PIKE Read Online Free Page B

walking cliché. You should try developing a conscience about something alittle more challenging. Like wife beaters, maybe. Or pimps.” He winks at Derrick and crams a forkful of green pie into his mouth, swallows it without chewing. “You know what one of the theories going around is? That the nigger was one of your dealers.” His eyes scrape all over Derrick’s face. “That he shorted you money.”
    “Say what you’ve got to say,” Derrick repeats. “Then take a walk. You might think I’m joking about shooting you, but it’s a point you don’t want to press.”
    Dick snorts, blowing green chunks of pie on his shit-colored tie. “Don’t threaten me, boy. Me and the union’s the only thing keeping you in a job.”
    “What’s keeping me in a job is I make arrests.”
    Dick wipes his mouth on his paper napkin. “And someday we’re gonna have a discussion as to your methods.”
    Derrick rubs his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “For the last time, what was it you wanted to tell me?”
    Dick grips the edge of the table and pulls himself out of the booth. “Get out of town,” he says. “We’re trying to salvage what little reputation you got left. The real you ain’t oughtta be here to collide with the you we’re trying to create.”
    Derrick watches him squeeze through the door. Then turns his eyes back on the window. A brick parking structure across the street, behind it the backside of the new Proctor & Gamble building, its twin stubs like missile silos. Or a pair of fake tits. The rendering of pig’s fat into soap. Exhaustion. Then a sudden rush of darkness from behind the building, starting from a pinpoint spot over the left stub and expanding to fill the sky. It’s a cloud. Like darkness itself, like the sky lowering. Like South Dakota, when he couldn’t stop driving. Cooking baloney sandwiches in a skillet over a fire by the side of the road, sleeping in the car. Spending the days staring into the prairie tallgrass, watching the mule deer and the pronghorn graze. Listening to the coyotes call at night. The morning sun rising like a flood up the spires, rushing through the ravines like bloody water. The clay and mudstone pulsating, the sun pumping aloft. Hell with the flames put out, a landscape that washed away every time it rained. Everything changing with every storm, nothing changed ever. Driving the same
    highway loops until every pinnacle and every ravine was burned into his brain.
    “You can’t sleep here,” the waitress says.
    Derrick turns to her and tries to open his eyes. But they’re open. “I was just leaving.”
    Her eyes glitter blackly in her head. “Don’t let me stop you.”

CHAPTER 8
~ The bulb of some purple black fruit in his palm.~
    A cabin on the outskirts of town, in a small wooded clearing just off a winding logging trail. It was once a hunting shack, years ago, before the deer were all hunted out. Across the trail and past a rusty barbwire fence, a snow-blanketed meadow opens out of the woods. The sun’s falling over the horizon and it’s almost dark, the early winter evening coming on. The smudges of light escaping the cabin’s windows flit like summer insects over the snowbanks and the tarp covered woodpile.
    The floor of the cabin is open. A pot-bellied stove, a writing desk and an iron bed the only furniture. A kerosene lantern sputtering on the windowsill. Rory’s just finished with the dumbbells, and is looking his hand over, the back of it bruised a rich purple like it’s been pounded with a ball peen hammer. He clenches it gently and lets a warm wave of pain wash up his arm. Please don’t be broken. At least a hundred dollars to get an x-ray, probably twice that to get it fixed.
    He clenches his fist again, hard this time. The bruise darkens, he feels his forehead burst with sweat. He rotates the hand, he doesn’t feel anything shifting that shouldn’t shift. So, he relaxes, swallowing away a wave of nausea. Probably just fractured. I’ll