Currency of Souls

Chapter One

Eddie’s Tavern.

This is where I come to try to forget my pain. There’s so much of it here that isn’t mine, it should make me feel better, but it doesn’t.

And yet here I am, same as always. Saturday night at Eddie’s.

There’s no neon sign out front, nothing to advertise this as a place to come drown your sorrows, and that makes sense because sorrows aren’t drowned here, not all the way, only pushed under and held for a while.

The moon is a nicotine-stained fingernail as I step out of my truck, ponder the feel of my gut straining against my belt, and ease the door shut behind me. I’m getting fat, and I suppose as they say, like death and taxes, I’m shit out of luck if I expect to be surprised by it. Man eats as much chili as I do without chasing it down with a few laps around the barn, well… weight doesn’t evict itself.

I start on the path to the tavern door and see pale orbs behind the smoked glass turn in my direction. Nothing slips past these people, quiet or not. The door doesn’t creak, though it’s old enough to have earned that luxury. Instead it sighs. I sigh too, but I don’t share the door’s regret. For me, I’m just glad to be out of the cold and among friends, even if they mightn’t look at me the same way. Even if, in the dark of night when sleep’s a distant memory, I really don’t think of them the same way either.

All the usual folks are here.

The pale willowy woman with the figure that could have been carved from soap, that’s Gracie. She inherited this place from her Daddy, and considers it less a gift than another in a long line of curses from a man who dedicated his life to making hers a living hell. Leaving her the bar was his way of ensuring she’d stay right where he wanted her, in a rundown hole with no prospects and surrounded by friends not her own. Gracie has no love for anyone, least of all herself. She’s still got her looks, though they fade a little every day, and she’d get out of this place in a second if she thought the city would take her. I’m sure it probably would. Take her, grind her up, and spit her out to die on some dogshit-encrusted sidewalk a thousand miles from home. Chances are a pretty girl like that with little world experience would end up missing, or turning tricks in the back office of some sleazy strip-joint to keep her in heroin. No, a girl like Gracie is better off right where she is, polishing glasses that stay so milky with grime you almost expect to see smoke drift out of them when she picks them up. She might be miserable, but I figure that’s her own doing. Her overbearing father’s influence is just an excuse. He’s dead, after all, and buried out back. There’s nothing to stop her selling this dive, except maybe a burning need to prove herself to his ghost.

At the bar sits a naked man. That’s Cobb. Cobb says he’s a nudist, and is waiting for the rest of the colony to come apologize for treating him so poorly. What they did to him is unclear, but he’s been waiting almost three years now so most of us expect he’s going to die disappointed. Cobb has big ears, a wide mouth and a line of coarse gray hair from the nape of his neck to the crack of his bony ass. He looks like a hungover werewolf caught in mid-transformation, and knows only four jokes. His enthusiasm doesn’t diminish no matter how many times he tells them.

“Sheriff…” he says with a wide grin.

Here comes the first of them.

“A sailor and a penguin walk into a bar…”

“You’ll have to take the back door,” I respond, feeding him his own punch line.

“Shit… I told you that one?”

“Once or twice.”

Two stools down, sits Wintry McCabe, a six foot six giant of a man who could probably blow the whole place clear into the next state if he sneezed. He’s mute though, so you’re shit out of luck if you’re waiting for a warning. Gracie asked him once how he’d lost his voice and that’s how we all found out that even if he could talk, chances are he wouldn’t say very much. Near the top of the Milestone Messenger (our weekly rag), in the tight white space beneath the headline, he wrote, in blue ink and childish handwriting: WENT UP THE RIVER. COST ME MY WORDS. Then he smiled, finished his drink and left. After he’d gone, we speculated what the Messenger’s new and intriguing sub-header might mean. Cobb reckons Wintry lost his tongue in a fishing or boating incident. Florence thinks he did something that affected him spiritually, something that forced him to take a vow of silence as repentance. Cadaver believes Wintry’s done hard time, was “sent up the river” and someone in there relieved him of his tongue. I favor this theory. He looks like a man with secrets, none of them good. But Wintry has never volunteered any clarification on the subject; he hasn’t written a message since, and he seldom opens his mouth long enough or wide enough for us to see if that tongue’s still attached. If he can’t communicate what he wants with gestures, he goes without. That’s the kind of guy he is. But while it remains a mystery why he’s mute, we at least know why he’s called “Wintry”. He got the name on account of how he lives in an old tarpaper shack on the peak of Grable Mountain, the only mountain within 100 miles that has snow on the top of it no matter what the season. As a result, even when there’s suffocating heat down here in the valley, Wintry’s always dressed in thick boots, gloves, and a fur-lined parka, out of which his large black hairless head pokes like a turtle testing the air. Tonight, he’s testing a Scotch, neat. And while may not be able to talk, he sure likes to listen.

He’s listening to Florence Bright now. She’s sitting sideways on her stool, her pretty ankle-length dress covering up a pair of legs every guy in town dreams about. She’s wearing a halter-top to match, the flimsy cotton material hiding another pair of attributes every guy in town dreams about. Flo is the prettiest gal I know. Reminds me a little of Veronica Lake in her heyday, right down to the wavy blonde hair and dark, perfectly plucked eyebrows. Florence has the dubious honor in this town of being both a woman in high demand, and a woman feared, but guys get drunk enough they forget they’re afraid of her. Everyone thinks she murdered her husband, see, and while I don’t know for sure whether she did or not, it’s enough to keep me from sidling up to her in my sad little lovelorn boots. Wasn’t much of a justice system here at the time, and I did what I could investigation-wise but wasn’t a badge inside the city limits or out that could pin the blame on Flo. Nothing added up, and I have to wonder how many male—hell, maybe even female—cops were just fine with that. Wonder how many she sweet-talked into forgetting themselves. After all, we had a woman obviously abused by her husband, then said abuser turns up not only dead but so dead even the coroner coughed up the last bit of grub he’d poked into his mouth when he saw the body. Something wasn’t right. That, or someone didn’t do something they should’ve. More than once I’ve put myself under that particularly hot spotlight but quit before I get too close to things I’d rather not see.

So that’s Flo, and looking at her there, the last thing you’d ever call her is a murderer. Of course that might just mean she’s cold-hearted. But whether or not she knifed Henry Bright to death, doused his body in kerosene and lit the match, I have to admit I get a stab of envy every time she laughs and touches Wintry’s elbow. Long time since I made a woman laugh. Long time since I did anything to a woman but make her weep.

I take a seat at one of three round tables spread out between the bar and the door. The abundance of space and lack of furniture make the place seem desolate and empty no matter how many customers it has, though the seven people here now, myself included, is about as busy as it gets. Except on Saturday nights, of course, when we expect one more. The poor lighting, courtesy of two plain bulbs hooded by cracked green shades, does nothing but spotlight dust and crowd everybody’s table with shadows.

At the table across from me, a young man in a plaid shirt sits sweating and scowling at me through his dark hair. One hand holds his bottle of beer in a white-knuckle grip; the other is under the table. Probably on a gun. That’s Kyle Turner, and he’s wanted me dead since the night I murdered his parents. That was last summer. Every Saturday night since, the kid’s been in here, trying to talk himself into using that Magnum .357 of his to ventilate my skull, but so far he hasn’t been able to draw it out from under the table. So he just sits there glaring, and has Gracie drop the beer down to him at his table so he doesn’t have to get up and reveal the piece he thinks I don’t know about.

Someday he might get the guts to do it, and they’ll probably kick him out of here, but only for disturbing the peace, not because he’ll have disturbed my brain with a few warm rounds of the kind not meant to be served in bars. I admit I get a bit of a kick out of seeing him though, and if he weren’t there I’d surely miss him. His hatred of me makes me feel a little like Wild Bill Hickock.

I know nodding a greeting at him will only aggravate him further, so instead I look the other way, away from the bar, back toward the door and the table shoved right up against the wall to the right of it. Cadaver is sitting there, lost in the shadows, though I smelled him as soon as I came in. I didn’t offer him a greeting because you’re not supposed to unless he offers you one first. It’s a tradition that precedes my patronage here, so I honor it without knowing why.

“Evenin’, Tom,” he says, in that voice of his that sounds like someone dragging a guitar pick over a bass string. He’s got a box where his larynx would be, which I guess is the cost of sixty years of smoking, and his face has sunken so deep you can almost see the contours of his chipped fillings beneath the skin. He’s got a cataract in one eye, the lid is pulled halfway down over the other, and an impressively wide scar bisects his face from forehead to cleft of chin. He’s a sight, and knows it, which is why he favors the dark, where he counts the pennies from his pocket and places them in rows, over and over and over again, until the sound of those coins meeting each other starts to feel like a measurement of time.

An ugly man, for sure, but damn he smells so good he makes me ashamed of my cheap cologne. Makes me wish I’d remembered to buy a nice bottle of Calvin Klein or some such fragrance. Something expensive. You can tell a lot by the way someone smells. Cadaver uses his to hide the smell of death.

“Evening,” I tell him back, and feel more than see his twisted smile.

“Wonder who’s drivin’ tonight,” he says, each word separated by a crackling swallow. It’s wrong of me to say it, but I wish he wouldn’t talk. Man without a human voice is better staying quiet, and I know that grinding electro-speak gives everyone else the creeps too.

“Wish I knew,” I say, and turn to the bar. “Gracie?”

“Comin’ up.” She tosses on the bar the soiled rag she’s been using to wipe the counter. “Hot or cold?” This is her way of asking if I want beer or whiskey. A strand of her auburn hair falls across her eyes as she waits for my reply, and she whips it back with such irritation, I’m suddenly glad she doesn’t have a kid to use as a piñata for her misery.

“Both,” I answer, because it’s that kind of night.

As if I’ve asked her to wash my damn car, she sighs and sets about getting my drinks.

I drop my gaze to the mirror behind the bar and see Wintry raise a hand. His reflection waggles its fingers, keeps waggling them like a spider descending a strand of silk, until the hand is out of sight, then he nods twice and goes back to his drink.

“I heard,” I say to his broad expanse of back. “We could do with it.” I glance over at the kid, see his puzzled expression surface through the anger before he catches me looking and quickly goes back to scowling. His arm tenses, and I wonder briefly if I’m going to feel a bullet rip through my crotch, or my knee. The way that gun is angled makes me wish he’d just take the damn thing out and go for a headshot. But I guess he wants to make me suffer as much as possible.

“Wintry says rain’s coming,” I explain, careful to make it seem like a general announcement so the kid doesn’t decide I’m trying to make a fool out of him by implying he didn’t get it.

“Started already,” Cadaver drones from the shadows.

“Weatherman says it’s goin’ to be a storm,” Cobb intones, his buttocks wriggling as a shudder passes through him. “Hope I can bed down in here if it does.” This last is directed at Gracie as she rounds the bar, a bottle of Bud in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other.

“This ain’t a boardin’ house, Cobb,” she says over her shoulder, puffing air up to get the errant lock of hair out of her eyes. I’m struck by the sudden urge to brush it out of her face for her, but she’d likely jerk away and tell me to mind myself, and she’d be right of course. Long ago I learned that men and women’s ideas of polite isn’t always the same, and never will be as long as we guys feel compelled to consult our dicks every time a woman walks into the room. “But there are plenty of empty places on Winter Street. I’m sure Horace and Maggie’d show you someplace to lay your bones. Hell, if you dog Kirk Vess’s heels, I bet he’ll lead you to shelter.”

Vess is our town lunatic, a card Gracie has played in the past just to get on Cobb’s nerves.

“I’m sure.” Cobb’s repulsion at the idea is clear, but everyone here knows he’s fighting a losing battle if he thinks he’ll get Gracie to cave. “I can pay you though.”

Gracie puts down my drinks, brushes dust off my table and looks into my eyes for the tiniest of seconds, enough to let me know that the superhuman precognitive sense unique to women has alerted her to what I’d just a moment ago been considering. And the message is: Lucky you didn’t.

She heads back to the bar, a lithe woman dressed in drab clothes designed to make her look less attractive. I’ll never understand that, but then again, the day men understand women is the day we may as well go sit on our plots and wait to be planted.

Or maybe I’m just not that bright at the back of it all.

“You can pay me by puttin’ some clothes on,” she tells Cobb. “Maybe if you were covered up, you wouldn’t need to fret about the rain.”

“I’ll put you up,” Cadaver offers in his robot voice, and Cobb turns slowly around, his bare ass making squeaking sounds against the top of the stool. I wonder how much Pine-Sol Gracie uses in any given month on that chair alone. It’s the only one she allows him use. Just that chair, or his squeaky ass goes on the floor.

There’s a look of consternation on Cobb’s heavily bearded face when he turns fully around, his small blue eyes squinting into the shadows, as if seeing Cadaver will lessen his distaste at the idea of spending the night with the man. His chest is a mass of silvery curls, thickest along his sternum where it leads down over a swollen belly to a frenzied explosion of pubic hair, from which a small stubby penis pokes out. We’ve been seeing Cobb and his tackle for three years now. We should be used to it, and I guess for the most part we are, but every time his dick eyeballs me, I want to ask him if chestnut leaves are considered clothing by whatever governing body inflicted his nakedness on us in the first place. But I keep my mouth shut and avert my eyes, to the kid, who’s doing a good job of looking like he may rupture something at any minute, and finally focus on my drink.

There’s a thumbprint on the shot glass too large to be mine.

“That’s mighty decent of you,” Cobb says eventually.

“Don’t mention it.”

Over Cadaver’s pennies, I can almost hear the hamster wheel spinning in the nudist’s head. Then he says, “But you know what…? I’ll just call my wife. She won’t mind comin’ to get me. Not at this hour. Not at night.” He claps his hands as if he’s just stumbled upon the cure for world hunger. “Hell, she’ll have heard there’s goin’ to be a storm, so she’ll have to come get me, right? No woman would make her man walk in this kinda weather.” He’s looking for support now, and not for the first time I envy Wintry’s muteness, because everyone here knows that getting Mrs. Cobb to come get her husband isn’t going to be as easy as he seems to think. The day he abandoned clothes was the last time anyone saw Eleanor Cobb in town. Naturally, we worried, but a few weeks after her husband’s ‘unveiling’ I checked on her. She’s fine, just laid up with a terminal case of mortification that I don’t see ending until Cobb starts wearing shorts, or that chestnut leaf. Why she stays with him at all is another one of those mysteries.

“You could always start walkin’ now before the worst of it hits,” Flo chimes in. Her voice is husky, perfectly befitting a crime noir femme fatale. It makes my hair stand on end in a good way. “No one ever drowned in the rain.”

Cobb ignores her. He’s got a drink before him and intends to finish it. He squeaks back around to face the bar. “Can I use the phone?” he asks Gracie, and this at least she’s willing to allow, even though it’s a payphone and no one should need permission. But this is Gracie’s place, and things run differently here. Stone-faced, she scoops one of the nudist’s dollars off the bar, feeds it into the till, and drops four quarters into his outstretched palm. With a grin of gratitude, Cobb hops off his stool and heads out to the small hallway that leads to the payphone, and the restrooms beyond.

No one says anything.

There is silence except for the clink of Cadaver’s pennies.

A few moments later, Cobb starts swearing into the phone.

No one is surprised.

I raise my glass with a muttered: “To Blue Moon,” in honor of the man who can’t be here, and take the first sip of whiskey. It cauterizes my throat. I hiss air through my teeth. Flo goes back to talking to Wintry, leans in a little closer, one leg crossed over the other, one shoe awful close to brushing against the big black man’s ankle, and there’s that envy again. But I remind myself that she’s probably only cozying up to him because he’s mute, and therefore unlikely to ever ask her about her past. For the second time in a handful of minutes, I’m covetous of Wintry’s condition.

Cobb slams down the phone, curses and stalks back to the bar, his flaccid tool whacking against his thigh. I close my eyes, pray my gorge can handle another night of the old man’s exhibitionism and concentrate on refilling my glass.

“She weren’t there,” he mutters before anyone has a chance to ask, and slaps a hand on the counter. “Fill me up, Gracie,” he says. “And make it same as Tom’s. It’ll keep me warm on the walk home.”

I almost expect Cadaver to remind Cobb of his offer, but Cadaver is ill, not dumb. He says nothing, just keeps on counting those pennies.

“You make it sound like you can just walk outta here as you please,” Gracie says scornfully. “You take a blow to the head, or is all the drink just makin’ you dumber?”

“He ain’t the boss of me,” Cobb says, scowling like a sulky teen. There’s no passion in his voice, no truth to his words. Everyone here knows that, just like we know a little brave talk never hurts, as long as you only do it among friends.

“You reckon he’ll show up tonight, Tom?” Flo asks, twirling a lock of her hair around a fingernail the color of blood.

“I reckon so.”

She sighs, and turns her back on me. Flo wants hope, wants me to tell her that maybe tonight will be special, that maybe for the first Saturday night in years, Reverend Hill isn’t going to come strolling in that door at eleven o’ clock, but I can’t. I realized a long time ago that I’m a poor liar, and despite the gold badge on my shirt, no one should look to me for hope, or anything else.

From the corner comes a sound like a dead branch snapping. It’s Cadaver clucking his tongue. Seems a coin slipped off the top of one of his miniature copper towers.

Gracie goes back to pretending she’s cleaning the bar.

Cobb grumbles over his beer.

Occasionally I catch Wintry looking at my reflection in the mirror. What I see in his dark eyes might be concern, even pity, but if I was him, I wouldn’t be bothering with the mirror, or me, not when Flo’s breathing in his ear. Besides, I’m not looking for sympathy, only solutions, and I don’t reckon there’s any to be had here tonight or any other.

The heat from the kid’s glare is reliable as any fire on a winter’s night.

These are my friends.

Chapter Two

The clock draws out the seconds, the slow sweep of the narrow black minute hand unable to clear the face of a decade’s worth of dust. When at last it reaches eleven, with no sign among us patrons that any time has passed at all, there comes the sound of shoes crunching gravel.

Everyone tries real hard not to watch the door, but there’s tension in the air so tight you could hang your washing off it.

Reverend Hill enters, and with him comes the rain, and not the spatters Cadaver announced, but a full-on tacks-poured-on-a-metal-roof downpour. Bastard couldn’t have timed it better, though if it inspires an impromptu sermon from him, he’ll have trouble getting anyone to believe God is responsible, no more than we’d buy that the silvery threads of rain over his shoulder are strings leading to the hand of a divine puppeteer.

For him, the door groans as he shuts out the storm.

He doesn’t pause to regard each of us in turn like any other man would, gauging the company he has to keep, or counting the sinners. Instead, that confident stride carries his lean black-clad self right on up to the bar, where Gracie’s stopped cleaning and watches him much the same way the kid at the next table is watching me. Except, of course, Kyle’s not looking at me right now. All eyes are on the holy man.

The town of Milestone has rotten luck, much like the people who call it home, though to be fair, over time we may have grown too fond of blaming the things we bring upon ourselves on chance, or fate. It’s more likely that bad people, or folks with more to hide than their own towns can tolerate gravitate here, where no one asks questions and they carry their opinion of you in their eyes, never on their tongues.

When Reverend Hill came to town, filling a vacancy that had been there for three years, he brought with him the hope that spiritual guidance might chase away the dark clouds that have hung over the people of Milestone since Reverend Lewis used his belt, a rickety old chair, and a low beam in his bedroom to hasten his rendezvous with his maker.

But in keeping with the town’s history of misfortune—or whatever you want to call it—what Hill brought to Milestone wasn’t hope, but fear.

“Rum, child,” he tells Gracie, and leans against the counter right next to Cobb. He makes no attempt to conceal his disgust for the naked man. Hill has beady eyes, too focused, self-righteous, and intense, to bother with color of any determinate hue. I’m convinced those eyes can see through walls, which may explain why no one in Milestone goes to confession anymore. He has eyebrows a woman would kill for, plucked and arched like chapel naves, a long thin nose that spreads out at the end to allow him the required amount of air with which to fuel his bluster, and a thin pale-lipped mouth that sits like a scar above a pointed chin. At a guess I’d say he’s about sixty, but his age seems to change with his mood. The dim light shuns his greased back hair, which is artificially black. Everything about the guy is artificial, as we discovered not long after he came to town.

Some folks think he’s the devil.

I don’t, but I’m sure they’ve met.

“Evenin’, Reverend,” Cobb says, without looking at the man. Cobb’s afraid of Hill. We all are, but the nudist’s the only one who greets him.

“What do the young children of Milestone think when they see you walking the streets with your tool of sin flapping in front of their faces, Cobb?” the Reverend asks, louder than is necessary. “Immodesty is a flagstone on the path to Hell, or were you operating under the false assumption that nakedness is next to Godliness? Think your “gift” gives you the freedom to disregard common decency?”

Cobb turns pink all over, and doesn’t reply.

The Reverend grins. His large piano key teeth gleam. Gracie sets his drink down in front of him. She doesn’t wait for payment.

I’m alarmed to find myself choked up, gut jiggling, trying to contain a laugh. “Tool of sin” is bad, even for Hill. Sure, he makes my skin crawl every time I see him, but even though I know there’s nothing funny about this situation, nothing funny about what goes down here in Milestone’s only functioning bar at this same time every Saturday night. As it turns out, the humor must already have been on my face, because those coal-dark eyes of his move from Cobb’s pink mass to me, and his grin drops as if someone smacked him across the face.

“Something funny, Tom?”

“Nope.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

“Your smile says different.”

“Who can trust a smile these days, Reverend? I sure don’t trust yours.”

That’s enough to give him his grin back. He scoops his rum off the counter and saunters over to my table with all the confidence of a man who enjoys his work, who’s going to enjoy knocking the town sheriff down a few pegs. He drags back the empty chair opposite me, sits, and studies me for a second. I feel like carrion being appraised by a vulture.

His face is only a shade darker than the little rectangle of white at his collar.

“Tell me something, Tom.”

“Shoot.”

At this, Hill looks over his shoulder, to where the kid is still sweating, but I’m willing to bet that sweat’s turned cold now. The Reverend turns back and winks. “Better not say that too loud. Someone might take you up on it.”

“He’s confused,” I tell him, and take a sip of my whiskey. Beer’s a pleasant drink, and requires patience; whiskey’s a straight shot to the brain, and I need that now if I’m going to act tough in front of the only man in Milestone who scares me. “He should be gunning for you.”

Thunder rattles the rafters; the smoked glass flickers with light, illuminating the rain pebbled across its surface.

“Maybe so,” the Reverend says, “But he knows better than to shoot a man of the cloth. He’s a God-fearing soul. He wants vengeance without damnation.”

“Bit late for that isn’t it?”

His lips crease in amusement. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

I decide not to humor him. “Who is it tonight?”

Cadaver has stopped counting his pennies.

“Straight to it, eh? I like that.”

“Cut the bullshit.”

He clucks his tongue. “Profanity. The mark of an ignorant man.”

I wish that were true. I’d love to be ignorant, sitting here with my drink, trading barbs with a priest who may or may not be the devil himself. At least then I wouldn’t see what’s coming.

“So who’s driving?” I ask, and everyone but Wintry turns to look. He’s watching the mirror.

The Reverend reaches into his pocket and tosses a pair of car keys on the table between us. “You are,” he says, and every hard-earned ounce of my defiance is obliterated. He might as well have shoved a grenade down my throat and locked me in iron skin. I release a breath that shudders at the end. No one in the bar sighs their relief but I see shoulders relax, just a little, and hear the clink of Cadaver’s pennies as he goes back to counting.

On the table, there’s a ring of six keys. Three of them are for the prefabricated hut that passes as my office. Two are for the front and back doors of the prefabricated hut that passes as my house. The last one’s for my truck, and the keys have fallen so that one is sticking straight up, toward the Reverend. It’s not a coincidence.

“You know how it goes,” he says, and sits back in his chair. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be all that surprised. You’ve dodged the bullet for quite a while, haven’t you?”

His face swells with glee. I imagine if I punch him right now, which is exactly what every cell in my body is telling me to do, his head would pop like a balloon. But no matter how satisfying that might be it won’t change the fact that tonight my number’s come up. I get to drive. Hill, son of a bitch that he is, is still only a messenger, a courier boy. Putting a hurting on him wouldn’t make a difference.

Cobb speaks up, “Hell, Tom, I’ll drive for you. It’d keep me out of the rain. Besides, I told ’ol Blue Moon I’d take him up a bottle of somethin’. Kill two birds with one stone, right?” His nervous grin is flashed for everyone’s approval, but he doesn’t get it. No one even looks at him, except me, and though I don’t say it, I’m grateful. I know Cobb walks around in the nip for one reason only—he wants to be noticed, remembered for something other than his gift, or maybe he does it to draw attention away from it. A hey look everybody! Underneath my clothes I’m just the same as you! kind of gesture. It doesn’t work, and I guess, like the rest of us, he’s tired of trying, tired of waiting here every Saturday night to find out if he’s going to have to murder someone else. Considering what he can do, and what he’s had to do in the past, it’s got to be tougher on him than most of us. Like being God and the Devil’s Ping-Pong ball. I also know, even if the Reverend allowed it, Cobb wouldn’t follow the rules tonight. Chances are, he’d drive my battered old truck right off the Willow Creek Bridge, be smiling while he drowned and poor old Blue Moon Running Bear would have to go without his whiskey for a little while longer.

“Very noble of you,” Hill says, sounding bored. “But this isn’t a shift at the sawmill. There’s no trading.” He looks Cobb up and down. “But don’t worry. You’ll get your turn. You get that car yet?”

“Wife doesn’t let me drive it. Not here. Not when I’ll be drinkin’.”

“Then either lie or quit drinking. But get it.”

“All right.”

Cobb offers me a sympathetic glance. I wave it away and look hard at the priest. “Who is it?”

From the breast pocket of his jacket, he produces a pack of Sonoma Lights. “Anyone got a light?”

When no one obliges, Gracie tosses him a box of matches, which he grabs from the air without looking—an impressive trick that leaves me wishing like hell he’d fumbled it. He lights his cigarette and squints at me through a plume of blue smoke. “You want the name?”

“No. I’d like to keep what little sleep I get at night. Unless you want to take that too.”

“Oh now, would you listen to this? You make it sound as if you’re the victim!” He barks a laugh and swivels in his chair to face the bar. “Is that what all of you think? That I’m the bad guy, come to destroy your lives?” He turns again, addressing Cadaver and the kid this time. “That you’re all just innocents, forced to do the bidding of some wicked higher power?” He shakes his head in amazement. “Don’t fool yourselves folks. Until I came along you were hanging in Purgatory, waiting for a decision to be made either way. You should be thanking me that you’re not all roasting in the fires of Hell.”

“So that’s not what this is then?”

He leans close, eyes dark, twin threads of blue smoke trailing from his wide nostrils. “Not even close, Deputy Dawg.”

We stare at each other over the table. I try to will the kid to take his shot. I don’t even care who he hits. But the kid isn’t moving, just watching, just like everyone else. The rain keeps raining and the thunder keeps thundering, but inside Eddie’s there isn’t a sound, until I speak.

“This will end, you know.” It’s a threat that has no weight behind it. I want this to be over; I want things to be the way they were before my wife died, before the kid got it into his head that my skull would look better spread across the wall; before we all ended up here as slaves to our sins, but it’s too late. There’s no turning back now. Things have gone too far. Hill knows this, knows surer than shit that all of us are going to be here next Saturday night and the Saturday night after that, and the one after that until we’ve paid off whatever debt it is he’s decided—or more accurately, whoever controls him has decided—we owe.

But tonight isn’t going to be that night, and as blue light fills the cracks in the rundown bar, I reach across and slide the keys toward me.

“I know it will end,” the Reverend answers, and pauses to take a deep drag on his cigarette. “Tonight it ends for you.”

I close my fist around the keys and let them bite into my palm.

“You get a thief and his girlfriend,” he continues. “The guy shot a pump jockey in the face, killed a woman and injured a little kid. The girlfriend’s an addict and a whore. No one will miss them.”

“Someone will. Someone always does.”

The priest sits back again and smiles. “That’s not for us to worry about.”

“Not for you maybe.”

“These missives from your goody-goody conscience are getting to be a real bore, Tom.”

“This, from a priest.”

His smile fades. “You’d best get moving, Sheriff. Your people need you.”

I throw back what’s left of the whiskey, then grab the bottle to keep me company. Hill won’t object—he likes us good and drunk—and though Gracie might be pissed that she’s out a few dollars, she won’t say anything either. She understands the nature of dirty work.

I stand and jingle the keys in my palm. “When this is over,” I tell him. “You’re the only one going to Hell.”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he slides my glass in front of him and puts his own thumb over the print. It fits perfectly. He chuckles and turns his chair around so he’s facing the bar. Flo avoids his gaze and slips her hand over Wintry’s. Everyone goes back to doing a real bad job of pretending nothing’s amiss.

At my back, Cobb grumbles on.

The few steps to the front door feel like a condemned man’s walk to the electric chair, the lightning through the windows only adding to the effect.

As I reach the door and grab the brass handle, the lightning reveals the skeletal profile hunkered nearby, the shadows of the coin towers like knives jabbing at his chest. He’s looking out the window, darkness pooling in the hollows of his eyes as, in what passes for a whisper, he says, “Someone’s comin’.” Then I hear it. Hurried footsteps, confused shuffling, and I move back just in time to avoid getting my face mashed in by a hunk of weathered oak as the door bursts open almost hard enough to knock it off its hinges. Rain, wind and shadows fill the doorway. Without knowing, or caring who it is that’s standing on the threshold, I lunge forward, plant my hand in the middle of the figure’s chest and shove them back out into the storm. “Get the hell out of here,” I tell them, in as hard a voice as I can muster under the circumstances. Hill would love this, more recruits for his twisted game. But whoever it is I’ve just tried to dissuade, grunts, pivots on a heel, slams back against the door for balance and reaches out an arm toward where I’m standing, ready for anything.

Anything but the gun that’s suddenly thrust in my face, the steel barrel dripping rainwater. “Get the fuck back inside,” a man’s voice says, and then a woman stumbles forth from the darkness and collapses on the floor. The rain that drips from her sodden form is pink. She’s bleeding somewhere but right now all my attention is focused on the black eye of the gun that’s three inches from my nose.

“Flo, Gracie…someone help the lady,” I call out.

“Don’t you touch her,” the man says. I wish I could see his face, but so far he’s only a voice and a pale sleeve with a Colt .45 at the end of it.

I’m getting real tired of having guns pointed at me.

Chapter Three

“Move back,” the gunman says. “Now, or I redecorate this shithole with your brains.”

“God knows that would be an improvement,” the Reverend chimes in, sounding not-at-all annoyed by this intrusion.

The woman is shuddering, and there’s that goddamn instinctual need to help, to touch her, make sure she’s okay, but that bullet blower keeps me in place.

“How come you don’t have a piece?” says the man.

“I do, just not on me.”

“Anyone else in there likely to act the hero?”

I consider Kyle. He’s got a gun, and the guy’s probably going to find that out sooner or later. But “No,” I tell him, because later’s better.

“You better not be lying to me.”

“I’m not.”

“Carla, you alive?”

On the floor, head bowed, dark wet hair almost touching the boards, the girl slowly shakes her head. She’s bleeding something fierce.

“She needs help.” It’s an obvious statement, but considering the guy is still standing in the doorway pointing a gun at me, I figure he could use the reminder.

“Yeah, no shit. Don’t suppose there’s a doctor in there?”

“No, but we can at least patch her up, stop the bleeding. Give her something for the pain. You’re not doing her any favors leaving her on the floor.”

It doesn’t take him long to realize I’m right. He waggles the gun in my face. “Back up. All the way to the bar, and keep your hands where I can see them.”

I set the whiskey bottle down on the floor and do as I’m told, walking backwards, hands in the air, until I’m just about level with the Reverend’s table. “You plan this?” I ask him, though somehow I know he didn’t, not unless he was suddenly stricken with guilt and decided to save me gas money.

“It would seem,” he replies, “that we’ll have to suffer an unscheduled interlude.”

“I find it hard to believe you don’t make allowances for this kind of thing.”

“Oh, but I do. Before this night is through, that man and his little trollop will be still be so many pounds of mashed up meat branded by the tires of your truck, Tom. Doesn’t matter what they do to piss away the meantime.”

“Shut your mouths,” the man with the gun says. He steps into the light and at last I’m able to see the face of my intended victim. He’s little more than a kid, it seems, not much older than Kyle, wearing a cream colored suit that was probably nice before the blood spoiled it, with a white shirt open at the collar. Shoulder-length blonde hair frames a face hardened by the many pit stops on the road to a Hell of his own design. He slams the door shut behind him and stands there, gun trained on me, then at everyone else in the room, before coming round to me again.

“This isn’t the way to do it, son,” Cadaver says, and the thief almost jumps out of his suit and the skin beneath. I wince, waiting for him to pump a few rounds into the shadow in the corner, but he manages to restrain himself. “Who the fuck is that?”

“Cadaver,” I tell him. “He’s just an old man. Leave him alone.”

“The fuck’s he doing hiding?”

“He’s not. That’s his table. Light just isn’t so good. It’s how he likes it.”

“Yeah?” The kid doesn’t sound convinced, and his fingers dance on the butt of the gun like he’s deciding whether or not to illuminate Cadaver’s corner with some muzzle flash. “Move out here with the others.”

Cadaver doesn’t make a sound, nor does he make a move.

The kid clicks back the hammer. It makes the same sound Cadaver does when he swallows.

“Look kid…” I take a step forward, and realize a split second after I’ve done it that it’s a mistake. The gun finds me again. Now I have two of them pointed at me. If Kyle and this guy fire at the same time, I may very well hit the ground with two shadows. I raise my hands palm out. “Just hang on a second, will ya? No one needs to get hurt here.” Which is a damned lie. Sooner or later, someone’s going to get hurt, and satin-pillow-in-a-pine-box kind of hurt. Right now though, the question is not who, but how many, and that’s not good enough.

The kid catches sight of Cobb. Frowns. “Why’s he naked?”

“Because I choose to be,” Cobb states boldly. “Ain’t got no use for clothes.”

The kid smiles, and for a moment I see the real kid, the one hiding deep down inside that suit, the kid who watched his manners when his aunt came to visit, said grace before meals, and shook in his shoes when he showed up at the door for his first date. An All-American kid run over on the road of life, relieved of his dreams, then fixed right up with some choice drugs, a gun and a whore and sent on his way. Only to end up here, with his would-be executioner trying to talk some sense into him.

“Some bunch of fuckin’ loons we got us here, Carla.”

The woman on the floor doesn’t respond, but I almost don’t notice because now I know her name, and it dances before my eyes in lurid neon, mocking me. I wasn’t supposed to know. I don’t want to know, but now that I do, their ghosts will have names too.

Wintry turns around in his seat, his huge head sheened with perspiration, and stands. The expression on his face is unreadable, but that big nose of his is flaring at the ends like a bull about to charge.

“Hey now.” The kid is visibly intimidated. “Sit right back down big man, or I’m going to have to cut you down.”

Wintry doesn’t move, but his eyes move to the fallen girl.

“What are you doin’?” Flo asks, and grabs his sleeve. “Sit down.”

But Wintry doesn’t. He glances at me and nods one time, as if it’s the cue to do something, as if he figures I’m clever enough to read those large brown eyes of his, or maybe he thinks he’s already shared his strategy via some telepathic link. Whatever it is, I don’t have time to figure it out because Wintry’s already moving, brushing past me, his jacket making a zipping sound as it grazes my outstretched fingers. It smells of pinesap and smoke.

“Wait…”

My objection is overruled by Flo’s panicked cry. “Wintry, don’t!”

Wintry keeps walking.

The kid stiffens. “Hey, I said sit down, man.”

“Goddamn it,” Gracie pipes up. “Do as he says.”

The kid aims the gun at the big man’s chest, licks his lips.

Wintry keeps walking, but he’s not heading for the kid. He’s headed for the girl, and surely the kid sees this. Surely he’ll read the big black man’s intentions, understand what I didn’t, and—

There’s a bang as if thunder has slipped under the door, a burst of light, and Wintry finally stops walking.

Flo screams, her hands flying to her face like a mask made of fingers.

The girl on the floor whimpers and looks up. Her face is a mass of ragged bloody scratches. The rain has smudged her mascara into raccoon-like circles around her glassy eyes. Her lipstick runs clear across her cheek. She looks at us all in turn as if she’s just realized we’re here.

My ears are ringing.

I wait for Wintry to look down, to assess the damage like folks do in the movies before they finally acknowledge a mortal wound and drop to the floor. Wintry’ll make a hell of a thud when he falls. My mind races, trying to think of something to do or say, but that shot might as well have passed through my brain.

“Wintry…” Flo sobs.

But when the smoke that coils like low fog between the big black man in the parka and the couple by the door finally dissipates, it’s the kid who staggers back and drops to a sitting position, his back against the door. On his face is shock, and confusion; on his shirt is a blossoming crimson flower.

“My, my,” says the Reverend.

I hear Flo’s breath catch in her throat.

Smoke continues to drift out from beneath Kyle’s table. The kid came here tonight to shoot someone, but the bullet that has my name in it now sits lodged in the belly of the man I was supposed to kill. I’ll wait to ponder the irony of that. There’s no time now.

Silence weighs heavy in the room. At last I find my tongue. “Wintry, go on.” He does, stopping by the girl, though his eyes are on the wounded kid, and the gun that’s still in his hand.

Cadaver, in an uncharacteristically animated move, emerges from the shadows looking grim, his black plastic raincoat swirling around him. His hip jars the table; another coin drops from its tower. Aside from Wintry and the girl, he’s nearest the kid, and knows it, and so hurries to his side, hunkers down and gives the kid a sympathetic glance before relieving him of his weapon. The kid doesn’t resist. Because the little microphone that Cadaver needs to press against the metal box in his throat to enable him to be heard is back on his table, he wheezes his words, and no one but him and the kid hear them. The kid stares at the old man as if he believes Death himself has come for him and replies, “Brody. James Brody.”

And just like that, my nightmare is complete.

“Fuck,” I mutter and squeeze my eyes with a thumb and forefinger.

There comes a crashing sound and everyone jumps, startled, no doubt wondering what calamity has befallen us now, maybe the storm, God’s Hand, has come to smite us all one by one, like we damn well deserve. But it isn’t anything so dramatic. It’s Flo, who has swept her arm across the bar, sending a bunch of glasses and bottles crashing to the floor.

“What the hell?” Cobb stands up, looking down at himself and the shattered remains of his Bud, but I know what she’s doing and silently commend her for it.

“Bring her here,” she calls to Wintry, and he lifts the girl as if she weighs no more than an empty sack.

Kyle’s still watching Brody, who’s gasping in the corner like he’s taken a slug in the lung. If he had, I figure he’d already be dead, but it’s hard to predict any man’s reaction to having his body insulted by a bullet.

Cadaver, still with Brody, looks over his shoulder at me and mouths the words, “Needs fixin’.”

I know he does, but the Reverend’s presence is like an extra shadow at my side, reminding me of the futility of our actions. Whether we patch those two unlucky kids up or not, they’re still going to die before the night ends. But Cobb is with Flo now, looking like the world’s unlikeliest orderly as they lay frayed towels out across the bar. Gracie is talking in soothing tones to the girl, who I can see now has a wide gash across her chest, another somewhere in the tangle of her hair that’s sending rivulets of blood down the back of her neck. Flo takes her hand as Wintry lays the girl down on the bar and heads back for her boyfriend. With the exception of Kyle, who I guess is in shock himself, the Reverend, and me, everyone is helping, even though we’re all privy to the same awful truth, truth we have no business knowing.

Those kids are doomed.

But right now, that doesn’t seem important. After all, they’re here when they shouldn’t be, and the keys to my truck, the keys to their fate, are still in my pocket.

So I do the only thing left to do. I go to Kyle.

I stop a few feet from his table, blocking his view of the wounded kid by the door. “You all right?” Another dumb question, but the only one I’ve got.

“What do you care?”

“You did the right thing, you know. If you hadn’t, it’d be Wintry bleeding to death on the floor. Any one of us might have done the same thing.”

“But you didn’t.”

“We would have if we’d had the opportunity.”

He looks up at me slowly and blinks, all of the hostility gone from his face, along with the color. “Is he dead?”

“No, but he’s hurt bad.”

“He going to die?”

I consider my answer, then decide on the truth. “Hell, everybody does, but maybe not tonight.”

“I’m going to Hell.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I murdered him.”

“Not yet you didn’t. And even if it’s too late and he expires on account of that bullet in his belly, all you did was hasten what was coming his way tonight anyway.”

“We’re all going to Hell.”

“Probably. Doesn’t mean we have to be in any hurry though.”

“That bullet wasn’t meant for him.”

“I know, but we can either stand here debating who should be dead and who shouldn’t, or we can help these kids out.”

“Why?” He frowns and the sweat pools in the creases. I’m overcome with a sudden and alarming urge to hug the boy, just crush the fear out of him. But to do that I’d have to be calm myself, and I’m a long way from that right now. Besides, while I suspect he’s shot the last man he’s ever going to, I’ve been surprised before, and I’m in no rush to test the theory. Not yet, anyway.

“Because they need it.”

He laughs soundlessly, a wheeze that could have come from Cadaver’s mouth. “I could put this gun in my mouth right now.”

“Sure you could.”

“Would you stop me?”

“I reckon I’d try.”

“Why?” When he looks up at me, the emotion in his eyes is more powerful than any bullet, powerful enough to make me drop my gaze and immediately feel ashamed of it.

I clear my throat, the words like glass tearing their way up my throat, slicing open my tongue. “Because no matter what you think of me, you’re still my son.”

He scoffs. “My father’s dead.”

“No I’m not, I’m standing right here. You’re looking at me, just as you’ve been looking at me every night since your mother died.”

“Since you killed her.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“Yes you did. You killed both of you.”

“If that’s true then why do you come in here every Saturday night with a gun pointed at me? Can’t kill a dead man, y’know.”

I’m fighting a losing battle to keep my composure. I want to hug the little son of a bitch, squeeze the hate out of him, reclaim him while I still have the chance, force him to understand.

But I don’t understand it myself.

“The bullet wasn’t meant for you either,” he tells me and finally brings the gun out from beneath the table. I recognize it of course, seeing as how it used to have a home in my holster. No police issue weaponry in Milestone, no sir. You just take whatever you think you’ll need to get the job done. Back when there was a job to do, that is.

“It was for me,” he says, and I feel my heart shatter into a thousand pieces.

Whatever I might have said, whatever magic words I might have summoned from the ether are blown away by the woman’s scream. Both of us turn toward the bar, and see Carla convulsing, chopping that scream into stuttered wails as Flo, wincing, presses a damp cloth to the girl’s chest.

“Jesus.” I give the kid one final glance, hoping he sees the plea for another chance to talk this over, then I’m gone, storming across to the girl, my heart and soul in ruins as surely as if I was the one stretched out on the bar.

I haven’t gotten far, when Brody, slung over Wintry’s shoulder, calls out, “Go easy on her. She’s pregnant.”

And that takes what little wind is left in my sails right the fuck out of them.

I turn on my heel and Reverend Hill slams his glass down on the table and stands. “Enough.”

I want to kill him. Rage boils within me, fueled further by regret over Kyle and his intentions, rage at my blindness, at my cowardice, for never questioning the speed with which my world grew dark, or the pain I dealt the people fumbling around within it. “You son of a bitch. You never mentioned a child.”

“What difference does it make? People who cause fatal accidents very rarely get the luxury of counting their victims beforehand. Had everything proceeded here as it was damn well supposed to, you’d never have known any different, and that murderer’s conscience of yours would have been spared an extra little slice of reality.” He steps close, until our noses are almost touching. “Never forget, Sheriff, that I am the only thing standing between you and eternal damnation. I’m the closest thing you have to God, and as such I own you, so it would behoove you to stop questioning it and accept it as truth.”

“This is eternal damnation,” I counter, “And it seems to me that God would know what the fuck was going on, which you clearly don’t.”

Brody moans with pain as Wintry sets him down in his own chair next to Flo. Even in times of stress he knows better than to seat anyone in Cobb’s place.

The Reverend looks over my shoulder at the kid, then smiles. “Then let’s find out why things haven’t gone according to plan, shall we?”

Cadaver regains his seat amid the shadows.

Gracie spills bourbon over the girl’s exposed chest—the wound is deep—eliciting another agonized shriek from her, and I know I’m right. This is eternal damnation, or at the very least, some kind of waiting room where all we get to do is sit and stew and wait for our number to be called. I decide in that moment, without even the faintest idea how it’s going to go down, that more than these kid’s numbers are going to be called tonight.

The Reverend stands before the kid, who has a blood-soaked hand clamped over his belly. “Well now,” he says, “Looks like you’re in a bit of a pickle here.”

“We need a doctor,” Brody says, his pallid face slick with sweat. “Please.”

The Reverend cocks his head. “And why should we do something like that for a man who introduced himself by shoving a gun in a lawman’s face, then threatened to shoot the only fella in here who seemed inclined to help him?”

“Gracie, call Doctor Hendricks,” I tell her, but the Reverend raises a hand he’d like you to believe was made to heal sinners.

“Do no such thing.”

“Reverend,” Cobb says. “This ain’t how he’s supposed to go anyhow, so what harm is there in fixin’ him up?”

I look squarely at Cobb. “Can you help them?”

He nods frantically.

“Will you?”

Everybody present knows what it will cost Cobb if he does, but damned if he doesn’t go on nodding that big old shaggy head of his. For a brief moment my envy extends from Wintry to this sad old man with his sagging body, who, if nothing else, has the kind of heart most of us would, and have, killed for.

But then the Reverend glances up at him and scowls. “You stay out of this, Cobb. When we need the black magic of heathens, you’ll be the first to know. ”

The dying kid fixes the nudist with an odd look. “Your name’s Cobb?”

Cobb, equally perplexed, nods. “Yeah. Why?”

The Reverend sighs. “Shut your goddamn mouth. Now listen here, kid. All I want from you is a simple answer. This town’s reserved for the dreamless, the lost and the hopeless. You may be a no-good piece of shit, but I bet you’ve got ambitions, right?”

“Sure. Seeing another sunrise was one of them.”

“From somewhere other than Milestone.”

“Yeah.”

“Why is it, then, that instead of being in the driver seat of your nice new—stolen—midnight blue Corvette heading North, right the hell out of this burg, maybe with that filthy whore of yours giving you a blowjob while you listen to some of the devil’s music on the stereo…why is it that you’re sitting here dying?”

Brody’s eyes widen until they seem to fill his face. “Shit, I’m dying?” He starts to chuckle. “Fuck me, Dean. Looks like we get to do that duet after all.”

The Reverend slaps him, a quick dry open-handed slap that knocks the mirth right off the kid’s face. He looks stunned, his breath coming in short hard rasps, then angry. “Preacher,” he says, mustering as much iron into his words as he can. “You’re lucky I’m down or I’d have to beg my Momma for forgiveness for busting your nose.”

And on hearing that, God forgive me, I find myself warming to the bastard.

“Answer the question, sonny,” Reverend Hill tells him. “Now, or I guarantee that shot to the gut will seem like a bee sting by the time I’m done with you. You see, here we follow a strict set of guidelines. Sinners atone for their sins by ridding the world of filth, just like them. There are outposts like this everywhere. Each one has its own methods too. Here at Eddie’s, you get to drive. But seeing as how you’re past doing anything of the kind, and therefore, all but useless to me, you’d better start answering my questions. So, for the last time, why are you here?”

Brody ignores the priest and glances at Cobb again. “She had the same name as you.”

Cobb blanches. “Who did?”

Brody starts shaking, worse than before, and suddenly his eyes are on me with such intensity, even Hill looks over his shoulder. “Sheriff,” the kid says. “Mind if I give you something?”

“Go right ahead, as long as it isn’t a bullet.”

“In my pocket…two twenty dollar bills and a five.”

“Okay.”

“Can you give them to that man there?”

“Cobb?”

“Yes.”

I resist the urge to ask him why he didn’t just get Cobb to take it himself.

“Not much life in you,” Hill says, dropping to his haunches. “Better start talking. Just because you die doesn’t mean I can’t reach you.”

Brody swallows, looks at Cobb, then away. “She came out of nowhere.”

Cobb takes a step forward, but is stopped by the Reverend’s glare and Wintry’s hand on his shoulder. “What’s he talkin’ about?”

“Your wife, I expect,” Hill says, with no emotion at all, then reaches forward and tilts the kid’s head up until their eyes meet. “Am I right?”

“We didn’t see her. She must have had her lights off. And if you don’t get your fucking hand off me, Preacher, I swear I’ll use every last ounce of my strength…to put you through the wall.”

As I’m listening, I picture Eleanor Cobb, hunched over her steering wheel, trying to look as small and inconspicuous as possible, afraid of being seen by anyone, even in the storm, lights turned off on a quiet road because she doesn’t imagine she’ll encounter another car, and doesn’t want to draw attention to herself if she does. But she hasn’t counted on a thief and his woman traveling on that same quiet road, pedal to the metal, eager to be clear of a town that reeks of death.

I lower my head. “Jesus.”

“Hang on, kid,” Cobb says, and his tone is both desperate and disbelieving. “You must be mistaken. She doesn’t come to get me. She never does.”

“She did tonight,” Hill says.

“No.”

“I took her wallet. Figured…with the state she was in…she wouldn’t need it. Saw her name…I’m sorry…you can have the money…I’m—”

I look up in time to see Cobb lunging for the kid, but Wintry’s got him in a firm hold, and all Cobb can do is struggle until the strength leaves him and he turns, embraces the big black man and weeps uncontrollably.

“Get him a drink and sit him down,” I tell Wintry, and he does. I’m surprised anyone is listening to me. On nights as wild as these, badges count for nothing.

All the fight has left Cobb.

Reverend Hill stands up and scratches his chin. He sighs heavily. “Sheriff,” he says. “Looks like you and I have a bit of a problem.”

Chapter Four

Considering the amount of blood on the chair and the floor beneath him, I don’t reckon the kid has much time left. His face is the color of fresh snow and he’s propped up against the bar like a guy who’s had too much to drink and is trying to remember where the hell he’s found himself. And, aside from the drink part, maybe that’s exactly what he’s doing.

The girl on the bar turns her head. Her tears are silent. Seems all the fight has left her too. She closes her eyes, jerking occasionally and gasping as Flo and Gracie tend to her. “She’s goin’ to die if we don’t do somethin’,” Flo informs me, and it’s hardly a revelation, but the one man willing to do something is way past doing it now. It’s not like I can waltz up to Cobb and ask him to mend the people who killed his wife. That’s the saddest part of all. I doubt he’d have been all that worried if his gift allowed him to raise the dead. But it doesn’t. He can heal, that’s it, and only wounds, not diseases. And right now, I’m willing to bet Cobb’s second-guessing the limits of his power, wondering if it might work on his wife.

The priest turns to look at me. “You’ve got a job to do, Sheriff. Lucky for you, there’ll soon be one less victim to worry about. Your boy gets that one. It’s almost poetic, isn’t it?”

“What is it you want me to do, exactly?”

“You gonna just let me die?” Brody croaks. “I knew there was a reason this town stank.”

The Reverend shrugs. “No more than you were planning on doing all along. I want you to get in your truck and drive through town, fast as that piece of shit can carry you.”

“Might want to watch the profanity there, Reverend. It being the mark of an ignorant man an all.”

“Just do your job.”

“For what? The kid’s dying and—”

“Quit saying that, wouldya?” Brody interrupts.

“—his girl’s bleeding out on the bar.”

“True…” Hill shows his teeth. “But dying means they aren’t dead yet. I reckon if you work fast and get them in your truck, you can still take care of business. Hell, I’ll give you a break and just get you to take care of the girl.”

“Can’t you just let this one be?” Flo asks. “She’s with child, for God’s sake.”

Without glancing her way, Hill says, “As are you, but you wouldn’t expect anyone to forgive you your transgressions just because you spread your legs for a man.”

Flo doesn’t look shocked or stunned. She looks angry, and when she looks at Wintry, who is kneeling next to Cobb at the table where I first sat down, that anger turns to shame. Wintry, however, doesn’t look quite so impassive anymore. Sins, the threat of Hell, death and murder don’t make him blink, but finding out he’s a Daddy sure does. His mouth is open, just a little, and I reckon even though he can’t talk, he’s saying something.

Thunder rolls like boulders across the roof.

Lightning shows me Cadaver in the corner, counting.

Me, I feel no more envy. Instead, I feel bolstered a little, aware that all those long-winded old passages you find in the bible about life and death and retribution may mean something after all. All we know, all we have known for as long as I can recall, is death. Now there’s life. Even if we can’t help poor Brody and Carla, even if we can’t save her baby, Flo is pregnant, and the significance of that single fact is so great it makes my head hurt and my heart beat a little faster. Flo, a creature of death, is carrying life. Untainted life. Life Reverend Hill, for all his threats and blustering, cannot reach. Yet.

Flo is pregnant.

And whether or not she ends up filling that empty vessel with hate, or sadness, or sin, right now, for me, it represents just the tiniest bit of hope.

It’s enough.

And it would seem I’m not alone in feeling that.

Without any of us, even the supposedly all-knowing Reverend, hearing his approach, Kyle is standing next to the priest, and the gun that has held so much meaning tonight, is gripped firmly in his hand again, the determination I’ve watched for three years back on his face, the muzzle nestled firmly against Hill’s temple.

“I’m not driving tonight,” I tell the priest, but Kyle has other ideas.

“Yes you are.”

I look at him, wondering if this is how he finally intends to rid himself of his long-dead father. A man, who, despite all the nightmares and all the people he’s killed on someone else’s behalf, only ever felt guilty for the death he didn’t cause. Cold as that sounds, I reckon there’s a lot of truth to it.

“Me and you and the Reverend are going to take a ride tonight,” Kyle says. “We’re going to take that girl with us, and we’re going to get her to Doctor Hendricks.”

The priest chuckles. “Is that so?”

“Shit,” Brody intones, struggling to sit up straighter. “What about me?”

He is ignored. We’re not going to abandon him. That much I know. Not if there’s a chance to save him. But Kyle’s calling the shots now, so we’re going to play it his way for the time being. The girl looks a lot worse off, so she goes first, is what I’m guessing is Kyle’s reasoning here, though it would be just as easy to take them both. Maybe I’ll suggest that once the gun’s been lowered.

“Yeah, that is so,” he says in response to Hill. The gun trembles in his grasp. I’m not yet at the point where I’m doubting my earlier opinion on whether my son will ever shoot a man again, but I’m not confident. What I am, however, is damn proud.

“Let me ask you something, Kyle. What exactly do you think shooting me will accomplish? Do you think I’ll just drop like a rock? Like all these other weaklings? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m the landlord here. Everyone answers to me, just as there are higher forces I answer to when the work has been done. When their penance has been done. And you, boy, have a lot of making up to do.”

“And when is the penance done, huh? How many corpses amount to penance in your eyes? Ten, twenty, a hundred?”

“You’ll know when it’s done.”

“Right,” Kyle tells him. “When you’ve had your fill, maybe, you sick fuck.”

The Reverend sighs. “Is it your intention to see how much suffering you can bring upon yourself? Pull that trigger then and we’ll all see just how—”

Without warning, Kyle does as he is asked. The Reverend stands where he is for a moment, then topples. The echo of the gunshot rivals the rage of the storm and the sound of blood dripping could be the rain tapping on the window. What used to be Reverend Hill’s head is now spread across the wall next to where Flo is standing, spattered in his blood. She doesn’t seem at all put out, merely inconvenienced. Her eyes, white periods in a gore-smeared face, widen. “There’s no way it can be that easy.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I tell her. “He’s down, and that’s the end of it.”

And yet no one moves. Instead we watch Hill’s corpse warily, waiting for some sign of the power that has kept us bound for years. We half-expect the brains splashed across the wall to fly back into the man’s ruined skull, the blood to return to the cavity Kyle’s bullet burst open, the wound to heal. We wait for the Reverend to rise, murderous rage contorting his sallow face as he chooses which of us to destroy first. We wait. We watch.

But what happens is infinitely more surprising.

Nothing.

The all-powerful Reverend just lies there, minus most of his head, and deader than dog shit.

“I’ve never in all my years seen so much blood,” Gracie says, and it sounds like a comment that should be followed by tears. But this is Gracie, and I’m willing to put money down that she’s already stressing over the cleanup. “Guess he was just a man after all.”

“I want to go home,” the girl on the bar says, and that pulls us from our trance-like state of expectancy.

“We’ll get you there, honey.” Flo’s hands tremble as she sleeves some of the priest’s blood from her face.

“It’s gonna be all right babe,” Brody soothes, though he’s in too much pain to sound sincere. “We’ll be out of here soon, then it’ll just be you, me and Dino.”

Kyle is still holding the gun out, still pressing it against the ghost of Hill’s temple, and I put a hand on his forearm, urge him to lower it before it goes off and adds someone else to the rapidly rising number of dead. For a moment he resists, then the tension ebbs away.

“It’s okay son.”

“Kyle,” he mutters.

“What?”

“You don’t get to call me ‘son’.”

“Okay.”

Wintry is still tending to Cobb. The old man has downed half a bottle of whiskey. I’m sure wherever his mind is, it doesn’t know what just happened, and maybe that’s for the best. Wintry locks gazes with me and in that brief glance, we’re like two old farts trading war stories. What’s happened here tonight won’t ever be forgotten, no more than will the things that led us here, the errors in judgment, the wrong turns, the simple little mistakes that all add up to an express elevator ride right into a nightmare no amount of waking up can cure. But this is a lull, and a welcome one, and I figure everyone (except maybe Brody and the girl) is going to savor it before the next unwelcome development. For however briefly, this is Eddie’s bar, the only functioning water hole in a near-dead town, and right now, for the first time ever, these people truly are my friends.

Wintry goes back to silently consoling the inconsolable Cobb. Gracie heads into the ladies room and emerges with a mop and bucket that are filthier than the floor but don’t, to my knowledge, have human remains on them. Flo tries to get the girl to stand up. It isn’t going to happen.

“We need to take him too,” I tell Kyle with a nod in Brody’s direction.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Yeah,” Brody adds. “Why? If it’s because you shot a perfectly nice guy like me, and don’t know how to apologize…hell…that’s all water under the bridge.” He grins and there is blood on his teeth. “I don’t hold grudges.”

“He’s a murderer,” Kyle says.

I lean in close. “For fuck sake, Kyle. Everyone here is a murderer.”

“Not like him we’re not. He enjoyed it. Did it on purpose.”

His logic makes my head swim, and the only thing I’m really sure of is that I don’t agree with it. “Listen, you have to—”

“Leave him,” Cobb says dreamily, as if our banter has woken him from a doze.

Everyone looks in his direction. He, however, does not look at us.

“Cobb…”

“Leave him. I’ll take care of him.”

I can’t be blamed for taking that like it sounds. Sure, Cobb can heal folks, but considering we’re talking about the man who just killed his wife, I don’t imagine healing has anything to do with it.

“Take care of him how?”

“Fix him up, Sheriff. What else?” His eyes are swollen from crying, his face almost as pale as Brody’s.

“Any number of things,” I reply. “He can die on his own if that’s what you’re figuring to help him with.”

“I said I’ll fix him up. Weren’t like he killed Ellie on purpose.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No. I don’t.” He takes another slug of whiskey. “But why are we here?”

I don’t know how to answer that. Seems no one does. But for the low whimpering of the girl, the room’s awful quiet.

“We come here to try to make peace when there ain’t none to be had. We come here to be forgiven. Way I figure it, Sheriff, is if I don’t do what every ounce of me wants to do to this kid, and instead I fix him up, like I want to be fixed up myself, like I can never be fixed up, then maybe it’ll count for somethin’ in this great goddamn plan we’re all so fuckin’ tangled up in. What do you think?”

I consider that for a moment because it’s worth considering. Then: “I think you may be onto something,” I tell him.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I look at the girl. “What about her?”

“Nothing I can do for her. Maybe Hendricks can pull a miracle out of his hat, but not me.” He glances down at Brody. “She’s too far gone.”

Brody sighs shakily, tries to stand and fails. Although Cobb has agreed to help the kid, I figure we’ve just seen his revenge. Telling the kid his girl is going to die is about the only weapon he has left to use, I guess. Hurt him as much as possible before he heals him.

“All right.”

Cobb nods, and goes back to his drink. “Don’t leave Ellie out there on the road, Tom. She deserves better.”

“I’ll see to it.”

“You’re leaving me here with him?” Brody asks, appalled.

“It’s the one good option in a dump truck full of bad ones,” I remind him. “Take it or leave it.”

Gracie comes around the bar, flips that lock of hair out of her face and sets the mop and bucket down by the priest’s body. “Think we should burn him?” she asks, as casually as she might inquire about the weather. “Bury the ashes and salt the earth?”

I understand her concern completely. No one wants to see that son of a bitch get back up. “If he was anything as dangerous as he led us to believe he was, he’d already have done something. And if he still plans to, then I don’t reckon cooking him or seasoning the mud’s going to do us a whole lot of good.”

She sighs, and it’s the most human I’ve ever seen her look. There’s the urge again, to hold her, but this time I know it’s because I need it, not her. So again, I restrain myself.

“Why didn’t we do this three years ago?”

It’s a good question, but I leave it unanswered.

I walk to the center of the room, Cobb and Wintry’s table to my right, Cadaver still lost in the shadows by the door to my left.

“You okay, Cadaver?”

“Just countin’ what’s left,” the electronic voice from the dark replies, followed by that familiar clink of pennies.

“Let’s get this done,” Kyle says behind me, and I’m glad to hear it. It means two things to me: First, he’s still in control. The shock of shooting two men in the space of twenty minutes hasn’t yet reduced him to the wreck it makes of others, and eventually will make of him when he least expects it, and second, it represents action, movement, right when my bones are threatening to turn to jelly and leave me a quivering, sobbing mess on the floor.

We move.

I’m stronger than Kyle, so I slip my hands beneath the girl’s arms; he takes her feet.

“Hurry, for God’s sake,” Brody moans. “Don’t let her die.”

We carefully time the move, and with Flo ahead of us, we’re out the door and loading Carla into the back seat of my truck before the second hand of the clock has made a full sweep.

We leave a trail of pinkish blood behind us.

Chapter Five

The rain is pelting down like machine gun fire, the wind trying its best to wrench the truck doors right off their hinges as we bundle inside. Makes me wonder if this is the Reverend’s ‘boss’ gathering his fury, preparing to blow us all to whatever the alternative hangout is for the kind of deities that would consider Hill a valued employee.

I’m still too scared to believe this is over. It’s an ugly feeling I know well, and can only hope will abate as soon as we have Carla at the door of the good doctor, provided she lives that long. As I gun the engine into life, and look at Kyle, who’s wiping the condensation clear and peering out at the rain, it occurs to me that if this is really the end of the nightmare, I have no idea what to do with myself. There won’t be any glorious sunshine through my window in the morning, marking the equally glorious beginning of a new chapter of my life. I’m still a murderer; there’s still the guilt, and there’s my son, who thinks I’m dead and doesn’t mind. All that will really change will be the venue into which I bring my suffering. I don’t imagine next Saturday I’ll be at Eddie’s. Instead I’ll sit at home without those faces to act as mirrors for my own self-loathing.

I guide the truck out of the parking lot, careful to avoid the other cars, and turn out onto the road that will bring us to town, and to the doctor who I know won’t take too kindly to being roused at this hour of the night, especially to tend to an injured whore with needle marks parading up her emaciated arm.

“Faster, she’s not looking too good,” Kyle says, looking over his shoulder as if he’s been peeking in on my thoughts. “Think the baby’ll make it?”

“Hope so.” I resist the urge to remind him what Cobb said about her chances.

It’s damn near impossible to see anything beyond the glass, the high beams like swollen ghosts staying three steps ahead of the grille. I’m going fast, aware that at any time I might inadvertently fulfill my obligations to the dead Reverend and run somebody over, or mash the truck into some poor drunk driver’s car as he struggles to make his way home.

“C’mon for Chrissakes, she’s bleeding bad.”

It isn’t a long drive, but the storm buffeting the truck and Kyle’s endless needling make it seem like hours. Lightning turns the world to rainy daylight as I turn off the main road onto Abigail Lane, where the good doctor has his home.

Hendricks’ place used to be a farmhouse, through the windows of which long gone farmers watched the world fall victim to the voracious appetite of progress. Mining companies bought out the land for the families of their employees, and people got greedy. Then the money ran out, and so did the people. Hendricks, an M.D. from Alabama who claimed he was “just passing through,” saw no reason to move on when he caught sight of the sickly state of those who’d stubbornly refused to leave Milestone in the great exodus of ’79, and when he heard the asking price for a house nobody wanted.

As we pull into the drive that slopes upward to the block-shaped two-story house, there are no lights in the windows, which doesn’t come as a surprise. I find myself wondering, if we had kept going instead of turning into Hendricks’ drive, how long it would have taken us to come upon the twisted wreck of Eleanor Cobb’s Taurus.

Despite the forbidding darkness of the house that looms over the car, Kyle’s already hurrying to get the girl out. Not the smartest move considering the Doc might not even be here, so I leave him to his grunting and trot to the door.

Knock, knock. No sound from within.

“Leave her there,” I call back to Kyle, who’s as good as invisible behind the car’s lights.

“What?”

“I said leave her be. If Hendricks doesn’t answer, what good will dragging her out in the rain do?”

“What else can we do?”

“I don’t know. We’ll deal with that if and when— ”

“Sheriff?”

The front door is open; the storm deafened me to the approach of the bespectacled man now standing there squinting out. “That you, Tom?”

He’s a reed-thin man and heavily bearded. I’ve always suspected that, just like the deceased Reverend, vanity has driven the doctor to dying his hair to keep from looking his age. And though in this light he doesn’t look much healthier than the girl in the back of my truck, I’m glad as hell to see him.

I summarize the situation as calmly as I can. It doesn’t sound calm in the least by the time it reaches my lips, but Hendricks steps back, his face a knot of concern. From upstairs, his wife calls out a demand to know what’s going on. The doctor turns on the hall light. It’s the warmest looking light I’ve seen in quite some time, and the shadows it casts are gentle. “Bring her in. I’ll see what I can do.” He reaches the stairs and yells up, “Queenie, I’m going to need your help down here.”

And in what seems like a heartbeat, the doctor is bent over the girl where she lies prone on the couch and swaddled in comfy looking blankets. The towels wrapped around her head make it look as if she’s being prepped for a massage, nothing more. The blood running between her eyes spoils that illusion though. She’s shivering, which is good. Means she’s still breathing. “Lost a lot of blood,” Hendricks says, pressing the cup of his stethoscope to her chest. “You said an auto wreck?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyone else hurt?” He appraises Kyle and me. “How about you guys? You look pretty shook up.”

“We’re fine,” Kyle says. “She going to be all right? She’s pregnant, you know.”

Hendricks frowns.

“She told us,” I add quickly, covering Kyle’s blunder. “Right before she passed out.”

I can’t tell whether or not he’s buying it, but he says nothing, just presses that stethoscope to the girl’s breast and breathes through his nose. His wife stands off in the corner, arms folded over her dressing gown. She looks pissed, and I can’t blame her.

When at last the doctor looks up, his face is grave. “I’m sorry to say I don’t think there’s a whole lot I can do for her, boys. The baby’s gone. That I can tell you right now for certain, and it’s only a matter of time before she follows. I’d have to open her up to say for sure, but my guess is she’s busted up pretty bad. Judging by that blood and the way she’s breathing, seems she’s got a punctured lung too. Pupils are dilated. Head’s cracked open almost clean through to the bone. Frankly I’m amazed she’s not dead already.” At the looks on our faces, he continues, “But you fellas did real good. Wasn’t much more you could have done for her. She’d have appreciated it, I’m sure.”

Another life lost. For nothing. Though at least when I dream of this one I’ll know it wasn’t entirely my fault.

“Uh…Sheriff?”

I look back at Hendricks.

“You just going to leave her here?”

I’m about to argue with him, but it slowly dawns on me that he’s right, that I’d have asked the same question. Hendricks, unlike me or Kyle, still has a life, and I don’t reckon we should leave a dead whore on his couch to remind him why we’re different.

“Sorry, Doc. We’ll take her back to Eddie’s.”

Hendricks looks confused. “Eddie’s? Why there?”

“Because it’s quieter than any graveyard. Most of the time. We can bury her out back right next to Eddie himself. I figure he deserves the company after all the shit we’ve done under his roof. Besides,” I move close to the girl. “We’ve got some burying to do anyway.”

“Who else died?” Queenie asks, her first words to us since we arrived.

“The Reverend.”

“Oh.”

I smile at the lack of emotion on her face. “Yeah. Ticker gave out on him while he was preaching to us about the evils of drink.”

Hendricks shakes his head. “Man had way too much time on his hands.”

“You got that right, Doc.”

We stay for a while, exchanging the kind of uneasy banter unique to folks who’re waiting for one among them to die. Kyle paces, torn between refusing to accept that the girl is gone, that we couldn’t save her, and eager to be in a room larger than Hendricks’ parlor so he doesn’t have to be within touching distance of me.

At last there comes a single hitching sigh. The girl frowns, as if in her dreams she’s stumbled upon something dangerous, then she shudders once, and that’s the end of it.

No one says anything for a moment. We all just stand there, trying to read the story of the dead girl’s life from the lines on her face, the punctuation marks on her arm, the commas at the corners of her mouth from too much time spent grimacing in pain. I reach down and brush a strand of hair away from her face.

“C’mon, Kyle.”

For the second time that night, we load the girl into the truck. I imagine she feels lighter, that the soul, or whatever leaves us when we die, has weight, and hers is somewhere better now, somewhere no one can touch it, and use the stains on it against her.

Our drive back to Eddie’s is a silent one. There’s plenty that could be said, but no need to say it.

At least, not until we see the fire.

“Aw Christ no…” Kyle says and is out of the truck and running before I have time to draw a breath.

Chapter Six

Eddie’s is in flames, a funeral pyre burning against the dark, turbulent maelstrom of the night, and though the rain is still beating down and pockmarking the mud, it’s not doing much to put out the blaze.

My first thought is that Gracie has finally had enough, that the Reverend’s death is the catalyst she’s been waiting for, the escape she’s longed for all these years. I imagine her chasing everybody out, leaving the Reverend’s body and Brody where they are, dousing the place from top to bottom with kerosene or spirits, then standing in the doorway, flaming rag in her hand. I see the light burning away the shadows on her grim face, making her seem young and innocent again. Then she tosses the rag, and the fire races across the floor and up the walls, a raging thing, but pure, and cleansing.

But as I watch the lithe silhouette of my son racing toward the inferno, I remember what I thought when I stood in there looking down at Hill’s body, waiting for him to suddenly resurrect himself. Cold dread grips my heart. Is this the surprise we expected from him? Did he burst into flame moments after Kyle and me left the bar? I picture his almost headless corpse erupting into bright searing flame, claiming the lives of those standing nearest him first before they’re even aware what’s happening, then spreading out and cooking the rest as they try to escape.

And then I think of Cobb.

I pull the truck to a halt in the parking lot. Flames rise up, licking the sky; the rain falls down. Glass shatters in the heat and I have to shield my face. Not before my eyebrows are singed away.

Kyle is not alone, and his company is not a decapitated burning thing. I make my way over, all but blinded by the light from the fire. It isn’t until I’m right there next to Kyle that I see it’s Cadaver who’s with him. His eyes are narrowed against the glare, but still there’s an odd look on his hollow face, almost like reverence.

“Cadaver, what happened?”

Kyle looks like a ghost, his eyes filled with fire. “He says Cobb did it. Just after we left, he went crazy and torched the place.”

Cadaver nods, but adds nothing. I notice his little microphone is absent, which explains his silence. Just like Brody must have thought when the old man hunkered down next to him, Cadaver looks like death. More so now than ever before, the orange-red light only adding deeper shadow beneath the sharp outcroppings of his cheekbones.

“Where is everyone?” I ask, afraid of the answer, because I’ve surveyed the area more than once on my way up here and I’m surveying it now again, and I don’t see anybody here but us, and that feels to me like a brand new nightmare fresh from the devil’s womb, waiting to be christened by the ignorant.

Kyle looks at me, and the flames shimmer in his eyes. “Gone,” he tells me. “Cadaver says they’re all gone. All but Brody.”

“And where’s he?”

Cadaver nods in the direction of the burning building, off into the shadows the fire is weaving to the side of it. I don’t see Brody, but I trust that he’s there.

“Jesus.” I put my hands to my face to block out a reality that seems to be getting darker by the second.

There’s a story here, I suppose. Cadaver must have seen it all from his place by the window, before he hotfooted it the hell out of the burning tavern. He might whisper to me of Wintry’s bravery, how he tried to carry as many people as he could out of the place before one of the big timber beams came down and cracked his head open like an egg, dropping him and suffocating beneath his weight those he’d carried in his arms, his beloved Flo among them. He might tell me the details of Cobb’s descent into madness, how one minute he was a sobbing wreck, the next a raving lunatic, whooping and hollering and raging, spinning like a top with spirits flying from the open bottles in his hands. Then a match, the smell of sulfur, and a small flame ready to birth an all-consuming fire. He might say that Gracie fought Cobb to the end, maybe cold-cocked him with one of those bottles, or gutted him with the sharp end of a broken mop handle before the smoke took them both, laid them down for the fire to burn them in their sleep.

Good for Gracie.

Cadaver might tell me these things, but I don’t want to hear that choked whisper from his cracked lips. My imagination is louder anyway.

“Is there a chance anyone else survived?” Kyle asks the old man, who shrugs and looks at me.

Like Wintry, there’s more truth in his eyes than could ever roll off his tongue. But I’m stubborn, and what pitiful little sleep I have these days will be robbed from me tonight if I don’t see for myself. There are no screams from Eddie’s, no sound of anyone begging to be saved, but then we’ve all been damned for longer than we care to admit, and we’ve never cried for salvation.

I start moving toward the bar.

Kyle’s hand falls firmly on my shoulder.

I start to turn, and the roof caves in. It sounds like a tree falling, a splintering crash that sends a plume of dirty smoke up before fresh fire rushes in to fill the hole, fed by the air that has tried to escape.

“Sonofabitch,” someone cries out from the dark, and finally I see a shape rolling around in the shadows, batting at sparks that are trying to ignite his clothes. If the kid’s able to roll, then could be his injuries are no more. We’ll have to wait and see.

Crackling, spitting flames, but still no screams. On some level I know I should be thankful for that, and for the fact that this atrocity was not the Good Reverend’s work, but I’m not. Not just now. Kyle is weeping, and as his hand slips from my shoulder, Cadaver’s hand finds his before it occurs to me to comfort him.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” I say, without knowing whether or not I’m even saying it aloud, or who I think I’m saying it to if I am. “They didn’t deserve this.”

Another dumb, obvious statement in a night loaded with them.

“We should call someone.” Kyle walks away and sits down, his back to the rickety wooden fence that separates the parking lot from the grassy slope down to the road. I start after him, rehearsing words of comfort that sound wooden, and useless, like pretty much everything I’ve ever said to that kid. He wants his mother back and he won’t get it; he wants his father dead, and he can’t get that either. If early life experience scars you for the rest of it, then Kyle’s nightmare hasn’t even started yet. He raises a hand as I draw near. It’s as good as a signpost saying ROAD CLOSED, and all I can do is stand there feeling helpless, which is exactly what I do until I hear a sound I never thought I’d hear again.

The sound of pennies being counted.

“Cadaver?”

He’s still facing the fire, but his head is bowed, all his attention on his upturned palm. I give the kid one brief, regretful look, then head back to the old man. Back there in the shadows, Brody’s still cursing.

As I draw abreast of the old man, I see there’s only two pennies in his palm. I guess the fire took a little something extra from him. But when at last he raises his head, not only does he seem calm, he’s almost smiling. A thin thread of blue-gray smoke drifts from the small hole in the box in his throat. Opaque eyes settle on mine, and they look ancient.

The smile.

The pennies.

It dawns on me then, the not-so-quick-witted Sheriff of a town on life support, that there was something to Reverend Hill’s threat after all. It was there right from the beginning. We were waiting for a great black winged demon to come bursting up from below, or the devil himself to come strolling in the door with a brimstone smile and eyes like glowing embers, all those peachy images the Good Book tells us we should be watching for, when we should have been looking at that ever-present patch of darkness in the corner. To the man counting his change.

Fear overwhelms me, and my legs, which have done a respectable job of holding me up through the madness, finally give out. I stumble. Cadaver’s hand lashes out and clamps on my arm, somehow keeping me upright.

“You all right, Sheriff?” he whispers, head cocked slightly in an admirable impression of genuine concern.

From the fire comes a great hiss. It might be a serpent; it might just be the rain meeting flame. I’m not so certain of anything anymore. Only that Cadaver’s the reason the air smells like burning flesh.

“’Just counting what’s left’,” I say, recalling his words to me before we left the bar. “You were talking about us.”

He nods, glances back at Kyle, then steps closer. There should not be enough strength in his old bones to keep me from falling, but there is. His hand on my elbow might as well be a metal brace.

“There’s no accountin’ for human emotion,” he says, his whisper tinged with sadness, aided by the expression of regret on his worn face. “Especially the love of a frustrated old woman for her shameless husband. Because of Eleanor Cobb, everythin’ went sideways on us. You were right. This shouldn’t’ve happened.”

“But it did.”

“Yes it did, and that’s a shame.” He closes his fist around the pennies. “If it means anythin’—and I don’t expect it will, at least not for a while—this isn’t what I wanted. They were my friends too.”

I’m bitter, and scared, and more than ready for him to reach inside my tired body and wrench out my soul, whatever’s left of it. “Am I supposed to believe that? Or is it just customary where you come from to burn your friends alive if things don’t go according to plan?”

He purses his lips, then squints at me like a short-sighted man trying to read the fine print on a legal document. “The Reverend got what was comin’ to him. They all did, unfortunate as it is. Wintry…” He shook his head, a wry smile on his wrinkled lips. “He can talk you know. He just chose not to after— ”

“I don’t want a litany of their sins,” I interrupt. “It hardly makes a damn bit of difference now. All I want to know from you is what happens to Kyle.”

He nods his understanding. Anyone looking might think we were discussing the latest decisions of the coaches of our favorite football teams. “Repentance is the name of this game, Tom. Don’t matter whether I influence it or not, or whether you both live to be a hundred and ten or die tomorrow, the debt’s got to be settled. It’s the price you have to pay for makin’ the wrong choice when both were available to you.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

He sighs. “I’m a reasonable man, Tom.”

I can’t help myself. I laugh long and loud at that little nugget of absurdity. The contradiction to Cadaver’s claim is burning high and bright before us. Sure, he didn’t strike the match, but if not for his influence, none of us would have been there to begin with.

He releases his grip on me. I don’t fall, but there’s not a whole lot of strength left in me. I stay standing only so I can look him in the eye when he tells me what’s going to become of my son. And maybe when he does I’ll have just the right amount of energy left to punch his fucking face in.

But he doesn’t answer right away. Instead he grabs my left hand, forces it out of the fist that I’ve made to follow up on my unvoiced threat, and drops his two pennies into my palm.

I look up at him.

His eyes probe mine, and my guts squirm as if a surgeon has put his cold fingers in there. I’m afraid I’m going to be sick. “Consider it a loan,” he says, and closes my fingers around the coins.

“Why?” I ask, as he starts to walk toward the burning building, the smoke whipping itself into specters that chase each other around the flames. Sparks dance like giddy stars.

At the threshold to the inferno that used to be Eddie’s Bar, he stops, seemingly unaffected by anything but the light from the blaze. He squints back over his shoulder at me, and though his voice is still a whisper, I hear it as surely as if he’s said it right into my ear.

“It’s all I have.”

Chapter Seven

Eddie’s is still burning bright by the time we snap out of whatever cocktail of grief and shock and confusion has held us there like moths, and I give up waiting for Cadaver to come back out and explain just what it is that’s making two cold spots in the palm of my right hand. Whatever he is, he’s right where he belongs, but that doesn’t make me feel much better. I thought for sure that Hill’s death meant it was all over, that at last the shackles had been removed and we were free to move on, if we could ever figure out a way to do it without taking the guilt and ghosts with us.

But nothing’s over. There won’t be any new chapters here. And Eddie’s might just as well be standing untouched by fire because after this, even though the numbers are lower, Milestone’s purgatory is still going to house a few folks pretending to live their lives while they wait for someone to come collect a debt they’re never going to be able to repay. Only difference is next time the debt collector won’t be a cocky bible-thumping Reverend with dyed hair, but a skeletal man with an electronic doodad where his larynx should be.

Kyle’s still watching the fire with tear-filled eyes, and I don’t have a goddamn clue what I’m supposed to do next, but because I need to move, I have a quick word with Kyle, watch him head for my truck, then I make my way over to the shadows, where I can hear Brody hacking and coughing as he stumbles away from the burning building.

“You’re alive.” The announcement is my way of letting him know he’s not the only one, in case he was wondering. His face, clear of the shadows and lit by the flames, is streaked with soot, his eyes narrowed as his lungs convulse and force another phlegmy cough from him. The nice suit is officially beyond saving.

“Yeah, no thanks to you.”

“How’s that?”

“You left me with that crazy man, didn’t you? The healer? Executioner, more like.”

I reach down, slip an arm underneath his elbow and yank him up. “You’re looking a damn sight better than when I left you. He did something for you or you wouldn’t be standing here.” I inspect the front of his shirt. The bullet hole is still there, but I can’t tell if there’s one in the flesh beneath it to match.

“I owe that to the big black dude.”

“Wintry?”

“Guy threw me right through the fucking window after your naked friend went nuclear.”

“Nuclear, how?”

He takes a few unsteady steps, and leans against the wooden fence. “The guy put his hands on me. Cobb did. And yeah, he fixed me up just like he said he would, but then…” He shakes his head, a humorless smile on his grimy face. “Then he starts bawling and whatever invisible shit’s pouring from his hands into me turns to fire. I tell you, I’ve been around—don’t be fooled by my age, I’ve seen plenty—but I’ve never seen nothing like that before. Blue fire, man, streaming like piss from his fingers. I don’t think even he expected it, but he just went right on bawling about his wife, about how he wasn’t going to let her go, then he raises those hands so the streams are about an inch from the top of my head—Christ, it was like looking up at an electric fence—and POW!, he cooks the hot chick right where she’s standing.”

“Flo?”

“Yeah, the one looks a bit like Marilyn Monroe.”

“Goddamn it.”

“Yeah, no kidding. Hell of a waste. So she drops, and that sets the big guy off. He grabs a handful of my shirt, the world starts spinning and next thing I know I’m doing a swan dive through the goddamn window.”

“What happened to the others?”

“Don’t know for sure. Didn’t see it; but it isn’t that hard to figure out, is it? Guy grieving for his wife finds his hands have turned into flamethrowers. Three seconds later the whole place goes up in smoke. Looks like your friend had himself a barbecue.”

Kyle finds us and with a grim look at Brody, hands me the set of handcuffs I keep in my glove box. Can’t remember the last time I had call to use these. Brody straightens a little. “What are those for?”

“You’re lucky to be alive, boy. You shouldn’t be, and that’s a fact. But you’re a murderer, and that’s a fact too, so you’re going to cool your heels in my jail for a while until I decide what to do with you.”

He stiffens, takes a step back, and I’m suddenly more aware than ever that I don’t have a gun.

Kyle does though. “Stay where you are,” he says, weapon trained on Brody.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. After all the shit I just went through, you’re going to stick me in a cell?”

“That’s the plan.”

“You don’t have proof to say I did anything.”

“I’ve got you threatening a police officer, and that’s enough for now.”

“Aw that’s bullshit. Besides, my gun is in there,” he says, jerking a thumb at the burning tavern. “Without that, you haven’t got squat.”

“Your girl didn’t make it,” Kyle says then. The guy’s expression falters, but only for a moment, like a breeze across a calm pond. “Yeah, I figured that. Thanks for breaking it to me gently, though, you asshole.” He rubs a hand over his face. “Naked old guy with flamethrower hands, fruitcake holymen…and a hick Sheriff and his trigger-happy boy trying to railroad me. I mean, for Chrissakes…where the hell am I anyway?”

“Milestone.” I motion for him to start moving. And Hell isn’t a million miles off the mark either.

We put Brody, cuffed, in the truck. He doesn’t resist, but I can tell by the tension in his muscles that he’d like to. “This is a crock of shit.” His grumbling lasts only until Kyle and me start unloading the girl from the truck bed. “What are you doing?” he asks then, his voice muffled. “Where are you taking her?”

“She needs burying,” I call back, and ignore whatever else he says. He probably thinks being her lover gives him some right to dictate what happens to her in death, and ordinarily I’d agree. Fact is, though, this isn’t an ordinary situation. Fact is, she’s dead because he was going too fast, hightailing it along dark twisty roads probably looking for somewhere to rob. Doesn’t matter how he felt about her in life. For her, life’s over, and he drove the hearse. So fuck him and his sense of entitlement. We’re planting her.

Kyle stands and draws the back of his hand across his eyes, carving clear furrows in the dust and soot. He glances at me for a moment, then shakes his head. I can’t figure out if the gesture is more disdain for me or regret for the tragedy that’s befallen our friends. Guess it doesn’t matter now. I get back to work clearing the debris from my own head. After all, we’re standing over a dead girl, about to put her in a hole far from home where no one will ever know she’s planted and won’t be able to visit her if they care to. But I’m guessing she was just as lost as the company she kept in her final hours, and probably won’t raise a fuss about where I lay her bones, and no one else will either. No milk carton appearances for this one, just an unceremonious burial out back of a burning tavern.

I turn away from the flames and it’s like walking from night to day. Raging light and heat behind me, cold rain and darkness ahead. A few feet away, Kyle’s watching.

“You got a shovel?” he asks.

“No. Why don’t you take that piece of yours and shoot some earth loose for me?”

“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You need me to explain it to you?”

His face contorts with rage. “Hey, I saved your fucking ass in there.”

“That so.”

“Yeah it goddamn well is so.” He moves to stand close, in my face, his eyes black fire. “I saved everyone in there. I stopped that guy from killing Wintry, and God knows who else. I stopped the Reverend from sending us all out on our little death drives. Permanently. So what the hell’s your problem?”

“You saved us?”

“Damn right I did. No one else had the guts to do it.”

“That what you think?”

A step closer. “We’re standing here aren’t we?”

“We are, yeah.”

He doesn’t answer, just stares until I can’t meet it anymore.I hunker down to the girl. She smells of sweat, or maybe that’s me, but there’s no question where the faint trace of perfume is coming from. The feeling I had earlier about the girl weighing less is gone now and my arms and legs quiver as I carry her up the slope. I figure it’s because I’m exhausted. All the fight has left me, along with everything else.

“What are we going to do with him?” Kyle asks, looking back toward the truck.

“I don’t know yet.”

“I could take him back.”

“If it’s all the same, I’d feel a lot better taking him in.”

“You don’t trust me?”

I look up at him and shrug. “You just killed a man, Kyle. I bet you’re even wondering if you’ve got the nerve to kill me, so no, I don’t trust you. In fact, I’d rather set that guy free than let you take him in.”

“You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

“Yeah well…doesn’t change the color of that bullseye on my back, now does it?”

“Fuck you.” He stands there for another moment, a black ghost with the flames of hell behind him, then he turns and walks away. I watch him go, waiting for him to lunge toward my truck and the unsuspecting guy handcuffed in back of it, because as little as I’ve known about this son of mine, I know even less about the one with the cold look in his eyes and the big goddamn gun in his hand, so I’m watching, waiting to see what he’ll do next.

But he doesn’t go to my truck. He goes to his Chevy, and doesn’t look back. The car’s lights make gray funnels in the smoke as he reverses out of the lot and back down the hill.

I’m left to ponder the irony of protecting a murderer from my son when I was all too willing to leave the guy in Cobb’s care. Could be I trusted Cobb when I had no right to. Could be not letting Kyle take the guy in was my way of protecting, not Brody, but my son, keeping him out of further trouble. Yeah, sure.

With a sigh, I circle the fire as close as it will let me get without burning the hair out of my ears. There’s a plot of land back here where no one should rightly be put to rest. It’s stony ground and hard, and its closeness to a tavern should disqualify it if the fact that its unconsecrated doesn’t. And when the toilets quit working, as they often did in Eddie’s, people pissed out here. That’s the smell I’m getting now, despite the rain and the smoke, because the smell of piss is stubborn like that. It’ll hang around, get stronger, no matter what you try and do to get rid of it.

Here’s where the whore’s going to get planted, in rocky unblessed earth that smells like the men’s room.

The fire’s close. If I stood up right now, turned and took a dozen strides I’d be right on the edge of it feeling what little hair I have left shrivel up. It dries my back as I lay the girl down and set about finding a rock with enough of a point to work as a tool. I’d use my hands but it would take me until this time tomorrow to get it deep enough that the coyotes and other scavengers would let her be. Takes me a minute, but I find what I’m looking for. It’s a spade-shaped rock half-buried in the wormy earth, and though it takes some persuading, I eventually get it free and start hacking at the earth.

Nothing here to say it’s a graveyard. No markers, no lumps in the ground where the dead have pulled the covers up over themselves, and no flowers. There’s a reason for that. Anyone planted here isn’t meant to be mourned, and so far they haven’t been disappointed. Looks like a damn vegetable patch that’s been let go to seed, but under all that stone and dirt and weeds, there are a number of folks I used to know and don’t miss. Among them is ’ol Eddie, a rat-bastard of the highest order and, I’m guessing, another reason this patch of ground reeks of piss.

You’re a real asshole, you know that?

Kyle’s got a girl. She’s not much, but she’s company. Used to be she ran a pretty good store out of one of the old buildings on Winter Street, selling clothes and trinkets and such. But in Milestone, the days of prosperous business for all but bartenders, undertakers and whores has ended, and Iris Gale knows that well, which is why she’s now self-employed in the latter trade. I figure she doesn’t charge Kyle for her services, on account of how he’s got no money, or at least none that I know about outside of the odd jobs he does for those willing to open their doors to him. Maybe that’s why he was so concerned about Carla. Maybe Iris has changed his opinion on whores and the like.

Doesn’t matter.

He’s gone, and now it’s just the dead girl and me with her boyfriend sulking in the passenger seat of my truck.

Or maybe not, because all of a sudden the back of my neck’s cold and that’s not right at all, not with the fire still fighting its blazing fight against the wind and rain. Someone’s watching me. I’m sure of it, and I cast a quick glance at the whore before standing, both knees crackling loud enough to make me wince. “I’ll get you there in a minute,” I let her know by way of an apology. “Just hang on.” That damn spied-on feeling grows stronger, until it makes my skin crawl. I have to wonder if it’s the rain after all. Maybe it’s just gotten colder. Maybe the fire’s finally admitting defeat. Maybe Brody’s throwing daggers at me from my truck. Maybe, maybe, maybe. It’s all bullshit. My way of trying to pretend I’ve gone through all I’m going to for one night.

I start to turn around and I’m full sure I’ll see Cadaver coming back out of the tavern, or studying me from the inferno. But it isn’t Cadaver.

The fire’s getting a little lower as it runs out of fuel to feed on, the heads of those flames whipping hungrily to the left, toward town, but with no way to get there, I reckon in an hour or two, they’ll be nothing the rain can’t handle. It’s still hotter than hell though, except here near the back, where I’m standing. The cold is coming from the almost perfect circle that has appeared through the smoke and the flames, forcing them to bend around it. Goddamndest thing I’ve ever seen, but sure as I’m standing here with a dead girl at my feet there’s a tunnel, tall enough to step into, drilled into the fire and stretching about ten feet into the tavern, like someone just stuck a great big glass tube right into the blaze.

At the end of that tunnel, brass foot rails reflecting the shunned fire, sits the bar itself. It should be a charred hunk of nothing right now, but there it is, untouched, and as always, unpolished. And behind it, busy fixing a couple of glasses of whiskey, and looking equally untouched and unpolished, is Gracie.

Chapter Eight

For a moment I just stand there, nudging my right foot against Carla’s cold body to make sure I’m really here. The cold air wafting from that tunnel makes me shiver. The combination of temperatures is going to leave me with one raging bitch of a head cold on top of everything else, so I do what I guess I’m supposed to do, and make my way toward the bar.

It’s like stepping into a freezer, or jumping into a lake of ice.

“Jesus Henry,” I moan and rub my arms like a worried housewife. The cold makes me instantly aware of every spot on my body the fire didn’t dry, and my breath turns to mist. I have to question why it needs to be this cold. If Gracie’s dead, then she’s dead. Keeping her on ice can only be someone’s idea of a sick joke. Or maybe it’s freezing because if it wasn’t, I’d be one crispy critter right about now, given that I’m at least four feet past the threshold of fire. It laps at the invisible walls around me, spreading out across the surface like some kind of amber marine creature desperate to suck me out of my shell.

Strange, but I figure it’s better not to analyze too deeply something that’s keeping me from being roasted alive, so I focus on Gracie, who for all I know might at any moment give me a little finger-wave and vanish, along with her little invisible asbestos test tube. I speed up my approach, and the closer I get, the less cold it becomes.

Gracie looks up at me. She doesn’t smile, but nods a greeting and tucks that rogue lock of hair behind her ear. If she’s dead, it’s been kind to her, but the drab unflattering outfit she supposedly burned to death in hasn’t been improved any.

“Sheriff.”

“Gracie.”

I test the reality of the bar by brushing my fingers across its surface. They come away black with soot, but underneath, the bar is there.

“Sit,” Gracie says. It’s not a request.

There’s only one stool, and I’m about to take it when it occurs to me to ask, “This wasn’t Cobb’s, was it?”

“Weren’t anybody’s.”

I sit. Gracie slides one of the glasses in front of me. I look at it, wondering how I’m sitting here in a bar that’s all but burned to the ground, about to enjoy a whiskey that doesn’t exist with a woman who died in the fire. It’s a couple of questions too many, so I figure maybe I can tackle them later. “For Blue Moon.” I sink the drink. It burns, scalds my throat on the way down and sends fumes rolling back up that I vent through my teeth. It’s real all right, and the conclusion forces me to accept that everything else is too, even as the fire dances around us.

Gracie slams her whiskey without effort, without expression, but that’s Gracie for you. Woman could get shot in the ass and wouldn’t blink.

“I’d be lying if I said I expected to see you here, Gracie.”

“Why’s that?”

“You died, didn’t you?”

“I did, but you know as well as I do that the only reason I spent every wakin’ hour behind this goddamn bar is because my daddy—may he burn in Hell—made sure I would. Last thing that sonofabitch said to me was “This is your place, Grace, and it always will be. Nowhere else right for you and you’re not right for anywhere else. Turns out it was more’n just words.”

“You don’t seem too put out by it all.”

“Wouldn’t be much point in that, now would there?”

“Guess not.”

She looks as tired as I feel, and that’s somewhat discouraging. If you don’t get find rest even in death, where can you find it?

“So that’s why you came back?” I ask, holding out my glass. She tips the bottle, holding back a little, but I figure she’s earned that right, being as how she got cooked and I didn’t. “To look after a bar that’s not here any more?” As I say it, I feel the solid wood beneath my elbows and shrug. “Or at least, shouldn’t be.”

Filling her own glass again, she says, “Lotta things none of you barflies knew about my daddy, Tom. He made promises and broke ’em just like every other fool on God’s green earth. Nothin’ special about that. But then there were the kinds of promises he made sure couldn’t be broken. Learned ways to guarantee that there’d be a price if anyone broke their word. Some tried, of course, and ended up ass-up out where you were puttin’ the whore. Others went about tryin’ to find a way to have the promises dissolved, with magic and other nonsense. But my daddy, he had a little ’ol ace up his sleeve in that wife of his.”

“Didn’t know he married again after your Momma died.”

“’Course you didn’t. No one did, and that’s how he liked it. His little secret. I was only eighteen at the time, and she—Lian Su—wasn’t much older. Said he won the little bitch in a poker game on one of his trips to the Orient, but figured out after too long that he’d been the one who’d come away a loser, on account of how she wasn’t…right. Saw things she shouldn’t have been able to see, made things happen, could hex people and the like. Could make people forget themselves, cause accidents, summon quarrels from calm. All manner of voodoo shit.”

“I’m not sure the Chinese have voodoo, Gracie.”

“Well whatever it was, it wasn’t natural, and it was dangerous. My daddy was afraid of her at first, tried to lock her away in the guest room upstairs, but given the kind of man he was, it was only a matter of time before he started figurin’ ways to benefit from her “gift”. Next thing, he’s winnin’ poker games all over the place and those few unfortunates brave enough to challenge him end up missin’, or worse.” She shrugs as if the recollection doesn’t bother her, but it’s plain to see it does.

“If he was winning poker games, what’d he do with the money? No offense but this place was never what you’d call fancy.”

“He was a gambler, Tom. Anything he made got lost just as quick.”

“Right.”

“So a year later, Lian Su gets a letter tellin’ her her Momma’s sick, and she begs my daddy to let her go home. Not quite sure why she felt the need to get his permission. Never could figure out what his hold on her was, considering she could probably abracadabra him into a possum if she had a mind to. Whatever it was, he agreed, but on the condition that he be allowed to go with her, I suppose to make sure she wasn’t scheming to leave him. I know he was secretly wonderin’ if maybe her momma was rich and left Lian a fortune that he could then add to his own pocket. Lian had no choice but to grant his wish. So they went. Before they did though, she did somethin’ to me at my father’s request. Made sure I stayed right here tendin’ to his shithole till he got back.”

She steps back from the bar, her gaze hard, and slips the strap of her dress off one shoulder, letting it slip down almost to the nipple of her right breast. If she’d done this earlier, I might have been grateful for the glimpse, and eager to see more, but there are two reasons why there isn’t anything even remotely sexual about this moment. First, there’s the obvious fact that she’s dead, and as much as I was attracted to her in life, that’s a line even I won’t cross. Secondly, there’s some kind of symbol branded into the flesh of that breast, a large ugly pink thing that looks like a couple of wigwams behind a crooked fence trapped inside a square. Hovering above the whole mess is a couple of rough Japanese or Chinese symbols.

“What’s it mean?”

She shakes her head, tugs the strap back onto her slim shoulder, and I’m somewhat disturbed to note how hard her nipples are beneath the material, and how harder still it is for me to ignore the fact. “I don’t know, but it’s how he kept me here,” she says. “S’why I’m still here. Night before he took off, he tied me down, took off my shirt and had the bitch spout gibberish over me before she drew that symbol on my tit with the business end of a red hot Bowie knife.”

“Jesus. You ever try to leave?”

“First time I tried stepping over the threshold of this place, it made me sterile and ejected the baby that was busy growin’ in my belly at the time.”

“You were—”

“No great loss. It was my daddy’s child anyway, so he did me a favor.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I put it down to coincidence and tried again. That one gave me such a pain it dropped me to the floor and left me there for two days, paralyzed and bleedin’ from every hole in my body. So I gave up, figurin’ if I tried a third time, it might be the last.”

“Might’ve been a mercy too.”

“This look like mercy to you?”

“Guess not.”

“So my daddy comes back. Lian Su isn’t with him, and he’s loonier than a goddamn fox-gnawed hen.”

“What happened?”

“Beats me, but it don’t take a genius to figure out what might have happened to a Western man in an Eastern house of witches, does it?”

I shudder at the thought, or maybe it’s the cold, but despite how unnatural my circumstances might have become, the whiskey is once again doing its job and blunting the edges.

“He locks himself in his room for a week, and I leave him there, happy to have him starve to death, till I remember he’s the only hope I have of ever steppin’ foot outside this place. So I go up there and I find him curled up on the bed like a child, naked and whimperin’, and I grab him by the throat.” She extends her hand and throttles the air between us. “And I tell him I’m glad he’s gonna die, that it should have happened years ago. And I tell him I’ll help put him out of his misery if he just tells me how to get out from under the bitch’s hex. And you know what he does?”

I wait for her to continue.

“He laughs. That cocksucker laughs in this hysterical girly laugh and tells me this is my place, nowhere else right for me, and then gets right back to laughin’.”

“So he could have done something about it if he’d wanted to?”

“Don’t know. Maybe he knew how to lift the curse, maybe not, but I didn’t give him a second chance to tell me.”

I drain my glass, and damn that whiskey’s hitting the spot now. I’m even wondering if Gracie will object to letting me take another bottle off her hands for old time’s sake. But her eyes are all glassy. She’s back in that room with her daddy for the moment so I guess it’s best to hear out the end of her account.

“You kill him?”

“You bet I did,” she says, the fire in her eyes hotter than the one at my back. “Fucker had it comin’. Should’ve done it years ago, first time he came into my room reekin’ of bourbon with his pants around his ankles. Should have stashed a knife and cut off his prick, but I never dreamed he’d do it. Could’ve done it any night after that but I guess I was too afraid, too stuck on the Bible and what it tells you about vengeance and righteousness and all that bullshit. He unlearned me of those lessons, I can tell you. My only regret now is that I left him off easy. Smotherin’ him with a pillow was a hell of a lot better than he deserved. I should have tied him down and…” She waves away the thought. “S’all the same now.”

“And here you are. Still.”

“Here I am.”

“The hell happened in here tonight, Gracie?” I want more than anything for her to be able to give me a straight answer, tie up the whole goddamn mess in one quick sentence, because she died, and surely that gave her the opportunity to see who pulls the strings in this little nightmare.

But all she does is shrug. “Don’t know.

“So what now?”

She looks around at the fire outside our little magic tunnel. “Guess I’m gonna have to start putting this place back together. Not gonna stand around in a pile of ashes for the rest of forever, and a girl’s gotta make a livin’.” This time she does smile, just a little.

“I’d be glad to help.”

“Appreciate the offer, Tom, but it’s not like I don’t have the time.”

“Not a matter of time, Gracie.”

“I’ll figure out what needs doin’, and the way I see it, if I can blow cold bubbles that keep the fire from eatin’ me up again, I can sure as shit make myself some walls and a roof.”

“I guess that’s true.”

“Besides,” she says, shoving aside her empty glass and taking a long swallow from the bottle. “You’ve got problems of your own.”

I sigh. “Don’t I know it.”

“Not yet you don’t.”

Setting down my glass, I feel the return of the cold. You can dispute bad news from just about any source, but when it comes from the dead, who I figure are more likely to know the score than anyone living, then you best listen. So I do.

Gracie’s dark eyes hold me in place. “Tonight,” she says. “This tavern, this whole town, has been rotten for a long time, Tom, and so are most of the people in it. Some more than others.”

None of this is news to me, but she’s building up to something, and I find myself getting edgier with every word. She’s trying to be gentle with me, and that’s not in her nature, so it doesn’t work, and that’s the worst thing of all, because if she’s trying to soften a blow that’s coming, it’s going to be a bad one.

“Tell me.”

She puts the bottle in front of me, nods for me to take it. I do, and with it comes the feeling that it’s a parting gift, that she suspects one of us isn’t going to be here when the sun comes up. That lock of hair falls over her eye. I wait for her to tuck it back. She doesn’t.

“It’s your boy,” she says. “You have yourself a Judas.”