“I thought doctors were used to gross things.”
“I’ve drained a few abscesses and have been puked on more times than I can count, but thankfully I don’t deal with rotting bodies.”
“I guess that’s a good thing as a pediatrician.” I prop the front door open, letting light fill the room. The carpet was beige at one point, but is now muddy and brown. An old couch is against the opposite wall, with dirty pillows and blankets strewn about. There’s an impressive collection of empty Pepsi and beer cans, as well as a few cans of tomato soup. The place is covered in animal feces and water seeps down the exterior wall. Papers and more garbage cover the coffee table, and an old twin-sized mattress half covered with a wet-looking sleeping bag blocks the hall leading into the kitchen.
We both step over it and move deeper into the house. The smell gets worse.
“Breathe through your mouth,” I tell Delphi, getting a flashlight from my bag. “I don’t want to taste it! How can anyone live this way?”
“I have no idea.” I shine the light around the kitchen. There’s a cluster of candles on the table, all melted down to almost nothing. The cabinets are missing the doors, and are full of mouse-eaten boxes of cereal. There are several takeout containers and McDonalds wrappers in the sink that can’t be more than a week or two old.
There’s a bathroom in the hall off the kitchen and the tub has some sort of thick crust around it.
“That was definitely used to make drugs,” I say, grimacing.
“This is really sad,” Delphi presses. “I knew the drug problem was bad in Charlotte, but I didn’t know it was this sad. I have patients who come from really poor families. What if they live like this?”
“You’re a good person,” I tell her.
“Both my parents were physicians,” she explains, using her foot to overturn a pizza box, sending several mice scattering. “And my grandma was before that. They always mainly served the pack, and I grew up feeling marginalized as a werewolf, but we didn’t live anywhere close to this.”
“It can put things in perspective, that’s for sure.”
We pick our way down the hall, stepping back over the dirty mattress. The smell of a rotting body intensifies, and Delphi gasps when I use magic to push open one of the two bedroom doors. A man—long dead—is slumped over in the corner. There’s a needle on the floor in front of him. The level of decomposition of the body is going to make him hard to identify.
“Oh my god.” Delphi turns away, face paling.
“Is that a tattoo on his arm?” I ask, shining my light on his forearm. Maggots have already started eating away at him, and it looks like bugs or rats—probably both—have started gnawing on his face.
“It looks like it, but I can’t tell what it is. This could have been used to identify him.”
“It still can,” I say and pull the bag from my shoulder. “Hold my light.” Delphi gets the light, shining it on this guy’s arm. I put on gloves and get a bottle of peroxide from my first aid kit and pour it on his arm, rubbing it into the area that’s tattooed. Only a few seconds later, the chemical reaction makes it easier to see the ink.
“A skull with a snake around it,” I say out loud as a bad feeling creeps over me like a tight wool sweater.
“You say that like you know the guy.”
“I didn’t, but I know someone who was looking for him” I take off the gloves, turning them inside out so the contaminated part stays on the inside and shove them into an outer pocket of my bag. “His first name is Abbot.” I take a photo of the tattoo so Ican show Antonio later. “I don’t think he was a dealer, so we still need to find Razor Mike.”
“What are you going to do about him?”
“You have a member of your pack in the police department, right?”
“Yeah, we have a couple, actually.”
“We can tip them off. Or even call 911 anonymously. Say we walked by and noticed the smell.”
I straighten up and take the flashlight back from her, looking around the room. I almost don’t notice it, but when I do, my heart skips a beat in my chest. “Oh shit,” I whisper.
“What is it?”
“Look.” I shine the light on words that are written on the wall in blood. “Ratunku,” I say slowly. I don’t know what that means, but I’ve heard it before.”
“It meanshelpin Polish.”
“It does?”
“Yeah. My ex mother-in-law is Polish. I learned a bit of it so she couldn’t shit-talk me without me knowing.”
