The Crymost by Dean H. Wild

Author:Dean H. Wild [Wild, Dean H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epub, QuarkXPress, ebook
Publisher: Blood Bound Books
Published: 2019-01-21T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

“Your judge is making the rounds today, did I tell you?” Harley asked him as they drove over to Field Street in Mick’s car. “Beth Ann and I saw him when we got back to town. Like a door-to-door salesman, he was.”

Mick managed an acknowledging grunt.

He felt anxious. Kippy didn’t answer his phone. It could be that the old boy was tooling around town on his bike somewhere, but a deeper undercurrent of dread ran strong and steady in his head. He choked up on the steering wheel and parked in front of Kippy’s house.

“Bike’s here,” Harley observed.

Both of them noticed the small wooden box near the front door as they approached, and an extra, nearly silent alarm went off in Mick’s mind. He knocked, hoping Kippy would answer with sleepy seeds still in his eyes. When no answer came, he turned the doorknob. The door opened easily.

“Kippy?” he called inside.

When they were answered by silence, Harley said, “Maybe he’s out back.”

They stopped in the living room where the cover of a book, its pages strangely absent, was tossed next to Kippy’s tatty sofa. Mick held it up so Harley could read the hand notation on the ancient cover.

“River Church notes. I.C.”

“He said he had some ideas. Maybe he found a connection between the die-off and the church.” He raised his voice. “Kippy?”

Harley tapped his shoulder. “The cellar door is open. Look.”

Mick’s feet turned heavy with dread. Old men fell down sometimes. Old men got sick. Old men were perhaps more vulnerable to forces preferring to be left unchallenged.

He went first, switched on the stairway light and went down the first step before the smell of blood hit him.

Kippy Evert was a motionless sprawl midway up the stairs, arms outstretched, one hand clinging stiff and gray to the lip of the next riser. His back bristled with jutting metal objects and his face was turned toward the upstairs door, toward an escape that never came. Mick glanced at his filmy blue eyes as if to confirm what the blood and the rigid posture already told him. His knees buckled with cruel acknowledgement.

“Ho, Jesus,” Harley said and snatched the back of Mick’s shirt. It was the only thing that kept him from pitching headlong down the stairs. “Come on. We don’t need to get any closer.”

“He’s dead,” Mick said, only because the words needed to come out. They were blocking everything else. “And somebody . . . do you see?”

“Yeah,” Harley said, and took a moment to stare and to process.

Two of the long objects in Kippy’s back were pressed in deeper than the others. On the step above Kippy’s head and then another step two risers higher, which put it near Mick’s current position, were spade-shaped prints rendered in blood. Shoe prints. Going up.

“They stepped on him,” Mick said. It was another blockage that required clearing. “Whoever did this stepped on his back on the way out.”

Harley tugged his shirt again. “Let’s go make some calls. On the porch, in the fresh air.

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