Currency of Souls

Chapter Nine

Wintry’s in agony and it’s not the kind of pain he’s accustomed to carrying with him. This isn’t the same as walking around with guilt pinned to your chest like Sheriff Tom’s badge, or keeping it in your eyes like Gracie, or in your heart like Flo, or like Cobb trying to shed it with his clothes as if sins are snake skins. It’s not the same as waking up every morning to find the faces of a few murdered men glaring at you in the mirror. This is a different kind of pain altogether. Oh yes. This is like being dragged for ten miles naked across a gravel highway until you tumble into a mound of salt and fire ants after being skinned alive and havin’ boilin’ water poured over you.

He sits atop a rock on the bank of the river, eyes closed, rocking like a child and whispering for forgiveness that isn’t likely to come any time soon. Most of his body’s burned, and burned bad, but despite the insistent demand inside him for self-pity, he figures maybe he deserves the scalding pain. Figures he should probably be dead so that those waiting for his end would finally get what they’ve been praying for. He knows for a fact that there’s a widow down in Atlanta who’d be overjoyed and more than a little relieved to hear the fire took him, or that he died right here crying like a baby on the bank of a foul-smelling river. Of course, Wintry doesn’t smell anything but the aroma of fresh-cooked flesh.

The problem is, that poor widow down in Georgia hasn’t gotten her wish, at least, not yet. Seems her prayers, just like Wintry’s, aren’t going to be answered for a while. But sitting here with the rain falling down around him and the black waters of the gurgling river rising up, he wishes to God they had been, that he’d joined Flo wherever she got off to when the fire was done with her and the child.

The child.

Instinct makes him want to rub his wounds, to soothe them, but he can’t. Even the slightest touch makes the raw oozing flesh on his body sing, so he keeps his hands pressed to the sodden grass, wishing the cold would help, but he’s beyond believing it will. He’s already washed himself in the river once, and for one brief moment, when the shock of the icy water hit him, there was relief, but then the fire returned with renewed force, eating him up from the inside out. So here he sits, and suffers, still sending up prayers to the Almighty to make the agony stop, if just for a little while.

And when, after some immeasurable length of time, with the rain coming down even heavier than before, hurting rather than helping every part of him it hits, he almost doesn’t feel someone touching his shoulder. With eyes filled with rain because the flames have burned his tears away, he looks first at the hand, silently hoping it’s the hand of a savior, or his executioner, both of which have come to mean the same thing in this night world of unprecedented suffering, then up into the face of the woman standing over him.

A smile splits his charred face.

“You alive?” says the woman. As brief as the first dip in that freezing river, Wintry feels love wash over him, easing his pain. He thinks of the child, he thinks of getting away, of second chances and God’s grace. He doesn’t consider the memory of that raging blue fire spreading from the hole in Flo’s belly, burning her up as if she was made of straw, or the horrible choking sound she made when finally she dropped to the floor and lay still. He doesn’t consider any of this and it doesn’t matter a lick. She’s here; she’s alive, and he’s not alone.

But then the raging red waves return and he gasps, not at the sight of his beloved Flo changing into a withered old man with a rusted box in his throat, but at the severity of the agony that consumes him.

The hand on his shoulder now is a gnarled one, and the grip is like a glove of fire, prompting Wintry to speak for the first time in years. “Who are you?” he croaks and the words are like glass scratching free of a scorched throat. He is not looking for a name, for it is one he knows. He’s looking for the truth.

“Opportunity,” Cadaver answers. “And punishment.”

Wintry thinks of drowning, or bashing his own head in with one of those slimy black rocks at his feet. He should be dead, he knows that, and he knows too that it isn’t going to take much to end it properly, especially now there’s someone here to make sure he doesn’t back out or come crawling back for the second time, even if it’s not anyone he considers a friend. He reckons he’s died with the only people he’d consider close once already tonight and shouldn’t be too fussy about not being able to do it again. He figures suffering of this kind is made to have an end, and surely Cadaver won’t stand in his way.

His head feels like it weighs a ton as he raises it to look at the old man, who smiles at him. “You might not think it, Wintry, but you’ve been through worse.”

“You do this?” Wintry asks. “You bring me back?”

“No. You brought yourself back. Crawled out in a hurry once you saw there was nothin’ could be done for your woman, or anyone else in there for that matter. Survival instinct got you out. Just like it got you out of prison. Just like it got you through life so far.”

Wintry understands what he’s being told, but he disagrees. He’s never suffered like this before, and suffering is no stranger to him.

“You’re a fighter,” Cadaver says. “Always have been, my friend.”

Wintry swallows a burning breath, and though his new kind of pain has inspired him to use his voice for the first time in fourteen years, it won’t come.

There is the creak and pop of old bones and Cadaver is suddenly hunkered down next to him, his eyes pockets of shadow in a pillowcase face, the smile still twisting lips that look sewn from dirty thread. “I can help you,” he whispers. “I can end this for you. Give you what you want. It’s why I’m here.”

Wintry shakes his head. Cadaver is the devil. He knows that now, and though what education he has comes from the street, the dingy alleys and shaded corners back in Atlanta, his fists the pen, hard faces his pages, he’s smart enough to know the devil never offers anything without taking something in return.

“Let me be.”

Cadaver sighs. It’s the sound of a cold breeze on a summer’s day. “You don’t want me to do that.”

“You…don’t know what I want, and can’t tell me neither. Go. Let me alone.”

“I can end your sufferin’. All of it. I can free you from the ghosts. I can give you the chance to clear your soul. I can help you save yourself.”

Wintry tries to smile but it’s as if fishing hooks are holding the skin of his face together. His flesh sings with agony. He shudders, restrains a gasp. At length, he sags, adopting the repose of death, though that mercy stays maddeningly out of his reach. “What you want from me?” he asks, licking his lips with a sandpaper tongue. “What will you take?”

Cadaver shrugs. “Nothin’.”

“You lyin’.”

“That’s one thing I never do. There’s never any call for it.”

“So you goan…set me free just cause you a nice…guy, huh?”

“No. You’re goin’ to free yourself. All I’m goin’ to do is tell you how.”

Before Wintry has a chance to say more, Cadaver stands and peers off toward the amber glow of the fire on the hill. Eddie’s is still burning, the air still reeks of smoke and burned flesh, though how much of that is from himself, Wintry can’t tell.

“You taught kids how to fight, Wintry. You trained them to defend themselves and inadvertently made them murderers. You beat a man to death with your bare hands, usin’ what your no-good father made you learn from him. He compensated for his abuse of you by teachin’ you how to use violence to get what you want. He hoped you’d use it on him someday if he pushed you hard enough. Hoped more than anythin’ that you’d deal him a fatal blow and set him free of his misery. But you never did. You let him die by his own clock because it was the kind of fight you were guaranteed to win. Tonight, if you want an escape from your own skin, you’re goin’ to have to fight one last time, use those hams of yours and beat your demons into submission.”

“Can’t,” is all Wintry can say.

Cadaver clucks his tongue. “You will if you want to be with your beloved when death does come for you.”

“Can’t fight.”

“You can and will. It’s the only way.”

Wintry frowns, winces. The expression yanks on burnt nerves. “Who?”

Cadaver is by his side again, breathing foul breath in his face that ignites the ruined flesh. “Tonight, my friend, you’re goin’ to fight the fight you dreamed of for years through frustrated adolescent tears.”

Wintry bares his teeth, feels anger cocooned in pain squirrel its way up his throat. “Who?”

Cadaver leans in close, his blind eye like a distant view of an icy sun. His whisper is almost reverential in tone. “Daddy.”

I should sleep. I’m dog-tired, and stinking of grave dirt and old blood that’s going to stay now that the rain’s finally giving up the ghost. I don’t look back at the tavern, though the heat’s dropping. Eddie’s’ll finish it’s burning soon enough. Whatever Gracie’s putting back into that place isn’t anything the fire’s going to be able to touch. Not tonight, or more accurately—as a quick check of my watch tells me—this morning.

Not this fire, but maybe the next catastrophe that blows in when folks’ sins start outweighing virtue.

Out there, past the willows and pines and beech and scrub, the sky’s starting to lighten like someone’s holding a flashlight down under the bedclothes. It won’t take long to spread, but when it does and that horizon catches fire proper, it won’t make Milestone any prettier. It’ll only send long shadows racing toward the borders.

There’s dirt caked beneath my fingernails and my knuckles are throbbing something fierce. Should’ve asked Gracie if she could conjure me up a shovel, but it’s a little late. The whore’s not buried deep, but she’s planted all the same. If I put all my weight on the earth when I pack it down, it sinks until if I poked a finger into the grave I’d be able to feel her under there, so I go gentle, patting it with my hands until there’s only a slight soggy hump in the earth to say anyone’s here at all.

In a few hours there’ll be stragglers on the streets as folks make their way to the church on Hymn Street. They don’t want to go, not when they know God has fled the place, but they’ll be there same as they always are, afraid Reverend Hill will come find them if they don’t, as he’s done in the past. They don’t yet know he’s dead, of course, so maybe if there’s time and I’m still breathing I’ll cruise on by the place and let them know. It’ll be worth it just to see their relief that the old bastard is finally gone from their lives.

But what’s gotta be done’s gotta be done soon before there are too many people around to see it. Business of this kind always goes on when the town’s quiet, so people can wake up in the morning and tell themselves nothing strange has happened while they’ve slept and the world’s just as dark and shitty as it ever was without being helped along by sinners.

I finish patting down the grave, then retrieve the bottle of whiskey Gracie was good enough to send along with me without me asking for it, and I head for my truck.

I’m going to drive with the windows down so the cold keeps me awake, and alert, so I can try to pull some inspiration from my ass and figure out how I’m going to handle Kyle, who Gracie tells me is all set to sell me out.

“Can I get out?”

I know what Brody wants, and I guess I should give it to him. The man has a right to say goodbye to his woman. But I’m not going to. I doubt he gave the family and friends of the people he’s killed such consideration.

Rich coming from me, I know.

“Just sit back and keep quiet.”

“C’mon man…just a few minutes. I’m not going to run.”

“Maybe later. Right now I’ve got some business to attend to.”

I put the truck in gear and ignore his protests from the back seat. He’s putting on quite a show, thrashing, spitting, cursing, but for all of that I’ve got the strangest feeling he really doesn’t care all that much that his girl’s dead. Not sure why that suspicion takes hold of me, but there it is. Maybe I’m way off base; maybe not. For now there’s no way of knowing.

“I can’t believe you, you hick son of a bitch. This isn’t fair and you know it.”

“Yeah, I do, but your little crime spree took away any privileges you might think you deserve.”

“She told me it was a mistake coming this way, you know. Should have listened to her.”

“Yeah, you should have.”

The truck rolls down the hill, the tires splashing through potholes in the dirt road that have filled with rain. Eddie’s burns but the light is growing dim, the flames appear caged behind walls that grow more solid as their shadows band together. Brody keeps talking, but I’ve stopped listening. There’s too much else on my mind. Kyle, for one, and where I might find him.

I decide to head for Winter Street, and Iris Gale’s place of business.

Most folks think Doctor Hendricks came to Milestone to make his fortune, ignoring the fact that most of what he gets are corpses, or the living dancing at death’s door, like the dead girl the Sheriff and his boy brought earlier. There’s no money to be made here, but just because he insists on dressing real nice and being respectful toward anyone who crosses his path, he’s labeled a gold digger. It’s almost funny. There hasn’t been anything worth having in this town for as long as he’s lived here.

Good thing then that he came here to die.

As he sits watching the embers dying in the fireplace, a freshly brewed cup of tea warming his palms, he’s aware, as always, of the long shadow above the mantel. It’s his father’s Winchester rifle. Now there was a man who decided young that he was going to be rich and didn’t stop until he was, no matter how many people he had to step on to get there. There was your 48-carat gold-digger, a man who only ever smiled in the company of people he was going to ruin.

At home, Hendricks saw his father smile a lot.

A breeze against the window makes the curtains shift a little. There is no keeping it out. The house is old and draughty. Upstairs, Queenie’s asleep, piled beneath enough covers to ensure she stays warm. She’s not alone though. Never alone. She’s got the cancer to keep her company, infecting her dreams with its promises of death, eating away at her brain while she snatches as much peace from her final days as she’s permitted. For Hendricks, who despite his profession can do nothing but sedate her and feed her painkillers in near-lethal doses, it’s become a lottery. First, he wonders if this morning will be the one he goes up to the room to find her dead. Then he wonders, if she does wake up, will she attack him, or scream hysterically because she’s forgotten who he is? And lastly, he wonders if today’s the day he takes that shotgun down and puts them both out of their misery once and for all.

He intends for it to happen, accepts that it must. The gun’s loaded, ready to go. It’s just a matter of when, and how many bullets he’ll need. The thought does not disturb him. He has watched his beautiful wife lapse into psychotic rages and foul-mouthed fits for almost two years now. He has sat with her while she wept, and thanked the Almighty Jesus for her spells of lucidity and apparent health. For the past two weeks, there have been no episodes, no late night panic attacks or spells of spouting gibberish like a possessed thing. It’s almost as if she’s been his, and his alone. As if he hasn’t had to share her with a parasite.

The lull won’t last though. It never does, and he fears that this is merely the calm before the final devastating storm that takes her for good. If it does so before he takes that shotgun down, so be it, but he has no intention of surviving her.

There is a knock on the door. It surprises him, jerks the cup in his hand and sends tea sloshing over the side. He grumbles, checks his watch, then rises, sets the cup aside, and casts a final glance at the shadow over the mantel.

Chapter Ten

Though Milestone’s creeping toward dawn, it always feels like deep night on Winter Street, and if you’re looking for sunshine, you’d best look up on over the roofs and not through the windows.

Time was you came here for your groceries, or for a haircut, or for some new clothes to impress your latest date. If you wanted the fancy stuff, you’d have to carry your ass clear into Saddleback, which I’ve always thought is a long haul just to spend twice as much as you would in Milestone for more or less the same damn thing. Doesn’t matter now though. These days, you come here to get laid or listen to the wisdom of Horace Dudds, one of only three town drunks who haven’t yet realized the town’s died around them. The others are Maggie, Horace’s unofficial girlfriend, and Kirk Vess, though he tends to wander and isn’t welcome on Horace and Maggie’s turf. Apparently they have standards he doesn’t meet. Politics of the homeless, I guess. If Maggie has a second name, she has never seen fit to reveal it, and no one ever asks. I guess we all figure when you’ve got nothing else to call your own, no one will begrudge you keeping your name to yourself.

I pull up outside a narrow gray building that looks like something from an angry child’s drawing with its funny angles and not-quite-straight edges, boarded up windows and trash stuffed in the wide cracks between the short run of steps leading to main door. Through the gaps in the boards nailed over the store’s plate glass window, a blinking florescent light shows a bunch of mannequins stripped of their clothes, and lewdly posed so they look like they’ve been frozen mid-orgy. A faded wooden plaque above the door bears the legend THE HOUSE OF IRIS.

On the opposite side of the road stands what used to be a clothing store for children before people stopped having them. Beneath the tattered red-and-white striped awning, sit two figures huddled against the weather.

“Evenin’ Sheriff,” Horace says, and offers me a toothy grin, at the same time drawing his bottle closer to his chest, like he’s afraid I’m going to snatch it. Horace may be a drunk, but he’s got a long memory, and can probably recall every bit of graffiti in my old drunk tank.

I nod my head, “Horace, Maggie,” and slam the truck door behind me. The sound echoes along the street and returns as thunder. I join them under the awning.

“Bad night. You two should be indoors, by the fire.”

Horace wears a purple peaked cap he won in a card game from an Irishman. A week later he played another game and lost everything he owned. Claims to this day it wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t beaten that ‘potato-eatin’ Mick’, who he says, “Went home with my luck snug in his ass pocket.” Beneath the cap’s peak, a huge nose keeps a pair of piercing gray eyes from meeting, though they seem determined, the pupils like black balloons anchored by dark red threads. His belt is a stretch of skipping rope with the wooden handles lopped off. People call him old, and he looks damn old, but the thing is, he’s been in Milestone his whole life and it seems he’s always looked exactly as he does now.

“Plenty of fire,” Horace says sagely, “But it’s too wet to walk a’far as Eddie’s.”

“What happened up there anyway?” Maggie asks. She’s dressed in her signature floral print dress—sky-blue barely visible beneath an explosion of pink roses. Maggie’s a formidable woman, heavy, and quick to anger. A tornado with a head of hazel curls. There’s no doubt in my mind she could throw me from one end of the street to the other if I pissed her off. So I don’t, even in the past when she’s given me reason to. See the problem is that when Maggie’s not sitting by Horace’s side wherever he’s chosen to settle, she’s standing in the town square, blocking traffic and hollering her damn fool head off about the government and how they’re going to round us up one by one and brainwash us to their way of thinking (whatever the hell that is). As if that wasn’t bad enough, her pontificating and gesticulating is usually enough to allow certain parts of her to spill out of her loose-fitting dress, causing quite a stir among those who don’t have the sense to drive around her. I’ve always thought that in another life she and Cobb would have made a happy couple.

“Cobb lost it,” I tell her. “Burnt the place up.”

“Oh,” Maggie says with a shake of her head. “He had a lovely voice.”

“Anyone inside?” Horace asks, after a puzzled look at Maggie. I know how he feels. No one I know ever heard Cobb sing, assuming that’s what Maggie means.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t suppose the Reverend was one of ’em?”

“Matter of fact he was.”

Horace nods his satisfaction. “Good. Bastard ruined this town. Place had a hope afore him.”

Maggie shakes her head, effortlessly snatches the bottle, which I see is a flagon of cider, from Horace’s protective clutches. “I wouldn’t say he done ruined it. Minin’ comp’ny and greed did that. Hill just helped is all. Set the stage for the men in suits and too-tight ties to come waltzin’ in and make us regret ever settlin’ down here.” She ponders this for a moment, then takes a swig from the bottle that’s so generous, Horace’s eyes widen and he makes a grab for it. They scowl at one another for a few seconds like two dogs over a piece of meat, then Horace shakes his head and looks at me. “Your boy’s okay though. Counts for somethin’.”

“He’s alive, if that’s what you mean.”

Horace smiles a little, and his bloodshot eyes gleam dully. “Yeah, that’s what I mean.”

“I’m assuming you’ve seen him around tonight, then?”

Horace shrugs. “Went in Miss Iris’s place. Gone again now though.”

Maggie grins. “He didn’t stay long, did he Horace? Which is a shame, because usually them two put on some kind of a show for us less-fortunate types.” She nods toward the double windows on the first floor of Iris’s building—which, much like the main window on the ground floor, isn’t boarded over enough to prevent the curious from seeing clear into the room, especially if the room is lit—and elbows Horace in the ribs. “I’m afraid one of these days it’s going to put ideas into your head.”

This is a conversation I have no interest in being a part of, so I bid them good night.

“Sheriff…?”

I stop, turn, look at Maggie. “Yeah?”

“You leavin’ us?”

“What do you mean?”

“You look like a man flirtin’ with the idea of runnin’.”

“No,” I reply. “Not yet anyway.”

“Man’s got a boy to look out for,” Horace adds. “Man with responsibilities can’t rightly run away from ’em or they’ll dog him for the rest of his life. Ain’t that right, Sheriff?”

“That’s right.” I get the feeling he’s talking from experience.

“Well you tell that handsome boy of yours Maggie says hello, and that if he ever gets tired of that young gussied-up whore, he can come see me.” She laughs uproariously and thumps a hand on Horace’s back, nearly sending him sprawling into the street.

“I will.”

“Hey, and Sheriff?” Horace again.

Exasperated, I frown at him. “What is it?”

“Town’s awful lonesome this time of night, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“You find yourself in need of company, or backup, you just let us know.”

This sends Maggie into renewed hysterics, but Horace isn’t laughing.

“Who’s your passenger?” Maggie asks, loud enough for Brody to be alerted. His pale face presses against the window of my truck and he smiles.

“Never you mind, Maggie.”

“Handsome,” she remarks.

“Trouble,” I call back.

I cross the street, ignoring Brody’s toothy grin. There are no lights on anywhere on Winter Street, but that doesn’t mean much. Iris’s place is the only one occupied, and it’s late.

My knuckles hurt like hell so I turn my fist to the side and thump the door like a pissed-off landlord coming for rent. It sounds like a gunshot, then the street gets awful quiet, as if I’m not the only one curious to see if I get an answer. Even Horace and Maggie have quit their banter.

Another bang on the door hard enough to send painful vibrations up my arm, and I hear soft slow footsteps descending the stairs on the other side.

A moment later, a sleepy voice filters out to me from behind the door. “Who is it?”

“Tom.”

“Sheriff Tom?”

“None other.”

“You here to arrest me, Sheriff?” I’m sure the playfulness in her voice is meant to be cute, and probably works for her customers, but it’s late, I’m tired and I’m in no mood for it. “Open the fucking door, Iris.”

“Not if you can’t be civil.”

“I don’t have time for this. Where is he?”

“Who?”

I take a deep breath, time enough to consider kicking the door off its hinges and her off her feet in the same shot. “Kyle.”

“He ain’t been here.”

“Cut the shit, Iris. I know he has, now either tell me where he went or I’ll knock this door down and you’ll spend the night behind bars.”

She laughs, as sweet a sound as any woman’s laugh, but it makes my teeth hurt. “Iris, so help me…”

“You seem awful uptight tonight, Sheriff. Tense. I’m almost afraid to open the door case you explode all over me.”

“The only thing that’s gonna…” I start to say, then decide to change tack. “Look, this is serious. Kyle’s in trouble, so you need to quit the crap and either open the door or tell me where he is.”

Her sigh is just loud enough to hear through the thick wood of the door. “Well now Sheriff, it’s all a bit fuzzy. You can’t come knockin’ up a girl and expect her to have a good head right away, can you?”

I press my head against the door, and wish, not first time tonight, today, whatever the fuck it is, that I had my gun. But then there’s the sharp snap of a lock, the door cracks open and I catch myself just in time to avoid pitching forward on top of the girl standing there with sleep in her eyes and a coy smile on her face.

“You’re no fun,” Iris says, her pout so dramatic I almost applaud. Her act might hold more water with me if I didn’t remember her back in her store-owning days, when she’d blush at the slightest of compliments and get flustered as all hell when anyone got up the nerve to ask her out. She was a decent sort and I reckon somewhere beneath the too-thick makeup and scandalous facade, she might still be, if years of lying beneath fat sweaty old men, drunks, and addled young guns hasn’t soured her on life completely.

She’s short, about five feet tall, and most of that’s legs, which are bare now beneath the hem of a man’s logging shirt. Her red hair is cut short, not long enough to touch the small slopes of her shoulders, and the shirt’s buttoned only at the middle, so when she moves her belly’s exposed, and there’s enough cleavage on show to let any man know what he’s walked himself into. A soon as I’m clear of the door, she steps close, and despite my feelings about her and the urgency that’s on me to find Kyle, there’s a lot to appreciate right there in front of me.

Her hands find my shirt and she runs her fingers over my chest, her blue eyes gazing deeply into mine, a small smile on her soft lips. “I was hopin’ you’d stop by, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, why’s that?”

“Well, why don’t you come up for a coffee and I’ll tell you all you need to know?”

She peers around me at the two hobos. I hear Maggie chuckling, then the door is shut and Iris is leading me by my hand up the dark stairs. Her skin is warm. Everything in me tells me to pull away, not to get suckered in by her games, though I’m full sure I won’t, not with the way my mind’s set, but this night/day hasn’t followed any rules but it’s own, and it’s hard to keep track of it without the mind just shutting down. So even though I’m trying hard not to look at the pale curves of Iris’s bare ass as she leads the way, I’m back to thinking of sleep, and it starts getting easier to imagine rest knowing there’s a bed right up here complete with a woman to share her heat with me.

Sand fills my eyes, approving of my train of thought, and I yawn, then immediately clear my throat and tell myself to snap out of it. I’m in danger of putting a whore over my son’s life, and though I’m guilty of a lot, I won’t be guilty of that. I withdraw my hand, and she lets me, doesn’t even look back.

“Long night, Sheriff?”

“The longest.”

We’re at the top of the stairs, and she walks ahead into a large room lit by more candles than I’ve ever seen in one place in my life, except maybe the church. They’re spread out around the floor so densely I wonder if there’s a trick to navigating it without setting your pants on fire. Not that I imagine too many folks are still wearing their pants by the time they reach this room. Iris doesn’t look the patient type, and given that her customers are lonely desperate men, I doubt they need to be asked twice.

There are mannequins in every corner of the room, sexless, naked, and tilted back so they’re all staring up at the ceiling with bored expressions on their plastic faces.

“Why don’t you take off your boots?” Iris says and all that’s missing from that suggestion is: And slide ’em under my bed.

“No thanks. I’m not staying long.”

“Maybe not but you’re trackin’ mud all over my floor.”

I look down and see that’s she’s right, but I’ve got no intention of taking off my boots. I’m sure I’m not the first visitor she’s had who ignored the mat inside the front door in their eagerness to be right where I’m standing now.

“It isn’t so bad that a quick sweeping won’t take care of it.”

“If you say so.” She walks into the room, making her way around that obstacle course of candles with the sure step only someone who put them there could enjoy. The flames dance in her wake. The combined heat from those candles brings sweat to my brow and I search for a chair. There’s only one, at the foot of the bed, facing it as if it’s there for spectators. I sit. The room is large, and there’s a door to the left of it, leading to a small kitchen area, and presumably a bathroom beyond. Iris stops here and leans against the doorframe. “How do you like it?”

“Black,” I reply without missing a beat. “Two sugars. You trying to save money on the power bill?”

“No. Lights don’t like me.”

“How’s that?”

“I turn ’em off.”

“Why?”

“Not on purpose. They just switch off whenever I’m around ’em. If I’m walkin’ the street, the lamps’ll go out. Same in here. Turn on a light and it’ll stay on just fine if I’m in the other room. Soon as I come in though…” She snaps her fingers. “Dark. Radios and TVs go crazy sometimes too.”

“Oh.”

“Been like that since the day I was born. Streetlight outside my house went off and the TV went snowy. Must be my magnetic personality.”

“Interesting.” My voice makes it clear I think no such thing. “Can’t say I remember you having that problem when you ran the store.”

“Well, it was usually daylight, wasn’t it? And when it wasn’t, I used hurricane lamps. You remember, you used to call ’em quaint, made you feel like you were at sea.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t remember that at all.”

“Maybe because they were better times. Some people hang on to those like prized jewels; others toss ’em as soon as misery comes a-callin’.”

She disappears into the kitchen, where I hear the hissing sound of her filling the kettle, the scratch of a match and the whumping sound of a gas ring catching fire.

The bed is rumpled, and I have to wonder whether or not Kyle even spent time in it tonight. I was sure I’d find him here, but for whatever reason, his visit was a short one.

A few moments later, with impatience ticking a countdown in my head, Iris emerges from the kitchen. She’s holding a single cup of coffee, which she brings to me. “I’m out of sugar,” she says. “Hope it’s okay.”

“It’s fine.” I take a sip that scalds my upper lip and tongue, but I don’t mind. It chases away some of the exhaustion that’s clinging to me like a shroud.

Iris stands close enough for my breath to warm her belly, and crosses her arms. “So you’re lookin’ for Kyle?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re a little late.”

“I figured.”

She turns and makes her way through the labyrinth of candles to the bed, and watches me as she unbuttons the shirt and slips out of it. God she’s a pretty thing, but I avert my eyes to the vapid stare of the mannequin in the opposite corner while she tosses the shirt on the bed and slips beneath the covers. “You’re welcome to join me,” she says. “Despite what you might think, that’s not an offer I extend to just anyone.”

“Then you may want to change your ad.”

“Funny. You got nice ears, Sheriff. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“How long was Kyle here?”

She plumps her pillows and sits back, the sheet drawn up over her breasts, nipples hard points beneath the flimsy material. “Not long. He wanted some company but…” She shrugs, puts again. “Seems he wasn’t up for it tonight.”

“He say anything to you about what happened?”

“Sure. Told me Eddie’s burned. No great loss if you ask me.” She sighs, then her lips curl in amusement. “Bet you’re wonderin’ why you never saw me up there with the rest of you sinners, aintcha?”

In truth, I wasn’t, but I am now, so I nod.

“Well I’m not real sure about that, Sheriff. Maybe it’s because women in my line of work get special consideration. Maybe we’re needed just like we’ve been needed all through history, so when it comes time to open that great big book of black sins, we get left out. Or maybe it’s because Reverend Hill, despite his bible thumpin’, was still a man at the back of it and needed his poke just like everyone else and couldn’t rightly put me up on the cross for givin’ folks, and him, what they asked for. Besides, it ain’t like I force people’s hands. And I ain’t never killed a man. Least, not yet.”

“What else did Kyle tell you?”

“That he wasn’t sorry to see those folks killed. But he was lyin’.”

“How do you know that?”

“Call it women’s intuition. You sure you wouldn’t like to join me in here where it’s warm?” She pats the empty space beside her. “You look like you could use the release.”

“No.”

“No charge.”

“I said no.”

“All right,” she sighs.

“So tell me.”

“I don’t think he gave a shit about the black man. In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t, was probably glad to see the back of him if the way he talked was any indication.”

“Wintry? Why?”

“Because he had the murderin’ bitch.”

“Why would that—?”

“Wake up Sheriff. I know you’re tired, but you ain’t stupid. Kyle had a thing for her. Didn’t mind tellin’ me neither, ’cuz y’know… I’m just good for one thing, right?”

She’s still wearing that smile, but a hardness has entered her eyes, splintering the candle light and I feel a small knot of shame because that’s exactly how I’ve always looked at her—Iris, former store-owner, current whore.

“Didn’t give a shit about Cobb, or Gracie, and didn’t care too much that he put a bullet in that young thief’s belly. Only one he really cared about was Flo. Said he’d planned to run away with her, get away from Milestone and start a good life somewhere.” She snorts a little laugh. “You raised yourself a gullible one, Sheriff.”

The coffee tastes sour and I set it down between my feet. “What else?”

“Well, I’ve already told you he needed lovin’ and I put on my best show for his poor soul. Didn’t work though. He wasn’t—”

“Yeah, you told me. He say anything else?”

She stares at me for a moment, and the expression on her face is unreadable. The light warms one side of her face, leaving the other in shadow. She sits forward, and the sheet slides down, exposing her breasts for a moment before she draws up her knees and crosses her arms around them. “He’s gunnin’ for you, you know.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Know why?”

“Off hand I can think of any number of reasons.”

“Know why he’s plannin’ on finishin’ you tonight?”

“No.”

“Because he made a deal and said he would.”

“A deal? With who?”

“That old guy who looks like a corpse.”

Cadaver. Not a great surprise, but it adds a layer of hurt to the pile that’s already festering inside me. What does come as a surprise is finding out Kyle knew Cadaver was behind everything, even if the old man didn’t start the fire. Now I’m wondering what they were really saying while they stood watching Eddie’s burn. The idea of the two of them being in cahoots makes my blood run cold and those two pennies in my pocket are starting to feel like sandbags.

“You know what the deal was?” I ask Iris.

“Nope. Kyle wouldn’t say, but I expect the end of you’ll be his ticket out of town. Maybe he’ll even get Flo back for his efforts. You never know.”

We share a moment of silence, both of us burning up inside over Kyle’s betrayal. I stand, careful not to send my cup of coffee flying, and put my hands on the cold bedrail. “He say where he was going?”

“He did.”

I wait. She says nothing.

“Where?”

“Not sure I should tell you.”

“Why’s that?”

“You haven’t settled up for the information you’ve already gotten outta me.”

“What is it you want?” I ask, sure I already know.

“Come here.”

“Iris. I have to get going. You know why.”

“I do, so I’m not gonna be hurt that you ain’t gonna stay with me. But that ain’t it.” She lays back, sheet to her waist, hands by her sides. “Just come here. It won’t take long.”

Against my better judgment, and struggling to keep my eyes from studying what’s there to be studied, I sidestep my way through the candles until I’m standing next to her. “What?”

She reaches up, one hand finding the back of my neck, drawing me down even as her face is rising toward me, an odd look about her, her eyes like stars, and she kisses me. But my eyes are open, and in the honey-colored light from the candles, I see a deep angry-looking scar running from the top of her forehead back into her hair, like someone tried to split her skull open with an ax. I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Doing what she does is bound to put her in the company of some mean folks, but I don’t like seeing it. I break the kiss, despite it making my body tingle with warmth that spreads across my chest and down to where I don’t want it going, and I step back, look at her. Goddamn it’s been way too long.

Iris hasn’t bothered to draw the sheet up again, but that’s all right. She’s smiling, and the urge to say to hell with everything and just crawl in with her is powerful. But I can’t, and she knows it. Knew it before she even opened the door to me, and I guess all this has been is a little betrayal of our own.

“We square?” I ask, after a few moments in which nothing needed to be said.

“I guess we are,” she says dreamily. “Too bad you’ve got to go runnin’ off though. I like talkin’ to you. You ain’t nothin’ like your boy.”

That’s hardly a revelation.

“Maybe when this is over,” she says. “If it ever is, and if you don’t end right along with it.”

“Where did he go?”

“The Reverend’s house,” she says.

“Why there?”

“Beats me.”

This puzzles me. I can’t figure out what he’d want up there, unless Hill had something he needs. Or something Cadaver instructed him to get. But what?

“I’m sorry.”

She raises her eyebrows. “What for?”

“For…” I don’t know how to apologize for thinking her nothing but a common whore. Don’t know how to apologize for a scar I didn’t give her, or for my son’s casual and tactless confessions. Or for the fact that this whole town’s gone to seed and I never once tried to stop it. And the only reason I’m saying a goddamn thing at all is because I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to say it again.

“Sheriff?”

But there are no words, and if there are, I don’t know them, so I do what any man does when what he feels he has to say gets lodged like a chicken bone in his throat.

I tip my hat and leave.

Chapter Eleven

Hendricks opens the door to a scarecrow in a top hat.

“What?” he asks, unwilling to extend even the pretense of courtesy to a man he once caught urinating on his doorstep.

“Doc,” Kirk Vess says, crossed eyes wide. “You’re awake, good. That’s good.” As he searches for words that seem to be dangling just beyond his grasp, he snatches his hat from his head, revealing a greasy nest of hair that resembles a mound of limp noodles heaped atop a dirty upended bowl. Beneath the pallid brow and contradictory eyes, a single drop of clear snot, sweat, or water dangles from the tip of a fishhook nose, which in turn presides over an impossibly wide mouth, packed to capacity with thin black teeth. Hendricks has often wondered, judging by his scars and the man’s erratic behavior, if Vess, at some point in his unremarkable life, donated his brain to science. It summons the comical image of a bunch of perplexed medical students clustered around a stainless steel pan wherein stews Vess’s brain. Good lord, it shouldn’t be that shape should it? one might inquire, while another asks, Where’s the rest of it?

Of Vess, he knows very little, except that the man is homeless and given to outbursts of violence, and that come autumn, he will disappear, to reappear in the first week of winter. What he does during this absence is unknown, but there are few, if any, folks in Milestone who care enough to ask.

“Good, good,” Vess says again, fingering with pale tapered fingers the brim of a hat as flaccid as the man himself. He wears a coat torn at the elbows and frayed at the hem, the lapels encrusted with a substance of some indeterminate origin. He reeks of urine, alcohol and vomit, from his scabrous scalp to his sole-less boots.

“What are you doing here?” Hendricks snaps. “If you’ve come to beg…”

Vess squints, leans in a little as if unsure of what’s been said, then gasps and raises his hands, the hat flopping wildly as he protests. “No sir, no sir. Not money. What am I doing here? Big question. Keep asking it and no one has an answer. Course, they couldn’t really.” He shakes his head, dismissing a thought that perhaps didn’t even make sense to him. “I didn’t want to bother you for nothing, truth be told. But I had to ask someone who’d know where it might have come from or who might own it.”

Annoyed, and loath to waste any more time on this odious creature, Hendricks takes a step back, intending to close to door. Vess’s pleas stop him. “No, wait! Sorry, sir. Just a tick. A sweep of sixty, please. I’ll show it to you.” He starts to rummage around in his pockets, which look flat and empty. “I kept it safe as I could, but it looks dead a long time.”

Intrigued despite himself, yet fully expecting the man will produce a dead rodent from one of those pockets, Hendricks only closes the door half way, just enough to let Vess know if this is some ridiculous scheme, it will be revealed to the morning breeze and a quiet street, but not a gullible doctor.

Frustrated, Vess begins to chastise himself in what sounds like an alien dialect. “Fffteck! Shlassen shlack!” Then with an apologetic look, he calms himself and reaches into the inside pocket of his coat. “Yes, yes. I knew it. I’m a fool,” he says and slaps a grubby palm against his forehead hard enough to make Hendricks jump. “Yes, hidden and safe,” Vess tells him and withdraws from the pocket a small brown bundle, which Hendricks mistakes for a stubby cigar. But as he prepares a suitably bemused tone with which to deliver his verdict, Vess, pale worm-like tongue poking from between his teeth, reverently unwraps the small parcel and holds it up, inches from the doctor’s face.

“I found more, but I wasn’t sure whether disturbing it was a good idea. I don’t need no ghosts on my tail. Isn’t that right? Not when I’m out of place.”

Hendricks doesn’t answer. Instead, ignoring the smell from the man, he adjusts his spectacles and steps closer.

“Told her I’d bring it back before she even know’d it was gone. Have to respect women you know. Even I know that and I’ve forgotten a lot.”

Hendricks raises his eyes and appraises the man anew, not because he has developed any kind of respect or admiration for his guest, but because he is now as suspicious and wary of Vess as he would be toward any man who showed up at his door with the remains of a human finger in his pocket.

Iris is on my mind as I steer the truck out of Winter Street. Woman like that makes me think of the future, no matter what she does for a living or how screwed up she may be because of it. Makes me want to help her, to fix her somehow, and in the process maybe fix myself. And that doesn’t make a lick of sense. I don’t know a damn thing about her except that she’s a whore, that she’s been with any number of men, including my son, and I’m not sure that’s something I wouldn’t see in her every time she smiled at me.

I can’t shake the feel of her lips on mine, though. It’s enough to distract me, take me away from the cruelty I’ve brought down on myself, to a place where everything isn’t sharp edges and pain, death and ruin. A place I’d like to stay, and might have, if Brody hadn’t just jerked me out of my thoughts.

“Check that out,” he says, sounding amused. “There’s someone out there.”

I check the rearview to see where he’s looking and then I spot it.

I’m a little ways past Hendricks’ place when I slam down hard enough on the brakes to make the truck shudder into a fishtail. The smoke from scalded rubber sweeps past my window.

“Jesus,” Brody groans, grunting as he shifts himself back onto the seat.

Bloodshot dawn glares at me from over the hills.

Between this road and the river, there’s a field. Dan Cannon, the previous occupant of the house Doc Hendricks now calls home, used to grow corn there. Now it’s barren and yields only a harvest of rocks. Tonight, someone has lit a fire in there a few feet from an oak tree with spindly branches that was the bane of Cannon’s prematurely short existence, and from here, I can see a figure moving sluggishly around it, the flames revealing a craggy ruined face I’m too afraid to admit I know, disfigurement and all.

“Isn’t that…?”

“Yeah,” I mutter. Milestone doesn’t have two giants. After what happened at Eddie’s it shouldn’t even have one. But that’s Wintry up there, doing what looks to be some kind of a slow-motion drunken war dance around the fire.

“You know what to do,” Cadaver says. He is hidden in the shadows beside the tree, shadows that refuse to be burned away by the light from the fire. Wintry tries to fill his lungs with enough air to power the words, but gives up at the realization that there is nothing he can say that the old man doesn’t already know. He wants to die now, but it appears even in his darkest fantasies he’s been wrong to think even an end to his suffering would come without a price. And tonight, here, that price has taken the shape of a dark pair of hands wriggling their way free of the oak tree’s trunk, pushing forth from the rotten bark, thick fingers trembling.

It is dark despite the fire.

It is cold despite the heat.

And those hands, now clenching and unclenching at the end of scarred and meaty forearms, are hands Wintry knows.

Near the roots of the tree, a battered work shoe is wrested free. Dirt and bark tumble; the fissure widens. At the top of the tree, almost but not quite at eye level, pale white orbs, striated opals, fix Wintry with a raging glare. Beneath it a sharp nose, shooting breath to clear the passages of bark and rot. Inevitably then, a mouth, dirty teeth bared above a pointed chin bearded with moss.

“Loser,” says the black devil as he jerks free of the tree to stand before his son. “No-good sonofabitchin’ loser.”

“You know what to do,” Cadaver says again, but now that there are two men before the fire, it is unclear to Wintry who is being addressed. His father does not spare the old man a glance, but nods faintly.

“Pop,” Wintry croaks.

“Lucius,” his father says, and the mere mention of Wintry’s given name is enough to unleash a cascade of unwanted memory:

That voice, resentful, and almost always raised in anger.

That mouth, sneering, twitching a little with each punch of those piston-like arms, smiling slightly at the cries, the injury, the fear.

Those hands, blackening his mother’s eye, shattering her nose, loosening her teeth.

Those hands…tousling the boy’s hair before bedtime, before the bad time.

Those hands, ripping off his clothes, breaking his bones.

Those hands. Around his neck, squeezing. And the words: Toughen up you little shit. Fight me. I’ll keep hittin’ until you do.

“How are you here?” Wintry asks, softly, not because he is threatened, which he is, but because his throat is raw and sore and the words feel like rocks being forced through a whistle.

“Don’t matter.” His father takes a step closer. He is a big man, bigger than his son but not as tall. The difference never mattered though. His father’s fists were always a great leveler, as Wintry suspects they will be now. “What matters is I’m here, and I’m more here than you, palooka.”

He advances another step and Wintry, already quivering from the shock of his injuries, is close to rattling free of the shoes that have been melted to his feet. Into the firelight steps his father, a man who, until tonight, existed only in memory.

“I don’t want this,” Wintry says, then turns his head to look at Cadaver who appears to have woven himself into a mesh of dead branches. “Make it stop.”

“Only you can do that, son,” Cadaver replies.

Narrow face taut with rage, the man before the fire chuckles. “Hell, he ain’t gonna do shit. He ain’t never done a damn thing worth a damn thing. He nothin’ but a worthless punk sent to steal all I had from me and make my wife ashamed of what she let into the house.” His smile widens, teeth gleaming in the amber light. “Shit. He didn’t find out till prison that we wasn’t his folks.”

Wintry sighs. “What do you want with me?”

“To put you down, boy. Just that. To put you down so’s you remember what you done.”

“I don’t need to fight you to remember.”

“Sure you do. You think you got ghosts now Lucius, but you’re forgettin’ all the good ones. All the real big mean ones, ain’t that right ’ol man?”

Cadaver says nothing, just goes on watching.

“So right here, tonight, me and you’s gonna dance. You gonna get the chance to swing a few, see if time’s taught you somethin’, see if you grew some balls up the river, and if you don’t, then you gonna be hurtin’ even worse by the time I get through with you. But I’ll be your Pop for a spell and do you a favor, for ’ol times sake. I’ll let you in on a secret.”

Whatever the secret is, Wintry has no desire to hear it. The fire is licking at his skin though he’s far enough on the other side of it to be out of reach of the flames, and the worst of the heat. Every nerve screams with pain, every muscle spasms, every organ revolts. He wants to lay down and die, most certainly does not want to be here in the heat facing down a man who died of prostate cancer while his son was in prison.

“For every blow I land on that cooked-up face of yours, you’ll remember somethin’ you forgot. You’ll remember some of the bad things you done that you don’t blame yourself for no more. You’ll see the little bits of truth. You’ll see yourself. Then maybe you’ll understand why I was the way I was with you.” His father leans over the fire enough to let the flames singe his short scraggly beard. “I saw what you was becomin’ boy, and you was becomin’ me.”

For just a moment, Wintry sees an aspect of the devil floating in the flames. “You want me to fight you?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” His father is enthused. “Go a few rounds with your old man, see what happens. See what you remember. See if you’ve changed.”

“I…can’t fight. I’m hurt bad.”

“Everybody hurtin’, Lucius. That shit don’t fly with me. Think I weren’t hurt when my brother dropped you off on my doorstep with no money to keep you? Think I weren’t hurt when my wife left me for a bucktoothed guitar playin’ crackhead from San Antone? Think I weren’t hurtin’ when every bit of company I tried to keep got scared off as soon as they heard tell of a kid? Or when they fired me from a job I’d had for over thirty years? Fired for drinkin’ and why, Lucius? Why was I drinkin? Because nothin’ ever worked right for me, and you weren’t nothing but another wrong thing in it. Everythin’ I had I gave up to raise you right and you fought me all the way no matter what I did to toughen you up. So you stand tall now boy and be a man. Fight me for the last time. This here’s long overdue.”

Wintry raises his head, realizes that at some point during his father’s seething monologue, he has fallen to his knees. The wet grass burns rather than soothes and it takes every ounce of strength he has left to stand again. When he does, the fire turns gray, then a darker red, and the hands, his father’s awful hands are poking through it and separating, like a swimmer parting water.

Tongues of flame lash from the fire, one of them narrowly avoiding Wintry’s face. Instinctively he ducks, groans and shields his eyes, wondering as he does so why his father spoke so passionately about fighting if he means to burn him alive. But the fire carries on past him until it touches the grass a few feet away and ignites. It is as if someone has touched a match to a gasoline trail poured in a perfect rectangle. The perfect shape for a boxing ring, the name of which has always puzzled him, because it isn’t a ring at all.

“This won’t…” Wintry starts to say, but gives up, the words too heavy in a mouth too weak.

“Straighten up,” his father commands, and steps through the flames. Wisps of smoke curl from the shoulders and sleeves of his denim jacket, which he shrugs off to reveal a soiled and yellowed vest beneath. The gray tangle of his chest hair streams smoke, blackens and curls. He stands three feet from his son. “Let’s go boy.” Sinewy muscles grow taut as he assumes a fighting posture, shoulders hunched slightly forward, fists raised so that only his eyes are visible above the dark work-roughened knuckles. He bounces every so slightly on his toes, an old man trying to prove he’s still as fast as he was in his glory days.

“I can’t fight you.”

“You can and will. Don’t you disappoint me again boy. I’ve come a long way to see you.”

Wintry shakes his head. “You’re dead.”

“Not tonight I ain’t. Now put ’em up and fight, you little pussy.”

Wintry looks at him, at this impossible caricature of his father, fashioned from oak and clay and ivy, and hate, and shakes his head again. “You want me to hit you. That all?”

“Be a fine start.”

Cadaver is still just a shadow and quieter than the dark. Watching.

Abruptly, there is a sound like a baseball hitting a bag of cement and darkness explodes before Wintry’s eyes. The world drops away, he falls—for a brief moment he is floundering weightless in outer space—and then the ground slams into his side, eliciting a silent cry of pain from him as burned flesh is crushed. Stars whirl across his field of vision; the wounds on his face ignite anew. The earthy smell of wet grass and the fiery agony in his skull keep him from tumbling headlong into merciful unconsciousness.

“Now,” his father says. “That’s one. You should’ve seen it comin’. Pay attention.”

Wintry tastes fresh blood on his lips. He opens his eyes wide. Field and fire are gone; his father vanished. This is no longer Milestone, but a back alley somewhere in Georgia. Wintry is lying on his side in a puddle. It’s cold, and soothing, and for a moment he relishes the relief, until he realizes there are people around him. He raises his head, into the rain of which he has only now become aware, and sees water sluicing down the groove in the barrel of a silver gun. Above it, made blurry by the rain, the gloom, the steam that billows from the vents in walls around the alley, and the proximity of the muzzle, which demands his attention, he sees a smile just as silver as the weapon. A man with a hat nods, cocks the hammer.

“Who the bitch now?” the man says and starts to pull the trigger.

Drawing from memory infinitely stronger than the pain, Wintry is on his feet, almost slipping on the slick concrete, then hunkered low and running, not away, but into the man with the gun, the man who he knows has been hanging around the gym, offering the kids little baggies, parachutes from which he promises an escape from the doomed plane of their lives, fairy dust to sprinkle on their troubles. Caught by surprise, the man does not do as he is expected to do. He does not quickly alter his aim. Instead he throws up his hands, the gun drawn back as if he intends to use it as a weapon, but by then it’s already too late. Driven by fury Wintry plows into him…

…and there is fire, and cold, and pain. And his father, looming over him.

“Then what did you see?” he says.

And Wintry remembers.

Smoggy daylight.

The man is dead, neck crushed, skull broken, three silver teeth scattered around his head, one stuck to his lower lip. Wintry is straddling him, fists joined together and raised over his head, an anvil ready to deliver another fatal blow. The children, cowering next to dumpsters, holding each other, covering their eyes at the sight of one monster killing another, stop him. He looks at them, an unspoken apology on his lips, pleading in his eyes. Glances from one terrified face to another until his skin goes cold and the blood drains from his own. There is a man there, nodding sagely as if what he has just seen is confirmation of what he has always suspected. The stranger is not as sharply dressed as the man with the fedora, the man Wintry has just beaten to a bloody pulp. His smile is not silver, but it’s just as blinding. He wears driving gloves, the leathery fingers on his right hand curled around the emaciated shoulder of one of the children, a small boy with tears carving clear lines in a grubby face. But while the boy may be deriving some solace from the stranger’s hand, there is no compassion in the man’s eyes. Only glee. And the knowledge that his efforts to contaminate these children will now go unhindered. The police won’t care enough to feign concern. The children are poor and black, after all. And the one man who assigned himself their guardian is going to be put away for the murder of a pimp.

Wintry starts to stand and when he does it is the night that greets him.

“The wrong man,” his father says. “But you been foolin’ yourself, tryin’ to make believe you been feelin’ bad about killin’ a man when all that’s been botherin’ you is not killin’ the right one.”

“What did you ever know about me?” Wintry asks, a new burning starting deep down inside him, a welcome flame that sears away some of the fear, numbs some of the pain. “What did you ever know about anythin’? Think now that…” His breath catches as new agony flares in his knees. He straightens, blinks once, twice. “Think now that you dead…think now that you know it all you can come along’n throw it in my face?”

His father is still bouncing on his feet, knuckles making creaking sounds, as if they’re encased in leather gloves. Wintry sways, staggers and rights himself, draws up to his full height, and in two unsteady steps is in his father’s face. “You know nothin’ about me,” Wintry says, and brings his right fist around in an arc, which his father watches with interest, approval, then avoids with a quick back-step. He follows the dodge with an uppercut that makes Wintry think his brain has been sent shooting from the top of his head.

Blood flies. He watches as it spurts upward and…

…“I can’t make it stop,” he moans and reaches down, his trembling fingers slick with the woman’s blood. “Jesus please…”

White light in a bedroom.

The olive-skinned woman stares at him, but the life has fled her eyes. The accusation however, hasn’t. She stares, peers deep into his soul and Wintry can hear her crying Why didn’t you see? Why didn’t you know? She is naked, lying in bed, her head propped up against the headboard, her wrists opened. She moves, jiggles, mimics life, but this is merely the effect of Wintry’s desperate attention. He moans, wails, rages at the ceiling, at whatever cruel God is impassively watching this drama unfold. She is the love of his life and he knows now the reverse was never true. Had it been, she would still be alive. Had it been, she would not have betrayed him and herself, by waiting until she was alone to die.

Then, abruptly, her mouth drops open. His moaning subsides. Frantically, he scrubs tears from his eyes, narrows them, afraid to believe he has just seen what they are telling him he’s seen.

And though no life returns to her face, she speaks, though here is where Wintry knows memory has slipped the rails. It hardly matters though, because what she says are the same words that have tailed him through life.

“You killed me.”

With a roar that is animalistic yet filled with sorrow and rage, Wintry once more regains his feet and without knowing, without caring, whether his aim is sure, he swivels on his heel and jabs hard at the air. His father is prepared and smiling a suddenly silver smile. He dodges the punch, as Wintry knew he would. It is a feint, a ploy to induce the dead man to open up into a vulnerable position. His father has grown too certain, too comfortable, depending on his son’s injuries and hesitation to make him predictable. In the old days he would have anticipated the feint. But these are not the old days.

An instant too late, he realizes his folly, tries to correct it. And in that instant Wintry unleashes a volley of punches: left jab, straight right, left hook, uppercut. His father reels, but refuses to go down, so Wintry does not stop. The anger in him rages to the surface, equals the fire in his wounds. Straight left, jab, jab, rabbit punch, right hook, uppercut…

“You fuckin’…” his father starts to say, his teeth connected by strings of black blood. Wintry steps back, watches his father try to regain his balance, and does not wait.

“Sonofabitchin’ los—”

Uppercut.

It almost takes his father’s head off.

“What…do…you…see?” Wintry says, his teeth grinding out a squeak as he punctuates every word with another punch, his arm pulling back, head jutting forward, knuckles crunching into yielding bone, skin slipping against tar-like blood. “What…do…you…see…you…son…of…a…bitch?”

“Wintry?”

The voice does not belong here, so he ignores it. There is no third man in the ring, no chief second howling advice at him, no cut man. There are no lights, no crowd, no world beyond the face that is caving in like a pumpkin but will not fall.

“Wintry, what the hell?”

“Fuckin’ palooka, fuckin’ tomato can,” his father manages to spit between punches. He raises his hands, covers, tries to block the barrage of lethal blows, but Wintry is fast now, on fire, caught up in a memory he can never change and so uses to deliver him from the loathsome presence of a man long dead, a man who didn’t need to physically return to haunt him. In the dark house inside Wintry’s head, the man he called father is a permanent resident.

“Go down,” he demands, the words slicing his throat. “Go down.”

“Wintry!” A shout, right into his ear and he knows it must be addressed, knows it must be dealt with. He prepares his last blow, the last shot, a right hook he imagines as a scythe that will slice through anything it touches. His father straightens, grins bloodily, goading him.

Wintry swings.

His fist thuds into rotten oak.

Chapter Twelve

“There’s nothing I can do for you,” the doctor tells him. “Take it to the Sheriff.”

Vess sags and his suit starts to feel like a tortoise shell, waiting to conceal his addled mind from a world that rarely seems inclined to cut it a break. “I thought…She told me to—”

Hendricks scowls. “This isn’t my business.” He starts to close the door and Vess, in an uncharacteristically bold move, makes an obstruction of his foot, which the doctor looks at as if some unpleasant rodent has just insinuated its way into his domain. Fear ripples through Vess. This is not how he behaves. He has forgotten much, but knows that what he has just done is a violation of the doctor’s sanctuary, his private quarters, and that if it suited him, the doctor could take any steps he deemed necessary to remove the foot, and its owner, and be well within his rights to do so.

So he speaks quickly. “She was shut up in a fridge, a white coffin. She wasn’t supposed to be in there. She told me. Said I needed to find someone, let them know where she was and why she was there.” He composes a sincere sorrowful look that nonetheless feels false under the glaring light from the doctor’s spectacles. “She’s a lady, Doctor, and no lady needs to be treated like that, left alone with no one to pray for her. And she doesn’t want to be there any more. Can’t blame her for that. She needs help.”

Hendricks looks up from the offending appendage keeping the door open. “What is it you think I can do for her?”

To this, Vess has no answer. All he can think of is that surely a man as distinguished and gifted as Doctor Hendricks can do more for her than he can, but before he has a chance to organize those words into a proper sentence, he feels a jarring pain in his foot and quickly withdraws it. When he looks up, the Doctor’s face is crimson.

“I have things to attend to,” he snaps. “Now take your goddamn finger and bring it to someone who can actually do something about it, assuming you didn’t swipe it from a boneyard somewhere.”

“No, sir. Oh no this wasn’t—”

The door is slammed shut hard enough to make his coat flutter. The gunshot-like echo is quickly drowned in the dense river of mist that has seeped up from the quiet earth. Vess stares at the door for a few moments, runs the tips of his fingers over the woodgrain, willing the doctor to come out again, then after a few moments, sighs and turns away.

“He wouldn’t listen.”

He has never claimed to be clever, or wise, and certainly not someone to turn to when a plan of action is required. He has drifted through these recent years with no responsibilities save one: to find the box and get home, but though he has vowed never to give up, his hope fades with every passing day.

“Find him,” the finger advises, and he smiles down at where it lays unmoving, nestled in his palm.

“Are you cold?”

“Find him. He must know.”

“It will probably be warm later today, but it isn’t now. I don’t want you to be chilly. Here,” he says and gently lays the small brown bundle inside his hat and pops it on his head. The bones are cold against his scalp. “I was distracted. I let my mind get away from me again. I should have thought of you being cold. I’m sorry.”

The finger doesn’t reply.

Vess puts a long-nailed finger to his chin and scratches at the stubble.

The Sheriff is a member of an exclusive club that gathers at the tavern on the hill. But of course the tavern burned down last night. Still, this early in the morning, perhaps that’s where the Sheriff will be, maybe picking through the remains of the place or making sure the fire is well and truly out. Barring that, he might be home, or at the jail, but one of the three sounds probable. If nothing else, it will keep Vess moving, keep him filled with that sense of purpose, keep him feeling useful.

For now, he is Kirk Vess, emissary.

Kirk Vess, soldier. And while there are no mortars detonating around him, no razor wire tugging at his clothes, no mud sucking at his feet, no bullets whizzing by, carving out the grooves in his face that he still bears today, no mustard gas tugging at his lungs, his charge seems no less important, no less thrilling.

He walks, and the small cold bundle pressing against his crown is a lock on the gate of his misgivings, holding back the tide of disappointment that has struggled to overcome him since the discovery that the metal box mired in the mud by the bank of the Milestone River was in fact just a fridge—albeit one with a body inside—and not the box he has been searching for since finding himself out of place, and out of time in this town.

Just a fridge, and not the box that can spirit him home.

“Hey, easy,” I tell him.

Wintry rounds on me. His face is a picture of hellish madness, his breathing horribly irregular as if his lungs have been replaced with sacks of dust. His eyes are wide and black, dominated by his pupils. They fix on me and the hair stands up all over my body. I suddenly feel threatened by the last man I ever thought would make me feel that way. He withdraws his fist from the guts of the oak tree and takes a step toward me. I take a corresponding step back.

“Where he at?” Wintry asks.

I’m shocked to hear him speak, but don’t dwell on it. No one ever said he couldn’t talk, just that he’d lost his words. Guess I should have given those cryptic messages of his a little more thought. “Who?”

His teeth are bared; his lips, swollen from the burns, are split. Blood laces his gums. “The old man. He made me a bargain. Where he at?”

It’s almost too much. Wintry’s not dead. Burned to within an inch of it, sure, but still up and around, and not only is he alive, he’s talking. For now I’m choosing not to think too hard about what kind of bargain he made with Cadaver, assuming that’s what happened and the big guy hasn’t just been driven crazier than a one-legged possum by his injuries. Right now the sight of those dilated eyes and the tattered state of his fists from ramming them into the oak tree, suggests it’s not at all unlikely that he’s gone off the deep end, in which case, maybe I have every right to feel threatened. Plus, there’s the small fire he set here, which for a man covered in burns, doesn’t seem like the sanest of ideas.

“I don’t know,” I answer. “I haven’t seen him since Eddie’s went up. We need to get you to a doctor.”

Wintry takes another step toward me. His arms are trembling, fists clenched so hard that blood trickles from the cuts and drips to the grass. “I put him down.”

“Wintry, take it easy, all right. It’s me, Sheriff Tom.”

That gives him pause. He stops moving but the expression of wild rage on that ruined face doesn’t change.

“It’s Tom,” I tell him, hands raised, as if they have a chance of warding off anything he might throw at me. “It’s me.”

The expression falters, and although I can’t be certain, it looks as if those eclipses in his eyes are passing. The rigidity that has held him upright, has kept his muscles taut, gradually subsides and then all trace of anger evaporates, replaced with suffering of the kind you’d expect to see on a man so badly wounded. He sags, leans, his shoulder hitting the tree hard enough to make it creak and sway back a little. Something in the branches above us lets out a startled cry. Wings beat smoky air.

“Sheriff?” he says, and blinks.

“You all right, Wintry?” I know he isn’t, but it’s all I can think to say.

“Hurts bad.”

“We need to get you to Hendricks.”

“No,” he says, with a sad shake of his head. “You need to put me in the ground.”

“Don’t be a fool. You’re still breathing.”

“I don’t want to be. Shouldn’t be.”

“Bullshit. We’re getting you to the Doc.”

This time it’s him who raises the hand.

“Okay. We can wait a sec.” Truth is, I don’t have the kind of time I’m about to spend with him, but though I may have forgotten a lot about the way people should be treated, there’s no way in hell I’m leaving this man to his suffering, not when there’s a chance something can be done about it.

I walk up close and put a palm on the tree. It feels cold, oily. “Thought for sure you went up with the tavern.”

“Got out. Ran and got myself into the river,” he tells me. “Maybe should’ve stayed under.”

“Don’t say that.”

His eyes find me. “Couldn’t save ’em.”

“I know, but that wasn’t your fault, and you did everything you could. Wasn’t you who started the fire. And you saved Brody.”

He starts to lower his head, at the same time bringing up his ravaged hands to cradle his skull, but they stop short of meeting, as Wintry no doubt remembers the pain it will cause him to do so. “Couldn’t save ’em, Sheriff. I always been tryin’ to save folks and it never works out right. Reckon…one mistake too many got me here, no matter how good the intention. Path to Hell, an’ all that.”

“Well…” A sigh. “I can’t put your mind at ease about that, Wintry, much as I’d like to. Fact is, we’re here, no matter what the reason, but I got a feeling in my gut that we still have a chance to make it out of this. Could be I’m wrong about that too, and we’re just killing time before a great big hand comes down and squashes us all. But I’m not going to just sit around and wait for that to happen, and you can’t either.”

“I was a fighter,” he says.

“You still are.”

“Naw, Tom. I’m done. Put my Daddy down and that’s all there is to that.”

I start to ask him what that means, but think better of it.

Pained eyes find me again. “Your boy all right?”

“I’m not sure. He isn’t dead, if that’s what you mean. It’s where I was heading now when we saw you.”

“We?”

“Brody’s in the truck. Been meaning to stick him in the tank, but it hasn’t exactly been calm tonight, y’know?”

“Where you goin’?”

“Hill’s house. Or at least I was. Gotta get you to Hendricks, or the hospital in Saddleback now.”

“Forget it.”

“I’m not leaving you here.”

“Then take me to the Rev’rends. Maybe I can help.”

I don’t see how he could be of help to anyone right now, but I meant what I said: I’m not leaving him. So I guess if he won’t go to the hospital, or see Doc Hendricks, then he’s coming with.

“All right, but when we’re done up there, you’re going to see the Doc if I have to haul you in there myself.”

The idea of me trying to physically force the wounded giant before me to do anything is a comical one, and neither of us can let it pass without grinning at it.

“Okay, Sheriff.”

I go to him, put my arm around his waist and let him lean on me. It’s almost more than I can handle, and the smell of singed hair and burned flesh is enough to make me choke, but I manage to keep him steady as I guide him back to my truck.

From the back seat, where not so long ago his girlfriend lay dying, Brody’s head is titled back, mouth open. Son of a bitch is catching himself a doze. I can hear him snoring from here.

We reach the truck. Wintry reaches out with an unsteady hand, braces it against the hood as I let him go and quickly open the passenger side door. “C’mon, get yourself in here.” It isn’t easy. He’s almost too damn big to fit, but that isn’t the worst of it. I can see how much he’s suffering with even the slightest of movements.

As for me, I’m fit for nothing but sleep. I’m running on empty and the idea of bypassing Hill’s house and just driving straight on to Saddleback and the hospital there is almost too tempting to resist. After all, what the fuck am I doing here anyway? Three murderers in a car. Sounds like the start of a joke. Heading for a dead priest’s house to try to convince my own son—who hates my guts—not to betray me? What difference will it make if he does? We’re both finished either way.

But I can’t ignore it. Can’t just leave. The clock might tell me it’s a new day, but Saturday night won’t end until all that’s come about because of it has been dealt with. Wintry’s alive, and still fighting. I’ve got a prisoner in the back. And I’ve still got too old pennies in my pocket from a loan I’m going to have to pay back whether I want to or not.

In the time it takes me to get back in the truck, the sun has dragged its head up over the hills, sending streams of fire through the trees. The road’s become a latticework of red-orange light. I sit there for a moment, wishing I had the kind of brain that could appreciate such a scene, but it still feels the same as it has for as long as I can remember: Like a flashlight beam washing over corpses. It doesn’t help that one of my passengers stinks of barbecued flesh.

“The hell are we doing here, Wintry?” I ask.

“Watchin’ the sun.”

It’s not what I meant, but I figure it’s as good an answer as any, so I let my hand slip away from the keys to my thigh, and I sit back, just watching that pumpkin colored light burning off the dark, chasing it underground, reflecting itself off windows that looked like dead eyes not twenty minutes ago.

Brody snorts in his sleep. It’s almost mirthful, and as I reach down, fingers touching the cold metal of the keys dangling from the ignition, I catch a flurry of movement in the rearview and my seat is nudged from behind.

In the mirror, Brody is suddenly a hell of a lot closer.

Wintry’s looking at me, agonized expression deepening.

I’m somewhat surprised to realize Brody’s no longer wearing the handcuffs, and that one of those newly liberated hands is holding something cold and sharp to my throat.

Chapter Thirteen

Hendricks tips the cup and spills what’s left of the cold tea onto the rug. Ordinarily he’s the kind of man who’d abhor such sloppiness. He’s always tried to keep a clean house, as hard as that’s been considering how long it has harbored sickness, and how many years the town has striven to shove its filth under his door. But none of that matters any longer, and there is a great sense of liberation in watching the muddy brown liquid darkening the rug. It signals the beginning and the end.

He sets the cup on the mantel, and with quaking hands, reaches up until his fingers find the cold wood stock of the Winchester rifle. The fire, though all but dead, still warms his feet as he lifts the gun free of its brackets. It’s an old weapon, meant to spend its final days as an ornament, but today it will get a chance to live again, to blast the killing shot from a cartridge, and breathe the smell of gunpowder into the stale air of this old house.

Hendricks lowers his arms, breeches the stock, his eyes moving to the couch, and the maroon stains on the towel crumpled there where the whore died. He feels a pang of regret that he couldn’t prevent her suffering, but then he thinks of Queenie, how she woke up and spun into an immediate panic-driven rage when he crept into the room an hour later, trying not to disturb her. She looked at him as if he’d come to rape her.

Tears well in his eyes.

He couldn’t save the whore.

He hefts the rifle.

But he can save his wife.

With a shuddering sigh, he makes his way upstairs. The steps are thickly carpeted and so his ascent is a silent one. The wood is old but doesn’t creak, perhaps out of respect for his grim mission.

The gun is loaded. It has always been loaded, sitting there above the fire, waiting, as if it’s known he would need it someday.

Silly. Silly thoughts. He shakes his head and a tear trickles down his cheek. He has thought of other ways, other options, but all of them have meant Queenie will be taken away from him, to die as she would die here, in agony. And if they let her stay, what choice would he have but to enter her bedroom each and every morning, his heart shattering, hope fading, each and every time she looked at him in terror.

Top step.

The landing.

He does not worry about visitors. It has been an unusually busy night, but no one will bother him now. Most people will be at church, he assumes, waiting for a priest who isn’t coming. But no one will come here, not in time to prevent what must happen here.

He opens the bedroom door.

Queenie is sitting up, eyes narrowed against the brilliant glow of morning sun through the windows. She raises a hand to shield her tired eyes so she can see him.

“Bill?”

It does her voice so well.

Her eyes find the gun. The color drains from her face.

His heart breaks and he levels the rifle at her quickly, before she can fool him into believing everything is all right, that this brief period of lucidity is the rule and not the exception. Before the parasite can use his love for her against him.

“Bill…” Her voice wavers. She stiffens, gaze dropping to the Winchester’s double barrel stare. “What are you doing?”

He eases back the hammer. “I won’t let it do this to you,” he says.

“Please…” she sobs, scooting back until she’s pressed against the ornate mahogany headboard. “Please…don’t.”

She raises her hand and it looks like a blood-drained spider, splayed for dissection.

“I love you,” he tells her. “So much.”

She wraps her arms around her head, her knees drawn up below her chin, as if she fears the roof might fall in.

“So much,” Hendricks says and brings the rifle up to his shoulder, one eye closed to ensure his aim is accurate.

“Oh God,” Queenie whimpers, and begins to pray, then drops her arm. Looks pleadingly at him. “Don’t. We can get help. You’re not—”

Hendricks pulls the trigger.

The blast deafens him as the barrel coughs fire. Through the plume of smoke he sees his wife rise up as if she’s going to leap from the bed. But just as quickly she falls and the face that looked at him with such alien terror is gone in a burst of crimson and gray. Blood and bone rains down around her. She settles on the bed, kneeling, propped up against the headboard, her arms twitching, and suddenly he is deathly afraid that the ruin above her neck will turn toward him.

He is surprised to find that what has erupted from the addled shell of her skull is not black.

He weeps, bites his lower lip hard enough to draw blood and closes his eyes. It hurts, the pain of what he’s done. It’s so much worse than what he imagined it would be, worse almost than having to look at his wife dying every day in this room, turned against him by the invader that made its home in her head, an invader that’s now splattered across the wall and can harm her no more.

“There you go,” says a voice that barely filters through the ringing in Hendrick’s ears, and his eyes fly open.

In front of him, between where he stands and the bed where his wife’s body still twitches, is an old man.

Hendricks recognizes him, but that recognition makes his presence here, now, no less baffling. No less unwelcome.

“What…?” he starts to say, but falls silent as Cadaver’s gnarled hand, the hand not holding that stubby little metal microphone to his throat, reaches out and forces him to lower the rifle so it’s pointing at the floor.

Confusion becomes fear and desperation as Hendricks realizes the old man might attempt to stop him from finishing what needs to be done. He is not a murderer, no matter how this might look to anyone who doesn’t understand what he’s lived with. This isn’t a crime. He does not deserve to go to prison. Can’t go to prison. He intends to die, to join Queenie on the other side. There are no parasites in the afterlife. All that’s left to do is to reload the rifle and set it up so he can end his own miserable existence.

Cadaver looks at him. “Damn shame that,” he says.

Hendricks swallows, backs up a step, collides with the jamb, sidesteps and moves out into the hall. “She was sick. It was eating her brain. I had to do it.”

“You’re a bit confused, friend,” Cadaver says, and follows him step for step. “Weren’t nothin’ wrong with her.”

“She was dying. She wasn’t right.”

“The cancer’s in your head, Doc,” Cadaver tells him. “Care to come downstairs so I can show you all the envelopes you’ve been hidin’ from her? All the test results and hospital correspondence that testifies to what’s gone crooked in your brain?”

“Get out of here,” Hendricks says, heat flushing across his cheeks. This is preposterous. He has never had much business with this man, and certainly hasn’t treated him. Why now he should break into his house and make such cruel and preposterous claims while his poor wife lies dead a few feet away is beyond him. He knows what those letters he keeps locked in the bureau say. He knows who the patient is and what the diagnosis was. Therefore, he knows Cadaver is lying. Thankfully, he has the means to do something about that right here in his hands. “Get out of my house and leave us alone.”

“I will. In a moment,” Cadaver says, his voice an inhuman whisper. “Despite what you might be thinkin’ right now, I didn’t come here just to enlighten you.”

“You have five seconds to leave.” To emphasize the threat, he raises the rifle.

“You haven’t reloaded.”

He’s right of course, but Hendricks stands his ground, does not lower the weapon. If it comes to it, there’s nothing to stop him from swinging the Winchester and crushing the old man’s skull. “What do you want?”

“You’re a murderer now, Doc. And as such you’ve opened yourself up to certain obligations.”

“What are you talking about?”

Cadaver glances over his shoulder, takes in the mess on the bed, clucks his tongue, then looks back to the doctor. “Call it an act of contrition.”

“I want you out of here right now.”

Cadaver reaches into the pocket of his coat and produces a set of keys. Hendricks recognizes them as the keys to his house and his Buick.

“What are you doing with those?”

“Nothin’,” Cadaver says and smiles. “You’re goin’ to drive.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

The old man’s shoulders drop a little and his expression changes to one of regret. “I don’t enjoy this in the least, you know—”

“Then leave.”

“—But if I don’t do it, then the consequences for us all would be catastrophic.”

“Get out of my fucking house.” Spittle flies from Hendricks’ lips. Terror worms its way through him. He has rehearsed this scenario a thousand times and not one of them had a mad old man standing in his way.

Cadaver raises the keys between them. “Here’s how it goes. You drive, you kill a man, and you get to go back to what you were plannin’ to do before I rudely interrupted this very intimate execution.”

“Kill a man? No.”

“What difference will it make? You’ve killed once already today, and if you really do have the stones to kill yourself, no one’ll be able to make you answer for it.”

Hendricks shakes his head. “Not in this life, maybe. But afterwards…”

Cadaver reaches out a hand, pats him on the shoulder, ignoring the fact that the muzzle of the rifle is a half-inch from his chin. The doctor feels the cold hard cylinder of the old man’s microphone digging into his flesh. Then Cadaver withdraws his hand, presses the mike to his throat again. “I don’t offer many assurances, Doc, but one I can give you is that where you’re headed, you won’t have to answer for a damned thing.”

“You can’t know that. No one could know that.” He swallows. “Who are you?” The rifle is slipping from his sweaty grip.

Cadaver’s still holding the keys in his other hand. Now he gives them a little jingle, nods as if everything has been settled. “Time to…”

“Hit the road, Jack.” Brody’s got the knife to my throat, but he’s looking at Wintry, who isn’t moving. “C’mon, beat it. And I don’t think I need to tell you what I’ll do to your friend here if you try something, right?”

Wintry still doesn’t move. I’m overcome by a peculiar sense of deja vu, then recall the standoff back at Eddie’s, how Brody kept barking commands at Wintry, which Wintry disregarded in his attempts to help the girl. I’m hoping to hell he doesn’t try that trick again. Chances are it’ll only get me killed first before the kid turns the knife to him, and though he looked fired up and capable of anything back in that field, Wintry doesn’t look like he could bat away a fly right now.

“Just…take it easy.” I raise my hands so Brody can see I’m not about to try anything. “You don’t need to do this.”

“Well, I appreciate the advice, Sheriff. Really. But if it’s all the same to you, I think I’m probably the most qualified of the three of us to decide what I need, don’t you think?” He looks back to Wintry. “The fire cook your fucking eardrums too? I said get the hell out.”

“He’s hurt bad, kid. We need to get him some help.”

“My heart bleeds.”

“He’s also the reason you’re not dead.”

“Which is the only reason I’m letting him out here. Now for the last time, big guy, move!”

Only Wintry’s eyes obey. He looks at me. Apology and regret swim like rockfish through the pools of his pain, and with excruciating slowness, he reaches for the door release.

“It’s all right,” I mutter. “It’s going to be fine.”

“That’s right,” Brody adds. “Everything’s going to be peachy if we all do as I say.”

“Hey,” I call after Wintry as he eases himself out of the truck, his legs wobbling as he looks back at me. I lick my lips. “Name that tune.”

He nods, gives me a flicker of a smile. “Good luck with that.”

“The hell does that mean?” Brody asks, annoyed, and the blade digs a little deeper into the flesh at my throat.

“An old joke. Can you ease off a bit with the knife, kid? I’m not going anywhere, trust me.”

“Trust you? Trust the guy that psycho priest said was supposed to kill me? The guy who left me with The Man with the Flaming Hands and buried my girl in a shallow grave behind a dive bar? Yeah, shit, Sheriff, we’re the next best thing to pals, you and me. Let’s not even start in on the whole you being a cop thing.”

“Just listen.”

“Go right ahead.”

“I have no interest in turning you in.”

He scoffs. “That so? Jeez, the handcuffs might not have been the best way to show that.”

“I did, sure. But not anymore. All I care about now is getting to my son in time to help him. He’s in trouble.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. Guy likes to ventilate skulls that much is bound to get his ass handed to him sooner or later. Hell, I know what that’s like. I’ll be lucky to live to see the Mexican border, and I’m all right with that. But what I can tell you right now is that I’m sure as shit not going to be run down in a backwater hole like this. So I’m taking your truck, Sheriff, and whether or not I leave you as a corpse in the dust all depends on what you do in the next five minutes.”

“You can go. I won’t stop you. I give you my word on that.”

“Good.”

“But you’re not taking the truck.”

“Say again?”

“I need it. It’s the only way I can get to Kyle.”

“Yeah well, that’s touching as all hell but you’re not going to be in much shape to do anything for the little prick if your head’s no longer attached.”

Our eyes meet in the mirror. Both of us are sweating, for different reasons. He’s getting ready to kill me; I’m getting ready to die.

“Take the truck,” I suggest then. “Just take me with you as far as Hill’s house. After that you can get gone and you’ll never hear from me again.”

“No dice.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I don’t like you.” The blade pins my Adam’s apple in place, biting the flesh there, drawing blood I can feel trickling down into my shirt.

“We did everything we could for your girl.” I’m hoping shifting the focus of the conversation might buy me some time. That’s not something I was trained to do; it’s just plain old common sense.

“It wasn’t enough.”

“Hey, you brought her here. If you hadn’t—”

“Don’t feed me that bullshit. We were here tonight because we were supposed to be here. I don’t much like the idea of not being in control of what I do, but that’s pretty much tough titty right now, right? Whatever juju you and your friends were doing up in that bar, it was what decided where we’d be, who would die and…” He shakes his head. “I’m getting out of here now.”

Trying to grab hold of a coherent thought right now is like to trying to find a licorice whip in a bucket of snakes, so I quit trying and let myself relax. He’s not getting the truck; that much I’m sure of. Everything else is up in the air, so I decide I’m going to end this, right after I ask him something that’s been on my mind since last night. “Did you kill Eleanor Cobb on purpose?”

“I didn’t kill her at all.”

“How’s that?”

“She came at us. Almost as if she was sitting there around that corner, engine idling, waiting for the first sign of headlights coming in the opposite direction so she could plow into them. Into us. Crazy old bitch.”

No, I think and close my eyes. Not crazy. Lost. Stuck with a husband who grew older every time he took someone else’s pain away, a man afraid to love her too much because he was going to die soon, whether because of his gift, or because of his sins and Hill’s regulating, it didn’t matter. She was going to lose him soon, and both of them knew it. Hell, everyone knew it. So she went first, and he followed.

“I have a favor to ask.”

The kid frowns. “What?”

“I want to turn on the radio.”

“For what? You’re getting out.”

“That’s the thing. I’m not getting out. I can’t, so I’d appreciate you letting me have the radio on. That way I don’t have to hear you breathing when you do what you have to do.”

Brody scowls at me. “Are you out of your fucking tree completely, or what?”

“No, but it looks like we’ve reached an impasse here, and you’re the one with the knife. All I want now is some music.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“Just like that.”

He holds the knife away from my throat, just enough for me to see that it’s a big son of a bitch, thick-handled, with a curved blade on one side, a serrated one on the other. The kind of knife my father used for skinning bucks.

He’s breathing quickly, sweating more. “You and Carla and the goddamn music. I don’t have this kind of time to waste.”

“So don’t.”

I reach for the stereo, leaning into the blade. Flip the switch, and sit back.

A moment passes. Wintry is a helpless shadow beyond the window.

I start to tremble all over. My guts squeeze bile into my mouth. Brody’s going to assume it’s because of him, because of what we both know he’s about to do. But it isn’t that at all. I’m not afraid of him.

It’s the goddamned stereo.

I’m afraid of the radio and what’s going to happen because I’ve turned it on, something I promised myself I’d never do again. Not in this truck. Not after the last time.

Brody curses, brings the knife back to my throat, positions the serrated side beneath my Adam’s apple but doesn’t start cutting. Cold metal teeth nip the skin. I figure maybe out of respect he’s waiting for the music to start. So we watch the stereo.

The green CD light blinks on. The disk begins to spin with a faint whirring sound.

Then at last, after what seems like years of silence, the music starts. Patsy Cline. “Crazy”.

And with a sigh that might be regret, anger, or relief, Brody begins to cut my throat.

“We’re closed.”

Confused and struggling to accept that somehow his mind has been playing tricks on him, Vess lingers in the doorway of a tavern memory tells him burned to the ground last night but his eyes swear is still here, untouched by fire on the outside, only slightly blackened on the inside. Near the far end of the room, by the bar, a svelte woman clad in gray tempers a carpet of soot and ash with short sharp smacks from a ragged looking broom. The air smells faintly of smoke.

“Of course you’re closed, but she’s looking for him,” Vess explains, but moves no further into the long narrow room. A single hurricane lamp has been set up on the counter, creating a murky twilight through which the woman moves like a delicate ghost. Thin shadows twitch spasmodically around the rows of bottles behind the bar. “The Sheriff I mean, of course. That might not have been clear. I don’t always say what I mean the way I mean to say it. Means I usually have to elaborate. I don’t—Hassak!” Annoyed with himself, he wrenches the hat from his head and tugs at it, forgetting its contents until the bones hit the floor like pebbles and skitter away from him. “Oh.” He drops to his haunches, stretches his upper body as far as he can over the threshold to avoid stepping foot into the room and therefore risking the woman’s ire. A single phalange remains maddeningly out of reach.

“Not here,” whispers the finger.

“What are you doin’?” the woman asks, and he jerks back. She has approached without his hearing her. He looks from the kernel of bone at her feet to her face and smiles involuntarily. She is without a doubt one of the most beautiful creatures he has ever seen, with her auburn hair and light green eyes. Often, on the endlessly lonely nights beneath the stars, he has dreamed—not of this woman—but of women like her. Maybe in his imaginings they were less severe looking, not so hard of eye or tight of mouth, but the basic model is the same. He finds his already muddled thoughts scrambling, his mind exploring fantasies he will never live to see made real, even if the same stars he sleeps under were to align and the woman decided to court a pauper.

“I asked what you were doin’?”

“Sorry,” he splutters, attempting a half-bow despite his posture already being an approximation of one. It’s an awkward feat that almost sends him sprawling, so he quickly steadies himself and rises, the last fragment of finger forgotten.

“I’m Kirk Vess.”

“I know who you are,” the woman responds icily. “I barred you from here, remember?”

He doesn’t, but nods.

“What do you want?”

“A woman’s finger brought me here,” he says, nodding pointedly at the phalange two inches from her shoe. “To find the Sheriff.”

“A finger?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“Whose is it?”

“I don’t know. Just…a woman. A pretty lady, I’m guessing. She…she was in a fridge.”

The barmaid’s gaze is penetrating. Vess feels himself growing warm from the inside out, the color rising to his cheeks.

“A fridge?”

“Yes, like a white coffin or… They put her in it as if it was a boat.”

Gracie frowns. “What?”

Vess squints, fearing his thoughts are squirming free of him and desperately tries to catch them. He runs the tips of his index fingers over his eyebrows and takes a breath. “Stuck in the mud,” he says slowly. “That’s where she was. I thought it was the box but it was only a fridge. Poor lady.” He clucks his tongue. “She wants me to find the Sheriff. I tried Doctor—”

“Understood,” Gracie says, her expression softening just a little. “You found a body.”

Vess nods eagerly. “Her finger brought me here.”

“Not here,” whispers the finger. “Not here.”

“I know he isn’t,” Vess whispers back, eager to silence the dead woman. Immediately he feels guilty for thinking her an intrusion into this unexpected scene, and grimaces. “May I…collect them?”

Gracie nods. “The bones? Go ahead.”

He does, stroking each segment by way of an apology before depositing them into his pocket.

“The Sheriff ain’t here,” Gracie informs him, and heads back to the bar. “But chances are he will be before long.”

Vess smiles. “I’ll come back. I’ll bring the finger.”

“You could wait.”

“Yes.”

“Want a drink while you do?”

Vess immediately begins to question what he thinks she said, for he has never been welcome here, or any other bar for that matter, with the exception of the kinds of places where no one with any sense would go, places where people still get killed over cheating at cards and old men in expensive suits sit in shadowy corners discussing the undoing of their enemies. Vess has never been welcome anywhere, which is why he exists to be elsewhere. With that in mind, he decides jumping at what he is not convinced was an invitation is not the wisest recourse, so he doesn’t, simply stays where he is and grins uncertainly.

“Well?”

“Think I heard wrong. Sorry. My hearing of things is like my speech. Trying to explain is—”

“Come join me for a drink while you wait.”

The smile almost splits his face, and certainly adds deep wrinkles where there were none before. He almost floats across the floor to the bar, so elated does he feel by this offering of kindness from so magnificent a lady. A drink in a place he should not be, in the company of a woman he should not know, stews his mind further, until it sends tremors of confused pleasure though his limbs.

“Sit.” She indicates a stool, and he takes it quickly.

Gracie produces two shot glasses from beneath the bar, and tucks a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Thought the place burned,” Vess says. “There was a lot of light up here. Must have been imagining things. I do that sometimes, especially when my mind gets tired.”

“You weren’t imaginin’ things.” She fills the glasses to the top, slides one before him. “It burned all right.”

“Oh. Wasn’t too bad then.” He sips the drink, savoring it and the moment. Accustomed as he is to cheap wine, the bourbon tastes like tears from Heaven. His mouth buzzes, tongue pleasantly scalded by the liquor. He coughs. “Bit of black and burnt, but still all right.”

“I was bored,” Gracie says, crossing her elbows and leaning on them, her face close to his, chin hovering above their drinks. “So I started to rebuild it. I’d rather be stuck in a room, no matter how miserable it might be, than a hole full of charred wood.”

He raises his glass in agreement and takes another sip.

“Not that I intend to be here for much longer.” She raises her own glass, starts to drink. Vess watches her, follows the single drop of bourbon that escapes her lips, winding its way down over her chin and throat until it disappears into the opening of her blouse. A new kind of heat flourishes within him and he grins.

“I’m movin’ on,” she announces, with obvious excitement. “After all these years in this goddamn town, I’m gettin’ out, leavin’ all these wretched people with their wretched lives behind.”

Vess’s grin falters. He wonders if she includes him in her estimation of the townsfolk, but then reminds himself that he is an outsider, a mere visitor, and a woman as pretty and smart as the barmaid would surely know this.

“Can I see the bones?” she asks then, slamming her glass down on the counter hard enough to make Vess jump.

“Oh yes. She might even talk to you,” Vess enthuses, and scoops the bones from his pocket, scattering them on the bar like a voodoo woman about to tell a fortune.

Gracie studies the bones for what seems to Vess to be a considerable amount of time, her expression unreadable until she smiles and looks up at him. The feel of her studying him is not an unpleasant one, and he is abruptly cast into those green eyes as helplessly as a man bound to an anchor tossed into the sea.

His drink no longer seems important.

He is a traveler, and in her eyes, he is seeing a place he has his whole life been forbidden from visiting. He will not, cannot blink.

“That’s hers all right,” Gracie says, and though she moves back a step, she does not look away, and for that Vess is grateful. “Not that I can really tell from the bones.” She chuckles and the sound is magical, like pipe music to wounded ears. “I know because I put her there.” His smile grows. He is not really paying attention to the words, only the lush red lips that form them and the piercing eyes that hold him in place.

“Not here, no not here!” the finger seems to wail from the surface of the bar, which is now oddly slick beneath his fingers. He ignores the cry, watches his world jar, once, twice, and believes it is his heart, which feels like it may explode.

Somehow, it starts to rain inside the bar. The shadows thicken and reach for him, attempting to steal away this delightful interlude. He resists, struggling to hold on.

“Can’t always ssssay it right,” he admits. “Werrdener…”

The barmaid’s scent intoxicates him. He does not want this to end, and is saddened a great deal to realize, as crimson tears flow copiously down his face, his skull deflating under the weight of the long metal pipe Gracie is bringing down upon his head like a woodsman cleaving a rotten stump, that it already has.

Chapter Fourteen

Static shrieks from the radio.

Hands follow.

“What the fuck?” The knife is gone from my throat, tearing off a strip of my flesh as Brody propels himself away from the pale tendrils of mist that are snaking their way free of the CD slot in the car stereo. “What the fuck, man?”

I’m no less scared. While Brody’s going to get hung up on the whole unnatural or supernatural angle here (maybe it reminds him of something from a horror flick he caught at the Drive-In with his high school sweetheart), this is a repeat of a moment I have been trying to avoid since the night Jessica died.

Brody claws at the door. “Unlock it for God’s sake!”

It isn’t locked. At least it wasn’t, but maybe she locked it.

The hands spread out, push further into the car, the tips brushing against my chin, making me flinch, bringing me dangerously close to soiling myself. It’s cold in here now. I can see my breath. I can see Brody’s breath too, pluming over my shoulder.

“Open this goddamn door!”

The mist separates, the CD slot gapes obscenely, lit from within by white smoky light. The black plastic cradle keeping it in place begins to crack. And all the while Patsy Cline keeps singing “Crazy” at the top of her lungs, loud enough to make my eardrums vibrate with pain. I feel a hand on my shoulder and bat at it in terror, but it’s Brody, trying to pull me through the seat. “What is it? What did you do?”

“It’s our song,” I tell him.

He starts kicking at the door.

She won’t let it open.

Her face emerges sideways, slipping impossibly from the too-narrow gap, her features distorting, forming and reforming, coming apart like windblown cigarette smoke only to be whole again before the eye can track the movement. There is nothing but a rope of smoke connected to her head as it rises like a tethered balloon from the CD slot. Her face settles. The face I loved. A face I am terrified to see looming over me now.

Brody screams at the sight of it, renews his assault on the door.

“Oh shut your trap,” Jessica commands and the door Brody is so desperately trying to break open is suddenly blown from its hinges with a tortured shriek of metal, clear into the trees on the other side of the road where it smacks against the trunk of a pine, falls, and is still. Brody doesn’t wait to see whether she intends him to be the next object thrown at high velocity from the car. He hurries out into the road, and straight into the bruised, burned and bloody knuckles of Wintry’s fist.

The kid drops and hits the ground hard.

“Can I turn this down?” I ask, desperately trying to avoid looking at that blue mask hovering three inches from my face.

“Why are you shakin’?”

“It was a close call with the kid, that’s all. I guess I’m not as tough as I used to be.”

“Right.” Even though the expression is made up mostly of dust, smoke, and air, and, for all I know, my own memories of her, the doubt sweeping across it is all too clear. I let out a long low sigh. The kid’s down for a while, thank God, and Wintry’s holding on hard as he can. But in my frightened mind I can still hear a clock ticking, still feel those cold pennies in my pocket. I don’t have time to hang around talking to my wife’s ethereal head, no matter how sentimental that song makes me feel.

“Looks like quite a mess you’ve made for yourself,” my wife says.

“Looks like it, yeah.”

“It didn’t have to be this way you know.”

I smile, but it’s a cold one. “Yeah, I do, but please spare me the list of reasons why. I don’t have time to hear ’em.”

The smoke coils in my vision. I’m tempted to close my eyes but that only leads to the dreadful thought of what she might do to open them, so I stare at the dashboard, at the undulating tendril that’s keeping her tied to the mangled stereo. Somehow, it’s still playing that song.

“You’re still actin’ the fool, Tom. Still pretendin’ life will eventually work out just fine if you keep walkin’ through it with blinkers on. What you can’t see can’t affect you, right?”

I say nothing. Have nothing to say.

“You shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised that it’s come to this.”

“I’m not. Just didn’t figure it would happen so soon is all.”

“What wouldn’t happen so soon? Do you even know what this is?”

I shrug, still can’t look at her.

“It’s not Hell,” she says softly. “It’s not damnation other than the one you condemn yourself to. The Hell inside yourself. Shun love and ignore hate, hurt people and dismiss those who truly need you…that’s the best way to find yourself stopped at an intersection in Milestone lookin’ up at a traffic light that hasn’t worked in ten years, without any idea how you got there. When did you get here, Tom? Do you even remember?”

I nod slowly. Sure I remember, but I don’t want to. Thankfully, it’s a question that requires no answer, because she already knows it. What I can remember without fear is the woman who worked in the library in its last year of service, the woman who at first sight encompassed every adolescent fantasy I’d ever had of the quiet bookish brunette, hair tied back, spectacles perched on her nose to downplay the sultry beauty you knew in your heart was there. But Jessica was so much more than that. Within ten minutes of getting up the courage to talk to her, I realized she was way out of my league, not only with her looks, but with her frightening intellect and resolve. She was witty, clever, and iron-willed. The mating ritual was of little interest to her. No let’s do dinner, then play phone tag until I trust you enough to fall into your bed. She was stuck in a small town that died a little every day. Her job was in danger. She needed a man to love her and provide for her, but railed at the slightest suggestion that it meant she would stay at home and play the good wife. No. She intended to study, paint and make enough money so she could get out of Milestone, maybe go back to school, and someday teach. A damsel in distress she certainly was not. A homemaker only under duress. Aprons would be worn not to bake cakes or apple pies, but to prevent the spatter from her paint from ruining her clothes. She was a bohemian, and if a prospective mate couldn’t understand that, or considered it something that would pass once she discovered the joys of Betty Crocker and Martha Stewart, then they would be sorely disappointed.

She frightened me, she enthralled me, and I knew the day I left her company for the first time and stepped out into noon sunshine that looked a little brighter, a little cleaner than ever before, that I had to have her.

She frightened me then; she frightens me now, for the same reason: She was always right.

“I’m sorry.”

The smoke clucks its tongue. “Too late for that, and I’m not the one you should be apologizin’ to, unless you’re goin’ to play the same game with me that you’re playin’ with Kyle.”

“I’m not—”

“Save it.” Her face whorls, and reforms right in front of my face, close enough for us to kiss. It’s hard to see her as my wife, so I avert my eyes once more. There’s no denying where the voice comes from though.

God, I still love her.

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

I shrug and it’s pitiful. “There was never a good time.”

“Bullshit. It would have required too much of you. It would have meant you’d have had to sit your ass down and talk to him like a man. You’d have had to face up to somethin’ for the first time in your life, but like everythin’ else, you turned your back on it. Just like you turned your back on me.”

“I didn’t—”

“What else do you need to lose before you see what you’ve done to yourself and the ones you love? How many more people need to die before the sun breaks through the clouds around that thick head of yours?”

“I have to go.”

“No.”

“I have to help him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s…because I have to.”

“It’s too late.”

I slam a fist on the steering wheel. “It isn’t, and don’t you say that.” Panic courses through me. Like I’ve said, she’s always right, and right now, more than ever, I don’t want her to be.

Again her face falls an inch or two, trying to stay level with mine. “Why do you care? Why now is it so important that you race to his rescue?”

“I don’t have to explain it.” Because I can’t, and I don’t want to have to think about it. “He’s my son.”

“He doesn’t think of himself as your son. I don’t think of him as your son, and on any other day you wouldn’t either. Do you think this will save you?”

I give a bitter chuckle at that. “Save me? From what? Myself? This town? That old bastard with his coins? There’s no salvation here and you know that as well as I do.”

“Then why fight it?”

“I don’t know. For Chrissakes I don’t know, all right? Why does there have to be a reason? Would you prefer I just sit here listening to you while whatever happens to our son happens?”

“Why not? It’s what you’ve been doin’ your whole life.”

“I don’t need to listen to this.”

“Then why did you turn on the stereo?”

I scowl and reach for the keys. “To get rid of the kid.”

“You’re lyin’.”

“You think so? Take a look around. The kid’s out there on the road, not here with a goddamn Rambo knife to my throat. That’s why I turned you on…”

I feel her smile and the urge to share it is almost overwhelming, but I kill the compulsion by reminding myself that for whatever reason, she’s trying to keep me here.

“I’m going, and I’m switching this thing off.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t have time to talk anymore, that’s why.”

A sad sigh. “Nothin’ ever changes in your world, does it Tom? The whole town could wake up buried under a hundred feet of ice and you’d still plod along with that badge pinned to your chest, swearin’ to protect while watchin’ them all freeze. And an hour later, it’d be forgotten, locked away for good in that holdin’ pen in your skull.”

I start the ignition. The truck rumbles to life. Wintry’s shadow eclipses the light through the passenger side window, where he stands, and waits, aware that the business in here is not something he wants, or has any right, to be a part of.

Finally, I look at her face, into her eyes. Death has made her one of her own sketches, a pale imprint on blue paper. Only the eyes look alive, miniature galaxies swirling in pockets of deep space.

“I don’t know any other way,” I confess, and quickly look away.

“There’s always another way, Tom, but you’ve never been interested or tuned in enough to seek it out. Your way suits you fine, and that’s why you’re here now, waitin’, maybe secretly hopin’ it is too late when you reach Kyle so you won’t have to shoulder the burden of what follows. You’re your own puppet, Tom, even if today, someone else is pullin’ your strings.”

“The hells’ that supposed to mean? No one’s pullin’ my strings but me.”

“There are two pennies in your pocket that say different. Sometimes, givin’ selfish people what they want is enough to bring a town to its knees, as it will bring you to your knees.”

“Wintry, come on,” I yell out at him, disgusted by the quaver in my voice. I lunge forward, through the smoke, through her, and gasp. She feels like winter mist on my skin. I kill the stereo.

“You should have told him you didn’t kill me,” she says sadly.

“I know. There’s a lot I should have done.”

“That you didn’t know how isn’t good enough. Apathy is sometimes worse than murder.” She starts to fade, dissipating like the Cheshire cat, only it isn’t her smile that remains clear while she dissolves, but her eyes. “You should have told him the truth.”

“Wintry…”

He half-raises a hand in acknowledgment, and opens the door, then slowly, painfully, eases himself into the seat. “We goan leave the kid?”

“Yeah.”

Wisps of smoke curl from the broken stereo. I sense him looking at it, then at me, and I put the car into gear to get us moving. I roll down my window. The fresh air cures the nausea.

“They ain’t always right, you know,” Wintry says.

“I know. But she was.”

We head for Hill’s house, Brody a dark dwindling shape in the rearview.