Dead Highways: Origins by Richard Brown

Author:Richard Brown [Brown, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Incendiary Books
Published: 2013-08-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

After drying my eyes, I headed back out to the living room. Diego was still on the couch with Luna. He had his bad leg propped up on the coffee table. Peaches and Bowser were in the kitchen prepping dinner.

“Where’s Robinson?” I asked.

“Outside getting the grill started,” Bowser replied. He was rubbing some sort of glaze on the ribs they’d got from the store. Jax was beneath him, licking his chops and smelling the floor for fallen food.

Peaches was pulling apart corn stalks and then soaking them with butter, getting them ready for the grill. “Where’d you run off to?”

“Nowhere. I was just checking on my grandma.”

“How is she?”

“Same, I guess.”

Out on the back deck, Robinson was checking the settings on the propane tank with the help of a high-powered flashlight Peaches and I had snagged from the cart of a comatose customer. The five candles Peaches had set up on the patio table didn’t provide much light beyond a short radius.

“How’s it coming?”

“Fine,” Robinson said, turning one of the knobs on the tank. “Just getting this thing warmed up. Got my worker elves going at it in the kitchen. Did you see?”

“I don’t know if I’d describe what they were doing as going at it, but yeah, I saw. How is Diego doing?”

Robinson stood up and lifted the grill lid, felt for heat. “His knee got cut open pretty bad. Had to bandage it up. Hope it doesn’t get infected. He also has some significant bruising up and down his leg that’ll take some time to heal. I gave him some leftover prescription pain meds I got after having a tooth pulled last month. Don’t know how much those will help, but they were the strongest I could find in the house.”

“Is his leg broken?”

Robinson shrugged. “Don’t know. I don’t have X-ray eyes, sorry to say. I hope not. I feel horrible about it. They’re gonna eat dinner with us. I even told them they could stay the night if they wanted.”

“What did they say?”

“They said they’d think about it.”

A half hour later, we all sat at Robinson’s dining room table and ate dinner. Peaches wanted to eat outside on the deck, but Robinson overruled her, for Diego’s sake. It was bad enough Diego had to get two people to help him walk, best to limit his movement to the bare minimum. The food was nothing extravagant: barbeque ribs, corn on the cob, and some pre-made potato salad Bowser had purportedly picked up from the Walmart deli. Not four-star restaurant quality, but certainly better than the frozen dinners I was used to consuming. Or, God forbid, the outdated junk food Aamod always sold me. It felt like months since I’d had a meal so filling.

“Quit your begging,” Robinson said to Jax, who was going from person to person hoping for kind favors.

“How old is he?” Peaches asked.

“He’s four.”

“Twenty-eight in dog years,” I said.

“Got you beat then,” Peaches said. “He’s a police dog?”

Robinson laughed. “Only in spirit. I got him for that reason, tried to get him professionally trained, but he wasn’t having any of it.

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