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With a gentle tap against the curb, Cruise halts his pickup and stops the engine. Ricki fidgets with her purse while he focuses on the dash. Finally the jingle of her keys pulling from the purse innards breaks the silence in the cab, and he feels her turn to him.
He points a small smile at her end of the dash.
“You starting back at work tomorrow?” she asks.
He shakes his head, “I’m not sure.”
Outside the door, one of Ricki’s neighbors lets out a long puff of smoke from his balcony.
“It’d help you take your mind of things. Going back to work.”
The trees are gently bending back and forth in the night breeze.
“I doubt that.” Continue Reading »
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<Read the previous Chapter
And on top of the day he’s had, Sherif Wayne got to end it with a shoplifter at the local book store. Amy, the owner phoned it in, and Marcus Wayne told his deputy he’d swing by on his way home. The trade off was: Deputy Abrahams got to finish the paperwork from the Cruise Whalin case. On top of his little abduction story, they had to type up his statement and slap it in the file before they could hope it would vanish into the world of filing cabinets.
Marcus taps the volume on his CB radio down, rubs his temples with an arm resting against the window ledge, and points his steering wheel toward Chester Street. He waits at the red light for his turn to cross Main Street, across which the Book-Out leans a little ways down the other side of Chester. He stops his truck in one of the diagonal parking spots just off the road out front, pulls himself out stiffly, and swings the door shut behind him. Continue Reading »
< Start at Chapter 1
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It’s not a dark room like you see in the movies. There’s no giant mirror across the wall with people hidden, watching from behind it. There’s a window that looks out into the alley behind the police station and lets the afternoon sun stencile itself into an even square in the floor. There’s a simple wooden table with mismatched four-legged chairs on either of its wide sides. Cruise waits seated on the side that faces the door, his hands cupped together and waiting on the tabletop.
He has some pretty terrible coffee a little waxed paper cup to his left. He sipped it to be polite at first, but now he lets it cool out of sight. One leg still aches a little, but otherwise the sores of four nights ago have vanished.
Twelve minutes after he got there, Sherif Wayne comes into the room where Cruise waits. Continue Reading »
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Cruise feels anxious being in his truck again. Ricki drives, the hospital content with the conquered dehydration set Cruise loose for home. The whine of the engine and the blink of a turn signal snaps his mind back two nights, and he shakes his head in an attempt to pulls his consciousness back to the present.
He can hear Ricki’s tense breathes, she slips the steering wheel between her fingers focusing on the road like a fisherman’s worm focuses on the world beyond the hook.
“How’d you get my truck?” He asks finally, fiddling with the I.D. Band around his wrist. Continue Reading »
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The repetitive beeps seep into his waking mind, as he begins to open his eyes an intense white light rips against them. He blinks and squints in an attempt to soften the intensity. He feels like he’s been asleep for days.
The coarse fabric rubs against his palms as he lightly shifts them from where they rest beside him. He wiggles his toes and shifts the weight of the back of his body as it presses against bedsores. The smell of cleaning alcohol draws into his nose and his eyes keep pressing against the light. Continue Reading »
The coffee drifts with the movements of the car, sloshing lightly against the underside of the lid as the vehicle rounds corner after corner. Few other vehicles dot the other lanes, and the sun is just lightly peaking through the jagged wall of pine needles standing alongside the road.
The radio on the dash is silent, the sparse troubles of the small town still asleep for now. To her left, outside the driver’s side window, the face of a mountain hugs each corner, pushing and pulling the road toward its destination.
Rain from overnight slides from the asphalt and mingles with the dirt and rock. The morning air is cool, and a few stars still glitter against the light blue sky dotted with gray, wafty clouds. Fluffy spots of gray and the shiny specks of light all against a flat blue morning. Sheriff Wayne had phoned her early. A simple 11-24 called in by an out-of-towner passing through on route 43. She’d pass it on her way in to the station anyways, she just needed to snap a few pictures and take down the license plate. Continue Reading »
It didn’t feel different, and that was the strange part. In the moment, you’d been elated, the sun beating down on your face outdoors, the school football field colonized by a million folding chairs and your parents clapping and beaming as their children and their friends and you processed across the stage one by one but now you felt like you again only now there was even less of you than there had been, a sort of vapid emptiness you couldn’t name or barely perceive except by looking at it with squinted eyes. Even sitting with Benny at the beach didn’t help and that surprised you even more than his fingers did when they began playing on your back and then later beneath the pier.
Benny will be dead in two years, washed up at some expensive college back east and depressed beyond your comprehension. What even makes a person do that, you will think, your own deep spells beneath the surface of the waves looking like puddles before the dive that Benny takes after you lose contact with him. He will bury a bullet in his ocular globe and that makes him a poor shot as well as a dead man, maybe his hand jerked at the last moment, like he didn’t really want to do it, or so you will tell yourself staring at the ceiling in your apartment. Ocular globe is a phrase you will have to look up when the policeman you speak to tells it to you in an unguarded moment, distracted a little bit you think by the low shirt you decide to wear, feeling powerful with your skinny body that you hated so much when you were still lying on that beach watching the implanted rich wives wander by and jiggle and make you wonder fleetingly if you might be a lesbian but no no Benny’s fingers bring you back around. Continue Reading »
read the previous chapter – “Walk”
El Dorado rains down on Edward. Flecks of gold stone blown from structures tumble through the sky with the loud silence of nearby explosions. Flashes of orange pop against the darkness of the city, and mouths shout silent instructions to each other. Continue Reading »
“Tell me a story.”
“What, another one?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok, hmm. Alright, I know one. It goes like this:
“There once was a very holy man. Everyone agreed on this. They testified to his mystical powers far and wide; they swore that his decisions were enlightened beyond all other men. God himself looked down at this man and smiled.
“Now, in these days, people believed that part of being a holy man was the ability to live the life of renunciation.”
“What’s that?” Continue Reading »
read the previous chapter – “Sail”
“This is the last boat sir, we’re setting up a small base camp here and the first team is just about to begin their sweep.”
Linus helps Mr. Rex off the makeshift raft, the last to ferry supplies and personnel across the lake occupying the entire East to West expanse of the valley. A few small tents are erect along the stony shoreline, they pull wildly against their poles and frames as the wind fights their tethered stances. The sky is grayed over and flecks of raindrops begin a slow assault on the area. Men with guns are stationed in a line parallel to the lake, dividing the city and the newly forming camp.
Beyond the camp and the line of men, a grassy field runs up to the city border. Waist high grass which ripples in the intense wind, the city stoic, still, and silent beside it. A river spews out of the city and cascades into the lake, the source somewhere to the North.
“Sir, look!” Someone points to the south bank of the lake they just crossed. On the other side, out of the cave they just passed through, several natives emerge. They move to the edge of the water and stand in a line facing the strangers outside their city.
“What are they doing?” Keamy asks no one in particular. Beside him Edward turns to glance the line of men guarding their camp, then back to the line of natives guarding the severe, rocky lakeside. Continue Reading »