by Hank Early
I closed my eyes again. It was good to have friends.
Sometime later, a doctor came in and told me I was going to live. I thanked him profusely and asked for more pain meds. He obliged.
It was only when I woke up again that I remembered I didn’t know. I sat bolt upright in the bed, and the pain flashed through my shoulder like someone was running a razor blade across my nerve endings.
“Take it easy, Earl,” Ronnie said.
“He probably wants to know what happened,” Rufus said.
“The kid?” I managed, but I wasn’t sure which kid I meant, Eddie or Jeb Junior. Okay, it was both. Somehow Rufus understood.
“The young one filled me in. Said, just after you got shot, Daddy was about to shoot him. That’s when the Hill Brother stuck a bullet right in Jeb’s eye.” Rufus chuckled, and it was a dry, crackling sound, like a fire that might burn on a cold winter’s night.
“Dead?” I said, realizing as I said it that I’d never wanted anything more in my life. Well, that wasn’t quite true. I’d wanted Mary Hawkins more, and maybe I could want other things too if I played my cards right, learned from my mistakes, caught a few breaks … like this one. Lord, please give me this one.
“Naw, but he ain’t never going to be the same. Besides losing that eye, the bullet blew out the back of his skull. He’s in a coma, and the doctors ain’t sure he’ll ever come out of that, and if he does …” Rufus shrugged. “Then he’s going to have a hard row to hoe.”
I nodded, not sure if feeling excited about that made me a bad person or not, but I was pretty sure I didn’t really care.
“Chip?”
Rufus winced. “They got to him.”
I felt like I’d been gut-punched. I closed my eyes, knowing I’d have to find a way to absorb that blow, a way to catch my wind again, to keep moving forward.
“What about Jeb Junior and Eddie?”
“Jeb Junior?” Ronnie said.
“You haven’t caught him up?” I said to Rufus.
Rufus smiled. “I don’t care to talk to him, if the truth be told.”
It sounded like the old Rufus, the one I used to know, but it also sounded like he was joking. Sort of. Either way, Ronnie laughed, and that made me feel a little better until I remembered I still didn’t know what had happened to the two boys.
“They’re okay,” Rufus said. “Well, I reckon as okay as they’ll ever be.”
Ronnie snorted. “Ain’t that the way it is for everybody?”
“No,” I said, remembering suddenly what I’d been about to tell Rufus before I realized that the men in the truck weren’t who they were pretending to be.
“You said you thought the shadow girl was Harriet,” I said.
“I know it is,” he said.
“You’re wrong about that.”
“How would you know?” he said.
“Let me get out of this hospital bed, and I’ll take you to her and you can see for yourself.”
Rufus was silent, his face opening up into a sense of serendipitous awe. Ronnie giggled. “He ain’t going to see shit.”
Neither of us commented on Ronnie’s dumb pun. We’d both realized, I felt sure, that real seeing didn’t require eyes as much as it required the truth. The truth of who you were and what you’d done, and the truth that the present mattered far more than the past or the future, the truth that we were all hanging over an endless and empty void, our feet snagged in the ropes of a suspension bridge that just got shakier as the years went by. The truth that hanging on was all there was, and all there had ever been, and you could always hang on longer than you thought if you had somebody there swinging out over the void beside you.
ALSO AVAILABLE BY HANK EARLY
Earl Marcus Mysteries
In the Valley of the Devil
Heaven’s Crooked Finger
Author Biography
Hank Early is a middle school teacher and writer located in Central Alabama. He enjoys good beer, strong coffee, and wild storms. He’s married and has two kids who are constantly giving him ideas for his next novel. This is his third Earl Marcus mystery.
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, places and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real or actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Hank Early
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crooked Lane Books, an imprint of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Crooked Lane Books and its logo are trademarks of The Quick Brown Fox & Company LLC.
Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication data available upon request.
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-64385-181-5
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-64385-182-2
Cover design by Melanie Sun
Book design by Jennifer Canzone
Printed in the United States.
www.crookedlanebooks.com
Crooked Lane Books
34 West 27th St., 10th Floor
New York, NY 10001
First Edition: November 2019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1