Skin the Cat by R Sean McGuirk

Author:R Sean McGuirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2019-07-25T15:51:46+00:00

17

Off the Record

Hard left and I veered into the entrance of the trailer slum called Pitch Pine Acres. A sense of urgency brimming over, and I took the Ford Taurus over the speed bump too fast, colliding into it instead of going over. The suspension heaved and rocked like the wheels might fly off. The car was getting really old. Outdated. The transmission slipped between second and third gear. But I’d grown attached to it. Like a pet. Or an old friend. Emily’s hair was in the seat cracks, near the stain on the floormat that day she spilled her coffee years ago, and the indented impression of the kid’s original baby-seats could still be seen in the upholstery. Tasting ashes in my mouth, I refocused and shook off the past, slowly counting trailer lots since half were missing numbers, and the other half was missing trailers. Total apocalyptic shit hole. If this place ever had a heyday, it packed its bags a few decades and a thousand busted dreams ago. As it was now, the development sat in the belly of a murky mud-skim nudged lengthwise against Cumberland riverbank, so close and at a sloping angle it looked as if the entire thing could slip into the river and sink to the bottom- which from the looks of it might not be a bad thing. Front yards were reduced to clay-slicks overgrown with weed trees, sparse patches of tall grass, discarded children’s toys, broken glass, busted furniture including the charred carcasses of couches flipped over with coiled springs exposed. But most offensive to the eye was the discarded electric greens, blues and hot pinks of Chinese plastic trash including shampoo bottles, toothbrushes, a shredded laundry baskets, torn plastic buckets, and scattered plastic forks. The colors stood glaring out from the muddy landscape, refusing to blend in, seeming to flip a middle finger at the trees, the rocks, making anything natural look ugly and dead. The legacy of man. This. A permanent outdoor ghetto.

Crawling along, the odd numbered lots were on the left side, and with only a few of the trailers inhabited, I stopped at what I guessed to be 3307 Pitch Pines Way. The entire front wall was delaminated and curling off where a Confederate flag hung in the window behind fractured glass. An awning hung diagonally above the front door, the full assembly suspended by a single screw. One hard push on any side and the whole thing might fall in. Even compared to the hardest southside Chicago ghettos, I was startled people still lived here. In gear, I reversed slowly, pulling into some weeds and backtracked on foot. A quick head-check and no one around, no one watching me that I could tell. I snuck up the steel-grated front steps that wobbled side to side under foot. Completely unlocked, the front door opened and shut limply in the breeze offering quick glimpses of the shadows inside.

Acutely aware the murderer might be lurking in there somewhere,

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