Currency of Souls (13 page)

"A deal? With who?"

"That old guy who looks like a corpse."

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

"You know what the deal was?" I ask Iris.

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

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

"He did."

I wait. She says nothing.

"Where?"

"Not sure I should tell you."

"Why's that?"

"You haven't settled up for the information you've already gotten outta me."

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

"Come here."

"Iris. I have to get going. You know why."

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's hardly a revelation.

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

"Where did he go?"

"The Reverend's house," she says.

"Why there?"

"Beats me."

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

"I'm sorry."

She raises her eyebrows. "What for?"

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

"Sheriff?"

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

I tip my hat and leave.

Chapter Eleven

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you doing here?" Hendricks snaps. "If you've come to beg..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

"Check that out," he says, sounding amused. "There's someone out there."

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

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

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

Bloodshot dawn glares at me from over the hills.

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

"Isn't that...?"

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

* * *

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

It is dark despite the fire.

It is cold despite the heat.

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

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

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

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

"Pop," Wintry croaks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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