“Gobbos.”

Elevator, top floor. Ding.

The smell of blood and human waste hits him even before the doors open.

The body. Not ten feet away.

The hallway is all creams. Walls like cream-in-coffee. Floors like cream before the coffee. A few punctuations of darkness here and there – a black lampshade, a couple dark lines in the wainscoting, the wrought-iron of the elevator.

And blood.

Dark blood. A lot of it.

Casimir Zoladski is face down on the marble. Sticky dark stuff spreading beneath a face smashed too far into the floor, so far that his face must be crushed and crumpled like an empty egg carton.

The grandson’s black jacket lies another ten feet to the left. His white shirt has been cut open. Not ripped, but cut. Delicately. Surgically, Mookie thinks. Like a pig’s belly opened by a careful hand with a sharp knife. Or a claw.

Symbols lie carved in the pale stretch of his dead back. Symbols Mookie doesn’t recognize – the rifts in the flesh form an inverted triangle (one point ending at each shoulder blade), and inside that triangle are lines that suggest a maze. And at the center of that maze is something that Mookie can only describe as a mouth. A circle with crude pointed teeth and forked tongue cut in the flesh.

Werth tilts his head toward the body. “Check the hands.”

Mookie stoops down. Knees popping. He grabs the wrist. Already stiffening. Turns it, sees a flash of orange: withered marigold. In this hand, and in the other.

“Two broken links of iron chain in the pockets,” Werth says.

Mookie grunts.

Sees something else, too. The fingertips. Smudgy with – at first he thinks, blood, his own blood, but no, it’s something else. Mookie bends down almost like he’s praying. He has to get close to smell it.

He knows the smell. Because he knows food.

“Chocolate,” he says. “Dark chocolate.”

Then, something else. A whiff of the familiar.

He crawls around to the front of the body.

Lifts the head. Hates to do it but has to. There’s the sound of peeling skin, like he’s scraping a car-smashed raccoon off the road–

In the middle of the stink of blood and human waste, he can smell something else.

A smoky, briny stink. Like the wind off the ocean. Like a peaty swamp.

And an acrid tang with it, too. Fruity and sour.

Booze. Like a peaty Islay Scotch. No. Wait. Like the roasted whiff of mezcal, tequila’s stranger, smokier cousin. That’s what it is. He’s about to say as much when two figures enter from a side door.

Haversham and the Boss. Oxygen tank squeaking behind.

The Boss looks a thousand miles away. Like he’s barely there inside his own skin, like what’s here and walking around is just a saggy scarecrow, his mind’s somewhere else, somewhere distant. He barely even notices Mookie and Werth.

Haversham in alarm: “What are you doing?”

Mookie swiftly stands, moving his prodigious bulk fast as he can, stammering out, “I was just – I thought I smelled something–”