We got out and were briefed by Officers Ford and Atienza before gloving up and swinging the front doors of the Caprice open.

Standing by the driver’s side, my feet straddled the edge of the highway. I stared in at the two bodies, while Remy walked around the other way, which abutted an incline full of wormwood.

The guy in the driver’s seat was Latin and had been shot through the back of his head. I leaned over, examining his face. There was no exit wound, which meant the bullet must have found its final resting place inside Juan Vinorama’s brain. Or maybe its second-to-last resting place. Our medical examiner, Sarah Raines, would dig in there and remove it.

“Safety first, Rem,” I said. Tapping at Vinorama’s seat belt, which was strung over his chest and still plugged in, even though his keys were up on the front dash, rather than in the ignition.

“Someone they knew?” my partner theorized.

Remy and I looked at the man in the passenger seat, who was Latin like Vinorama, but heavier, with a chest like a keg and thick muscular arms. The big guy had taken a shot to his head, but the bullet had exited somewhere near his right eye, spraying blood and brain across the front and right windshield inside the car.

I examined both men from head to toe. The two wore cheap dress pants and plain white T-shirts. They sported inexpensive black shoes with rubber soles, as if they worked in a restaurant. Nothing about them screamed high-end, except for the fact that they’d obviously been hit by a pro.

“You think drug couriers?” Remy asked. “Maybe they crossed someone?”

Northern Georgia has had its fair share of drug trafficking in two categories: illegal and illegally manufactured. At one point three years ago, when sales were at their peak, the AJC reported that over 180,000 Georgians had an opioid problem. Which was like saying the entire city of Macon was hooked.

Remy had the back door on her side open, and I did the same on mine, letting the sunlight stream in. The plants on the hillside smelled of sage and were covered in whiteflies. Some of the insects had migrated over to the car and were stuck, dead, in the blood on the passenger windshield. It looked like someone had taken jelly and dusted it with powdered sugar.

I took a step back.

Behind the driver’s side, on the floor, was a pile of four T-shirts, still folded. I held up the top one and saw that they were thin, novelty-style shirts. “Five-dollar shirts,” my wife used to call them. The one I grabbed featured an illustration of an anthropomorphized worm climbing out of a bottle of Mezcal. The bubble near the worm’s mouth read, I don’t have a drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall down. No problem.

“You think these guys were living out of their car?” Remy asked.

On the back-seat floor on Remy’s side was an empty bag of Doritos and some Skittles wrappers.