Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (10 page)

I drained the last of my beer, tasting something not unlike rancid dishwater. "Sure," I said. "Don't expect a call, then."

"Hubris has ruined plenty of people, Rol,” Deuce warned. “Don't let yourself be one of them. Small towns are like small oceans, full of piranhas and sharks."

"Piranhas are freshwater."

"Don’t fuck with my logic, man. People like Brickmeyer, they're the sharks, and everybody else who wants to be anybody, they're the piranhas. Once the shark gets all chewed up and spit out, then one of those little piranhas starts growing. Gets bigger, and the cycle starts over."

"I see what you're saying."

"The key is, though it may seem like there's a lot going against you, there's also a lot going
for
you. People hiding around the edges, waiting for you to take down the shark. They'll help you, for sure, but don't be surprised if the same people who help you end up turning you into chum for everybody else to feed on."

I took that last statement to heart.

I got up, patted Deuce on the shoulder. "Be careful." He had his fingers steepled together and shook his head as I made my way toward the exit.

"And show up for your court date," he said, just as I closed the door behind me. "I don't wanna have to come find you."

*  *  *

I drove down the street to the IGA and picked up a whole, uncooked chicken, a sack of potatoes, cigarettes and beer and then went home.

I do sort of like to cook, but I’m not very good at it. I never could make food for groups of people or anything, or work in a restaurant, but I can fry up southern food so it's edible.

It’s calming. There is something entrancing about the repetitive actions of preparing and cooking food - the constant cup-and-ball game of moving food and ingredients, only to have it end up on a plate - and it keeps me from thinking about all the things I’d fucked up. I can leave my mind in a suspended state. So I cook.

I do make a pretty mean country fried steak. I can say that.

The key is to drop whatever it is you're frying, from thinly sliced crookneck squash to cube steak, in the pan when the grease hits the right temperature. Cook it when the grease is too hot and you'll burn the flour; throw it in lukewarm grease you’ll end up with mushy food. You've got to burn plenty of drumsticks before you get it right.

I rinsed the chicken and cut it up, dipping the sections into a mixture of egg yolks, salt, pepper, and Louisiana hot sauce before powdering them with flour and tossing them into the pan, which was almost too hot but not quite. Some people take the skin off because it's healthier. I don't. I leave the skin on. I'm old-fashioned. I reuse oil, sometimes old bacon grease. I do use vegetable oil, but not olive oil. It changes the flavor. My Aunt Birdie would curse God Himself if she saw me using it to cook.

For the sides, I cheated and cooked canned cream corn. I put it on the stove with pepper and quarter-stick of butter in it and let it simmer while I boiled and mashed the potatoes with the skins still on, stirring in spoonfuls of sour cream for flavor. Peel some potatoes and leave the skins on others, and don’t mash them too vigorously, or you’ll turn them soupy. Not good.

I made a great big plate and took two beers and my cigarettes outside and ate on the tailgate of the F150. I thought it'd be good to enjoy an evening unspoiled by rain.

After dinner, I scraped the leftovers off my plate out by the trees for the strays and put the rest in the fridge for later. I smoked a cigarette outside, wondering what to do next. If I wanted to get Brickmeyer hot, I had to do something public, something embarrassing to his family. I thought on it for a while but never actually came up with anything.

Later, D.L. called me while I absently channel-surfed. I muted the TV and answered. "You that desperate down there at the station, calling me on your own time?"

His laugh sounded like dried twigs in a wood chipper. "I don't have any of my own time, my boy. Didn't you ever learn that? I just have hours of theirs I don't spend at the office."

"That's why you make the big bucks."

"I reckon. Listen, Rolson, about that license plate you gave me."

My heart dipped in my chest. He sounded dour. "Find out who it belongs to?"

He sighed. "We did. Dead end, partner. It's stolen."

"Stolen?"

"Took the tag off some old abandoned wreck, hadn't been registered to anybody in years. Make and the model are immaterial, as you probably already figured. Down here, diesel trucks are as common as camo. We got fifty or sixty just like it, right down the color, from here to Dublin."

"Damnit."

"That's right. I know you’re probably not going to listen to me, but whatever you do, don't piss anybody off. You made the find. They probably just wanted to make sure you weren't going to be any trouble."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Somebody saw Laveau out at your house today. That have to do with the one thing, or the other?"

"You got eyes everywhere, don't you, Chief? Lot of reach for such a small department."

"Somebody made a pass by your house." He laughed again briefly, a dry cackle. "And
you
won't be doing shit with this investigation, Rolson. I hear of you sticking your fingers in the pie, I'll cut 'em off. You hear me? You got bigger things,
personal
things, to be worrying about. Worry about those. This dead Laveau guy doesn't have anything to do with you."

"You're right. I'll back off," I said. I made it sound convincing.

"Damn better. No disrespect to Mrs. Laveau, but it looks to me like she's using your, uh,
situation
to call in a favor. She wants you playing vigilante because she knows you feel like you owe her."

"So."

"So if by the grace of God you're able to track down the killer before we do, what do you think she's going to have you do? Call us? Turn him into the police so he can stand trial?"

There was a pause on the line. I couldn't think of anything to say. "Don't kid yourself, Rol. She's playing you, big time, and it's not going to end well. Either she wants you to kill the punk for revenge's sake, or she wants you take some kind of fall. I've seen it happen before. Don't let yourself get sucked into something you can't get out of. I'd hate for that to happen to you, dumb-ass or not. Okay?"

D.L. hung up. I placed my phone on the edge of my knee and twirled it mindlessly, watching the way it spun around. If Janita Laveau was lying, she had a pretty convincing scam going.

"I guess we'll see, " I said to nothing and nobody in particular.

*  *  *

When the sound of high-performance mufflers yanked me from sleep, I had been dreaming about a river that was made of money. Cars had never been the thing to haunt me - I’ve never cared for the woods too much - but now it seemed like I was living in some hellish Stephen King novel.

I leaped up, grabbed the .45 from the bedside table, and went outside, aiming at nothing and everything. The truck had been nearby but was now tear-assing it down the road a ways. In the absence of a city, cars make a hell of an echoey racket, especially with glass pack mufflers on the back.

As I swept the perimeter, a single image from my dream kept coming back to me: someone floating in the midst of all that cash. Going down through a swampy entrenchment in bare feet, I looked for just the right silhouette. Just the right combination of light and dark. Maybe the moon glinting off a windshield. Or a gun glinting against pale moonlight. It was not so dark that I wouldn’t have seen it.

It took fifteen minutes for me to come to my senses.

You're losing it, old buddy, I thought. Soon the fucking trees will be a threat. You cannot jump at every backfire, and there are a lot of backfires out here.

After another few minutes of searching, I straightened up and headed back toward the house. What was I going to do, find a truck in the mud of a nearby field?

I stopped in the middle of the road, glancing back and forth between my house and the Brickmeyer tract. Something pinged in my chest, sending shivers down my arms. The darkness of the woods was calling to me, and I considered a late-night walk.

It was silly, devoid of any real logic, but it was more enticing than going back to bed. So I let my intuition drive me into the woods at midnight.

I turned and walked toward the Boogie House. A slick wire tightened around my guts, and I felt my testicles draw up against me. A vaguely human shape was slinking between two rows of trees. I stopped cold. Could have been a lot of things, I tried to convince myself. A white-tailed deer, maybe. Or light playing tricks on me. But it wasn’t. It was a person.

I moved quietly toward the woods, my mind filling with fantastically disturbing images. The woods, in turn, responded with silent awe. The chaotic weather of the last few days had subsided. There wasn't a breeze making branches rattle together. No cicadas or crickets. No raccoons scuttling about in the underbrush. Just me, the silence, and the Boogie House.

And it happened again.

The music started up, quietly at first. A guitar in the dark, playing a low blues chord progression. It was the sound of somebody warming up on a six string acoustic. I stopped and listened. The shadows around me grew into shapeless, watery pools. I kept going.

They always get fear wrong in the movies. You don’t shit your pants and scream yourself blind when something happens. If you’re smart, you don’t do that. More likely, you convince yourself everything is all right until you’re convinced it’s not. And then, even then, you just sort of gulp it down and go on with your life. There’s no running and screaming, just a kind of halfhearted acceptance that you or the world is crazy.

Word is, Robert Johnson gave over his soul to the devil to play slide guitar. Met up with a real mean fellow at the Crossroads and had him teach him the blues, and afterward the man just disappeared. Johnson came back a different man. A strange, drunken virtuoso. The rumor went that he played with his back to the audience so nobody could cop his style. He died under mysterious circumstances, and though most people believe he was poisoned by a jealous husband, some think his deal had dried up and the devil claimed his soul for Hell.

This midnight rendezvous felt no different, complete with an authentic soundtrack. What devil was I handing my soul over to, and for what price?

Once the Boogie House came into sight, with its gaping, rotted mouth of an entrance, the music swelled so that it sounded like someone running a high-speed drill right through my head.

I pressed both palms against my ears. The sound of the guitar rattled my teeth, a ululating whine that hurt so bad I tried to close down every one of my senses to push it out. Not that it helped. A single note hummed in the center of my head, creating a vibration threatening to split me in two. I pushed through, stumbling toward the building.

With each step, the drill bit inched into my brain. ‘Ear-splitting’ doesn’t even begin to describe the sensation of having sound cut your head in two. I had been to concerts where the crowd pressed me against the monitor and the songs became a wall of distorted sound, and this easily put a late-80s Metallica show to shame. It was like someone sandblasting my eardrums.

I stared down at my feet. Focused on taking steps. Worked my way forward.

When I reached the entrance, I let go of my ears and heard only the wind blowing through the trees. Well, that and the throbbing
wha-wha-wha
sound your ears get after a concert.

“You have a funny way of showing love,” I said. I sounded like an adult from Charlie Brown. “Is this how you treat everyone who’s trying to help you?”

I stepped through the door. Death lingered inside. Not the smell of death, but death itself. You could taste it in the air, thick as cigarette smoke. The yellow tape was still there, but this place had already gone back to being forgotten. It had to get back to the business of rotting, breaking down so that all traces of its existence could be erased forever.

A flash of white flickered beside me and I jumped back to avoid it, stumbling over a ragged set of boards. I landed against the side of a table and cracked my head a good one. Stars danced a jig across my field of vision in time with my throbbing skull.

Everything melted into a blurry mess. A slow stream of blood trickled down my neck and into my shirt. The darkness in the old juke spread out, and no matter how much I blinked, the light wouldn’t return. I was going to pass out if I didn't get some real oxygen soon. Real as in
not
the stuff I was breathing in here.

I drunkenly tried to find my feet. Then I began to hear them. Voices coming to me through the open doorway. I crab-crawled backward on my hands, behind the chair that had nearly knocked me unconscious. I pressed myself against the wall, wrapping my arms around my knees and peering under the table at the faint moonlight creeping inside. The pain on the back of my head was excruciating, but I managed to keep still and to keep awake, no matter how alluring the other side of consciousness was just then.