too early to tell." He turned back to Cindy. "Your David did it this time."
    "Maybe I don't want to know."
    Fond as he obviously was of her, he wanted her to hear. "You remember all these years what I told you?"
    "Please don't give me a speech, Gibby. Not now. Later on, all right. But not now."
    We were silhouettes in the squad-car headlights that lit the leprous wounds of the trailer wall. The stars were faint now. A coyote cried out long and lonely from the limestone cliffs.
    "I got a call."
    "From who?"
    "Don't know."
    "They didn't leave a name?"
    "Right. No name," Gibbs said.
    "And they said what?"
    "They said I should look inside his car trunk."
    "For what?"
    The other two cops came back out. "He's gone, Chief," one of them said. He had a blond crew cut and needed to lose thirty pounds. Everything about him was small town in a comfortable way.
    "I would've told you that," she said.
    "That's bullshit, Cindy, and you know it," said the cop who'd done the talking. "I tried to arrest him for public drunkenness that time, and you was all over me."
    "You were hurting him."
    "You seem to forget he kicked me in the nuts."
    "That's enough!" Gibbs said. "All we're concerned about right now is tonight. Not the past."
    But I was glad I'd heard the exchange between Cindy and the other cop. It made me understand better why the radio dispatcher had spoken about her with so much contempt. Cops run interference for family members all the time, but there are limits and I sensed that Cindy had pushed those limits pretty far.
    "Let's go take a look at the trunk."
    I didn't have any doubt what we'd find.
    All the time they were trying various keys and pries to get the trunk-lid up, I knew exactly what we'd find. Pictured it perfectly.
    "Gimme those," Gibbs said after a time.
    He went through three more keys. The third one turned a quarter-inch or so to the right but it still didn't open the trunk.
    "I wish you weren't here," Gibbs said to Cindy. "You'd really hear me swear."
    "Be my guest."
    Gibbs went back to working on the trunk. The two uniformed cops exchanged winks. The Chief wasn't any better at this than they were.
    Gibbs said, "If this next one don't work, I'm gonna open the damn thing with a screwdriver."
    Lights were coming on in windows around us. Police in the middle of the night guaranteed excitement. Infants cried; dogs barked; a frontier train rattled through the dark.
    The lock clicked free.
    "Gimme that flashlight," he said, holding his hand out so one of his men could fill it with a long silver light.
    The trunk popped open.
    We all gathered round.
    Gibby played the light inside.
    Her arm had been taken off pretty cleanly. That was the first thing I noticed.
    The second thing I noticed was that the blue of the naked body matched the blue of the arm I'd seen earlier. Two, three days dead she was, at least long enough for postmortem lividity to set in, the body filling with gas and distending the areas of chest, stomach and thighs. The