The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2) Read online

  The Devil

  Came Calling:

  A Rolson McKane

  Novel

  T. Blake Braddy

  Copyright © 2015 T. Blake Braddy

  Jinx Protocol Productions

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0692608966

  ISBN-13: 978-0692608968

  This book is for Kate, who endured all those five o’clock alarms that did not get me out of bed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have come to pass without the following people, so please allow me to thank them in full: Bridget Lopez, whose editing was both informative and hilarious; Zach Fishel, for providing me with some unassailable notes about how to strengthen the core of my second novel; Kate (again), who helped me choose this book’s title from the dozen or so cringeworthy examples I showed her; Johnny Anderson, as always, for bouncing feedback to me, when necessary; Jeanna Wheeler, who I did not thank properly last year for helping me get my web site up and running; and then, in no particular order: Tommy Stubblefield, Josiah Shoup, Drew Wheeler, Bryan Center. Finally, I want to thank everyone who bought the first book and gave it to friends and family members and coworkers and book club acquaintances. You’ve made this quite a ride. Thank you.

  prologue

  Staring at the incoming tide on an empty beach is the very definition of heaven, matched only perhaps by contemplating eternity from atop a wisp of cloud.

  It’s the little things. Wiggling your toes, digging them into the sand. Polishing off bottles of beer at such a rate that you sweat out most of the alcohol before you get fall-down drunk. Feeling time just...pass.

  And when you’re drunk enough and courageous enough, you step into the frothy blue-and-brown tide on this mostly clean stretch of sand. You dive into the water and allow it to yank you around like a little brother at a theme park.

  Those are the best moments a beach can offer.

  Then you feel the edges of your vision tear and rip, and you fight to keep the scene in place, tacking it up with whatever willpower you have left, but the sides begin to slip. Old posters on a faded dorm wall. Your heart races when you realize you’re not alone, and having that other person invading your beach pops another seam in the fabric of this daydream.

  The person nears, and you figure out she’s not a lazy, good-for-nothing beach bum but your dead ex-wife, months of putrefaction hanging from her bones, the rest of the curtain falls away.

  There is no water. There is no sand. There are no bottles of beer at your feet. You’re not even near the beach. You’ve been fantasizing about it this whole time, because some half-wit criminal is holding a saw above your hand, threatening to cut the rest of your fingers off. You’d think imagining your ideal scenario would mitigate the feeling of being forcibly removed from your hand, but you’d be wrong about that.

  As the rusty, gore-covered instrument is lowered to your mangled paw, the sequence of events leading up to this moment crystallize, in what drunks call a moment of clarity. You are suddenly outside yourself, experiencing the height of fortune and misfortune simultaneously.

  You are me, and I am Rolson McKane.

  Take one step back from this, and you’re a month removed from this violence. All the suffering – the new suffering – is still weeks away. At this point, you’re still happy. You’ve settled into a variety of odd jobs, and you’re not drinking (but goddamn if you don’t want to sometimes). You’ve got a rental house and an annoying-ass little dog.

  Take three steps back, and the world is starting to emerge from the fog. You’ve moved away from your hometown of Lumber Junction and spent a few months wandering Savannah in hopes of finding if there is anything beyond what happened back there, in the Boogie House. The bottle is close to you, but you’ve managed by sheer will to keep it at bay. You drink a metric fuck-ton of diet sodas to keep the cravings away, and you gain fifteen pounds, but you’ve begun run-walking through tree-lined neighborhoods in hopes of finding that runner’s high all the assholes in the little short-shorts always yap about.

  Six months gone, and you are encased in fog. The world is a vague, unsatisfying mystery, and your arrival in Savannah is marked only by a hurricane that sweeps viciously through the Gulf and ends up doing a two-step away from the Georgia Coast at the last possible minute, leaving you wondering if you caused it somehow. The dreams still fuck with you, and sometimes you awaken in a fit of panic, covered in sweat that somehow smells like Jim Beam, yet you manage to keep the demons at bay by not drinking.

  The day you leave Lumber Junction, there is an old slide guitar playing in your head, and the more sober you get, the further away it seems. It drags along like that for a few days but slowly deadens to silence. The ghosts have mostly gone away, but the dreams remain, and they are awash in blood.

  Metal teeth grazing the skin of my arm yanks me headlong from those momentary contemplations. The battered face above me smiles, bloodied gums and broken teeth mere inches from my eyes.

  “Bet you wish you’d just left us the fuck alone, don’t you, drunky-drunk?” a voice calls from somewhere in the room. “Ba-ha! Get ready for the sawblade, you prick.”

  Screaming doesn’t seem to do any good.

  first chapter

  A dream of dead ex-wives and old friends drove me to lace up my Adidas at five in the morning. I stretched on my way out the door before slipping into a jerky, heaving ten minute pace. I ran along East Broad, and by the time I reached River Street, my lungs ached like someone had lit a Bunsen burner beneath them. Water calm as a funeral march greeted me, and I stopped for a while to bask in it.

  The goal was to end up in Forsyth Park for a quick rest under one of the oak trees before limping home for a shower. By the time I finally got there, the sun had begun to peer over the treetops, sending oddly pleasant shadows throughout the grounds. Elderly men and women were my only company, and the occasional smile-and-wave was all that kept me from total solitude.

  I walked a lot. I should have hated running six months in, but I was okay. I’d given up smokes with the booze, even though every AA old timer I met called me a goddamn lunatic for trying to make two high-stakes changes simultaneously. “You don’t know how stubborn a McKane can be about being told what he can and can’t do,” I usually responded.

  I had commenced a morning routine out of desperation, when the anxiety got to be too much. At first, I’d wake up, grinding my teeth like sawblades on wood, and just kind of dart out of the house before I knew quite what I was doing. I think, in the beginning, half of it was me walking to find a liquor store, but being in a new city without an internet connection made it at least troublesome to find a place to indulge my weaknesses.

  The story I landed on in meetings had to do with my only real close call so far, where I went to a restaurant on River Street one Sunday morning and ordered a beer. “It doesn’t have to be good, doesn’t have to be cold – it just has to be in front of me immediately.”

  This had been after a particularly nasty dream about some convergence of fucked-up events from my past. I’d left a trail of bodies in the wake of my living on this Earth so that I couldn’t sleep without them coming to visit me, and some nights it just got to be such a heavy burden I couldn’t help but yearn for a way to turn off my brain. Every capillary and nerve ending in my body was firing, and if I didn’t deaden them with something fizzy and alcoholic, I was going to explode.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it’s Sunday,” the waitress had said, pronouncing it Sundy.

  I glanced at a Budweiser clock on the wall. It read 11:07.

  I looked back at her. My guts were boiling with a desire
to quench a thirst no water on this Earth could extinguish. It was the kind of thirst only a person with my disposition experiences. I’m sure I was even sweating through my clothes, at this point.

  “Y’all don’t serve people until noon?” I asked in a quavering voice. My hands were shaking, and focusing on keeping them still had been my only means of preventing a violent, desperate outburst.

  “Noon-thirty,” she responded. “Now, I’d be happy to–”

  By the time she got to suggesting appetizers, I’d already slipped out to the street to find somewhere else. I felt like a werewolf mid-transformation.

  Thing was, I hadn’t found another place. Still haven’t. I got down the street a ways, soaking in the salty river air and the sweetly sick smell of old alcohol and fresh vomit, and just kind of experienced a deflation of my desire. I went for a walk instead, and when the nightmares came back to me, when the wounds opened up and felt fresh and the people in my life I’d let die hovered before me, I’d take off in a little trot to make them go away. I had gone from figuratively running from my dreams to running from them.

  Eventually, I’d made it back home. I still hadn’t had a drink, these six months since I’d absconded from Lumber Junction.

  “It was like I got a new shot at being lucky,” I’d said at my first meeting, and even though it didn’t make a whole lot of sense, that feeling kind of stuck with me.

  Winston ran the meetings I attended, and he had this saying about my experience: “You don’t leave the house looking for a drink unless you really want it, and it doesn’t sound like you really wanted it. That wasn’t luck – it was a choice, and you made the right one. Day by day, you just don’t drink anymore. That’s it. Isn’t any luck to it.”

  Guess he’s right, most days, but sometimes I thought he was just making me feel better.

  He was a good man. Family man. Raised his daughter, Yaelis, by himself. I kept up with them about as much as I’d ever done with my own family, and sometimes they invited me over for dinner. It was a nice break from eating alone with the dog staring up at me, licking his chops.

  Somebody rented me a nice little place near downtown, and though I mostly think that was a stroke of luck, too, it was not entirely uncommon for me to hear gunfire in the middle of the night. Sometimes it ripped me from dreams of seeing men burned alive, of being near death myself, watching the world around me engulfed in flames. Other times, however, I was already up, peering through open blinds into the night, black as a cupful of Coca-Cola, another thing I’d become reacquainted with in my newfound sobriety.

  Even though I couldn’t sleep, the staring wasn’t about insomnia. The sixth sense I used to possess, in which dead people got up and gave good conversation, still hadn’t entirely disappeared. I expected something, I reckon. In my head, I had a vision of a man trundling down a tree-lined walkway straight for me, his eyes cold and dark and ready for dealing death. Didn’t have to be a dead man – probably wouldn’t be a dead man – but nevertheless, I expected someone to come for me, and my only hope was I’d be ready for him when he did.

  A couple of close calls had sent me rifling through my bedside drawer for my .45. False alarms - old drunks stumbling back home to their modest little houses, tilting this way and that, but managing to stay upright. The gunfire never bothered me, but the men in the old suits set my skin to dancing around on me.

  One of these days, I was in the habit of thinking, it won’t be a man in an old suit stinking of jug wine that will be walking down the path. Be ready for that, unless you want to join the cavalcade of the dead you’ve created.

  Other new things, Jesus, I don’t know.

  I got a TV with some screen burn-in, so every show looks like it’s advertising a Fast and the Furious movie. It’s all right, because I don’t watch much more than the Braves anyways, and they didn’t make it to October this year, so the television looks like little more than an oversized nicknack.

  And the dog. Willie the Mutt. Not much of a guard animal – spends most of his time on the bed I bought him, eyeing me with his cloudy gaze like I owe him something – but overall not a bad dog, either. Guess I’m just not so used to something depending on me.

  New phone. Not a flip phone, either. I upgraded and got something like an iPhone but not quite as fancy. Still couldn’t quite make the damned thing work very well. I’m only in my late 30s, but I’ve reached the age where technology leaves me bereft and confused. Mostly, I call people on it. I text some, too, though I’d prefer not to. I’m old school that way, I guess.

  After I contemplated the fortune of my circumstances – new phone and all the dead bodies – I put my legs underneath me and tried to run home. They felt rubbery and loose for the task, so I run-walked the majority of it. I still hadn’t figured out the process for getting music onto my new phone, so no old blues or 80s metal for me. Instead, I allowed the sound of the wind through the trees to push me forward.

  Down the sidewalk and up the steps of my tiny house sent me into my first truly unsettling moment in that place. I heard Willie barking even before I saw the destruction. I’d only ever heard him bark that way when he saw – or mostly smelled, since he was largely blind – another dog he found disreputable.

  I couldn’t get the key in the lock fast enough, and when I got inside, I was greeted with what might have been an ominous movie scenario.

  Things were everywhere. Couch cushions and books had been strewn all over the living room, the stuffing of each piled like remaining snow drifts along the living room floor. The place had been ransacked, and I might have rushed to get my .45 had I not noticed the tuft of white material dangling from my dog’s snaggle-toothed jaws.

  “The hell’d you do all this for?” I asked him, at which point the old dog barked. Just once, an acknowledgement of the deed. He also swiped his tail across the floor once to show his own joy and amusement at the task, but then he lumbered back to his bed and lay down, sighing like he was already over this situation.

  Still in my running clothes, I went about cleaning up after the bastard. Some of the stuff was mine, but most of it had been procured through some extensive shopping at the Goodwill off West Broughton, so it wasn’t a grievous loss. Everything had a mismatched, I’ve-had-this-since-I-was-eighteen look, but it’d have to do for now. When I got out of Lumber Junction, I had gotten out quickly. The house was sold as quickly as possible, and I left most everything there. I feared bringing all that with me would make me more likely to relapse, which had been my primary concern.

  I had fled Lumber Junction like someone was looking for me, and the more time I spent in Savannah, the more I believed that might be true. My ex-wife, Vanessa, had been involved with some nasty business and some nasty people before she died, and something told me there was a dark cloud with my name on it floating around somewhere in the world.

  I don’t know what it was that made me look up, but I did. I’d been wiping up a tiny pee stain over by the television – the dog’s favorite spot – when I reckon something glinted out of the corner of my eye.

  The realization caused me to bolt upright. My heart played a 4/4 backbeat in my chest, double-time. I hadn’t seen the item in question since, hell, I couldn’t remember when, and of all the things Willie had ripped up and tossed haphazardly in the living room, this couldn’t have been one. It was a relic from the past, from a time before all the bad business in the Junction, when the world was still bright and shining and in front of me. So much was behind me now, and this one thing was a simple reminder of all that could have been.

  On a shelf where I’d been storing the few books I’d brought with me sat Vanessa’s engagement ring.

  “Welcome back, baby,” I said to the cool morning air.

  Second chapter

  “The only thing I can figure is, I put it there in one of my midnight hazes,” I said.

  Winston shrugged. He seemed to be eyeing me like a man waiting for a bad punchline. Of course, I didn’t believe that, so I didn’t know
why I was even getting into this discussion with him. I had a sneaking suspicion the reason for the ring’s appearance couldn’t be explained to a man as straightforward and prone to common sense as my AA sponsor.

  He said, “Maybe it’s a way of you bringing her memory to the forefront. You need to deal with her death at some point, so maybe this is you actually doing something about it. Emotionally, right? You say sometimes you don’t sleep well. Maybe it’s, I don’t know, a manifestation of that. Like sleepwalking. You said you packed in a hurry.”

  It was not true, but I nodded nonetheless. Winston was a nice guy, and I didn’t need to give him all of the details yet. Part of me thought he might figure it all out: that he, too, somehow spoke with the dead in some impossible manner. The guy talked like me, thought like me, so sometimes I wondered if he didn’t also snap awake with the words of the dead jangling in his ears, as well.

  Vanessa was never much for sentimentality, but she clung religiously to a few items of hers, one of which being her engagement ring. I found it miraculous the damned thing hadn’t ended up in an Atlanta pawn shop, but I guess even I could be surprised sometimes. Left her clothes, her pictures, her goddamn makeup, but she trotted off with a little box full of trinkets.

  And it was ending up in my house, but how?

  I grabbed a stack of chairs and set up each one, completing a row. Getting everything ready for a meeting was a sort of meditative act, and I took a distinct (and probably self-serving) amount of pride in doing it.

  “At a certain point, I guess it’s impossible for me to bury my past before all the pieces are put to rest.”

  I thought of home. Of Lumber Junction. My last case. I had become involved with a family in dire need of assistance, and it had drawn spirits out of the woodwork. My mind became a repository of ghosts, my dreams a meeting place for the undead who begged for my help. The closer I got to the truth, the stranger and more disconcerting my contact with the other side of the void became. I communed with strange, phantom versions of a murdered young man, and he guided my investigation, as much a partner in his own case as he was a spectator.