Six Feet South: The Rolson McKane Series Book 4 (Rolson McKane Southern Mystery) by Braddy T. Blake

Author:Braddy, T. Blake
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

After a long conversation, Paula led me upstairs. She stopped at the closed door to Van’s old room and said, “This one is off-limits.”

I nodded.

“I don’t think I could handle being in there,” I replied, but she seemed unconvinced.

She just had to trust me. No one wanted to bury the sorrow of losing her—the first woman I’d ever loved—more than I did.

Still, I couldn’t help but drag my fingers across the door as I passed. It was a way of—I don’t know—holding onto her. Of capturing just a fleeting feeling of what I used to have.

She then took me to a spare room and offered up a change of clothes. I showered and shaved and put on D.L.’s threads.

I was startled when I heard a voice coming from behind me.

“Man shouldn’t wear a dead man’s clothes.”

Deuce was sitting on the bed.

His face was swollen, the skin sloughing off in places. One eye had turned a thick black, the color of motor oil, and the other, well, it was a milky, unsettling white.

“How would Goodwill ever make any money?” I said, tying the drawstring on my pajamas to account for the difference between D.L.’s considerable waist and my own.

“Comedian,” he said. “Man on the run, and he thinks it’s time to make jokes. He don’t think it’s time to get serious.”

I whirled on him.

“Were you there for the conversation I had with Paula down there? How much more serious can it get?”

“I don’t know. You could be dead.”

“Why the fuck are you defying every single decision I make?”

“Maybe I’m not...here. Maybe I’m a figment of your imagination. Maybe I’m just the conscience you’ve let slide bubbling back up to the surface.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It’s like a muscle, and you’ve got to work it every once in a while for it to be viable. I don’t mind saying, you’ve had a severe deficit in the empathy department for a little while, Rol.”

“Deuce, I don’t even know how to fucking respond to that.”

“Listen,” Deuce said. “We went after my brother’s killer—killers—with all the vim and vigor of serial killers on holiday, and though it felt good to bust some heads, all it did in the long run was get my family and my own dumb ass killed. So it should seem obvious here that I don’t want for you what happened to me. You dig?”

I went into the bathroom and splashed age-old aftershave on my cheeks. “I dig,” I said.

“You make it sound so white,” he said.

“I am white, Deuce.”

“You had a temporary brother card, and you chose to let it go to waste. Like everything else in your life.”

I’d begun brushing my teeth, careful to scrub around the stump of the one pearly white which had fallen out. The one next to it was loose, and it would just be a matter of time before it, too, ended up circling the drain.

And the worst part was, no matter how long I brushed my teeth, the smell coming off my tongue was worse than all the barf burps I’d ever experienced.

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