The Memory Killer by J. A. Kerley Page B

and red as he tries to make his bulk invisible in the tight confines of the cluttered bar.
    “
What did I tell you, hon?
”
the silver-haired boy calls to Debro’s back. “
A scream, right?
”
    Debro can’t keep his head from turning to them: the faces alight with humor, the storyteller with his hands on the shoulders of a handsome green-eyed boy who’s smirking into Debro’s eyes.
    Until five minutes ago he’d had just the unpleasant, stinging pictures. But now he had names: Billy Prestwick and Patrick White. He looked up and saw White heading for the door of the bar and turned the ignition key. As he pulled away he looked in his rear-view, seeing White appear on the street.
    Two in one night. He wished they could all be so easy.

16
     
    The next day we flew to Houston and caught a twin-prop to Rio Grande City, Texas. I was met by the County Sheriff, Martin Dooley, a large and mustachioed man who topped his uniform with a brown Stetson.
    “I checked with the hospital across the border in Cuidad Camargo,” Dooley told us in his office, knotty-pine with a set of longhorns on the wall and a rattling window air conditioner. “They didn’t record a birth, bolstering the story of a home delivery. There is a death certificate for a boy, Donald Ocampo. It’s signed by a Dr Raoul Pariella. I barely recall old Pariella, musta been eighty when the birth occurred. Then there’s some paperwork indicating the body was delivered to the US.”
    “Would it have been seen?” I asked. “The child’s body?”
    “You got a box going by with papers saying there’s a dead baby inside. Someone would prob’ly open it today, the drugs and all. Back then I expect they just waved it past.”
    “What do you remember of Pariella?” Gershwin asked.
    Dooley frowned. “Mostly Mexicans in his practice and he was as likely to try and cure you with herbs as with medicine. An’ he had a sideline in chiropractic. But then, it wouldn’t been like he come outta UT with his medical degree. I doubt any American woulda gone to Pariella unless it was a pure emergency.”
    “Can we see the child’s gravesite?” I said.
    He stood and pulled his hat from the rack. “It’s a bit of a drive because it’s in a town that ain’t there no more.”
    The drive was twenty-five minutes in the hot Texas sun, the land baked dry by drought, more brown than green, the highway an asphalt strip linking clusters of homes and strip centers broken by wire-fenced pastures of dark and heavy-shouldered cattle.
    In the precise center of nothing, we skidded on to a road crumbling at the edges, winding toward a copse of trees. A cemetery lay in the distance, a hillside studded with markers, a couple hundred of them, most small and unassuming. Dooley looked at marking numbers at the edge of the lane.
    “Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty … Here we go.”
    We exited and looked down on a marker of cheap stone, the incised letters saying
Donald Ocampo.
Below that the dates framed a life spanning less than two hundred hours. Below that read,
Rest in Peace Tiny Angel.
    “How hard will it be to get an exhumation release?” I asked the Sheriff.
    “Easy, since no one’s gonna challenge it.”
    We were back by mid-afternoon as a small backhoe dug away a few feet of the cover. The operator finished the exhumation with the shovel. “Easier digging than I figured. Probably spring flooding from the creek kept it softer.”
    We looked down to see a small coffin. The worker cleared enough dirt to free the box and lifted it high. Gershwin and I set it on the ground, then gave the guy a hand up. He bent over the simple casket with a foot-long pry-bar.
    “Hold your noses,” the Sheriff advised.
    “Ain’t gonna be a stink, Sheriff,” the worker said, slipping the bar under the lid. “Just a little mummy in baby clothes.”
    He pushed the bar under the lid and popped it open. The sunlight shone down as we all leaned close to peer inside.
    No little mummy. No clothes.
    The