When I lifted the head from the box and moved it to my desk, the first thing I noticed was that the wound was almost completely bloodless. The slice was as clean as any I’d ever seen. In fact, the slice was so clean, it looked like it had been cut by a laser. It was so evenly severed, so straight, that I was able to stand the head on my desk by the stump of its neck without any other support.

Sam’s head was covered with old scars from past battles. One ear was gone. The other was hardly a flap and a hole. His nose was bent and lumpy, and the rest of his face was a crisscross maze of healed hacks, scratches, and scrapes. Poor, ugly old bastard. What a way to go.

I sat in my chair and stared at the face of my probable future; the monster hunter, finally beaten. Finally outsmarted. Somebody, more likely something, had done this to him. Now it had been sent to me, I assumed, as some kind of twisted warning. Fuck them. It would take more then a head to frighten me. I wasn’t scared in the least.

Not until the eyes fluttered. Not until the head moved.

I jumped back. Sam Burnett’s severed head spoke.

“Cal?!”

The fucking head was alive! I jerked backward so hard that the legs of my chair dug grooves into the floor.

“Is that you, Cal?”

My chair tipped, toppled and I fell. I smacked my head against the hard plaster of the floor. I opted to stay there until it spoke again.

“Cal? Where’d you go, fer Christ’s sake?!”

Slowly I peeked over the edge of the desk. Sure enough, Sam’s head was sitting there, eyes wide open and alert.

I muttered, I stumbled, and finally spat out a somewhat coherent sentence.

“Hey, Sam. How you been?”

“I’ve been better, you big fuckin’ pussy! Get off the floor and talk to me. We got troubles.”

Despite the fact that I had a talking head on my desk, it was the “we” that bothered me the most. As I sat, I noticed Sam was smiling.

“You shoulda seen the look on your face. You were about as scared as I’ve ever seen anybody! Big bad detective, my ass! You’re still a punk.”

I felt my face flush. The head was right. I was lucky I hadn’t pissed myself. “You wanna tell me what happened?” I said, hoping for a diversion from my embarrassment.

No such luck.

“Yer eyes popped out of yer head like two Ping-Pong balls,” the head laughed. “What’s the matter? Ain’t you ever seen a decapitated head before?”

I glared at it. One more word and I was gonna punt him out the window. “You finished?”

“Haw!” Sam wanted to keep going. “Okay, Miss McDonald, I’m done. Big pussy.”