The Ancestor by Lee Matthew Goldberg

Author:Lee Matthew Goldberg [Goldberg, Lee Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Crime, Thrillers, Historical, Suspense
ISBN: 9781643961149
Google: -RfzDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1643961144
Publisher: All Due Respect
Published: 2020-08-20T06:00:00+00:00

32

The teenagers don’t have any heroin on them so Wyatt follows one back to their trailer.

Upon reaching it, he understands why they sleep outside. A dead drunk elder lies sprawled on the floor with a moonshine bottle clamped in his hand. Cigarette burns as artwork along the reed-thin walls. Stains along the floor, mix of water damage and dried blood. The teenager in his sleeping bag steps over the passed-out relative, disappears behind a curtain, and returns with a baggie.

“And a needle?” Wyatt asks.

The teenager vanishes again, returning with the request. Wyatt pays with crumpled-up bills as the teenager shuffles outside still cocooned by his sleeping bag.

“Do you stay out here all nights?”

The teenager narrows his eyes, agog that a stranger could care. “If it’s not below freezing,” he says.

“Who was that in your trailer?”

“Uncle.” Spit. “He’s a fuck.”

The teenager flops back between the two teen girls. Through sleeping bags, their limbs enclose him and he nestles.

“Thank you,” Wyatt says, heading to Aylen’s trailer.

Across from it, an elderly man steps out of his own. He grips a cane with intricate carvings, but he’s too far away for Wyatt to make out the details. The elderly man stabs the cane into the solid snow, chews at his gums since he doesn’t have many teeth, observing this new visitor, this white man. The elder would have been imposing in his younger years. Thick shoulders, a powerful torso that has sunken in due to age, beak of a nose and eyebrows like caterpillars. A sweet smoke pours from his trailer, honey-like and reaffirm-ing. He points his cane at Wyatt, calling out in a language Wyatt can’t understand. He dubs the elder as insane, then knocks on Aylen’s door.

It takes a minute of knocking before Aylen arrives. She opens the door in a pink bath-robe and fuzzy slippers, hair in shock mode, a mug of hot coffee steaming from her hands.

“What do you want?” She coughs as she moves away from the door but leaves it open.

He takes it as a sign to go inside. In the morning, the trailer looks sadder. Old magazines fill up tables. A sink overflows with dirty dishes. She sits on the counter with her knees up to her chin, lights a cigarette.

“You caught me on my day off,” she says, not excited, nor angry, simply letting him know.

“I have a favor to ask.”

He tells her as much of the story as her brain might handle. That gold exists in the wilderness, which he hid for some reason, and he needs to find out why and where. Her eyes dance at the mention of gold, but dull when heroin gets brought up.

“I need you to inject me,” he says. “Again and again so I don’t come out of it too soon. And to monitor me so it doesn’t kill me neither. Is that something you can do?”

She stubs out her cigarette, sick of it. “Tohopka came back. Tore through this place last night looking for something, swearing like hell. Not sure if it was because he found whatever it was, or because he didn’t.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.