The Heart's Eternal Desire by David Holly

Author:David Holly [Holly, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626394216
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2015-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I set down my cell phone and stood looking at it. Dusty and I had been placidly watching The Big Sleep with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall when my phone gave a jingle. I didn’t recognize the caller’s number, and no identifying name popped up. Regardless of the outcome, I answered it, and after listening for a minute, agreed to call the phone number the caller gave me.

Dusty was holding onto my arm, an expression of anxiety and distress on his face. “Who was that on the phone?”

“One of our cellmates, Dusty.” Dusty stared at me as if I were the most credulous specimen going around on this planet. I shrugged off my gullibility. “It might be true.”

“Cellmates?” Dusty sounded so dense that I wondered which alter was out. “What cellmates?” He hadn’t been mocking my naïveté after all.

I spoke in a hushed non-threatening way to conceal my annoyance. “Yes, our cellmates.” I hoped to jog his memory of our shared history without bringing out a different alter.

“What do you mean?” His voice rang with a plea of frantic perplexity. “I was never in prison.”

“Our cellmates in the county jail, Dusty.”

Dusty shook his head with anxious determination. “What are you talking about, Seaton? We…I was never in the county lockup.”

I made him sit down. He was becoming so agitated that I had to pet him until he was calmer. I hugged him to me and kissed his lips hard. The kiss lingered. Then I said quietly, “You sure were in jail for a night. We were both there on a bogus charge, and the policemen Kobzina and McClure who arrested us are dead.”

“I don’t remember it.”

I told him about the night we’d been arrested. Dusty listened with fascination mingled with darker emotions. When I finished telling about our night in jail, he asked, “You say that the cops are dead? Did you kill them?”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Do I look like a cop killer, Dusty?” I’d just answered a question with a question, which was always a basis for suspicion. “I didn’t kill them. I didn’t even know they were dead until the night of our Yule party.”

Dusty pounded on the side of his head. “Too many voices. I don’t know what to think because everybody is talking at once.” He was quiet for a minute. “Uh, Sea, did I get raped in jail.”

“No, Dusty. They were afraid of you.”

“Who was afraid of me?”

“Our cellmates. Our fellow prisoners. The Satanists whom Corrections Officer Thel Peters called the Seven Lords of Hell. You scared the shit out of a gang of violent motherfuckers, and beat one within an inch of his life.”

The clouds of Erebus lifted, and Dusty began to giggle. “Now I know you’re making this up.”

“I’m not. Your fellow prisoners were afraid that you’d rape them. You could have done it to, if you’d had a mind to.”

Dusty didn’t remember his actions when that unnamed fighting alter was out. Unable to cope with what he was hearing, he shifted the subject.

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