The Territory A Novel - By Tricia Fields Page 0,11
methodical.
“Murder or suicide?” Josie asked.
“There’s a nice piece of irony,” Otto said. “Gunshot through the head. Unless he’s been moved, angle’s wrong for suicide. Five hundred guns in his closet to save him from the government, and what do you want to bet one of the other gun crazies shot him?”
Josie introduced Otto to Winning, who still looked hot and annoyed.
“Let’s go over this again. What time did you get off work?” Josie asked her.
Winning rolled her eyes. “My shift ended at seven o’clock this morning. I got home at seven fifteen. I took a shower and went to bed.”
“You slept here all day long?” Josie asked.
“Yep.”
“A guy gets shot on your couch and you don’t hear it?” Josie asked.
“Nope.”
“You might want to lose the attitude. You’re a suspect for murder on a pretty short list.”
Winning laughed. “A short list? The guy’s threatened to kill half of Texas, you included. You got more suspects than you can count.”
“Difference is, he’s lying on your couch,” Josie said. “Now, tell me how it is a man gets shot in your trailer and you don’t hear it.”
She scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. “If I knew, I’d tell you. Maybe someone shot him with a silencer. Maybe they shot him while I was in the shower with the music up.”
“You have a stereo in the bathroom?” Josie asked.
Winning walked to the trailer and stepped inside her front door. Josie followed her up the stack of cinder blocks that made for a front stoop and entered the trailer. Otto had propped the door open, but the heat was stifling.
The corpse was lying on the couch with a hole in the center of his forehead and three dried blood rivulets that ran down the side of his nose and right cheek. His face was covered in stubble that matched the gray of the military haircut on his head. Red’s eyes were open and vacant, the old arrogance extinguished.
Red Goff had been a thin man, standing about five feet five inches, but in the heat of the trailer, his face and arms were already beginning to bloat. It gave him a distended look, as if he were reflected in a fun house mirror. He wore black polyester dress pants and a white button-down shirt that was pulled up on one side, exposing a pale, hairy stomach that somehow looked more obscene than the bullet hole through his head.
The couch was up against a wall in the living room, the only room to the left of the front door. To the right was a small dining room and kitchen.
Pegasus pointed down a short hallway through the kitchen. “Bathroom and bedroom are down there.”
Josie entered the bathroom and saw a duffel bag–sized stereo perched on a wooden shelf on the wall facing the shower. She pushed the power button, and the Kinks blasted out from the speakers. She turned it off. She stepped back out into the hallway and saw that Red’s body couldn’t be seen from the hallway area in the back of the trailer. The couch sat behind a four-foot-by-four-foot half wall that separated the front door entryway from the living room.
“Satisfied?” Winning asked.
“Otto?” Josie called. “Give me twenty seconds, then shoot off one round.”
Josie ignored Pegasus standing in the hallway and shut the bathroom door. She turned the shower on and pressed the power button on the stereo to hear a head-splitting La-la-la-la Lola. Ten seconds later she heard a dim pop, but if Winning had been singing with the music, she could have missed the sound. Her bedroom was to the right of the bathroom, so she could have taken her shower and gone to bed without seeing the body.
Josie opened the door.
Winning cocked her head but said nothing.
“It’s pretty flimsy. What time did you take your shower?” Josie asked.
“Seven thirty.”
“Exactly?”
“I get off work at seven. I come straight home. Drink two or three shots of tequila. Depends on how bad the shift was. I take a shower, brush my teeth, and go to bed.”
“You lock your door when you’re home?”
Winning pulled a rubber band off her wrist and ran her fingers through her sweaty, tangled hair to pull it into a loose ponytail behind her head. “Can I at least turn the air-conditioning on? I turn it off when I leave for work. I can’t even breathe in here.”
Josie nodded toward the living room and watched Winning walk by the body on her couch, grimace down at it, then turn the