Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery (2 page)

Second Chapter

The next morning I overcooked a pot of cheese grits and ate joylessly in the doorway, nursing a pretty vicious hangover as I stared at the woods. Made me feel like I was bickering with an upset neighbor. I guess I sort of was, only Brickmeyer didn’t know what the quarrel was just yet.

In my head, as I thought about last night, I tiptoed around the word
ghost
(and also the word
crazy
). I wasn’t some half-baked lunatic, but I also couldn’t help but acknowledge what I had seen. I had been drunk but not high. I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing, but...shit, I didn’t know. The whole thing reminded me of a piece of Gonzo journalism.

What I thought was out there made me more jittery than my two cups of coffee. And the weather wasn’t helping. It was pouring down outside, like it does late in the spring, and the rain was busily erasing the truck’s tire tracks from last night.

It almost hurt to believe it was the truth. Sometimes things happen to drunks, and they have to accept that reality, even if it doesn’t quite measure up with what a sane, sober man might see. A drunk man’s truth is still his truth, even if it isn’t
the
truth.

Everybody needs something to convince him to get out of the bed in the morning.

I finished the grits and placed the bowl in the sink with the other grimy dishes before dressing for a muddy trek. I rescued a shirt from the bottom of the dirty pile and also a pair of jeans - tucking the .45 discreetly into them of course - and then I donned a jacket and slogged through the muck and the rain for the Boogie House.

The smell in there bent me over like a swift kick to the guts. I ran outside to be sick. Something had happened overnight. Being drunk makes you immune to some smells, but this was beyond even that. It wasn't hot outside, but the humidity had excited the decomposition of
something
. A four year degree wasn’t necessary to identify the smell of something dead and rotting.

Once all my breakfast was on my shoes, I returned to the front entrance, weapon drawn for good measure, and scanned the inside of the juke joint. Nobody hiding here today. Couldn't take the smell, I’m sure. Not now. Not today.

It was then I found the reason the giant who tried to kill me had been here in the first place.

He - at least I thought it a he - lay sprawled in the corner, against the base of what used to be a serving bar. One arm stretched out above the body, giving the illusion of pointing, both legs screwed in awkward, rag-doll positions.
Dead
no longer accurately described his condition. He had gone to the far end of dead and then some. Georgia can be brutal on a body if the weather’s hot and wet enough.

Medical examiner was going to have a field day. He’d probably had no experience with anything worse than a hunting or car accident in years.

"'Lo?" I said. No answer. Some birds fluttered in the rafters and flew away.

“Hello?” I repeated. Nothing. Outside, the rain played an improvised, striding rhythm on the partially caved-in roof.

I stepped inside, covering my mouth and nose with the front of my shirt, and approached the body. The stench seeped through the fibers of my tee. In eyeing the body, I tripped and nearly went waist-deep in the floor. Again.

One of the floorboards was loose. It wasn’t like the others, which had rotted, so I had to be careful to get around it. No telling what kind of diseases and conditions were gestating on the ends of the old, rusted nails.

The victim was African-American. Young guy, maybe twenty or twenty-five, though I couldn't be entirely certain. Somebody'd given him the white sheet treatment, if I had to guess.

“Goddamn,” I said. “That’s a goddamn shame.”

I leaned in, examining the face. Poor bastard had been knocked around pretty good, so that identification would be difficult. The two halves of his face looked mismatched. Could’ve been two different heads, so far as I knew.

A piercing sound made me jump, and I thought my skin would crawl off the muscle. I turned to find an old piano in the corner, swollen and rotted and incapable of producing sound of that caliber. But it had. Someone or something had played a chord of immense and simple beauty.

The tone suspended in the air for a few moments and then faded. A brief image of last night came back to me, but I shrugged it off.
Maybe a rat or something
, I told myself.

Haha. The lies we tell ourselves for the sake of self-preservation.

I returned my attention to the young man. He had suffered unimaginable torment. Not only that, but he had to endure the indignity of decomposing in an abandoned gin club. It was a fate befitting a child molester, or an abusive husband, not...whoever this turned out to be.

The Chief was going to have a fit when he found out I had turned up this body.

"No one deserves this," I said into my shirt, looking at the face, whose eyes stared at nothing. There was almost something knowing in them, a kind of death wisdom. And the lifeless orbs were staring directly at me. A fly lit upon one of the lids and then skittered across the open eye.

I shuddered. I felt myself being pulled into something against my will, but that could have just been the supernatural effect of the Boogie House.

The rain refused to slacken, but I poked around nonetheless, humming the melody to an old Elmore James song to keep the willies at bay. The old, rotten place carried a tune of its own, and that tune was harrowing, but there were no more shenanigans with the piano, so I was able to fail at being a detective in quiet solitude
.

I was looking for a tree with a bullet lodged in it. Or bullet shards. All I got out of the deal was wet. There also were no footsteps in the corner where the stranger had shot at me, so it turned out to be a real bust for me.

Only, I guess it really wasn’t. Coming out here had reinforced my belief that the Boogie House was haunted, though I didn’t actually see any ghosts this time. A slightly supernatural piano chord would have to do for now.

At a certain point, I thought I heard slide guitar, but it was never definite enough for me to feel put off by it, not like what happened with the piano. This was something else. Could have just been me thinking about Elmore James again. Guy could play a slide guitar that made you not even want to pick up the damn instrument when you heard it.

By the time I was done puttering about, trying to do something miraculous with my less-than-stellar detective skills, the rain had soaked through my clothes. I walked back to the house and reluctantly called the police station.

I was told not to step foot in the station until the mess I had created blew over, and even though my first instinct is to ignore direct commands, my legs were still too shaky for me to even drive into town and face down my boss. (He might have described me as his former boss, but we have differences of opinion we’re always trying to work out.)

"Lumber Junction Police Department," said a smoky, heavily-accented voice.

"Hey, uh, Dara.  D.L. around?"

Dara Gibbons, not normally short for words, popped her gum.  She wanted to dispose of me without me knowing. She started up chewing again. Too late.

"Mayor’s in there with him,” she said in explanation. “Can't have any phone calls. Take a message?"

"Mmm hmm," I replied. "Important stuff, or are they swapping bullshit back there?" I tried to make it known that it was most definitely the latter. It was
always
the latter.

"
Language
," she said. "He said not to let
anybody
through. That includes you.
Especially
you, and
especially
right now."

I rolled my eyes. "So does that mean D.L's not back there with the mayor, or he's making you lie because he didn't want to do his job?"

"And talking with you is his new job description?"

"Got nothing to do with me, D. I promise I won't give him a coronary. Just a minute. Sixty seconds. After that, you can transfer me back and pop gum in my ear until I hang up."

Her sigh could have curdled milk. I waited, holding my breath, until at last she said, "Oh, all right. Hold on a sec." There was a momentary pause, then, "You know, if you get him riled up, I'm gonna say you were posing as his golf swing coach or a
Guns & Ammo
editor or something."

"The only thing could help his golf swing is a gun." I thought of last night and cringed. Something sharp plunged through my guts. “It sounded funny in my head, right before I said it.”

"I’m sure most things do, Rolson." I thought I sensed her smiling on the other end, but it could have been wishful thinking.

The line clicked over a moment later. Before D.L. could muster the breath to scream at me, I cleared my throat and said, "D.L., listen to me. I got something to tell you that has nothing to do with my case or how full of shit I am."

D.L. grunted, a hard, weary sound. "What is it? I actually
am
in a hurry, for once. Got lunch with the wife in ten minutes, and they dock her pay if she ain’t back on time."

"Chief of Police should have influence over that stuff."

"You'd think that, but flower shops aren’t intimidated by strong-arm tactics." I measured his voice. So far it was dry, non-committal. D.L.'s knack was for conversational banter of a certain kind.

I ignored the lie about the mayor meeting and dove right into an explanation. I said, "You know that shack that used to be a juke joint, over on the land the Brickmeyers bought some-odd years ago?"

"Not too far from your place? I s'pose I do. Brown Jug? Something like that?"

"The Boogie House. Brown Jug's the bar from that old Skynyrd song."

"Right, right. I get it. The
Boogie House
." He spoke quietly, in a measured tone. There was a question in his voice, but I wasn't about to answer it, not the way he wanted.

I said it bluntly.

"There's a body in it."

It was D.L.'s turn to sigh. I imagined his impossibly bushy eyebrows sliding up his forehead. "You drunk again, Rolson? Or did you run over somebody in the woods this time?"

I kept my voice level. "Nope. Sober as a judge."

"Round here, that's not saying much." It was a joke, but he said it distractedly, like he was also looking for a lost note on his desk.

He sucked his teeth and made that familiar
Mmmn-mmm-mmm-mmn-mmn
sound parents use when they are so incredulous that words fail them. "Jesus Christ. A body in the Boogie House. Sounds like an old blues number, doesn't it?"

He snorted, as if something horrible occurred to him. He paused again. "For a minute, I thought you were calling to tell me something had happened to Vanessa."

"D.L."

"Sorry. Wait until you have a child that breaks your heart like Vanessa did ours. And, as a wife, broke yours."

"Ex-wife," I said. Quickly changing the subject, I added, “Listen, D.L. In all the drama surrounding my...meltdown-”

"Let’s be clear, Rolson: I did what I had to with you. These fucking - 'scuse my language - but certain people in town, well, they smelled blood in the water. They would have sent me out of town on a rail if they thought I'd shown you any preferential treatment. Far as reasons for calling, I figured it had something to do with Vanessa."

"I haven't seen her in forever."

"Don't suspect so. I keep waiting for the call, for them to tell me they found her face-down in a dumpster. Too bad you can't force sobriety on people." I could tell he resented the last sentence. "Anyway, Rol, I'll get a cruiser and ambulance out there. You sure it's a dead person? Not a squatter sleeping off a mean drunk?"

I readjusted the phone to the other ear. Shit, now that he mentioned it, I wasn’t sure of much.  "Pretty certain."

"I'll go ahead and call the medical examiner as well, then."

I waited, grasping for something to say. D.L. must have sensed it, because cut in with, "Take care of yourself. You ever need anything, you give me a call. Hear?"

*  *  *

Neither the cruiser nor the ambulance seemed to be in much of a hurry. Both vehicles crept along the road until the drivers saw me. The faces of officers Bullen and Harper turned to scowls as I directed them into the woods. Spooner, the ambulance driver, didn’t react one way or the other.

The path was just wide enough for vehicles, and I followed them to the Boogie House on foot and then went wordlessly inside after them. Above us, the clouds had given a respite from the rain, and in the humidity and rising temperature, the odor was particularly vicious.

Ronald Bullen stepped through the front door, spat. "Great fucking day to be out here," he said. "So goddamn great, the boss even refused to show up. Don't you think so, Harper?"