The Killing Kind by Holm Chris

Author:Holm, Chris [Holm, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2015-08-27T07:00:00+00:00

Albert Tuschbaum was having a lousy day.

For one, his throat was killing him. Thirty shows in thirty days will do that to you. Well, that and the sinus infection he’d picked up somewhere between here and San Antonio. He’d spent the last month snaking upward through the country on Greyhound after Greyhound: north on I-35 to Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Oklahoma City, then east on 44 to Tulsa and Joplin. To get to the gig in Branson, he got stuck on a local bus instead of an express, which meant stops every other mile it seemed, and damn near twice the travel time—all while wedged between a grubby, ponytailed biker-type too long since his last shower, and a woman whose snot-crusted toddler kept coughing like he had the plague. On the leg from Branson to Springfield, they’d lost his dummy, Mickey—though they claimed they’d loaded him into the luggage compartment before departing, he wasn’t there when they arrived—which meant he had to go onstage with the backup dummy he kept stuffed into the bottom of his other suitcase, whose threadbare clothes and chipping paint seemed to mirror Albert’s own sorry state. And from Springfield to his Pendleton’s gigs, his bus’s toilet had backed up, meaning that he not only couldn’t pee—his cholesterol meds made him piss like a racehorse—but he also couldn’t eat, the foul stench of human waste ensuring the lunch he bought at the station went untouched. Hell, he’d been in town for hours now, and still he felt as though the awful reek of chemical toilet clung to his clothes, his hair, his skin.

Then again, maybe that was the smell of his career.

How could he have let it come to this? Time was, he played the Vegas strip, warming up the sold-out crowds for acts like Tom Jones and Neil Diamond. Twice, he’d appeared on Carson, once even getting invited over to the couch. But that was years ago—decades. Two divorces and countless hip flasks of Canadian Club. The booze had eaten through his stomach, his marriage, and his reputation, etching its mark deep into the lines of his face, into the broken corpuscles draped like lace across his nose and cheeks. It drove away his wife and friends, and left his children flinching every time the phone rang, not knowing if the voice at the other end would be that of their maudlin old man, or the inevitable rote sympathy of some faraway police officer, informing them they needn’t flinch any longer.

Then Grace came and changed everything.

Five weeks early, she showed up. Her lungs were weak, her body bruised from the trauma of early labor and a breech presentation. Ultimately, the doctors were forced to perform an emergency Cesarean on Albert’s daughter Rachel—herself the baby of the family. In the end, mother and daughter were fine, though the first few days were touch-and-go for both. And though Albert’s ex managed to put aside years of heartache and resentment to wire him money for an airline

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