Jake finished the beer and crushed the can, contemplating having another. Sounds of his father’s pain carried from the living room, like an old door creaking open. The setting sun sparkling like diamonds off the surface of the pond drew him back to his tenth birthday, sitting on the bank with Nicky by his side, tracking the blood red sun as it dropped below the horizon. Nicky’s arm draped over his shoulders. Feeling the sheer intensity of his love for his older brother, the idol. Crickets chirping, an occasional car droning by on Old Highway 83, bullfrogs croaking. Peaceful. Happy.
Stony emitted a long and soulful groan dripping with agony. Jake pictured him bent at the waist, clasping at his cancer-ridden abdomen underneath the howling timberwolf afghan. The tears that rolled from Jake’s eyes earlier were gone, nothing but salty remnants on his cheeks. Whatever emotion passed through him earlier disappeared in that handful of tears he shed on his knees in front of his father. He rubbed his kneecap and the lump of scar tissue. Could still hear the sound. The sound that changed his fate. He thought of Nicky, dead on the dock and his mother laying cold in the ground. He felt that white leather belt cracking across his back and the gold ring breaking his skin.
The clock of his diminishing forty-eight-hour deadline ticked away.
The moaning from the living room devolved to a pitiful wail, driving Jake to his feet. Half-moon craters indented in the skin on his palms from clenched fists, crimson lines forming. He took in the murky waters of the pond and waited for some sense of compassion or pity to wash over him. Something to drive him to the living room, to relieve the pain and suffering of the man who brought him into the world. When no such feeling came, he grabbed his phone off the table and searched until he got the number he wanted.
“Yeah,” he said when a woman from Hospice House answered. “I need to talk to someone about getting my father in there.”
Chapter Eleven
While his father slept in his chair, Jake grabbed his laptop out of the truck and booted it up at the kitchen table. He turned on the hotspot on his cell phone and pulled up the Internet. The signal was weak and his search for anything related to Shane Langston was painstaking slow. He found a few references to a Shane Langston and a car dealership, a fuzzy picture of Langston at a charity event in Sedalia, but nothing of any real help. Frustration grew. He scrolled through names in the Warsaw directory, trying to come up with someone he knew that he could hit up for information, but came up snake eyes. At midnight, he gave up, drugged Stoney according to Janey’s list and carried him to bed.
Jake spent a restless night in Janey’s old room. The moonlight through the window lit up the gold leaf on the Bible cover. Why the hell did Stony have the Bible in the first place? He’d declared on multiple occasions there was no God. Maybe the Bible belonged to his mother. She took them to church on occasion when Stony didn’t bother to come home on Saturday nights. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth listening to his diatribes about the money grubbers of organized religion.
Perhaps it was the same Bible Stony hit Mom with when Jake was seven. Lying on his bed with the pillow over his head until his mother screamed and something broke. Enraged, he jumped out of bed and stormed into the living room, just in time to see Stony towering over her with her Bible in his hand, like an overzealous preacher to an unrepentant sinner. When Stony struck her across the face with it, Jake threw his skinny frame at his father, tiny fists swinging and swearing. Stony held a palm out on Jake’s head, holding him at bay, laughing. When he tired of his offspring flinging obscenities and punches, the laughing stopped. Without a word, he punched his middle child in the face with the ragged ring. Jake told people he earned the scar on his cheek from a pickup football game.
The moonlight faded to sunlight. With no more sleep in his near future, he padded to the kitchen and fixed a pot of coffee. He needed to track Langston down, but couldn’t very well do it while playing caregiver to his father. He couldn’t ask Bear about him and had no idea who still hung about Warsaw to make inquiries. Maybe Janey would know something.
Jake popped a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster, the morning mist rising over the pond out the window above the sink. He’d finished buttering the toast when Janey’s car crunched in the driveway. He poured an extra cup of coffee and went to meet her in the living room.
“Everything go okay last night?” she asked.
Jake shrugged. “Fine, I guess. He was pretty quiet.”
“You sleep okay?”
“Not really. Strange being back in this house again. Lots of ghosts.”
“There were some good times too, weren’t there?”
Jake sat quiet for a moment. “Not many, but a few.”
Janey sipped her coffee and Jake leaned back on the couch. Keats popped into his head. He’d want an update and Jake had no idea where to begin. How was he going to find a local drug dealer in a town he hadn’t been to in sixteen years? Since his sister worked in the sheriff’s office, maybe she had a clue.
“Janey, you ever hear of a guy named Shane Langston?”
Janey’s brow furrowed and she looked at him sideways. “Why?”
“Someone in Kansas City asked about him.”
“Who?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it does. What do you need him for?”
“What do you know?”
“He’s a mean, drug dealing scumbag. Every sheriff in four counties would love to get their hands on him. Tell me why you’re asking. You mixed up in something, big brother?”
“No,” Jake said with a wave of his hand. “My boss asked me to poke around since I was heading this way. You don’t know where I can find him?”
“He’s got a car dealership in Sedalia. That’s about all I know except he’s extremely bad news.”
“What kind?”
“The worst kind. No telling how many bodies he’s buried from what I hear.”
“No,” Jake said, “what kind of dealership?”
“I don’t know. Lincoln, I think. Maybe Ford.”
“So he’s not some local little drug head?”
“Far from it. He’s as bad as they come. But it doesn’t matter either way because you’re not going anywhere near him.”
“All right, forget I mentioned it.” Crap. A half-assed lead, but not the bounty of information he hoped for. He’d assumed Langston was going to be some little white trash bottom feeder he’d have no trouble finding and taking care of. This was going to be harder than he thought.
Janey held the coffee cup in both hands, her elbows resting on her knees, eyes fixated on the floor like it would tell her how to start the next uncomfortable conversation.
“About Dad…” she said.
“I made an appointment for later this morning to see if we can get him into Hospice House in Sedalia. You want to go with me?”
Janey shook her head. She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“You sure that’s best?” she asked, apparently forgetting she brought up the idea the night before. His temper rose a little.
“Don’t you? He’s on his last legs, Janey. You can’t care for him the way he needs to be and I sure as hell don’t want to.”
“I can’t pay for it. I ain’t got two dimes to rub together.”
“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “I got it covered.”
“Where’d you get that kind of money?” Her eyes narrowed.
“I’ve been working steady and have some squirreled away. He have any life insurance?”
She took another drag and crushed out the cigarette in the ash tray on the coffee table. She pulled a few pieces of paper from her purse and passed them over.
“A few thousand-dollar whole life policies Mom took out on him. Might not be enough to cover all the burial but should take care of most of it. Just doesn’t seem right sticking him in some hospital. Wouldn’t be what he wanted.”
Jake got to his feet, on the verge of shattering the coffee mug in his hands, sick of her utopian memories of Stony.
>
“Who gives a shit what he wants? He never gave a damn what we wanted. He’s lucky we don’t leave him here to rot alone.”
“Jake,” Janey said, wide eyed, shocked.
“No.” He cut her off with a hard wave of his hand. “No more of this poor old Stony crap. You brought me here to do what you can’t and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m getting him in that place so they can at least make him relatively comfortable for the last hours of his miserable life. You don’t like it, I can hop in the truck and head back to Kansas City.”
“No, don’t do that. I just meant…” She trailed off, her lip quivering.
“I know what you meant,” Jake sighed. He sat next to her on the couch and placed his arm across her bony shoulders. No sense in being a dick to her. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Tears brimmed in her eyes. She wiped them with the palms of her hands. “You going now?”
He nodded. Though the appointment wasn’t for another two hours and the drive north to Sedalia took forty minutes, he wanted to get the hell out of the house. Maybe go sniff around Langston’s dealership.
“I’m gonna check on him,” she said. “Call me when you find out something.”
She shuffled to the master bedroom. Jake slipped on his shoes, grabbed his wallet and keys from the coffee table, and darted from the house before she opened the bedroom door and let the smell of death touch him again.
* * *
Jake drove to Warsaw in silence, snapping off the radio when he started the truck. The thick morning air produced a light fog that rose off the highway and swirled behind the truck. He noticed he’d put the ring back on some time in the night. He removed it, setting it in the spare change cup under the dash and spent the ten minute drive over the winding and dipping roads thinking about the last of his stash and how big of a chunk this would likely take out of it. Would Keats really give him a fade into the sunset bounty if he took this Shane character down?
He pulled off Highway 65 and headed toward downtown Warsaw, wanting to grab a cup of coffee at Casey’s before continuing to Sedalia. Traffic was scarce, only a handful of locals in pickups and jalopies passed by on the two-lane road, until the unmistakable whoop of a siren and flashing blues and reds in his rearview mirror. Jake cursed under his breath and moved to the side of the almost non-existent shoulder.
The cop waited in his car for a minute, likely running his plates, leaving Jake to sweat out whatever caused him to get pulled over. The cop grabbed the roof, yanking his massive frame out of the car, and sauntered to Jake’s truck, his hand resting on the butt of his service pistol. Jake kept his hands on the wheel in plain view.
“You rolled that stop sign, boy,” the cop said as he swaggered to the window. Hanging jowls obscured by a neatly trimmed black beard, his brawny frame stretching the seams of his uniform. Jake’s image reflected in the cop’s mirrored sunglasses.
“The hell I did,” Jake replied, matter-of-factly. “You need to get a prescription for those cheap-ass sunglasses. You steal those from the Dollar Store?”
The cop dragged his top lip over his teeth and sucked in a deep breath.
“You got a bad attitude, boy. That kinda talk is gonna get you in a heap of trouble around these parts.”
“Heap of trouble around these parts? What is this? Fucking Hee Haw? Better having a wrong attitude than being a fat-ass cop in some piss-ant Ozark town.”
The cop glanced up and down the road, probably checking for potential witnesses, grabbed the door handle, opened the truck door, and stepped back.
“You better get your ass out of the truck. Somebody needs to teach you some manners.”
Jake swung his legs out, stretching his muscular frame as tall as he could. He rested his big hands on his hips and puffed his chest.
“You gonna teach me manners, fat boy?”
The cop feigned a punch to the head that Jake ducked. He dropped his hands and scooped his thick arms through Jake’s arm pits and squeezed him in a bear hug. He started laughing. Jake clapped the man on his back and joined in as the cop twirled him around.
James “Bear” Parley held his old friend tight for a moment then set Jake back on the ground. His brown eyes twinkled as he removed his sunglasses. He gripped Jake by the shoulders at arms’ length.
“Son of a bitch,” Bear said. “It’s been a long, damn time. You look good, buddy.”
“So do you.” Jake didn’t realize how much he’d missed Bear until the mountain stood in front of him.
“Bullshit, I look like the goddamn Michelin tire man poured into a cop uniform.”
“Can’t believe James Parley is the sheriff.”
“Yup, elected three times in a row.”
“Must be doing something right then. Must be tough to stay popular around here.”
Bear snickered. “As long as those who vote like me, I’m good. The shitheads who I bust aren’t going to vote anyway, so fuck ’em. Janey said you were in town for your dad. Poor, miserable bastard.”
The mention of his dad wiped Jake’s face clean. He had flashes of late nights in the woods behind his house with Bear when they were kids. Sitting in the dark, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer lifted from Stony’s stash—Jake talking, Bear listening. Bear letting Jake hide out at his house. Bear watching TV at Jake’s and running with him to the woods when Stony rumbled into the driveway. You could tell the level of Stony’s inebriation by how he pulled in. When the gravel flew, so did Jake. Only Bear knew the full story.
“Yeah, heading over to Hospice in Sedalia to see if they can get him in there.”
“Seems like the best option to me.”
“Don’t have any other choice,” Jake said. “I can’t and don’t want to take care of him. Figure my job is to make sure somebody does.”
“You should check out the nurses while you’re there.”
“What do you mean?”
Bear grinned. “There’s one in particular you might find interesting.”
“I’m not going to pick up chicks in a hospice where I’m taking my dying father, man.”
“Just trust me, okay? Check them out while you’re there.”
While Jake cyphered through Bear’s cryptic clue, the two stood in uncomfortable silence as the sunlight gleamed against the faded scar on Bear’s forehead.
Jake pointed. “I see you still got that scar from the Valley Bar.”
Bear rubbed at the spot. “Yeah, that was a hell of a night. How many beers and whiskey shots did Stony feed us?”
“Enough. You remember which Crane brother started the shit with Stony?”
“Matt started it then his brother joined in. Hell, Stony fell off that bar stool and only spilled half a beer on Matt. The way those two assholes carried on, you woulda thought your old man took a piss on both of them.”
Jake laughed. “We whipped their asses in the parking lot though.”
“Yeah, you only got a busted lip and a black eye. I got a beer bottle in the head and twelve stitches.”
They stood in silence for another moment as if in honor of the memory.
“So,” Bear continued, “how long you gonna be in town?”
“Till it’s over, I guess. Kinda in between jobs and I don’t have a hell of a lot of pressing concerns back home.”
Bear’s cell phone rang, and he answered it with a gruff greeting. How could Jake subtly ask about Langston? Bear had to have some bead on his whereabouts, but it would raise too many questions. Bear grunted into the phone and hung up.
“I gotta run,” he said. “Tell you what. You get Stony situated and give me a call. We’ll grab some brews and head out on the lake, catch some catfish and get caught up.”
Jake held out his hand and Bear grabbed it, giving it a couple of shakes and flashing his pearly whites like he’d just won a million dollars.
“Goddamn,” Bear whispered. “It’s good to see you, man. Don’t forget the nurses.”
He pumped Jake’s hand one more time with a wink, do
nned his sunglasses and headed back to his patrol car. Jake leaned against the body of the truck and waved as Bear drove off. Forgetting about his coffee run, he climbed in the cab of the truck, cranked the engine over and drove toward Sedalia to find a place for his father to die.
Chapter Twelve
Willie drank his mid-morning coffee on the porch as the cook arrived in a beat up, black paneled van. The cook eyed the house through the windshield and climbed out, all bones in tattered, denim shirt sleeves. The van door screeched with rust as he opened and shut it. He took off a ragged John Deere ball cap, ran his hands through stringy, russet hair and replaced the cap as he approached the porch.
He stopped short of the steps, regarded Willie for a moment and pulled out a pack of Marlboro’s. He lit one, inhaled deeply, and walked the perimeter of the house as he smoked. Willie stayed on the porch and waited for the cook to come around the other side. It didn’t take long.
“Place looks like a shithole,” the cook said.
“It is. Got it cleaned up inside, though. We should be good to go.”
The cook took one last deep drag and crushed the butt into the dirt.
“I’m Dexter.”
“Willie.”
Neither man made a move for the customary handshake.
“How many you have here now?”
“Me and three others. They’re inside waiting.”
“Call them out and help me get the stuff out of the van. Then, send ’em home,” Dexter said. “Shane says you’re pretty good in the kitchen, so we won’t need ’em yet and they’ll be in the way. You good with that?”
“Yup.” Whatever got the money rolling in. As Dexter walked back to the van, Willie went in the house to rouse Bub, Howie and Bennett.
Jake Caldwell Thrillers Page 6