My mind screamed at me.
Get out of here.
Instead, I crept toward that shoe. I shuffled slowly closer, deeper into the alley, toward the Dumpster.
I suppose I expected to find a bum, some drunk sleeping it off in this quiet spot rocked to bed by the sound of the sodium streetlight buzzing above as he found blissful slumber.
The body looked burned.
The skin all dry and black.
The hair on the top of the man’s head was a wiry white, brittle. Clumps had fallen off around his head, these tufts of hair twisted in the light breeze stirring the ground, fluttering on the filthy blacktop.
His eyes were open, what was left of them. Where his eyes should have been there were only dry, yellowish-white orbs sunken into his skull. He stared up at me blankly, his mouth slightly agape.
He looked old.
He looked older than any man I had ever seen. A thousand-year-old mummy missing his bandages.
The body looked burned, but oddly his clothing did not. He wore blue denim jeans, a Styx tee-shirt, and a Pittsburgh Pirates fleece jacket. The clothes were filthy but not burned, not like him, as if he had been dressed after whatever horrible fate had found him. Soaked in gasoline, lit aflame, and dressed when the last bit of fire finally ran out of food.
Your little girlfriend did this.
He smelled horrible.
I tried not to think about that.
I knelt down beside him.
In my comics, when a superhero (or a Ninja Turtle) found a body, the first thing they did was try to figure out who it was.
He probably had a wallet.
I didn’t want to touch him, I knew I shouldn’t, but that didn’t stop my fingers from reaching around to the back of his jeans in search of that wallet. It didn’t stop me from turning him over just enough to pull the wallet out.
His driver’s license said his name was Andy Flack from Bethel Park. He was thirty-three years old. He looked nothing like the photo.
Andy Flack coughed.
That’s when I ran.
I bolted from the alley and out the mouth, nearly slipping on some wet cardboard boxes stacked near the opening. It wasn’t until I was on the sidewalk that I realized I was across the street from Krendal’s Diner, less than a block away from home.
I raced down that sidewalk, pushing past the people blocking my path, jumping over the cracks and holes. Inside our building, I made quick work of the stairs, fumbled with our lock, and pushed inside, slamming the door behind me. I dropped to the floor in a wheezing and huffing mess, trying to draw in enough air. When I realized I had dropped the wallet, the note too, the real panic set in.
5
“Dude, that’s fucked up. You need to call the police,” Dunk said, his voice muffled through the telephone receiver. His dad fell asleep watching TV, and he didn’t want to wake him.
Although our phone was in the kitchen, the cord was about a mile long, and I had dragged it to the window so I could see what was going on. “They’re already there. There are four cop cars blocking the street, and they sealed off the alley with orange cones and yellow tape. There must be a hundred cops down there. An ambulance, too.”
“Dude. I’ll be right there,” Dunk said before hanging up.
Five minutes later, he stood at the window with me. “We should go up on the roof.”
“I’m not allowed on the roof. Besides, they’ll see us.”
“They can see us here.”
