What Won't Take Paint

The fourth one was Rudy Nance, and Dinah found it when she rolled him to get at the shoulder. It sat on his left flank below the ribs. A palm and four fingers and a thumb, spread the way a hand spreads when it takes hold of something that is trying to go the other way. The color was wrong for a bruise and there was no bruise under it when she pressed, no break in the skin, nothing to it at all but the color, which was somewhere between rust and the inside of a plum. She got the casket tape off the hook and measured it, thumb tip to the tip of the little finger. Nine and three-quarter inches. Her own spread hand is seven and a half and she is not a small woman. The notebook was in the drawer with the eye caps. She wrote Nance, R. — L flank, 9¾, same, and under it the date, and then she stood with the pen for a minute and wrote four and circled it, which she had not done for the other three. She had tried the cosmetics on the second one. That was Bern Kovalcik in August, and his was up…