The Reckoning by Carsten Stroud

is gone.
    That’s it.
    Like a video clip, a few seconds and then gone, and Danziger is back in the here and now, with Frank Barbetta kneeling by the corpse of the man he had just killed.
    “Ollie, you dumb, stupid fuck,” Barbetta said, picking Ollie’s knife up and slipping it into his jacket pocket. He was patting the headless corpse on the shoulder. “How many times have I told you, stay off my mile.”
    Danziger, shaking himself clear, looked around him and realized that the Mile was now empty and dark from one end to the other. The fog and mist hung in the air like shotgun smoke.
    He looked back at Barbetta, who was kneeling by Oliver’s body, smiling down upon him like a new daddy at his firstborn. Gordon, a few feet away, was snuffling and jerking, coming around.
    Barbetta stood up, his gun belt creaking. “Come on, Charlie. Help me get this sack of shit into the car.”
    “
Which
sack of shit?”
    Barbetta laughed. “Yeah, I forgot. You state guys require specific instructions for everything, probably need a laminated card with cartoon drawings on it shows you how to pee. The live one goes in the back of the cruiser,” said Barbetta, his grin a bit wild. “Got a body bag for Ollie here. We’ll get him in the trunk, drive on over to the bridge and dump him into the Tulip. The rain will take care of all the blood and the rats will get the nibbly bits.”
    “It’s not raining,” Danziger said.
    Barbetta looked up, then gave Danziger a Coker-like grin. “It will, Charlie. It will.”

And What If the
Second
Swallow That Came Back to Capistrano Was Really a Crow?
    It was after three in the morning when Nick and Mavis walked away from the Morrison house. The rain, which had been on and off most of the evening, was coming back on, veils of it shimmering down through the live oaks and palms and pattering on the asphalt drive.
    All the cruisers were gone, Riley’s CSI van, and Tig’s green Benz too. The network satellite trucks and the print people from Cap City had come, pestered, pried, pontificated, and eventually pissed off after hitting a wall of No Comment at This Time from Mavis Crossfire.
    There were street cops and detectives who liked to maintain civil relations with the local media. Nick was not one of those cops. His term for war reporters was “combat proctologists.” His term for civilian media people wasn’t actually a word.
    There was a coroner’s wagon parked up the block, sitting in a pool of light under a streetlamp, engine idling, smoke rising from the driver’s window, a tiny red spark as the guy drew on his cigarette. The driver got out of his van as Nick and Mavis came down to the curb, his partner, a young woman in a black suit, following behind. Neither Nick nor Mavis knew the girl, but the driver was a Vietnam vet named Myron Silver.
    Silver was old, easily into his seventies, and spoke in a slow hillbilly drawl, which was an accomplishment since he was born and raised in Baltimore. He flicked his cigarette into the night as he reached them. “We can bag ’em?” he said, speaking to Mavis.
    “You can. We’re through here.”
    “Four, right?”
    “Yes. Four.”
    Silver looked at his assistant, back to the two cops. “Heavy?”
    Mavis thought it over, looking at the girl. “The bodies?”
    Silver tilted his head, waited.
    “Not really. The dad ran one sixty. Woman maybe one thirty. The kid was small, and the girl…the girl…a lot of her is just not there. What is there is not all in one piece. You’re going to have to use your judgment as to which piece is which. I think you and your assistant can handle it.”
    Silver nodded, made to turn away, and turned back to them. “One bag for the dismembered vic?”
    Nick shook his head. “No. You’ll need three. Tag each one.”
    “Tag them? Tag them how?”
    “With tags,” said Mavis.
    “No, I mean, if we can’t ID the pieces?”
    “Improvise, Myron,” said Nick. “Use your initiative.”
    Silver said he would,