The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  “Quite a party,” I said, once my shoes were off.

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s not always like this. Sometimes there are people you’d actually want to know here. People who go to meetings.”

  “Seems like tonight a busload of high school kids showed up.”

  “Richie’s a real insecure guy,” she replied. “He doesn’t feel like he’s got anything if he doesn’t have people around him. Same reason he’s got that television and them loud-ass speakers. He figures people will like the video games and all the free food and shit, even if they don’t like him.”

  “There was food?”

  She punched me on the arm.

  “It’s different than going to a meeting,” she said. “Going to meetings is fine and all, because it helps keep me off the juice, but it’s not the end-all, be-all.”

  I nodded, looking out over the river. It was narrow right here, the other side a marshy bog of a place, covered in high grass.

  She continued. “I need something else, something that will sustain the other parts of my soul. And the kind of friendship I have with Richie and the rest of his misfit toys is just way different from what I get elsewhere. I don’t know. Maybe I can’t explain it.”

  We lingered in that silence for a time, and I don’t know how she felt, but my heart was beating a heavy metal soundtrack into my ribcage.

  She was beautiful, in her own disaffected way. Allison wasn’t delicate. She wasn’t a flower in danger of being de-petaled with a strong enough breeze. I immediately liked her, and I wanted to let myself do that. I’d been digging a moat around Vanessa’s shrine in my heart for six months now, and I suddenly realized maybe I could put down the shovel for a while. It seemed to be pretty well entrenched.

  I think I felt something coming off her, too, though, because she sighed and said, “Come on. Let’s go back inside and have a ginger ale and a slice of pizza.”

  We carried our shoes with us back to the house. I followed the yearning that was slowly beginning to arise in my guts, a feeling which had been dulled for so long, and tried not to react too overtly to it. Save for a few unintended rendezvous after Vanessa left me some years back, my love life was virtually nonexistent.

  We bypassed the game room and went directly for the boxes of pizza stacked in the kitchen. The sounds of violent gun-death echoed throughout Richie’s makeshift mansion, and so making conversation proved difficult.

  “This is so lame, isn’t it?” she said, knocking out half a slice of pepperoni in a single bite. She chased it with gulps of ginger ale and then leaned against the stainless steel countertops.

  “It’s the first time I’ve left my house with the intention of doing something other than meetings or work or running,” I said.

  “Or just wandering around with your thoughts,” she said.

  “Right. Seems to be a default setting for people in our condition.”

  She paused, swallowed, and then placed her pizza on the top of one pizza box.Then, she pulled her hair behind her head and tied it up in a bun. “Did you really see all those people die?” she asked, without preamble.

  I nearly choked on my food.

  “That story was all over the news,” she said. “I mean, killing’s as common as kindness in this country, but what happened up in Lumber Junction is something else. It’s the sort of thing that follows you around, and shit, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to live through it. I’d still be drinking, no matter my condition.”

  I smiled. “Have you thought about becoming a sponsor?”

  She punched me on the arm, again. Ginger ale splashed on the sleeve of my shirt, and she laughed, trying not to blush.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That time in my life – people say I went into shock. I’m not sure. I did walk around like the undead for a time, but part of that was climbing up on the wagon. I wasn’t yet acquainted with Bill W., but it just kind of went by. I’d spent so much time fucked up, it felt weird to be sober anyway, so I reckon the change from drunk to sober had as much to do with it as anything else.”

  “But the shit that happened – don’t you still dream about it?”

  Yes. Fuck yes. “No, not really,” I said.

  Allison’s resulting stare could have wilted flowers.

  “Okay, yeah. I do. They’re real fucking bad.”

  The dreams themselves appeared like ordinances from God, without preamble, and I woke screaming from them. However, it wasn’t for the reasons one would think. It wasn’t just the terror of being placed like a toy soldier back in that situation. Everything had to do with the otherworldly presence that lingered in the dreams, like a sun in the background of a hot day. It – and I had no name for it but “it” – hovered in my subconscious, keeping me tethered to the world of the dead.

  Sometimes I felt the presence driving the dreams, leading the figures like marionettes on strings. Ronald Bullen, an unrecognizable crisp of a human being, trudging toward me. Burnt and blackened and trying desperately for a way to grab me and drag me into the ground with him.

  It was all of them. H.W. Bullen. Leland Brickmeyer. They visited me, and each brought with him a different need for me to join the dead. For some reason, they dragged me wherever they felt most comfortable, and they made no attempt to hide their deterioration. Skin dangling from rotted scalps. Eyes sunken and black. Fingernails and hair grown out to wispy, ragged lengths. And they wanted to touch me with those hands, to pull me into a permanent, unmarked grave.

  The worst was Jeffrey Brickmeyer, whose visage could only be discerned through inference. I never quite understood how I knew. He had died the most horrific, violent death of them – and perhaps for good reason – but whatever had taken him would not release his spirit to wander the living world like the rest. He wasn’t so much a zombie or ghost as negative space personified. A moving shadow. A set of monstrous, inhuman particles set against the backdrop of–

  “Rolson, you okay?”

  I blinked.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sometimes the memories, they–”

  “I understand,” she replied. “I didn’t mean to, um – I thought it would be good getting-to-know-you chit-chat. I had no idea it was so–”

  “Fucked up? It was.”

  “Don’t you want to talk about it, though? Don’t you want to let it out?”

  I thought about it. “Not really.”

  “See, I’ve never understood that. I guess I’m the type of person never saw the point in holding onto things. Course, I moved around a lot as a kid. I don’t have a sense of sentimentality that I know of. My feelings and experiences are as transient as the details of my physical life. Where I’ve been. What I’ve owned.”

  “The things I saw, nobody should know about.”

  “But maybe they should. You don’t trust the people around you to be able to shoulder what you have to unload, but I bet they can hold it up.”

  Someone appeared in the periphery of my vision.

  It was the girl who had given me the stink-eye earlier.

  “You’re Rolson, right?”

  Not quite sure of how to respond, I nodded. She had caught me off-guard. Allison had introduced me, sure, but I didn’t want my name on the lips of every partygoer here.

  She must have seen my alarm, because she smiled. “That’s a once-in-a-lifetime kind of name. Nobody else has it, I bet, so I’m going to take a guess and say you’re from the metropolis that is Lumber Junction.”

  Her smile widened at my reaction. Clasping her hands together, she swayed her shoulders from side to side like a child asking for an impossible Christmas gift.

  “You want to know how I know where you’re from?”

  “A part of me doesn’t,” I replied. I didn’t recognize her in the least. Was she someone I had, in a drunken state, somehow wronged? Was I unknowingly walking into a minefield here?

  “Well,” she said coyly, “it’s not that I knew you. No, that’s not it at all. Why? You think we hooked up one time,
maybe got it on and you didn’t remember?”

  Looking at her, there was no way we’d have done anything without me remembering it. She was small and lithe, and she was somehow tan in October, her dark skin beautiful against the red of her dress. The only indication of trouble was in her eyes; they were intense, and they seemed to look right into you when she was totally focused. It made me uncomfortable.

  I looked from her to Allison, who had disappeared. She was heading for what I assumed to be the bathroom. I probably shouldn’t have continued with this charade, but now I couldn’t help myself.

  “I don’t believe that, no.”

  “We didn’t hook up, not at all. Oh my god, no. I knew your wife.”

  All of the oxygen dropped out of the room, but somehow I still managed to take a breath.

  “You were married one time, right? Girl named Vanessa?”

  I leaned against the countertop, nearly sending a whole stack of pizzas tumbling to the floor. I caught myself, took a deep breath.

  She laughed. “So you are that guy. Man, oh man, I knew it. I figured there was a one-in-a-million shot I’d ever get to meet you. All the things that woman said about you, Jee-sus Christ. And now, here you are. In the flesh.”

  “How – How did you know her?” In that moment, with six months of grief pressing against my throat, I could only stammer to get the words out.

  “Now, isn’t that a conversation for another time?” she said. “We just met. And you must not have been aware of the things she said about you. Else, you wouldn’t be so quick to jump into a conversation about y’alls relationship.”

  I could only imagine what she’d said in the wake of our split-up. “She and I had it pretty rough there for a while,” I said. “Two different ideas about what the word ‘relationship’ means, I think.”

  “And so, what, you come down here to chase after her, maybe try to get her to come back to you?”

  I said, “Not exactly.”

  She smiled, a little more seductively this time. “And why not?”

  “Well, because she’s dead, for one thing.”

  I watched her face change from a smug kind of joy to something bordering on shock. She was a beautiful woman, but she’d spent too many long nights in the arms of an abusive lover. It was evident in how she carried herself. Something awful had clung to her for some time, and she was reaching a point of no return with it.

  Allison appeared back into view. She said, “What’s wrong? Jess, what’s wrong?” She turned to me. “The fuck’d you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  I hadn’t realized she had begun leaking tears. My mind was playing Red Rover, Red Rover with itself, and I barely felt present.

  “Did you hit on her? Did you make a move?”

  “No, I– she and I had a mutual friend, from back in the day.”

  This woman, Jess, did a half-sob snort, wiping the side of her palm against one leaking eye. “His ex-wife. Or wife. Fuck, I don’t know. She’s fucking–she’s fucking dead.”

  I knew that I was in a pretty obviously bad situation, but I was more concerned in that moment with figuring out more about this girl who knew Vanessa than I was about being able to explain myself to Allison. This was the link I was looking for.

  I believe the world is full of little threads that tie it together. Some get broken, while others stretch great distances and wind everything up. I’d somehow found one of those long threads, and I wasn’t about to let it go.

  With Allison’s eyes boring holes into the side of my face, hot with grief and embarrassment, I said, “Could we talk about this some other time? I realize– I’m sorry. I just dropped that on you, and I figured – I thought – that everybody knew, by now.”

  “She was so much fun,” this girl Jess said, still half-crying.

  It didn’t answer my question, but I was persistent, so I asked again. Yeah, sure was her answer. By the time I got her number and name into my phone, Allison was already halfway down the driveway to her car.

  She got in and turned the key, while I stood next the passenger side door, hoping she would unlock it. Took a few moments, but she finally did. I got in, put my seatbelt on, and stared out the window. It wasn’t like I didn’t want to explain this to her, but it also seemed like I didn’t need to.

  “I’m not angry,” she said, reversing out of the driveway. “I’m not pissed. I have no right to be. We’re not teenagers, and I expect baggage. Fuck it, I’ve got baggage. I’d be suspicious of you if you didn’t have baggage.”

  She paused, whipping the car around and straightening it out on the one-lane road we had come in on. The way she was accelerating, I hoped we wouldn’t meet any late traffic.

  “It’s just a lot to have dropped on me in one info dump. On the first, well, I don’t even know if we call this a date. Pretty stupid fucking first date, if you ask me. I mean, what is this?”

  “It’s a lot,” was my response.

  “You were married. So what? I don’t care. I don’t know why I should care. I guess it just felt like, I don’t know, it was so weird. The way you looked at Jess when she mentioned your ex, it made me really uncomfortable.”

  The car sped past overhanging trees, missing ancient branches my mere inches.

  “She died,” I said. “Drug overdose. We split up when she took off on me, and she came back and got severely fucked up. I had no say in it. Our relationship, I mean. She came back, at some point, but there was no ‘us’ to speak of, and then she OD’d. That’s all you have to know on the subject, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Christ. That’s horrible.”

  “She treated death like a secret passage behind a locked door. Everybody passed it, knew her name was on it, but she was the only one could unlock it. Finally, she did, and I hope she found something worthwhile behind it.”

  “You don’t strike me as the religious type.”

  “I think there’s something,” I said, and left it at that.

  We drove in silence for some time.

  “I don’t,” she said. “I don’t believe there’s anything beyond the veil besides darkness and dirt. I think about what it must be like to put myself in the ground, one way or the other, I can’t help but believe darkness is all we deserve. Least of all me.”

  I shrugged.

  We didn’t talk much after that, so I watched the world pass by in the glow of her headlights, trying hard to stay in the moment but feeling my thoughts drift over to Vanessa. She was haunting me from her resting place, continuously turning the knife, and here I was, helping her along. I guess it was bound to happen.

  “Do this again sometime?” Allison said, smiling, as she pulled to a stop in front of my house.

  I searched her eyes for some indication that she meant it, but I couldn’t tell. The smile was forced, her posture stiff and unrelenting.

  “Sure,” I said simply, and got out of the car. She pulled out of the driveway and sped off, me listening to the sounds of what I expected to be my last contact with her.

  I unlocked the front door and pushed into the house.

  Instantly, I knew something was wrong. Somebody had been in the house. Might not still be, but someone had been here, and recently. The night at Richie’s had momentarily spun my wheels in a different direction. Perspective, perspective. Needed to keep what’s important in the right places, and this took precedence.

  I knelt in the doorway, closed the door behind me. It echoed with a resounding click.

  Every light in the house was off, so darkness covered everything that didn’t happen to be touched by the weak moonlight cascading through the windows.

  The silence obscured any sound that might be hiding beneath it, its texture the auditory equivalent of static on an old television.

  I needed my gun, but like always, I’d left it in it usual place – in the back bedroom. I’d not feel safe again until I had the gun in my possession.

  Counting to three in my head, I made a break for it. My balls and my lungs sh
rank inside me, while my heart went into overdrive, spewing what felt like venom and bile through my veins. I snatched the .45 from its hiding place and racked a round into its chamber.

  No footsteps. No gunfire. Not even an ominous laugh to tell me I was done for.

  Silence. Utter silence.

  I sat on the bed and trained my piece at the door, waiting. I’m a good waiter. Got patience for days, if it comes down to it. I only needed something in the shadows to make a move.

  After about ten minutes, I slowly made my way back to the living room. I kept the gun focused ahead of me, peeking the barrel into the bathroom and the hall closet before ending up in the front, where the most shadows seemed to linger.

  That’s when I saw the message.

  The strips of masking tape I’d placed on the doors and windows before leaving had been taken down and spread on the ground to form a single word: DEAD. I didn’t quite know what that meant, exactly, but I got the general gist.

  I put down the .45, sat on the couch. Contemplated leaving the case on the floor in the living room, right on top of the four letters which had been ominously left for me in my absence. Would that satisfy them? Would they stop tormenting me?

  Something told me yes. Something told me that this wouldn’t end until someone was in the ground. Didn’t they realize I was a tough fucking dude to kill?

  Beyond that, I was stubborn. If they wanted the money, they could ask for it. I wasn’t going to shit the bed over a few break-ins. They had made the wrong move by fucking with me. Ask, and ye shall receive. Fuck around like a bunch of half-wits, and ye shall not get a goddamned thing.

  “Willie,” I said, waiting for him to come trotting out of one of his usual hiding spots. Part of me couldn’t wait to settle in and pet my fraidy cat of an attack dog.

  I said the dog’s name one more time and then started yet another search of the house. I suppose I had let my fear blind me to the fact that I wasn’t greeted by my canine buddy. Where the hell could he be? As I turned over each corner of the place, my actions became increasingly harried and clumsy. In that moment, I needed the dog to be home, to be safe, and to be ready to see me. The scraggly little mutt wasn’t much to look at, but he was by far the best dog I’d ever had, and he never let me wonder about him when I came home.