Deputy Sheriff Ray Boyd recognized the flies. He remembered them coming out of the woodwork when his grandfather killed hogs on the farm in Valdosta, Georgia. Grandpa called them blowflies and sucker flies. The blowflies had large red eyes and green bodies. The sucker flies had red eyes, yellow-gray striped bodies. Both drank blood. The horse flies drank blood, too. But they got it from biting live animals. These flies drank the blood from dead animals.
Deputy Boyd left his patrol car at the entrance to Pioneer Village, walked along the perimeter, following the split-rail wooden fence as it loped around the edge of the property. He’d first spotted one of the flies sitting on the fence rail.
Then there were more.
Something was dead. Maybe a petting goat or one of the chickens he saw pecking in the small barnyard.
In his eight months with the sheriff’s department, he’d never come in contact with a dead body. He stepped from the path and cut across toward the back of an old general store. He walked by the Burma Shave sign painted on the whitewashed cypress side. It wasn’t yet noon, and the hot Florida sun licked the back of his neck like a flame.
A black crow called out and flew from a tall pine to the top rung on a tower supporting the windmill blade. The wind picked up and turned the blade a few times, the clatter sound not spooking the crow.
Deputy Boyd could smell an odor. It wasn’t like any from the hog carcasses. He walked around the front of the store, toward the porch. He reached for his gun and his mouth at the same time. Don’t vomit, he told himself.
The body was sitting in a rocking chair. Head slumped on a shoulder, like the neck was broken. Eyes and mouth open. Flies were darting in and out of the mouth, biting into the bluish, swollen tongue. More flies worked at a gaping wound in the head.
The crow’s call sounded like a mocking laugh as it flew from the windmill.
Deputy Boyd spun around, his gun pointing at darting butterflies and late morning shadows between the barn and the old church. He turned back to face the body. His hands shook reaching for the radio on his belt. Under the rocking chair, fluids pooled like dark oil. Boyd stepped back. He stepped away from the porch. Stepped away from the smell of death.
He keyed the radio and said, “I got a ten-fifty-six…and it’s a bad one!”