“Shit,” muttered a WRVA reporter as he stopped and backed up. “Wouldn’t go over there if I was you,” he said to a crew from Channel 12.

“What’s going on?” Style Magazine called out to Richmond Magazine. “A sewer line break?”

“Hell if I know. Shit, man.”

Bubba went on red alert.

“ ‘Shit man’ is right.” A Times-Dispatch reporter waved his hand in front of his face.

Bubba’s blood heated up. He didn’t hear a word Chief Hammer was saying to him. Bubba was completely focused on the knot of reporters, cameramen, photographers and technicians gathered by his Jeep. They were restless and angry, talking and bitching loudly amongst themselves and calling him Shit Man.

“Anybody seen what’s going on back there behind the building?”

“They won’t let anybody close.”

“You can forget it. The minute you get to the garden center, the cops push you back.”

“Yeah, one asshole put his hand over my lens.”

“Shit, man.”

Bubba’s mind whited out the way it always did when he heard the voices and the laughter shrieking from dangerous, painful convolutions in his brain. He saw a legion of little faces distorted by taunts and cruel grins.

“My editor’s gonna kill me. Shit, man!”

“Stop it!” Bubba screamed at the press.

His eyes suddenly focused. Hammer was staring at him, rather startled. The media wasn’t interested.

“Maybe the body’s decomposing,” one of them was saying.

“It’s back behind the store.”

“Could’ve been here first. Maybe they moved it for some reason.”

“That wouldn’t make sense.”

“Well, they wouldn’t want to leave it here right in front of the bank.”

“No way it could have been here long enough to decompose without someone spotting it before this morning.”

“Oh, so now you’re a medical examiner.”

“Maybe it was dumped. You know, the victim’s been dead for a while, is getting ripe and the killer dumps her.”

“It’s a her?”

“Maybe.”

“Dumps her here?”

“I’m just throwing things out.”

“Yeah, asshole, ’cause you want the rest of us to write them down and make fools out of ourselves.”

“Then what stinks so bad?”

“Chief Hammer?” a reporter raised his voice without getting any closer. “Can I get a statement?”

“Don’t talk to them!” Bubba said to her in a panic. “Don’t let them do this to me! Please!”

“Truth is, I think our source is him,” a reporter broke the news. “Look at his pants. Not all of that’s camouflage.”

“Shit, man.”

“See!” Bubba hissed.

“How can she stand there like that? It’s bad enough way back here.”

“I’ve heard she’s tough.”

“I’m interested in your vanity plate,” Hammer said to Bubba.

Officer Horace Cutchins wasn’t interested in anything except his pocket Game Boy Tetris Plus as he drove the detention wagon at a good clip along Leigh Street.

He’d been on duty only three hours and had already transported two subjects to lockup, both of them gypsies caught burglarizing a Tudor-style home in Windsor Farms. Cutchins didn’t understand why people didn’t learn.