Beast of the Field by Peter Jordan Drake

Author:Peter Jordan Drake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Published: 2012-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

*

The girl knows something, alright, Sterno thought.

He resumed his search in the long grass. He walked in straight lines while swinging the torch to and fro like a pendulum. His feet kicked up and pushed around the soil, in case it had been buried. Whatever "it" might be—he still didn't know what he was looking for out here. The girl's throwing of his flask got him to thinking, though: the same thing could have been done that night—with something of Tommy's, his wallet maybe, flung out by someone to be lost in the dirt and forgotten. He'd seen it before—panic in the moment. Sterno broadened his search. Once in a while, he cast an eye to the car, where the girl stood silhouetted by the beams of light from the headlamps.

She must have seen him, because she yelled to him over a gust of wind, "What makes you so sure I know something, anyway?"

Sterno spat. The blood was coming less now but the pain was back. About a hundred paces from the woods he turned and like a farmer behind the plow he started back in a straight line towards the road.

"He didn’t go around blabbing about his life to just anyone, you know!" This came from the girl. She was standing next to the car yelling with both hands around her mouth. “He was a sneak too, just like the rest of you!”

Sterno stepped on his flask. He lifted it up to show it to her before he pocketed it. He resumed his search. His flask was not what he had been looking for. He made it nearly to the road when a dead tree stump surrounded by weeds caught his eye. In the daytime, from the road, the high grass hid the rotten cottonwood stump; he had not noticed it. He stopped. The battery on the torch was beginning to fail, so he clicked it off.

"Just because you come here to help me find out who killed Tommy, that don't mean I have to tell you everything—anything!"

He approached the stump. He studied it. He took another long look around him--the road, the woods, the field. He shook his head. The plow would bring it up, or one of those mutts, if it was the field. If it was near the road then someone else made off with it like old man Donnan said.

"A person makes a promise, it's a promise. It's as simple as that! Maybe you folks over in Missouri aint heard of such a thing as a promise, huh?"

His chin fell to his chest; he was looking at the stump again. Come on now, he thought, only a halfwit would hide something in such a perfect hidey-hole as that.

A halfwit.

Sterno clicked on the torch. He got down on one knee and began to push the long weeds grown up around the stump to one side or another. They were thick as jungle weeds.

"What in all of hell's fires are you doing over there! You aint chucking up all that whisky, are you?"

He heard the girl tromping through the weeds towards him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.