Sawbones: A Novella. Stuart MacBride

arms and legs. Women’s arms and legs.”

      Henry stares at him. “We know they’re fuckin’ arms and legs. We’re not blind!”

      I know the Weasel can hear the voice – ‘Don’t poke the fucking bear!’ – because he hurries over to the counter-top and comes back with a clipboard, flicking through the pages and stammering in his rush to be helpful. “We . . . we’ve got another three sets of limbs in the morgue . . .” pointing at a row of refrigerators “... they were all removed ante-mortem with a sharp knife and some kind of saw – ”

      I say, “Back the fuck up. Who the hell is Auntie Mortem?”

      “Ante-mortem . . . it means ‘before death’. The victims were alive when he cut them up.”

      “Fuck.”

      Henry pulls a pair of latex gloves from a box next to the table and snaps them on. Then he leans over and prods at the remains. “Not easy,” he says, one hand resting on an upper thigh, “taking a leg off someone who’s still alive.” He makes like he’s got a saw in his other hand, hacking away at the point where the pale yellow-purple skin turns in to raw meat and bone. “They’d struggle like hell. You’d get blood everywhere.” He lets go of the woman’s thigh. “Much easier to hack someone up when they’re dead.”

      And he’s right. We’ve done more than our fair share of nasty shit in our time, but we’ve never cut some poor bastard’s arms and legs off while they’re still alive. Not to say we’ve never chopped anyone up, but just, you know, after they’re dead.

      The Weasel goes pale. “Right . . . Yeah . . . Er . . .” eyes scanning the coroner’s report, looking for something that will get us the hell out of his nice quiet morgue, “we’re doing a tox screen on the blood, but the labs are swamped right now. They’re supposed to be sending an FBI agent down to – ”

      “Special Agent David Mills.”

      Weasel nods. “That’s – ”

      “He’s not going to make it.” That’s because he’s lying dead in the trunk of our car. But he was nice enough to tell us everything the Feds knew before Henry finished with him.

      And the guy goes even paler. “Ah ... right. OK.”

      “We want details,” I tell him, “like: where did they find the bits? How long they been dead?”

      “Ah . . . that’s just it, isn’t it? The arms and legs were removed when they were still living. There’s nothing to say the victims are dead. I mean with the shock and everything it’s likely, but you never know. They could still be alive.”

      I look at Henry and I know he’s thinking the same thing I am. Laura, no arms or legs, trapped in some shitty bastard’s basement while he does stuff to her. She’s only sixteen, for fuck’s sake.

      Henry growls.

      I scrawl my cellphone number on a scrap of paper and tell the Weasel to call me if anything else comes up.