Murder Boy by Bryon Quertermous

Author:Bryon Quertermous [Quertermous, Bryon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Polis Books
Published: 2015-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

PARKER FARMINGTON laid his plan out for me and it was surprising in its simplicity and workability. We were sitting at a back corner booth in the diner attached to the Barrel Roll Inn and he was about to tell me why the books in the trunk of our stolen car were so goddam important.

“It’s poetry, yes, but it’s based on reality,” he said.

“How based?”

Parker pushed a copy of the book over to me and held it open to a page in the middle. It was a haiku about a drug dealing biker snitch.

“No,” I said.

“Posey and I figured it out together after the last time he caught us together.”

“The language is really quite beautiful. I’m a little jealous.”

“And the subject is very much real. Well, was real until somebody found out what he was doing and set him on fire.”

I flipped through the rest of book and scanned the poems. The styles varied across the full spectrum from sonnets to the last section, which was an epic poem about a crooked border guard, his sister, and a destitute bounty hunter.

“These are true?”

“Who would think that thugs and lowlifes would read poetry and understand it, let alone recognize each other?”

A waitress interrupted our conversation with a soft grunt and a snap of gum. She looked like a reject from a John Waters flick and smelled like the grease trap of a deep fryer. She stared at me, waiting for me to answer a question she hadn’t bothered to ask.

“Coffee,” Parker said. “For both of us. Black.”

He turned to me.

“Black right?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Whiskey keeps it black, eh?” I said.

“And a platter of the regular stuff for both of us to pick at.”

“Tell me about the storage locker,” I said when the waitress left. “Tell me everything. Did you know two guys in wedding dresses went to that same locker today and blew it up? One of them was killed.”

Parker’s face went loose as if he was dropping his jaw, but not letting his mouth open to reveal it. His eyes were the only thing expanding and his brows arched upward as his facial muscles dropped.

“Your money wasn’t in the locker either,” I continued. “Did you know that?”

“What money?”

“I know about your book deal with the publisher who wants to mix the blood of your subject with the—”

“He’s not my subject. And the blood thing was just a…it wasn’t really going to happen.”

“And the money?”

“You don’t have it,” he said. “Or you’d be gone from here.”

“I know who has it. The same person has my backpack with my thesis form in it. The thesis form you’re going to sign.”

“We’ll see about that,” he said. “First we need to get on the phone to Titus and find out what he’s got in his head about me and where I am.”

“You think they still have pay phones in Niagara Falls? It seems kind of stuck in time here.”

“We’ll use your cell phone. It doesn’t matter if they recognize the number because—”

“I don’t have a cell phone.

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