Vile Blood Read Online Free Page A

sleepy voice.
    “Yeah?”
    “Richie, this here is Uncle Dellbert.”
    “Yessir.”
    “You alive and kickin’ boy?”
    “Yessir.” Sounding like he was down deep in a well.
    “You seen a Dodge Charger down your way?”
    “Black?”
    “As the night.”
    “One came on here to get gassed up.”
    “What time would that have been?”
    “ Midnight, I reckon.”
    “The men in it, they go into the diner?”
    “Yessir, they did.”
    “That Martindale girl workin’ tonight?” A pause. “Speak up, boy, goddamit fore I come over there and beat you like a rented mule.”
    “Yessir. She was workin’.”
    “She get a ride home, maybe?”
    “No sir, she walked.”
    Drum heard the sound of a car through the phone. “Somebody there, boy?”
    “Chief Deputy Martindale’s just come on, sir.”
    “Okay, you go and attend to him. Tell him all you told me, but don’t mention we spoke, you hear me?”
    “Yessir.”
    As he crested a rise, Drum saw the flickering neon of the Milky Way Motel . A sparkling constellation in its hey-day, the sign was reduced now to one stuttering yellow asterisk, like a faded star of Bethlehem leading him to the domain of the fallen man of God who cooked meth and ran harlots from the tumbled remains of the motor court.
    The men in the Dodge, hotshots from the big city, part of a syndicate, had come down to tithe the smaller operators. They’d threatened Reverend Jimmy Tincup who had opened a dialogue with them on Drum’s advice, while he planned on how to deal with this. But now it was no longer their problem. Something he’d relish telling Tincup, but tonight his business was with somebody else.
    As he neared the rundown motel, the neon jerking and jittering like a meth whore, Drum turned off the blacktop and onto sand, heading toward the clump of single-wides that were surrendering themselves to the desert.
    Until the rampage of bloodletting five years before that had caught Gene Martindale’s wife and unborn child in its wake, these trailers had housed Reverend Jimmy Tincup’s flock. Nothing to rival a compound like Waco in its prime, but it had provided Tincup with a steady supply of fresh pussy, a gaggle of brats and men young and stupid enough to do his bidding. Then Junior Cotton and his rancid bitch went rogue and the flock was dispersed , leaving the preacher dreaming of faded glory.
    As the Ford bucked and bounced across the dirt, Drum reviewed the situation around the slicks in the Charger. The why of it all was plain to see: big city gunsels who thought they could muscle in on the turf of backwoods meth cookers. It was the how that had been irking Drum. How had they known about Tincup and his trade, here in the middle of nowhere?
    Drum had arrived at an answer. A hunch, to be sure, but an educated one, and since he wasn’t in a courtroom, there was no need to trouble himself with the burden of proof.
    He stopped the Ford outside the least dilapidated of the trailers, the only one that was occupied. No electricity out here, so a candle threw a shadow show against the cloth that covered the window. Leaving his hat in the car, he took a brown paper bag from the glove box and went up to the door of the single-wide, tapping lightly.
    “Yeah?” A female voice. Scratchy. Agitated.
    “It’s me, darlin’.”
    A bolt was drawn and the door swung open, revealing a disheveled woman somewhere between thirty and death, a nest of dirty blonde hair sprouting from her skull.
    “Dellbert, Jesus. I’m climbin’ the fuckin’ walls.”
    “Relax, Holly. I come bearin’ gifts.”
    The woman backed into the trailer, the place stinking of mold and disuse, the stars visible through a gash in the roof. The single-wide had been uninhabited for years before Holly, Tincup’s oldest serving wife, had crossed him one too many times and was banished out here two weeks ago.
    She slumped down at the table, her bitten fingernails scratching at the scuffed wood, the candle yellow lighting the wrinkled