Bluebird, Bluebird by Attica Locke

Author:Attica Locke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

14.

THEY QUIT drinking shortly after the band’s first set because it had grown loud and difficult to get the bartender’s attention. So they were both still walking straight when they left the roadside bar. Still, Darren tossed the keys to Randie and asked her to drive. She was a drink behind him, and that seemed like sound enough logic, until they arrived at the Chevy, parked on the other side of the gravel lot. She looked so small standing beside the driver’s-side door that he couldn’t believe he’d ever let her behind the wheel. The Chevy was parked on the north side of the building, which was painted a deep blue that nearly blended with the night sky around it. The bar had only a single exterior light, a tin barn light affixed over the front door. The light was too weak to turn corners, which is why he didn’t see the blood at first. He actually smelled it before he saw it. This had less to do with his law enforcement training than with his boyhood in Camilla, where his uncles, if one or both of them was lucky enough to bag a buck for the season, used to drain deer carcasses off the back porch, letting the iron-rich blood soak the grass and making Darren hold the hose to run the waste down the hill behind the house, a river of blood that sank into the earth and left a copper-scented tinge in the air until the next hard rain.

Tonight there was a bunch of it leaking out of the driver’s side of the truck. Darren told Randie to step back. He’d lost his flashlight in the bayou. He had another one inside the truck, of course, but he wasn’t touching anything until he knew what this was. He used the flashlight on his phone to brighten the scene. There were fat drops of blood, dried nearly black, on the pebbles and gravel stones by the left side of the truck, but there was nothing on the door itself.

“What is that?” Randie said.

Darren didn’t answer. Instead he pulled out the tail of his shirt and used the fabric to cover his hand while he opened the door. Soon as he did, the head of a red fox flopped out along the side of the truck. Its throat had been slit, and blood was starting to gum up around the wound, black clumps of it clinging to the animal’s fur. Someone had slit the fox’s throat and placed it in the cab of Darren’s truck. Randie screamed when she saw it, and again Darren told her to step away from the car. “Don’t touch anything,” he said. His mind was racing as he turned and looked both ways up and down Highway 59, as he scanned every inch of the bar’s parking lot. He saw no one, heard only the music inside the bar, the bass and drums thrumming against his rib cage. He was struck less by the

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