The Devil You Know Read Online Free Page A

collection. “Why don’t you come back to Jesus, young man?”
    I smiled nicely. In retail, the customer is always right. “His dad and my dad don’t get along, I’m afraid.”
    The church lady left the shop looking very confused.

I biked out to the Berger house at the end of Berger Hollow Road. The weather was balmy cool and simply too nice to stuff myself into a car. Besides, the Bergers lived in a development only two miles away, and I’ll do anything to save a few cents on the ridiculous cost of gas these days. The car I owned was a huge Dodge Monaco and it hoarded oil like an Arabian sheik.
    The Bergers, though among the first settlers in the area, were a dying breed, and Thom Berger was the last of his kind, so far as I knew. The family had taken a massive hit during the Depression and never really recovered. They’d started out as city elders but wound up lawyers and business owners.
    By the time I got down to the development where the last of the Bergers lived, the tailgating party was in full swing. The Bergers lived in a huge neo-Colonial that looked less than two years old, brick-faced, with two wings. The lawn, even this late in the season, was a chemically treated, eye-sizzling green, and there were planters full of yellow and rust-colored mums in the window boxes. The long, curving asphalt drive was crammed with vehicles, mostly huge blue pickups covered in decals. In Blackwater it’s mandatory that one owns two things: 1. a dark blue 4 x 4 with decals and 2. a red-and-blue Phillies cap. That’s in the manual somewhere. Those who couldn’t fit their monster truck in the drive had parked it on the lawn, and I could imagine the lawn guy having conniption fits when he saw the big muddy furrows when next he did the Bergers’ lawn.
    Behind the Berger house rose a panoramic view of Bear Mountain, so big it looked sheer going straight up, a misty fairytale blue that was one of the perks of living this close to the Blue Ridge Mountain Range.
    The tailgates on all the blue 4 x 4’s were down and the locals were hyping themselves. I saw plenty of plastic Igloo coolers and Tupperware full of cold food being expertly handled by pretty, manicured wives. There was a lot of beer being manhandled. A scattering of hounds bayed nervously from inside truck cabs. I froze momentarily and attempted to prepare myself for stepping into this particular hornets’ nest.
    Brad King and his boys were gathered around his giant blue Cadillac Escalade. Brad stood outside with his elbow resting in the open window as Toby Keith bellowed soulfully about the red, white and blue. Meanwhile, his bleached-blonde wife ran in circles around him, a cell phone clipped to her ear, unloading the flatbed. Brad spotted me immediately like he had radar tuned in to just witches, then turned and said something to a member of his Legion of Doom while flopping his wrist rather dramatically. The Legion of Doom member snickered in response.
    Boys and girls, inbreeding is bad.
    I sighed, crushed out my cigarette, stuck my hands in my belted trench coat, and ambled forward, edging toward the police vehicles in a line in the street.
    “Hey, it’s Dick Tracy,” one of Ben’s deputies said, looking up from a thick manual he was reading in the midst of all this chaos. Did the police actually have to consult a manual on how to canvas a wooded area? He was young, early twenties, and probably wouldn’t know Dick Tracy from a hole in the ground.
    I ignored him and looked around, spotting Ben heading toward me. I wondered if he still had the Kachina doll in his pocket. “Nick,” he said, “thanks for showing up.” He did that guy slap thing on my shoulder and handed me a photocopied Google map that meant almost nothing to me. Telling a New Yorker to go north here or south there rather than right or left is about as helpful as teaching a pig to sing. I crumpled the map up in my pocket as he started giving me a rundown of the procedure. There were going to