Leave the Living Read Online Free Page A

to his side away from the images and shut his eyes. He’d always been able to find pictures or meaning in the most random places and had done so since he was a child. It started in a common way, his father taking him for a backpacking hike behind their property to a hill known only as The Rise. His father had told him it was the highest point in the county, its semi-bare back looming up out of the conifers that grew in such thick abundance on their land it was sometimes hard to see the sky.
    And the sky was where he had seen his first picture.
    They’d eaten a small lunch on the peak of The Rise, and he’d lain down in the untamed grass that grew there, the scratching touch of their blades against his arms and face. The azure bowl above them had been blemished by fluffs of cumulus that cruised by on an unfelt wind beyond the tops of the trees. A face had been in one of the clouds, not a scowling, unkind visage but one of gently smiling eyes and a mouth turned up at one corner only enough to notice if you were looking directly at it. The rest of its features were lost in the indistinction that changed on the edges of the cloud.
    It was years later, after he’d become enamored with art and design, that he’d finally seen Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and realized it was a semblance of her face he’d witnessed that day floating thousands of feet above him, there and gone in the accumulation, but he’d never forgotten how that suggestion of a smile had made him feel.
    Now the image of his father’s lifeless eyes were there whenever he shut his own, their staring depth seared into his brain. And the way the corpse had jerked played over and over on an endless reel accompanied by the soundtrack of dead flesh meeting steel.
    The phone beside his bed rang, and Mick twitched, like Dad did on the tray, sitting up to stare at the device as if it were a coiled snake. He reached out and picked up the receiver, somehow knowing his father’s voice would issue from the other end.
    “Hello?”
    “Mickey.”
    His stomach cartwheeled, flipping itself a dozen times before he realized the voice held a scratchy tinge of cigarettes and hard booze that had never graced his father’s tone.
    “Uncle Gary?”
    “Sure is, kiddo. How you doin’?”
    “I’m…” Mick stood up from the bed and rubbed the side of his face with one hand. “…I’m okay.”
    “I’m so sorry, kid. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
    “Yeah, me neither. It’s a…a shock. How’d you know I was here, by the way? I just checked in an hour ago.”
    “I’m acquainted with the front desk staff. They told me which room you were in.”
    “Oh.”
    “Say, you want to get a bite to eat? I’d like to see you, talk a little bit.”
    The thought of food made his stomach slop like a mop bucket that had been bumped. He glanced at the ruffled bedspread he’d been lying on, his eyes traveling up from its garish pattern to the curled hand on the ceiling directly above him.
    “Sure. I should eat something.”
    “Good. Come down to the dining lounge off the lobby. I’m at the bar.”

 
     
     
    7
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The restaurant was designed to be dark. The carpets were red, pocked with indefinite patterns of black. The walls were a deep beige that most would call brown. Heavy curtains hung beside windows shrouded by a gossamer material that muted the already dismal light let in by the storm outside. A dozen round tables stood silent at this hour, empty chairs tucked beneath them. The bar itself was polished mahogany, and only two of the red fixtures glowed above it, bathing its top and one occupant in a bloody halo.
    Gary Bannon sat slumped forward, his elbows propped on the bar and his head slanted down so that he stared into an amber beverage choked with ice. Gray hair poked from beneath a tattered plaid cap, and his face was a scowl of lines covered in salt-and-pepper scruff. As Mick approached, he looked up. His eyes, uncannily like his brother’s, found