It was just another October evening. It was cool and breezy, and the leaves were falling off the trees into the street. It was really kind of nice. Or at least it would have been, if I weren’t investigating the disappearance of a six year old girl named Lacey. She had disappeared about two weeks ago, and her parents were understandably beside themselves. She had disappeared while walking from her bus stop (about a block and a half away from her home) to her house. Not very far. So we knew the perp had to be somewhere along that block and a half, and nobody had seen her go into a car with somebody.
So after all that time, and after investigating every house and business that was along that walk, I was wondering if anything would turn up. But I’m not your typical detective, and it wasn’t your typical case. A police detective might have given up long ago. But I had taken a special interest in the case, and I wasn’t a police detective bound by rules and procedures. After interviewing everybody that could have seen something and hearing nothing but denials, I knew that somebody was lying. So I did what a police investigator can’t do: I started breaking fingers.
Admittedly, it didn’t seem to have a whole lot of effect at first, but people get scared enough of you, they’ll tell you shit that they didn’t know they knew. And that’s how I ended up here, at the butcher shop. It wasn’t along the walk home from the bus stop, but it was only a hundred feet from the street that she would have been on. And the butcher, nice fellow that he was, lived right next to the shop. This was, after all, a small town.
I sauntered up to the front step of a old style shotgun house that looked to be about 50 years old at the time. The paint was peeling off the front, and there were bloodstains on the door. That would seem damning, at least if this weren’t a guy that was handling raw meat all day and probably came home covered in the blood of a hundred different animals. Ah well. I pressed a red button that was next to the front door. I wanted to talk to the guy and ask him some questions, if he were home at least. The butcher shop had closed about an hour earlier, but that was enough time to come home, rinse off, and go somewhere else, like perhaps a bar. As a low buzzing noise rang throughout the home, I heard a couple of dogs barking in the back. I do remember somebody saying that he had a pair of vicious Rottweilers.
That wasn’t a big deal. I had an old Chief’s Special in .38 that my dad gave me, and I was a decent enough shot. I’ve never had occasion to use it in a fight though, as I’ve never had a situation where I wasn’t able to overpower my opponent, despite facing a few that were nearly twice my size.
Anyhow, the dogs continued barking, but it became clear that nobody was home. There were no lights on, and the only sound was a television coming from one of the rooms, but I was able to see enough through the windows next to the door that nobody was watching it. After a moment of looking around to ensure the street was deserted, I picked the lock of the door and crept inside.
I wasn’t sure what I expected here. It was the standard shotgun house layout, as I had mentioned, with the living room in the front (with the television still on, tuned into the Chicago Cubs), a dining room, and a kitchen in the very back, with a staircase in the leaving room that led up to the bedrooms and bathrooms. The sofa wasn’t big by modern standards, but it was big enough. The television was jut an old box that appeared to have a 20 inch screen. It was in black and white, but color television had only been out about ten years, and this was back in the days when they actually built stuff to last a while.
I wandered into the dining room, and observed a small table with two seats at it, a small bookcase with the latest issue of Playboy and a few books on hunting and shooting, and an empty beer can that had probably been sitting there a day or two. There wasn’t a whole lot to see there, really, other than what you would expect at a bachelor pad.
The kitchen was slightly more remarkable. It had a pile of dishes in the sink that appeared to be a day old, and there was a knife on the counter that hadn’t been cleaned off yet, and had a little bit of meat still stuck to eat. There was a rather large refrigerator that had your typical bachelor pad fare outside of having a large assortment of various meats, which isn’t unexpected when the guy’s a butcher. I pulled aside the blinds for a moment to glimpse out the back window and saw two large dogs fighting over a bone. Fine.
Then I waited.
After about two hours passed, I heard the key turn in the lock. I waited right behind the kitchen corner as the butcher came through the house to (presumably) let his dogs in. He was about half again my size (not hard since I’m only about 5’8” and 150), standing at 6 feet tall or so and with a considerable belly. He had a wisp of a goatee and a mustache. That much I saw before I crept up behind him, put my gloved hand over his mouth, and slit his throat. The blood gushed out and left a puddle on the floor, and got onto my shoes. I just bought these things, damn it. The dogs were again engaged in fighting over another bone. The yard was littered with them. Soon there would be a few more.
I left the butcher’s body on the floor and grabbed a bone saw from upstairs. Just like the knife, it had some meat left on it. The butcher wasn’t the type that was good at cleaning up after himself, and it was his undoing.
I sawed off his arms and legs and tossed them into the backyard for the dogs, just like the butcher had done to Lacey two weeks prior. The dogs would now fight over the remains of the butcher rather than those of the little girl that they had fought over earlier.
Submitted May 24, 2017 at 04:25PM by ouroboro76 http://ift.tt/2rT43ke libraryofshadows
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