The World's Finest Mystery and Crime Stories Vol 3 by Ed Gorman Martin H Greenberg

Author:Ed Gorman, Martin H Greenberg [Ed Gorman, Martin H Greenberg]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I spent most of that afternoon at Len Dozier’s place, working on his tractor. We got it up and running some time around four, so I stopped by the mar— ket in Kingston Mills, picked up a couple of steaks, some potatoes, a sixty-four-ouncer of Coke, and headed back to my father’s place. When I had left, he had been sitting at the kitchen table, staring vacantly into his half-empty cup of coffee. It was only a matter of time, I figured, before the coffee was replaced by whiskey, and if that had already happened, it was a good bet I was going to find him passed out cold on the living room couch.

But that’s not where I found him.

He was sitting on the front porch, next to a pile of plastic bags filled with bottles and cans. I climbed out of the truck with the grocery bag in one arm, and as I closed the door, I watched him toss an empty whiskey bottle into the air. It sailed a good fifteen or twenty feet, landed smack-dab in the middle of a feeding trough with loomix stenciled across the side, and then shattered with the harsh sound of a bottle landing in a recycling bin.

“What are you doing, Pa?”

He didn’t bother to look up. As I went through the gate, he popped the tab off a can of Budweiser, dumped the contents out through an opening between the porch slats, then crushed the can and tossed it in the direction of another pile only a few feet away. It fell short, making almost no sound at all.

“Pa?”

When he finally did look up, his face was drawn and haggard, and though I had seen him like this before, this time was different. This was not a man who had hung one on while I had been gone. It was a man who had looked at himself in the mirror and had been frightened by what he had found.

“Pa, what’s the matter?”

He stared at me a moment, something apparently aching silently inside him. “You ever meet Lloyd’s kid?”

“Joey Egan?”

He nodded.

“Yeah, a couple of years ago, I think. When I was helping with Four—H.”

“He died last night,” my father said mechanically. He took a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label out of the plastic bag next to him, gazed fondly at the label, then unscrewed the top and emptied out the whiskey. “It was a hit-and-run, off Buzzard Roost Road. He was on his way home after the school dance.”

“Are you sure?”

“It was in this morning’s paper,” he said. Then he sent the empty bottle sailing across the yard, end over end. A spattering of sunlight glittered off the glass just before the neck of the bottle landed against the side of the trough and fell apart before my eyes. I’m not sure I even heard the sound it made. It seemed a thousand miles away just then.

“Maybe it wasn’t you,” I said.

“You’re forgetting the blood on the bumper, Will.”

“Yeah, but … Jesus, don’t you remember anything from last night?”

“Not after I left the bar.

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