Mike Sweeney sat in his cruiser, staring out the window at the dead cow. The rain was so dense it nearly obscured the animal, but Mike could just make out its shape there in the tall grass. The sight of it bothered him more than it should. It felt ominous in some undefined way. Mike scowled through the windshield at it.
No one could ever accuse him of being overly cheerful. Not at the best of times. The police chief, Malcolm Crow, made a lot of jokes about Mike being an Olympic-level brooder.
“Mike can brood the ass off a thing,” Crow would say.
That was true enough. Life wasn’t a happy bunch of puppies to Mike. Life had started with an abusive and violent stepfather and then slid downward from there. Considering everything that had happened to him over the years, and what was going on inside of him, brooding seemed reasonable. Even imperative.
Looking at the dead cow was not what depressed him. It wasn’t even the cold rainwater that had wormed its way into his boxers and puddled in his shoes.
The story the Duncans had told bothered him.
The tattoo.
Corinne Duncan was so unwaveringly certain that her husband had, for some reason, gotten the ink removed.
The husband, Andrew, was equally sure that he never had a tattoo. Mike was good at reading people, and when that man insisted that his wife never had cancer, and he had certainly never gotten a pink ribbon tattoo … there was no lie in his voice. Or his eyes.
The scar, if it was a scar, looked old. Years old.
“What the hell?” he asked the dead cow.
The cow, being both dead and a cow, said nothing.
His windshield wipers slashed back and forth and the rain fell.
“What the hell,” Mike murmured again.
And again.