Poor Boy Road (Jake Caldwell #1) (5 page)

The cook house was a shit-heap that passed the state of condemned two decades ago. Willie took in the sagging, rotting front porch of weather beaten wood, forming a creepy grin under a pair of broken windows. Gray paint peeled off in long strips like flayed skin. Overgrown trees and thick bushes on the side hugged the tiny ranch like the place would collapse if you cut them away.

Bub climbed out of the truck. “What a creep hole.”

“Yup,” Willie said. “The location’s perfect, but I got a feeling we’re gonna get dirty as hell trying to clean it out to get ready to cook.”

“Place looks haunted.”

“Ain’t no such things as ghosts, Bub. Shane picked the place. We might as well get busy gettin’ it ready. Be hell to pay if it isn’t.”

Willie moved to the porch, testing the wood before putting his full weight on it. He kicked away empty beer cans and cigarette butts. Someone had been using the place as a hangout. Probably local kids doing some daytime drinking. Willie sure wouldn’t come out here at night. If Shane worried about any foot traffic, he wouldn’t have picked the site in the first place.

Shane was dead on about the location. The house sat a quarter mile down a rutted lane off Poor Boy Road. A rusted, four-railed, green gate overgrown with foliage guarded the entrance. They drove by twice before finding it. A footpath ran along the side of the house and disappeared into the woods. Willie didn’t know where the footpath led, but would scout it himself tomorrow.

He touched the rusty front door knob, afraid it would crumble in his hand. The door resisted but eventually gave in with a ghostly groan. The movement kicked up a thick layer of dust that Willie let settle before he moved inside. Something squealed and scurried away in the darkness.

“This place makes my trailer look like the Taj Mahal,” Willie said.

“What the hell is the Taj Mahal?” Bub asked behind him. Willie rolled his eyes and stepped in.

An old dust-covered sofa with rat-eaten cushions occupied most of the space in the tiny living room. A couple of folding chairs sat around a beat-up coffee table, littered with beer cans and an overflowing ash tray. An old console television with half a red brick protruding from the broken screen rested in the corner. A floor lamp stood in the other corner with a yellowing pile of the
Benton County Enterprise
at its base. Willie checked the dates on the newspaper. Two and a half years old.

A narrow dining room with a cheap card table surrounded by four mismatched chairs lay across from the living room. An old china hutch towered behind it, empty except for a few chipped plates and a black and white picture of a rail-thin man in a ragged shirt and a fat woman in an awful diamond-patterned dress, both wearing expressions of equal misery. Willie picked up the picture, wiping the dust layer away with the side of his hand.

“Who is it?” Bub asked from the doorway.

“Royce Weathers,” he said. “Always wondered where the old asshole lived.”

“Royce? He’s been dead for years.”

“Gotta be at least five. He used to tear it up with my old man. Wonder what happened to the wife? Can’t remember her name.”

“Mable, I think,” Bub said, the wood floors creaking under his weight as he stepped inside. “She bailed town two seconds after they threw the first shovel of dirt on his coffin. Used to see her around, but haven’t seen hide or hair of her in a couple years.”

“Can you blame her? I wouldn’t want to come back to this shithole, either.”

Willie tossed the picture back on the hutch and walked the short hall leading to the kitchen. A few black-crusted dishes lay abandoned in a sink covered with mold. Next to it, a grimy, white refrigerator Willie vowed not to open. He returned to the kitchen and flicked a light switch up and down a few times with no effect.

“Gonna have to get some lights up here. Only a couple hours till dark,” Willie said, inwardly groaning at the prospect of hefting the bulky generator. He worked the faucet handle at the sink, getting nothing but a shudder of pipes and no water. He pulled out a notepad, making a list of supplies they’d need, and handed it to Bub.

“Go to Walmart and pick these up.” He reached into his pocket and peeled off a few twenties. “Pick up Howie and Bennett on your way back. It’s gonna be a long, dirty night getting this place ready.”

Bub trudged like a little kid asked to clean his room, but had to figure driving back to town would be better than hanging out there. Willie followed him out to the truck and grabbed a few brooms and trash bags he brought with him. Bub wedged himself behind the wheel, fired up the truck and took off toward town. A breeze rustled through the trees, branches scraping the old shingled roof. Thinking about the money, Willie got busy.

After an hour sitting in his mother’s rocking chair, his attention alternating between his father’s labored breaths, ways to track down Langston and the Royals game on the muted television, Jake got up and wandered through the house. The kitchen hadn’t changed in twenty years. The same dishes he ate off as a kid dried in the dish rack next to the sink. He opened the fridge. Pre-packaged lunch meat, some lettuce, a jar of pickles and a six-pack of Budweiser. He shut the door, and wandered past the living room and down the hall.

He ran his hand along the wall where he and Nicky first attempted dry walling. A fight over something stupid that spilled into the hallway. Jake got Nick into a headlock, swung him around and put his head into the wall, punching through the plaster below the framed school pictures of them from a couple years before.

Nicky’s face and hair were covered with white powder and chunks of dry wall, looking like some sort of half-assed ghost. They alternated wary glances between each other and the hole, wondering how bad Stony would whip their asses.

Jake took the worst of the whipping. Not because he had to, but because he could take it more than Nicky. They both learned how to tape, mud, sand and paint the next day. Over and over again, day after day until they more or less got it right, or until Stony got too drunk to really care. Mom came in when Stony went on a beer run and switched out the bright light bulb for a dimmer one to help hide the tape seams.

He stood by the closed door. Mom and Dad’s room. Jake remembered running in there and climbing in bed with Mom during thunderstorms when Stony was gone. If Stony was home, Jake just trembled beneath the blanket in his own bed. He once tried to crawl in with his parents, but Stony shoved him to the floor and called him a pussy. Jake passed his parents’ door without opening it. He hadn’t been in the room since Stony made him go in there with Nicky to pick out the dress Mom would be buried in.

There were two doors on the right. One for Janey’s room, one for the room he and Nicky shared. He peeked into Janey’s. No remnants of her childhood, just a pitted, black-iron bed frame and a twin mattress next to a tiny lamp with a timeworn cone shade and a copy of the Bible perched atop a scarred nightstand. Her old dresser retired to the corner of the room under the only window, a thin gray layer of dust gathered on its barren surface.

Jake stood at the closed door to his old room, one he’d opened and shut thousands of times. He placed his hand on the knob and jerked it away on contact as if the knob was red hot. Too early to tackle that one. Instead, he returned to the living room.

Stony slept, drawing in hitched, raspy breaths. Jake went to the refrigerator, drew out one of the cans of beer, and went out the side door, past the carport to the back deck. The deck looked down the hill toward the pond a hundred yards away. The algae-covered water partially hidden by a row of untrimmed evergreens, lit up by the bright moon. He cracked open the beer, took a deep pull and dropped into a yard sale, plastic-strapped chair at a damaged wood table that saw its best days twenty years ago. Stony never believed in throwing anything away.

He pulled out his cell phone and scrolled through his contact list. He made three calls—one to a dirty cop he knew in Kansas City, one to a dope head in Independence and one to a mid-level gorilla named Matthews who worked for one of Keats’ competitors in St. Louis. The cop and the dope head never heard of Langston, and Matthews didn’t answer. Jake left a message, but doubted he’d get a call back. The last time he saw him, Jake broke both his legs with a sledgehammer after trashing two of his cronies. He tossed the phone on the table and stared at the black water of the pond.

He and Nicky used to fish at the pond every chance they got. Stony kept it well stocked, one of the few nice things he did for them. He and Nicky would dig up fat earthworms as thick as your pinky in the muddy banks. On the constant lookout for snakes hiding in the overgrown weeds. Skipping rocks to see whose could make it all the way across on the days the fish weren’t biting. Pulling out long catfish and feisty crappie, and flinging the guts at each other while cleaning them under the carport.

The pond where Janey found Nicky three years ago. Sprawled out on the sun bleached dock with its cracked boards and rusty nails, fishing pole dangling in the murky water, an empty heroin syringe next to him. Track marks up and down his arm, a ghost of a smile on his acne scarred face, and glassy eyes staring to the heavens, forever lost in the gray skies above.

Janey eventually got hold of Jake. He’d spent the day staking out the place of a derelict who owed Keats a grand. After six hours sweating in his truck, Jake picked the lock on the back door of the grungy two story the guy lived in, searched the place and found over thirty-six thousand dollars hidden under a floor board in a bedroom. Jake gave Keats the grand the guy owed him and kept the other thirty five for himself. He’d been on cloud nine with his newly-acquired wealth until his cell rang ten minutes later. From top of the world to hell in the span of sixty seconds. He still regretted staying in his truck throughout the funeral. Coward.

Jake finished the beer and crushed the can, contemplating having another. Sounds of his father’s pain carried from the living room, like an old door creaking open. The setting sun sparkling like diamonds off the surface of the pond drew him back to his tenth birthday, sitting on the bank with Nicky by his side, tracking the blood red sun as it dropped below the horizon. Nicky’s arm draped over his shoulders. Feeling the sheer intensity of his love for his older brother, the idol. Crickets chirping, an occasional car droning by on Old Highway 83, bullfrogs croaking. Peaceful. Happy.

Stony emitted a long and soulful groan dripping with agony. Jake pictured him bent at the waist, clasping at his cancer-ridden abdomen underneath the howling timberwolf afghan. The tears that rolled from Jake’s eyes earlier were gone, nothing but salty remnants on his cheeks. Whatever emotion passed through him earlier disappeared in that handful of tears he shed on his knees in front of his father. He rubbed his kneecap and the lump of scar tissue. Could still hear the sound. The sound that changed his fate. He thought of Nicky, dead on the dock and his mother laying cold in the ground. He felt that white leather belt cracking across his back and the gold ring breaking his skin.

The clock of his diminishing forty-eight hour deadline ticked away.

The moaning from the living room devolved to a pitiful wail, driving Jake to his feet. Half-moon craters indented in the skin on his palms from clenched fists, crimson lines forming. He took in the murky waters of the pond and waited for some sense of compassion or pity to wash over him. Something to drive him to the living room, to relieve the pain and suffering of the man who brought him into the world. When no such feeling came, he grabbed his phone off the table and searched until he got the number he wanted.

“Yeah,” he said when a woman from Hospice House answered. “I need to talk to someone about getting my father in there.”

While his father slept in his chair, Jake grabbed his laptop out of the truck and booted it up at the kitchen table. He turned on the hotspot on his cell phone and pulled up the Internet. The signal was weak and his search for anything related to Shane Langston was painstaking slow. He found a few references to a Shane Langston and a car dealership, a fuzzy picture of Langston at a charity event in Sedalia, but nothing of any real help. Frustration grew. He scrolled through names in the Warsaw directory, trying to come up with someone he knew that he could hit up for information, but came up snake eyes. At midnight, he gave up, drugged Stoney according to Janey’s list and carried him to bed.

Jake spent a restless night in Janey’s old room. The moonlight through the window lit up the gold leaf on the Bible cover. Why the hell did Stony have the Bible in the first place? He'd declared on multiple occasions there was no God. Maybe the Bible belonged to his mother. She took them to church on occasion when Stony didn’t bother to come home on Saturday nights. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth listening to his diatribes about the money grubbers of organized religion.

Perhaps it was the same Bible Stony hit Mom with when Jake was seven. Lying on his bed with the pillow over his head until his mother screamed and something broke. Enraged, he jumped out of bed and stormed into the living room, just in time to see Stony towering over her with her Bible in his hand, like an overzealous preacher to an unrepentant sinner. When Stony struck her across the face with it, Jake threw his skinny frame at his father, tiny fists swinging and swearing. Stony held a palm out on Jake’s head, holding him at bay, laughing. When he tired of his offspring flinging obscenities and punches, the laughing stopped. Without a word, he punched his middle child in the face with the ragged ring. Jake told people he earned the scar on his cheek from a pickup football game.

The moonlight faded to sunlight. With no more sleep in his near future, he padded to the kitchen and fixed a pot of coffee. He needed to track Langston down, but couldn’t very well do it while playing caregiver to his father. He couldn’t ask Bear about him, and had no idea who still hung about Warsaw to make inquiries. Maybe Janey would know something.

Jake popped a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster, the morning mist rising over the pond out the window above the sink. He’d finished buttering the toast when Janey’s car crunched in the driveway. He poured an extra cup of coffee and went to meet her in the living room.

“Everything go okay last night?” she asked.

Jake shrugged. “Fine, I guess. He was pretty quiet.”

“You sleep okay?”

“Not really. Strange being back in this house again. Lots of ghosts.”

“There were some good times too, weren’t there?”

Jake sat quiet for a moment. “Not many, but a few.”

Janey sipped her coffee and Jake leaned back on the couch. Keats popped into his head. He’d want an update and Jake had no idea where to begin. How was he going to find a local drug dealer in a town he hadn’t been to in sixteen years? Since his sister worked in the sheriff’s office, maybe she had a clue.

“Janey, you ever hear of a guy named Shane Langston?”

Janey’s brow furrowed and she looked at him sideways. “Why?”

“Someone in Kansas City asked about him.”

“Who?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yeah, it does. What do you need him for?”

“What do you know?”

“He’s a mean, drug dealing scumbag. Every sheriff in four counties would love to get their hands on him. Tell me why you’re asking. You mixed up in something, big brother?”

“No,” Jake said with a wave of his hand. “My boss asked me to poke around since I was heading this way. You don’t know where I can find him?”

“He’s got a car dealership in Sedalia. That’s about all I know except he’s extremely bad news.”

“What kind?”

“The worst kind. No telling how many bodies he’s buried from what I hear.”

“No,” Jake said, “what kind of dealership?”

“I don’t know. Lincoln, I think. Maybe Ford.”

“So he’s not some local little drug head?”

“Far from it. He’s as bad as they come. But, it doesn’t matter either way because you’re not going anywhere near him.”

“All right, forget I mentioned it.” Crap. A half-assed lead, but not the bounty of information he hoped for. He’d assumed Langston was going to be some little white trash bottom feeder he’d have no trouble finding and taking care of. This was going to be harder than he thought.

Janey held the coffee cup in both hands, her elbows resting on her knees, eyes fixated on the floor like it would tell her how to start the next uncomfortable conversation.

“About Dad…” she said.

“I made an appointment for later this morning to see if we can get him into Hospice House in Sedalia. You want to go with me?”

Janey shook her head. She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

“You sure that’s best?” she asked, apparently forgetting she brought up the idea the night before. His temper rose a little.

“Don’t you? He’s on his last legs, Janey. You can’t care for him the way he needs to be and I sure as hell don’t want to.”

“I can’t pay for it. I ain’t got two dimes to rub together.”

“Don’t worry,” Jake said. “I got it covered.”

“Where’d you get that kind of money?” Her eyes narrowed.

“I’ve been working steady and have some squirreled away. He have any life insurance?”

She took another drag and crushed out the cigarette in the ash tray on the coffee table. She pulled a few pieces of paper from her purse and passed them over.

“A few thousand dollar whole life policies Mom took out on him. Might not be enough to cover all the burial, but should take care of most of it. Just doesn’t seem right sticking him in some hospital. Wouldn’t be what he wanted.”

Jake got to his feet, on the verge of shattering the coffee mug in his hands, sick of her utopian memories of Stony.

“Who gives a shit what he wants? He never gave a damn what we wanted. He’s lucky we don’t leave him here to rot alone.”

“Jake,” Janey said, wide eyed, shocked.

“No.” He cut her off with a hard wave of his hand. “No more of this poor old Stony crap. You brought me here to do what you can’t and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m getting him in that place so they can at least make him relatively comfortable for the last hours of his miserable life. You don’t like it, I can hop in the truck and head back to Kansas City.”

“No, don’t do that. I just meant…” She trailed off, her lip quivering.

“I know what you meant,” Jake sighed. He sat next to her on the couch and placed his arm across her bony shoulders. No sense in being a dick to her. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Tears brimmed in her eyes. She wiped them with the palms of her hands. “You going now?”

He nodded. Though the appointment wasn’t for another two hours and the drive north to Sedalia took forty minutes, he wanted to get the hell out of the house. Maybe go sniff around Langston’s dealership.

“I’m gonna check on him,” she said. “Call me when you find out something.”

She shuffled to the master bedroom. Jake slipped on his shoes, grabbed his wallet and keys from the coffee table, and darted from the house before she opened the bedroom door and let the smell of death touch him again.

                                                        #

Jake drove to Warsaw in silence, snapping off the radio when he started the truck. The thick morning air produced a light fog that rose off the highway and swirled behind the truck. He noticed he’d put the ring back on some time in the night. He removed it, setting it in the spare change cup under the dash and spent the ten minute drive over the winding and dipping roads thinking about the last of his stash and how big of a chunk this would likely take out of it. Would Keats really give him a fade into the sunset bounty if he took this Shane character down?

He pulled off Highway 65 and headed toward downtown Warsaw, wanting to grab a cup of coffee at Casey’s before continuing to Sedalia. Traffic was scarce, only a handful of locals in pickups and jalopies passed by on the two lane road, until the unmistakable whoop of a siren and flashing blues and reds in his rearview mirror. Jake cursed under his breath and moved to the side of the almost non-existent shoulder.

The cop waited in his car for a minute, likely running his plates, leaving Jake to sweat out whatever caused him to get pulled over. The cop grabbed the roof, yanking his massive frame out of the car, and sauntered to Jake’s truck, his hand resting on the butt of his service pistol. Jake kept his hands on the wheel in plain view.

“You rolled that stop sign, boy,” the cop said as he swaggered to the window. Hanging jowls obscured by a neatly trimmed black beard, his brawny frame stretching the seams of his uniform. Jake's image reflected in the cop's mirrored sunglasses.

“The hell I did,” Jake replied, matter-of-factly. “You need to get a prescription for those cheap-ass sunglasses. You steal those from the Dollar Store?”

The cop dragged his top lip over his teeth and sucked in a deep breath.

“You got a bad attitude, boy. That kinda talk is gonna get you in a heap of trouble around these parts.”

“Heap of trouble around these parts? What is this? Fucking Hee Haw? Better having a wrong attitude than being a fat-ass cop in some piss-ant Ozark town.”

The cop glanced up and down the road, probably checking for potential witnesses, grabbed the door handle, opened the truck door, and stepped back.

“You better get your ass out of the truck. Somebody needs to teach you some manners.”

Jake swung his legs out, stretching his muscular frame as tall as he could. He rested his big hands on his hips and puffed his chest.

“You gonna teach me manners, fat boy?”

The cop feigned a punch to the head that Jake ducked. He dropped his hands and scooped his thick arms through Jake’s arm pits and squeezed him in a bear hug. He started laughing. Jake clapped the man on his back and joined in as the cop twirled him around.

James “Bear” Parley held his old friend tight for a moment then set Jake back on the ground. His brown eyes twinkled as he removed his sunglasses. He gripped Jake by the shoulders at arms’ length.

“Son of a bitch,” Bear said. “It’s been a long, damn time. You look good, buddy.”

“So do you.” Jake didn’t realize how much he’d missed Bear until the mountain stood in front of him.

“Bullshit, I look like the goddamn Michelin tire man poured into a cop uniform.”

“Can’t believe James Parley is the sheriff.”

“Yup, elected three times in a row.”

“Must be doing something right then. Must be tough to stay popular around here.”

Bear snickered. “As long as those who vote like me, I’m good. The shitheads who I bust aren’t going to vote anyway, so fuck ‘em. Janey said you were in town for your dad. Poor, miserable bastard.”

The mention of his dad wiped Jake’s face clean. He had flashes of late nights in the woods behind his house with Bear when they were kids. Sitting in the dark, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer lifted from Stony’s stash—Jake talking, Bear listening. Bear letting Jake hide out at his house. Bear watching TV at Jake’s and running with him to the woods when Stony rumbled into the driveway. You could tell the level of Stony’s inebriation by how he pulled in. When the gravel flew, so did Jake. Only Bear knew the full story.

“Yeah, heading over to Hospice in Sedalia to see if they can get him in there.”

“Seems like the best option to me.”

“Don’t have any other choice,” Jake said. “I
can’t
and
don’t
want to take care of him. Figure my job is to make sure somebody does.”

“You should check out the nurses while you’re there.”

“What do you mean?”

Bear grinned. “There’s one in particular you might find interesting.”

“I’m not going to pick up chicks in a hospice where I’m taking my dying father, man.”

“Just trust me, okay? Check them out while you’re there.”

While Jake cyphered through Bear’s cryptic clue, the two stood in uncomfortable silence as the sunlight gleamed against the faded scar on Bear’s forehead.

Jake pointed. “I see you still got that scar from the Valley Bar.”

Bear rubbed at the spot. “Yeah, that was a hell of a night. How many beers and whiskey shots did Stony feed us?”

“Enough. You remember which Crane brother started the shit with Stony?”

“Matt started it then his brother joined in. Hell, Stony fell off that bar stool and only spilled half a beer on Matt. The way those two assholes carried on, you woulda thought your old man took a piss on both of them.”

Jake laughed. “We whipped their asses in the parking lot though.”

“Yeah, you only got a busted lip and a black eye. I got a beer bottle in the head and twelve stitches.”

They stood in silence for another moment as if in honor of the memory.