Buried Prey

parked on the street at the side of the building and walked around back, carrying the bag with the gloves and the Vicks, and the heavy shirt, and found Sloan, Hanson, Lester, and Jack Lacey, the owner of Tom’s, standing in the alley looking up at the dumpster. The bright motion-sensor light shone down from the roof, onto the space around the store’s back entrance, half illuminating the dumpster. A stepladder stood next to it.
    Lucas said, “Hey,” as he walked up, and Sloan said, “I owe you,” and Lucas said, “You really do.” Lucas made the mistake of sniffing at the dumpster and gagged and turned away: “Holy shit; when was this thing dumped?”
    “They get it once a week,” Lacey said. “It goes out tomorrow. It’s been hot.”
    “Maybe they ought to get it twice a week,” Lucas said. “This is disgusting.”
    “Only in the summer . . .”
    “Listen, it’s been nice chatting,” Lester said. “So, let’s get your ass in there.”
    Lucas looked at the dumpster, sighed, pulled on the heavy canvas shirt, unscrewed the jar of Vicks, put a daub in each nostril.
    “He’s a goddamned pro,” Sloan said, with false heartiness.
    “Gonna ruin everything I’m wearing,” Lucas said.
    Lester said, “Put in for it. I’ll approve it.”
    “Yeah, yeah.”
    Lucas climbed the ladder and looked into the dumpster—and looking was almost as bad as smelling. The basic component of the mess inside was rotten cheese, along with rotten meat, rotten crusts, rotten grease, rotten greasy cardboard, and flies. He’d always wondered where flies went at night, and now he knew. He could see a couple of cylindrical cartons that once contained tomato sauce; and a rat, with tiny black ball-bearing eyes, each with a highlight from the overhead alley spot.
    The rat saw him coming and ran up the far corner and over the side. Lester cried, “Man, look at the size of that sonofabitch,” and Hanson said, “Don’t get bit. It might have rabies.”
    Hanson had his pistol out, tracking the rat. Sloan shouted, “Don’t shoot it, don’t shoot it, the ricochet . . .”
    Lester said, “Remind me to bring my old lady here for dinner.”
    Lacey: “Hey. There aren’t any rats inside. . . .”
    When the excitement died, and Hanson put his gun away, Lucas said, “Ah Jesus,” put his hips on the edge of the dumpster, swiveled, and let himself drop inside. The mass of cardboard—it was mostly cardboard—was saturated with various fluids, and was soft and slippery underfoot, almost like walking on moss.
    He was breathing through his mouth, but with a nose full of Vicks, couldn’t smell much of the crap anyway. He said, “Get out of the way,” and bent and started throwing cardboard over the side, watching carefully where he put his fingers, looking for needles. In two minutes, his gloves and lower legs were covered with rotting cheese and tomato sauce, and another rat made a break for it, running up the corner, and again the guys outside yelled at it, and Lucas threw more crap over the side.
    He’d been digging for five or six minutes when a patrol car turned into the alley and the light bar flared, and Lester walked around and yelled, “Turn the goddamn light off,” and the light died. A patrol cop shouted back, “We got a call on you guys. . . . What’s going on?”
    “Had to check the dumpster,” Lester said.
    Lucas peered over the edge of the dumpster at the car, and one of the cops inside said, “Hey, it’s Davenport.”
    The other guy started laughing, and then called, “Hey, plainclothes.”
    “Fuck you,” Lucas shouted back, and started throwing more crap out.
    The car left, and Sloan asked, “How’s it going?”
    “Fuck you.”
    They all laughed.
     
     
    HALFWAY DOWN, Lucas found the box.
    It was sitting flat on its bottom, as though it had been carefully placed inside the dumpster, a box that you might use to move books, its top flaps carefully interleaved. “Got something,” he reported.
    “Get it out,” Lester said.
    “Sort of stuck in here . . .” He threw more crap over the side, excavating around it. The box had been soaked in sludge on one side—mostly grease, with a little tomato sauce—and had weakened. He cleared a space all the way around it, then slipped a hand beneath it, and lifted it out.
    He put the box on the top of the stepladder, boosted himself onto the edge of the dumpster, swung his legs over, and carried the box down. He put it on the ground under the door light,