Floater by Gary Brandner

Author:Gary Brandner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-07-10T08:53:31+00:00

Chapter 17

ROMAN

He lay on the brown chenille spread that covered the double bed in Room 416 and tried to concentrate on the cartoon that was playing on television. It was not easy because every minute or so the picture would roll. It was just enough to be annoying, but not enough to make him get up and go turn off the set.

So far the visit to his old hometown had been every bit as deadly as Roman had thought it would be. The streets were empty; the bar downstairs was like a morgue. The geek at the registration desk didn’t know anything about any high school reunion, and didn’t care. As long as he was here Roman would stay the night, but if somebody didn’t tell him what was going on by tomorrow morning he’d haul ass.

Roman poured a healthy shot from the bottle of Jack Daniel’s into the water tumbler that had come encased in its little plastic envelope on the glass-topped bureau. He swallowed the whiskey and stared at the animated antics of some insufferably cute little blue creatures called Smurfs.

“Ought to club the little fuckers to death,” Roman muttered. “Make a nice blue coat for somebody.”

He got up and went over to switch through the channels. News on two of them. He didn’t need other people’s bad news. Continuing around the dial: Little House on the Prairie, Love Boat, an old movie with Bette Davis, a Chinese cooking show. He clicked all the way around to one of the news shows from Milwaukee and went back to the bed. At least it was better than Bette Davis.

He drank the neat Tennessee mash whiskey and yawned through the report of some ongoing hearings in Congress. There was a commercial for a tire dealer, then a sleek broad with good knockers came on with the local news. They flashed on a film of a body being pulled from Lake Michigan, and the whiskey turned sour in Roman’s throat.

The television screen and the hotel room faded and vanished. Roman was back in the outboard on Wolf Lake in the gray morning after the last Halloween Ball.

He thought he was going to chuck his cookies when the thing in the water rolled slowly over and the dead white face of Frazier Nunley looked up at them. But with Alec already trying dryly to puke over the side, and Lindy just this side of hysteria, he held it in.

“It’s Frazier,” Lindy said unnecessarily.

Alec got control of his stomach and moved up with the others. “Is he dead?”

“Hell yes, he’s dead,” Roman snapped. “What do you think?”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’ve got to get help,” Lindy said.

“It’s too late to help him,” Roman said. “What we’ve got to do is get out of here.”

Lindy turned to face him. “You mean, just… leave him like that?”

Roman gave her a narrow-eyed glare. “What do you want to do, take him with us?”

Lindy bit her lip, looked back at the floating corpse, and shook her head.

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