by JG Faherty
So go for it.
The voice in his head seemed more like Eddie’s than his own, but he followed the advice just the same.
“Um, that would be, um, kinda cool, actually. Maybe we can grab a soda or a coffee or something?” As the words left his mouth, he felt like biting his tongue off. Coffee? Soda? He sounded like a bad fifties movie.
“That sounds great. I’ve got to get back to school, but I’ll call you tomorrow.” She surprised him a second time by taking his hand in hers. “I really am sorry about Eddie. I know he was trouble, but he was your brother. I’m sure you loved him a lot.”
Then she walked away, the memory of her soft skin still tingling his palm. She stopped and said something to Carson’s mother, gave her father a quick kiss, and headed down the path toward the entrance to Eternal Rest Cemetery. From there it was only a three-block walk to the high school.
That was when Carson remembered she’d lost her own brother, a half brother actually, back in middle school. Jeff Sanchez had been a Hell Rider, too, around the same age as Carson was now when it happened. He’d died when he lost control of his bike on a rainy night and slid across the road right into a utility pole. From what Eddie used to say, Jeff had been too wasted to drive. He’d also complained that it was around then when Chief Jones started going out of his way to make life difficult for the Hell Riders.
He should have tried harder. Maybe they’d both be alive.
Carson’s thoughts returned to Kellie. She probably did know how he felt, even if she hadn’t grown up in the same house as her brother.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.”
Her words echoed in his head as he helped his mother into Chief Jones’s car while the Chief put the wheelchair in the trunk. Kellie Jones was going to call him. He climbed into the backseat and felt a sudden nervousness as Chief Jones slid behind the wheel.
What if he doesn’t let her call me? He’s the Chief of Police. What if he’s pissed she was talking to me? He never liked Eddie, and he’s probably only nice to me ’cause of my mom.
For the entire ride home, Carson stared out the window, afraid to face the man whose daughter he’d just touched hands with. When they got back to their trailer, he quickly made himself busy in the kitchen, helping his mother’s friends with the food and dishes.
He didn’t relax until Jones went home. But even then, he kept thinking about Kellie and her father, scared and thrilled and worried all at the same time. Had she really meant what she said, or was she just being polite? Would she call, or just blow him off? Would Chief Jones even let him within a hundred yards of his daughter? By the time he went to bed, he was so wound up again that he found himself staring at the ceiling, just like all those nights when he’d waited for Eddie to come home.
Except it wasn’t the sound of his brother’s motorcycle that reached Carson in the dark silence of the house.
Instead, it was his mother’s crying that kept him awake all night.
Chapter Six
With all the mourners gone, Eternal Rest Cemetery grew as beautifully tranquil as a secluded glen or rarely visited park. Birds sang and insects buzzed, but their soft, mellow noises created subliminal harmonies that increased the feeling of serenity instead of disturbing it. Eddie’s funeral had been the only one scheduled for the day, and since it was a weekday afternoon, there were no visitors at the other graves. They would come later, after work or dinner, in ones and twos, bearing flowers and tears for the departed. No more than ten on an average evening; it was a sad but true fact that once the initial shock and heartbreak wore off, most people only visited the graves of their loved ones on weekends or special occasions.
After a few years, sometimes not even then.
Floating helplessly over the gaping hole of his grave, Eddie Ryder listened to the chirping and whirring below him and felt resignation push away a tiny bit of his anger. If he had to be stuck somewhere forever, the cemetery wasn’t such a bad place to be. There was a nice view, and hopefully his family would come by once in a while to visit. Maybe they’d even talk to his grave, the way some people did, and in so doing fill him in on the details of their lives.
It was at that moment the cemetery’s two groundskeepers came down the path, shovels over their shoulders. Eddie didn’t need to see their faces to recognize them. Lenny Bates – Mouse Bates’s father – and Elmer Dinkley, Hell Creek’s resident town idiot. Their job was to operate the crane that lowered the casket into the grave, and then use the backhoe and shovels to fill in the hole. It took them over an hour to maneuver the casket into place, while Eddie fumed above them.
Goodbye, me, Eddie thought. Hello, a thousand years of staring at the ground.
Except something quite different happened.
The moment the first load of gray, sandy dirt landed on the casket with a metallic thump, something snapped painfully inside him, a digging, twisting agony that would have had him rolling on the ground if he’d still been alive.
Then it vanished.
And he was floating up, up, and away from the grave, his former ties to his body severed in one toe-curling snip.
What the…?
I’m free!
With that realization, all his fury erupted and he screamed with joy. Thunder shook the sky and he rocketed skyward.
Guess what, Hank? Eddie fucking Ryder is back!
And I’m coming for you!
* * *
Blissfully unaware that his son was being interrogated by the police for the hundredth time in his relatively short life, Lenny Bates threw the backhoe in neutral and looked up at the sky in surprise as sudden thunder, louder than the ’dozer’s engine, shattered the cemetery’s quiet.
“What the fuck?”
“Mebbe a storm comin’,” said Elmer, leaning against the backhoe’s cab to spit a stream of tobacco juice on the grass. “Guess we better finish this fast.”
“Ain’t a cloud up there.” Lenny knew that didn’t mean a damn thing, not in South Florida in the fall, when a thunderstorm could show up out of nowhere, much like his mother-in-law, just as loud and unwelcome.
“Whatever. Just hurry up. I don’t feel like gettin’ soaked.”
Elmer scooped up some loose soil while Lenny aimed the backhoe for another run. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, though, and every few minutes he found himself looking over his shoulder, thinking someone was watching them.
“Shouldn’t work in no damn cemet’ry, dey’s full of haunts.” Lenny remembered his father’s words, back when the old man was still alive, on the day Lenny quit high school to take the assistant groundskeeper’s job. In the thirty years since, he’d never once felt like he’d rather be working somewhere else.
Until now.
Fuckin’ haunts. Now I’m gonna be creeped out all goddamned day.
* * *
The interrogation room at the Hell Creek police station stunk of cigarettes and body odor. The former was a permanent fixture, from years of drunks, punks, and assorted lowlifes cadging smokes from police officers. The second, and by far stronger, eau de funk emanated from the pores of Mouse Bates, who, much like his grave-digging father, considered bathing something best left for holidays, weddings, and semi-annual trips to the whorehouses in Homestead or Miami.
Doing his best to breathe through his mouth, Johnny Ray Jones fought to keep from slamming a fist into Mouse’s greasy, zit-infested face. Instead, he pushed a pack of Camels toward the so-far uninformative gang member, hoping that if he couldn’t get the asshole to talk, he could at least knock a few weeks off the shit-bird’s life.
And in the process maybe burn away some of the foul stench the kid wore like a pole-cat jacket.
Johnny Ray waited until Mouse lit up and exhaled before starting in on him again. It was the second time that week they’d brought him in, on the slim hope he might slip up and contradict his
previous statement. “So let me get this straight. You’re telling me you don’t know anything about what happened at Eddie’s place? You gotta do better than that, Mouse. We know somebody torched the garage. And there’s a kid in a grave because of it.”
The skinny teenager flipped his long, greasy hair back and gave Johnny Ray a shit-eating grin that was equal parts yellow teeth, leftover food, and chewing tobacco.
“It’s the truth, Chief. We wasn’t anywhere near the place that night. We spent the night partyin’ at the clubhouse.”
“Really? I got a videotape shows you, Hank, and Duck jawin’ with Eddie the night he was murdered.”
Mouse’s smile fell off a bit, just enough for Johnny Ray to know he’d hit a nerve, but the boy did a good job of regaining his composure.
“Yeah, well, we was just lettin’ him know who’s boss, ya know? Keep him on his toes a little. We’d have prob’ly busted him up a little, too, if it wasn’t for the cameras. But teachin’ someone a lesson’s a lot different than killin’ him. Alls we did after that was buy our beer and go to the party.”
Johnny Ray gritted his teeth. Mouse wasn’t smart – not book smart, anyhow – but like his namesake he had a kind of animal intelligence, a knack for scurrying into a hole whenever there were signs of trouble. The kind of slimy little asswipe who always managed to escape by the skin of his balls while his friends got caught red-handed.
The worst part was, the little fuck knew it. His toothpaste-challenged grin was back in full force, showing enough accumulated sludge that nine out of ten dentists would have lost their lunches just looking at it.
When Johnny Ray didn’t immediately say anything, Mouse figured correctly the questioning was over. He stood up and dropped his cigarette to the floor, crushed it with one road-worn work boot. “Hey, if that’s all you got, Chief, I guess I’ll be goin’. Have a nice day.”
Johnny Ray put his arm across the door, halting Mouse’s exit. “You can go, Leroy,” he said, and was rewarded with a dirty look. Mouse hated his given name more than anything. “But before you do, know this. I sometimes look in the other direction on a lot of the shit that goes on in this town. Easier that way. Less paperwork. But when it comes to murder and arson, I tend to get very serious. And when it happens to involve the family of a person I’m very close to, someone who’s one of my dearest friends in the whole goddamn world, I guarantee I will find who did it and put their fucking ass in jail for life!” By the time he finished, Johnny Ray had his face nose to greasy nose with his suspect and he’d let his voice rise until he was shouting.
Mouse’s eyes went wide and for the first time Johnny Ray saw something in them other than arrogance.
Fear.
He stared for a minute longer, and then moved his arm away. As Mouse opened the door, Johnny Ray whistled softly.
“Hey, Leroy.”
No longer smiling, Mouse looked back.
This time it was Johnny Ray’s turn to smile.
“Have a nice day.”
* * *
The poorly muffled roar of Mouse’s Harley was still vibrating the windows of the police station when Ted Moselby joined Johnny Ray by the brew pot in the break room.
“So, what do you think? When do we make our move?”
Johnny Ray filled two plastic cups, set them down on a counter stained from years of spilled coffee, and considered the question. Moselby knew better than anyone that the Hell Riders were guilty. But once again his big-city experience worked against him. Things moved differently in small towns. Slower. In a close-knit community like Hell Creek, you couldn’t lock someone up unless you had real, hard evidence. The kind that even a councilman or bank president couldn’t pay to make disappear.
“I think,” Johnny Ray said, sipping the tepid, bitter brew, “they’re as guilty as fuckin’ sin. But we ain’t got a lick of proof. And as long as Duck Miller’s uncle is mayor around here, we can’t do squat until we have that proof. Lots of it.”
Moselby shook his head. “And here one of the reasons I left LA was to get away from the political bullshit.”
With a shrug, Johnny Ray said, “You never get away from it. It just comes out of different assholes. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We keep a close watch on them. Bust their balls for every little thing. I mean everything. One of them changes lanes without a signal or goes a mile over the speed limit, we ticket their ass. Maybe we’ll make ’em nervous enough that one of them slips up. Christ, they’re all dumb as friggin’ roadkill. One of ’em is bound to get wasted and open their mouth to the wrong person.”
Johnny Ray took another sip of his coffee and groaned as it hit his stomach like a shot of acid. It didn’t matter what coffee they bought, or who made it. Somehow the machine turned it into pure factory runoff. Damn thing’s possessed, he thought, and then wondered where that idea had come from. If there was one thing Johnny Ray Jones didn’t believe in, it was haunts and ghosts.
That would come later.
Chapter Seven
From two hundred feet in the air, Hell Creek revealed itself as truly insignificant.
If you type ‘pissant town’ into Google Maps, I’ll bet this is the picture that comes up, Eddie thought, looking down with a mental sneer. His irritation was due in part to his growing frustration with the invisible leash, longer than before but no less unbreakable, keeping him tied to his corpse, but also because rage was as much a part of his genetic makeup as his black hair or wiry frame. He’d had the bad luck to inherit Big Eddie’s temper rather than his mother’s calm, rational demeanor, a temper that at times during life had been uncontrollable, a demon inside him that constantly wanted to be set free.
And death only seemed to have made it worse.
He’d spent the past two days trying to get a handle on his new condition, with little success. While being released from his short lead seemed like a blessing at first, in actuality it had left him more aggravated than ever, because he’d had a taste of real freedom only to find he was still stuck in a cage; a larger cage than before, but still a cage. And he had no idea how to get out.
Rising higher from the ground had been easy; all he had to do was stop thinking about doing anything else and away he went. Coming back down had been harder. After some practice, he’d found that it helped to visualize an anchor sinking into the deep blue depths of a lake.
So far, though, he’d had little luck moving in other directions. No matter how much he concentrated, all he’d managed was a few yards left, right, back, and forward, with a little bit of rotation thrown in for good measure. Instead of staring right at his grave, now he could look down at the whole cemetery, while the town stretched off to the left and right before fading back into the swamps it’d been dug from.
This will not do. I’m like a dog on a chain, except the view is a little better.
Not much better, though. Not when you were stuck over Hell Creek. By spinning himself around, he could see the entire town. From the cemetery, Main Street extended south for all of three miles before becoming the interstate again and eventually curving down toward Everglades Park proper. Dividing Main Street perfectly in half was River Road, which Eddie’d always thought was the stupidest name they could have come up with, since there wasn’t even a stream near it, let alone a river. The intersection of River and Main marked the center of the town and its pitiful business district. From his vantage point, Eddie was able to follow River Road as it stretched out to the west, right into the wilds of the swamps. Just outside of Hell Creek, in a no-man’s land of swamp and overgrown fields ignored by county and state governments alike, was where the Hell Riders had their clubhouse, an abandoned airboat repair shop Ned Bowman had somehow scraped up the money to buy. They’d cleared it out and filled it with secondhand furniture, a half-assed bar, and a couple of TVs.
Eddie’d often wondered where Ned had gotten the money for the place. He suspected the gang lead
er was into shit the others didn’t know about. Like moving drugs for the Colombians or Mexicans. Not all the time, just here and there. Enough to put some real cash in his hands, not like the small-time dealing he did around town. Which did come in handy. Not only did it keep him and the gang supplied with plenty of weed and coke, it made him popular with the kind of people who were always looking for a party and didn’t care what they had to do to get in on the good times.
Assholes like me, Eddie thought. I always looked down on the wannabes and the coke whores, but I wasn’t much different.
Regardless of how it had been paid for, the makeshift clubhouse was a perfect place to party because it was just past the Hell Creek town line, meaning Chief Jones couldn’t bust their balls, and it was so remote the Staties never bothered with it.
A new kind of frustration rose up in Eddie as he remembered all the times he’d banged Sandy Powell there. She’d been his steady girlfriend for over a year, right up until he ratted on Ned. Then the bitch had dumped him cold. Bad enough, but the very next day she’d taken up with Hank Bowman and Eddie’d leaned the hard way she’d been nothing but a cycle slut, that she’d been into him more for his status as an original Hell Rider than because she loved him.
Another thing I owe that asshole Bowman for. Impotent rage coursed through him and he knew that if he’d had a real body he’d have been red-faced and shaking, ready to lash out with his fists at something. Or someone.
Spinning on his metaphysical axis, Eddie turned away from what he’d once considered a second home and stared in the other direction, looking past the shops and town buildings, past roads with names like Cypress, Big Pine, and Mangrove, to the far edge of town. A charred square marked the spot where his garage had been. His memories of that night were spotty, but something he definitely remembered was climbing onto Diablo and trying to escape.
How’d that work out for ya, Eddie?
One of the many things that sucked about being dead was he had only himself to talk to. He hadn’t expected to miss conversations with his brother, his mother – even his customers – so much. Now there was only his own brain, and it was starting to be a real pain in the ass.