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can’t handle.”
                 
    “You going to be okay?”
                 
    Travis looked at Jon square in the eyes as he replied, “You betcha. But, do me a favor?”
                 
    Jon smiled. It might not be apparent to those who were watching the exchange going on, but a world of information was had passed between them. A brother knew how to talk to his sibling without saying much of anything. Travis was telling him he was innocent, that there was still a job to be done and that he was going to have to do it underneath the noses of these suited braying jackasses.
                 
    Jon nodded. “Sure, what’s on your mind?”
                 
    “Punch that Pence guy in the face first chance you get.”
     
    ********
     
    Cory wasn’t happy that Jon had decided to leave his truck in front of her apartment, but she didn’t have the time to dwell on it. When she arrived at work, she came to a very frayed-looking intern and the devil himself for a boss. The bodies had been in the lab since the morning, waiting on God knew what to be processed, and as soon as Dr. Willis saw her, he set into gnawing on her posterior.
                 
    “Do you think that in your job description it states that you are entitled to show into work whenever you wish to arrive?”
                 
    Willis’ face was the color of a plum, his tiny round head and beady eyes appeared as if they were about to pop like zits out of his skull. He continued, “If I didn’t need your hands right now, I’d have you fired and barred from ever working as an M.E again. You have a lot of nerve, what with me tolerating you working here to begin with, and with you being a woman to boot. What about the world worries you besides saving for high heels and lipstick?”
                 
    Cory shook her head, but kept quiet. She could see that Drew had taken most of the verbal beating as it showed in her eyes and in the redness that rimmed them. Cory took a deep breath, straightened her clothing, and said, “Sir, if you would allow me, I’d like to examine the bodies with you. I was told that they were in advanced stages of decomposition. I don’t think we should wait much longer, do you?”
                 
    “I will be heading up the examinations to make sure you don‘t go messing anything up like you‘re bound to do and you will be assisting. If you so much as look off into space during the exams, I’ll fire your pretty little rump on the spot.”
    Cory followed Willis into the lab, struck first by the smell that had filled the entire room. The smell coming from a human body that had had a week long to decompose had a kind of rank odor that could have wafted out of Hell itself. The hitch to her stomach, the moderate tilt-a-whirl that seemed to slosh her insides back and forth had her gagging like she was fresh out of med school.
                 
    “You going to be okay, or do I need to send in for your hopeless intern to take over?”
                 
    Cory glared at Willis behind his back. The man was a monster, the kind of creature outdated by more modern standards of thinking. She could bet that in his day, it would have been a crime to consider a woman an equal. She hadn’t realized before now how much she’d grown to hate the man.
                 
    She watched as Willis began to examine the first body, a woman by the name of Heather. Cory had known Heather; she’d lived only five apartments down from hers. Friendly enough, Heather had a son who lived with her mother because Heather had had some trouble with drugs after her boy was born. The woman had been living in the apartment on her own under a clean-living program and had been scheduled for a custody hearing next month. Whenever Heather had talked about the hearing, her face had lit up like it was the night before