Slaughterhouse High

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Sheriff Dewey Blackburn had a soft spot in his heart for the week leading up to prom night.

He never told anyone, though.

Wouldn’t have been professional.

As Blackburn cruised the streets of Corundum, Kansas, scanning parks and sidewalks for ne’er-do-wells, he felt mighty glad that his hand gripped the tiller of the law, keeping the more deranged impulses of the citizenry in check. Corundum was a thriving town, not so small as to bore one to tears, yet not so large as to lose its charm.

In the back seat, his charges shifted.

The woman released a low moan. The prom gown into which she had been tucked—a waste of fabric, to Blackburn’s way of thinking—whispered and crinkled like Christmas wrapping paper. She had been a real scrapper in the holding tank, resisting the needle with every ounce of strength.

Not so her male counterpart, some aimless drifter who stank of sewage until Blackburn’s junior deputies washed, coiffed, cologned, and tuxedo’d him. Obligingly had he hazed toward his fate, a sheen of resignation smoothed over his eyes. The blunt, ragged remnants of his earlobes betrayed the shame of his past: ducking out on his prom (“promjumping,” kids called it these days), being arrested and ostracized, having his lobes crudely docked before being thrust out to fend on his own.

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