Instead of answering, she pressed her lips to the sousaphone mouthpiece and played seven quick, low notes.
Shave-and-a-hair-cut, two-bits!
Then she spun away, once again like a ballerina. No mean feat while wearing a sousaphone.
“I knew you were smart when you made D. H. Lawrence your bitch,” I called after her. I got a few sharp looks from some of the parents in my vicinity, but I didn’t care.
Then I went to the gymnasium door and ran into Lester coming out. He had a stunning brunette woman on his arm who was a full head taller and at least thirty years younger than he was.
“Any barbecue left, Mister Marx?” Lester asked. “My lovely spouse insists upon some brisket. So I got to get her fed in a big goddamn hurry.”
The stunning brunette smiled. It was dazzling. “Otherwise,” she said in the sweetest of voices, “I’m going to stab him.”
I told them that my share was still there, and I stepped aside and held the door for them. As I did, I looked back toward the loading dock and saw Garrett and Elizabeth talking and laughing. I thought about going over to say good night. But then I went on through the gym, into the foyer, and out to the main parking lot.
The week had not turned out as I’d hoped. I had done much better in much tougher circumstances in Chicago, so I wasn’t sure why I’d had so much trouble in my own hometown. Maybe I could only thrive someplace where I wasn’t comfortable. Like Chicago.
But as I slid into my Toyota, I looked across the Kingman Rural High parking lot … and there, at the gray edge of the artificial light, saw Bobby Tone handing his plastic-covered plate of oatmeal cookies to a chubby guy with a ponytail. Simultaneously, the chubby guy handed Bobby something that Bobby tucked into his denim jacket. I noticed then that the plate of cookies looked bulkier than it had before.
Bobby Tone watched the chubby guy climb into an SUV and drive off. Then Bobby climbed into his big silver Dodge Ram and drove off as well.
It occurred to me that I still didn’t know where he was living these days. And since he was an old friend of the family, that didn’t seem right.
No, I wasn’t going back to Chicago or anywhere else for a while. I was curious about too many new developments in the land of my birth. Things like Lester’s unlikely marriage to his possibly violent showgirl wife. Things like Donny’s and Tyler’s indentured servitude to Deputy Beeswax. Things like whether Kaylee would choose Jared or Baylor. Things like Marisa’s burgeoning banda career.
And of course I should at least stick around long enough to see if Elizabeth needed me to teach on Monday.
Besides, I hadn’t liked it when Bobby Tone had told me I couldn’t steal anything back. I didn’t think that was his call.
I waited until the Dodge’s taillights were almost out of sight out on the highway. And then I started up my Toyota, flipped on my headlights, and followed Bobby Tone into Kingman.
I didn’t know what he had slipped into his jacket.
But I knew it was going to be mine.
Cherie Priest
Cherie Priest is probably best known for her steampunk Clockwork Century series, consisting of the novels Boneshaker, Clementine, Dreadnought, Ganymede, and, most recently, The Inexplicables, as well as the chapbook novella Tanglefoot, but she has also written the Southern Gothic Eden Moore series, consisting of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, Wings to the Kingdom, and Not Flesh Nor Feathers, and the urban fantasy Cheshire Red Reports series, consisting of Bloodshot and Hellbent. She’s also written the stand-alone novels Dreadful Skin, Fathom, and Those Who Went Remain There Still. Her latest is a new novel, Fiddlehead. She lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Sometimes, when things get tight, a bad man is the best one to have on your side. And the worse things get, the badder that man needs to be …
HEAVY METAL
Cherie Priest
Kilgore Jones wrestled free from the Eldorado and kicked the driver’s door shut. It bounced and swung back open again, so he gave it a shove with his hip. The old car rocked back and forth, creaking in protest, but this time the latch caught and held—mostly for its own good. The Jolly Roger was a big car, but its driver was a big man.
It wouldn’t be a real bold stretch to say he was six and a half feet tall, and a good carnival guesser might put his bulk at a quarter ton. Bald of head and fancy of facial hair, he boasted a carpet of impressive brown muttonchops that shone red in the sun, and a pair of mirrored aviator glasses. Everything else he wore was black. If you asked him why, he’d straight-faced tell you it was slimming.
His wardrobe notwithstanding, Kilgore threw a globe-shaped shadow on the ground—a one-man eclipse as he walked across a set of ruts that passed for parking spaces.
The old hoist house loomed before him: a nineteenth-century behemoth built for work and not beauty. It was red brick with a green roof, and easily the size of the grand old church in Chattanooga where he was no longer welcome—because a pastor singing about Satan made sense, but a layman going on about monsters was just plain silly.
As he approached, he saw patched-up places where new brick filled in old windows, doors, and shafts. He noted the remains of white paint around the main door and its entry platform, all of it lead, most of it peeling and fluttering in a cold, sharp November breeze.
Gravel crunched beneath his feet, and the wind yanked at his coat. The sun was vivid and white against a crisp blue sky without any clouds, but there wasn’t much warmth to go around. The Smokies were not yet brittle like they would be in another month, but he could smell it coming.
“Hello?” Kilgore called. The word went wild, echoing against the hoist-house walls and adjacent boiler rooms, banging off the time shack and the bit-building across the way, rattling against last century’s mining equipment abandoned on the end of the track. “Anybody here? Miss Huesman?”
He scaled the steps of the entry platform and stood on the wood-slat landing—gazing toward the cavernous interior. Inside he saw pumpkins, leftover from a Halloween fund-raiser, if the banner could be believed. They were laid out on pallets with discount signs scrawled by hand in thick red marker. Even the largest, a gourd advertised as a seventy-pounder, looked tiny beneath the vast, gabled ceiling strewn with crisscrossing tracks that toted great tubs of ore back before Kilgore’s grandparents were born.
Wind whistled through the rafters above, scattering dead leaves and ruffling the fat little birds who huddled on the hauling lines.
“Hello?” he tried again. “Anyone here?”
“Hello?” someone called back, then added more, but he couldn’t make it out. The voice came from deep inside, past the pumpkins on their pallets and back against the far wall … behind a door that might lead to an office.
He headed toward the sound of the speaker.
“… sorry if you’re here about Rich. He’s gone home for the day—and I think he took the money pouch for the pumpkins. But if you want one, and you have exact change, I’ll see what I can do. All the proceeds go to support the museum …”
The door banged open, forced that way by the shoulder of a woman whose arms were full of miscellany: files, papers, magazines from the first Bush era, and a messenger bag from which peeked the sleek shape of a tablet. She paused. Or more precisely, she froze. Whatever she’d been expecting, Kilgore Jones wasn’t it.