Broken Ground by Joe Clifford

Author:Joe Clifford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2018-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I MADE AMY promise she’d rest up. I didn’t have much food in the fridge but said I’d fix that on the way back, hit Hank Miller’s grocery mart downstairs and stock up. I didn’t want Amy leaving the apartment. Spend the day in bed, recoup. Let your body, spirit heal. Whatever you do, don’t go back to that asshole. I told her I had work to get done but would be back early. Today was the last day left to deliver a shipment. Down south to Lake Winnipesaukee and that asshole Owen Eaton, former competitor of my ex-boss Tom Gable. I was too bush league for Owen to view as a threat, and I did my best not to do business with the dirtbag—he’d swindled a company that was rightfully mine—but we’d worked out a nice deal on a chest of drawers and Wepner stool, and I needed the cash.

I hadn’t been at my storage space twenty minutes, when I saw Turley pull up. I was in the middle of loading the dresser onto the back of the truck, straining my lumbar, bracing for more ball busting. Stay cool, I told myself. This is payback. You’ve spent the last several years drinking too much, acting like a jerk, being a pain in everyone’s behind. Suck it up, buttercup. It takes a while to earn back trust. They preached it in the AA rooms all the time. But there was that other part of me still in there, the one with the short wick and loose wires, and he wasn’t good at things like calm and patient. Sober or not—how much longer till he snapped?

“Those hunters,” Turley said, ambling over. He slapped his police hat off his pant leg, swatting away snow. “The other night.”

“The ones you told me I made up?” I jumped down. “What about them?”

Outside my shop, stacked cracked pallets and scattered milk crates replicated a homeless encampment. Moving blankets I hadn’t brought inside had frozen over barrels and boxes into unholy, crooked angles. Turley glanced around the snowy, windswept alley. I waited for him to try giving me a citation for being messy and unorganized.

“Man, I have to get rolling,” I said. “Got a tight schedule. I have to go way down to Lake W—”

“Describe ’em to me again.”

“The hunters? What for?”

“Do it.”

“Thought you said I was cracker-jacked.”

“I didn’t say you made anything up. I thought you might’ve had one of your episodes.” He puffed up, before dropping shoulders in a mea culpa. “Okay. You’re right. I thought you overreacted, panicked, heard a moose call and let your mind get the best of you. Would it help if I apologized?”

“Don’t bother.” I didn’t add to the conversation I’d wondered the same.

He nodded up the road, in the direction of the Desmond Turnpike. “Fry cook. In Chevreport. Not far from where we found Emily Lupus’ body, the Black Bear Den. Young kid, Matt something. Said he served a couple guys. Not long after your experience in the woods.

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