From A Dead Sleep Read online

  She thanked God often for a husband whose loyalty to her let them uproot their lives, despite the passion Gary felt for his job, but that afternoon as she washed the windows it was her brother who occupied her thoughts. She’d left four voice messages for him over the past eighteen hours. None had been returned.

  Looking outside through streaks of bubbling foam, she noticed a faint trail of dust rising up from the gravely switchback that led up to her driveway. Someone was about to stop by for a visit. She hoped it would be Sean, but it wasn’t. Gary’s Jeep Cherokee crested the hill and rounded the thick blue spruce that shaded the front porch of the house. He waved to her from behind the windshield. He parked at the edge of the short cobblestone walkway, killed the engine, and climbed out. Even from the distance, she could see his mouth work a wad of gum mercilessly.

  “Slow day,” Gary remarked with a dash of disappointment in his tone after he pushed open the screen door and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  “Hot day,” Diana countered.

  He tossed his car keys across the corner of an end table.

  “Thought I’d come home for lunch.” The door smacked shut behind him.

  She used her free hand to lift up a small wastebasket from the patch of carpet beside her. A cagey smile directed her husband to spit his gum in it, which he did.

  “Well, this is a nice surprise. We’ve got leftovers in the fridge.”

  She warmed up a plate of spaghetti as he gave her a nod and made a quick trip to the bathroom. Upon returning, he snagged the TV remote from the living room coffee table and turned down the volume on Delores’s sitcom. The move was met by his mother-in-law’s agitated moan of dispute.

  “Now, Mom,” Diana reasoned. “It was up too loud.” She quickly set him a place at the kitchen table and within moments was watching her husband twirl spaghetti along a silver fork.

  “You know, Sean still hasn’t called me back,” she said.

  Gary’s eyebrows rose as if he had something relevant to say. He held up a finger and wolfed down a mouthful of pasta. He then swabbed the corner of his mouth with a cloth napkin. “He’s gone.”

  She watched him gather another bite. “What do you mean?”

  “I took a drive out there about an hour ago. You know, to check up on him because he wasn’t answering his phone. When I got to Meyers Bridge, I saw Toby Parker messing around down by the river, right by where Sean said he saw the guy fall. I asked him what he was up to and he told me that he was looking for the body.”

  She responded with a sigh. “Oh, dear.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately it’s the talk of the town after it wound up in the paper. But get this . . . he said that Sean left town for a few days and that he’s taking care of Rocco.”

  “Toby is?” she questioned. “Is Sean doing a job for Uncle Zed?”

  Gary nodded. “I assumed so. I probably should have asked, but I was having trouble hearing him over the water. Plus I couldn’t keep the kid’s attention. He was literally turning rocks over down there. A man on a mission.”

  “Why wouldn’t Sean just call me to take Rocco? He usually works so hard to avoid Toby.”

  He drained a gulp of cold lemonade down his throat. “Probably too embarrassed to talk to you, I’d imagine. You know how he gets. Whenever there’s a Sean Coleman public snafu, he hides under a rock for a few days. He probably chose Toby because he’s the only person in Winston not laughing at him right now.”

  Her shoulders shrunk. With a frown, she said, “I’m not laughing at him.”

  He lowered his drink to the table and leaned back in his chair. “I’m not laughing either, honey,” he said with some empathy. “I’m just telling you the perception.”

  She pulled out a chair and sat across the table from her husband, windows forgotten. She planted her elbows along the tabletop and rested her chin along the top of her clasped fingers. She turned her head to the kitchen window where she gazed out at a row of three short pine shrubs she and her husband had planted last year. A hummingbird buzzed on up to a red sweet-water feeder hanging from the overhang of the roof.

  “Give him a few days, honey,” comforted Gary. “He’ll be fine. Getting out of Winston for a little while is probably good for him.”

  Her husband’s words were easing. Diana nodded her head, letting her eyes drift from the window to him. A smirk formed across her lips. “Thanks for checking on him. That was very sweet of you.”

  He grinned. “It was no problem, ma’am,” he replied playfully.

  One of her fingers began to toy with her hair before her soft smile shifted to an enticing, wider one. “Well, Chief,” she said. “I wish there was some way I could repay you for your thoughtfulness.”

  Her eyes motioned toward the open bedroom door behind her husband.

  His eyebrows suddenly formed sharp arches. He sat up in his chair, quickly directing his eyes to Delores in the living room, then back to his wife.

  She snickered. “She’ll be fine,” she insisted. “Andy Griffith is on next.”

  Chapter 16

  The sun felt warm against Sean’s shoulders, gleaming through the rear window as if it were urging him forward like the flame behind a rocket. When it set behind a flat horizon— unlike in his hometown, a sight he wasn’t used to—it was the rising moon that drew him forward. Hours passed and the oncoming headlights grew more and more infrequent.

  He made it past some moonlit fields on the outskirts of Des Moines, Iowa, before he found himself nodding off at the wheel. The lack of sleep he’d been managing through over the past 48 hours had finally caught up with him. He spotted a small business district along an upcoming exit. There wasn’t much there other than a couple of 24-hour gas stations, a closed restaurant, and a short strip mall. The mall, however, had a decent-sized, dimly lit parking lot where he noticed a couple of semis resting. That told him that he probably wouldn’t catch any hassle for parking there overnight. He had a bit of money in his pocket, but he wasn’t going to spend it on the luxury of a motel, even a shoddy one. He had to make that cash last a few days. He flipped the blinker.

  Spending the night in the back of that Nova used to be a fairly regular practice when he was younger. Sometimes it was because his mother had kicked him out of the house. Other times, it was to sleep off a stupor. It had been years though. His body wasn’t what it used to be—now aged and heavier. Multiple attempts to contort his large frame along the bench seat in different positions didn’t prove fruitful. Whether it was an aching neck, too much blood rushing to his head, or not enough blood flowing to his legs to keep them both awake, he found himself snarling in aggravation. After twenty minutes or so, he was sitting up straight and rotating his neck to alleviate some stiffness. He watched the headlights of sparse traffic glide back and forth along the interstate while the odor of spilled oil along the cracked pavement beneath the car urged him to breathe through his mouth.

  When he swallowed, his mouth felt dry. Like he’d just been granted a wish by a genie, he turned his head to meet a small, lit-up establishment sign over at the far end of the strip mall. He remembered seeing it from the road but was too groggy to focus on the content of the sign itself.

  The Cuckoo’s Nest Pub.

  Other than the gas stations, it was the only business in sight that showed a hint of activity. Only three cars were parked out front, but it was definitely open.

  Minutes later, he found himself sitting in a dark corner inside with a hand wrapped around the throat of a cold bottle of beer. He’d chosen a booth in the back and kept his head low, sending off a vibe that he was just there to drink and not socialize. He savored the beverage unlike he normally did, appreciating its amplified value after a long day of travel. With each swig, the tension seemed to drain out of his body as the drink drained down his throat.

  The bartender was a haggard-looking woman with a tightly curled mane of hair and a complexion and physique that suggested she’d given up on her appearance long ago. Sh
e occasionally glanced over at him with judging eyes, probably wondering if her chances at a tip were better than 50/50. Had she known him better, she’d never have given him such favorable odds.

  A long day on the road had gotten him farther along than he’d hoped for, but the fatigue he felt was making him pay the price. Having been wedged in a near permanent position for the past twelve hours, his rear end felt like he’d bounced down ten flights of stairs on it. His eyes were red and they stung like hell, but they still managed to continually wander over to a young couple at the other end of the room who were both wearing what appeared to be serving uniforms.

  He guessed that they probably worked at the closed restaurant across the parking lot and had stopped in before heading home. They didn’t look twenty-one and probably shouldn’t have even been inside a bar, but no one seemed to care. He watched them gaze into each other’s eyes that were ripe with excitement and untamed youth—not the kind of demeanor one would expect to find after midnight in some hole-in-the-wall place in No-Name, Iowa. Seated next to each other instead of across from one another at a small table, they couldn’t keep their hands to themselves. Sean half expected them to go at it right there.

  He was surprised to see there was actually a bouncer on duty. It seemed pointless, given how few patrons there were, but maybe with truckers stepping in for a nightcap before settling down in their rigs, there was the occasional dust-up between blowhards. The bouncer was Hispanic with short, slicked-back hair and a mild goatee. He wore a tight-fitting, yellow t-shirt tucked into black slacks and shoes that made him look like an event staff worker at a rock concert. He wasn’t close to Sean’s size in bulk, but it was easy to tell he’d spent some time in the gym. The guy seemed to take his job seriously, alert and drinking coffee out of a cup that the bartender would refill from time to time.

  Sean had grown mildly irritated with the screechy street-slang spewing out of a skinny loudmouth that had stepped in with a much quieter friend shortly after Sean had sat down. The loudmouth, probably in his early twenties, was clad in an aqua and orange University of Miami velour jogging suit—probably the only such jogging suit that existed within a two-hundred-mile radius. He wore what had the appearance of sunglasses, but because the lenses were the identical shade of aqua as the jogging suit, it wasn’t clear if they actually provided protection from the sun or if they were just for fashion. He wore the top zipped two-thirds down, exposing his concave, hairless chest, which he seemed to take great pride in showing off. He had a white baseball cap that he wore at an angle. His buddy was much less flashy, in a black rock concert t-shirt and jeans with short, blonde hair. He looked the same age.

  “It’s like this . . . it’s like this . . .” Practically every sentence that left the loudmouth’s flap began with the words, before transcending into some tale of a sexual escapade with some chick that probably didn’t even exist.

  His buddy would just nod his head and sip his drink, never bothering to crack a smile, even when the loudmouth would leap into a high-pitched cackle that resembled that of the main character from the old sitcom, What’s Happening? He’d probably heard it all a million times.

  After a while, Sean managed to largely tune out the rhetoric, and his thoughts turned to the remainder of the long trip that he’d complete the next day. At one of the rest areas he’d stopped at earlier in the day, he’d thumbed through a road atlas with a dusty cover that hadn’t left the floorboard of his car in years. He calculated the mileage and estimated that he’d end up in Traverse City some time in the late evening. He’d given up guessing what he might find once he got there. It was all that had occupied his mind from the moment he’d left Winston. Instead, his fluctuating conscious drifted to a memory of when he was seven years old.

  It was only a few months after his father had left. After watching a PBS special on Bigfoot, the ape-like creature of folklore, young Sean decided he was going to search for the animal in the woods outside Winston. He’d been determined to find and capture it. Over and over again on the projector of his mind, he’d replayed the famous footage of the tall, hairy beast lumbering through the forest with those long arms, turning back to take notice of the cameraman for just a moment before vanishing into the forest.

  Sean had told a couple of older boys who lived down the road about his plan. They laughed and teased him for it, but Sean wasn’t deterred, relishing the imagined looks on their faces when he returned triumphant. What a find it would have been. The long, national mystery solved. Everyone would finally know the truth. His name and face in the paper. Maybe his dad would even read about him.

  The next afternoon, his mother called the police after he’d been missing for hours. A search party was formed. They canvassed the mountainside after the two neighbor boys came forward with what Sean had told them. He was found around ten o’clock that night, much deeper into the forest than anyone would have guessed. It was his Uncle Zed that tracked him down.

  A sudden chill swept along Sean’s spine as he sat in the dark corner of the bar, recalling how his uncle had found him shivering from the bitter cold, clinging to the base of a rotted pine with a toy bow hanging over his shoulder while water poured from the night sky. The whole town soon knew of Sean’s naiveté and failure. It was a painful lesson learned.

  He wasn’t sure what exactly had dredged up that memory, years later as he sat in a lonely bar in the middle of nowhere, but he thought it might have something to do with the fear of setting himself up once again for a crushing defeat.

  The loud, abrupt collision of pool balls from a sharp break echoed across the small room and commanded Sean’s attention like a dog who’d just heard his name called. His head spun in its direction.

  “That’s right bitches!” the loudmouth yelled in triumph.

  His curly haired friend, standing beside his buddy at the table, expressed an apologetic glance to the bouncer who seemed a bit torqued by the profanity. Curly shrugged his shoulders and shook his head in assurance that the term bitches was directed at him alone and not anyone else in the establishment. The loudmouth couldn’t have cared less and was oblivious to the exchange of body language as a cigarette dangled from his mouth.

  Sean had noticed the table when he’d first come in, as he did anytime a pool table was in his vicinity, but it had been vacant. He watched the two play with some interest as he finished his beer. If the loudmouth was half as good at pool as he was at trash-talking, he could have gone pro. Though he was pretty average, he was still better than Curly and sunk the eight-ball after ten minutes to win the game.

  “Slap it down there, bitch!” he howled with a cackle.

  Curly jammed a hand into his pocket and retrieved a ten-dollar bill that he then laid across the edge of the table. Sean’s eyebrow rose along with his pulse. The loudmouth snatched up the bill and shoved it in his own pocket.

  Sean watched them play another game with the same outcome. Ten down. The loudmouth’s cockiness and intrusive laughter stirred Sean’s competitive juices. He knew he needed to make his money last for the trip, but an opportunity had been dropped right in his lap to thicken that wallet. The loudmouth was no Moses Jones. It was a sure bet.

  He felt his body fending off fatigue with adrenaline as he rose from his chair and crossed the room. Curly noticed him first and met him with a curious gander. The loudmouth noticed him, too, but pretended not to.

  “Let a new player in?” Sean asked politely.

  The loudmouth grinned widely and flashed a wink through his shades to his buddy that went unnoticed by Sean. After scissoring his cigarette with his fingers and prying it from between his lips, he turned to greet the much larger man.

  Smoke escaped his mouth as he spoke. “Well, that depends. Will you give me a better game than this jackass?” He motioned to his friend whose eyes rose to the ceiling.

  “Oh, I think so. Twenty bucks? Eight-ball?”

  The loudmouth twisted his eyes and mouth into an expression of feigned bedazzlement that hinted t
o Sean that he was being mocked. It made him want to wrap his hand around the twerp’s throat and squeeze some seriousness back into his face. He kept his cool though.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but the loudmouth cut him off. “Okay, man. Twenty it is.” He placed his finger on Sean’s chest and added, “You rack ‘em.”

  Sean didn’t like being touched, but he just smirked and went to work. After laying a twenty and his beer along the top of a small, round cocktail table beside them, he snagged a wooden triangle rack from a coat hook on the nearby paneled wall. He formed the balls tightly along the well-worn burgundy felt that lined the table.

  The loudmouth chalked his stick, broke, and immediately sunk a solid, which incited a toothy grin in the direction of his comrade. He missed the follow-up shot, which opened the door for Sean to sink three stripes in a row. Despite his tiredness, his game was clean and he made short work of his opponent, dropping the eight while three solids still rested on the table. The loudmouth had quieted down a bit, but to Sean’s surprise, he didn’t let the loss deflate his spirit.

  “How about double or nothing?” he asked with a chortle. He glanced at his friend as if he were confirming that his ride could stay a bit longer. Curly didn’t seem to be in a hurry and just shrugged his shoulders.

  Sean was eager to increase his winnings and motioned to his competitor to rack up. The loudmouth seemed a bit sharper on the second game, and Sean grew nervous after his streak of four sunken balls in a row. The game had commanded the attention of the others inside. The young couple leaned forward in their seats, occasionally offering words of encouragement to both players, and the bartender even crept out from behind her perch a few times to follow the action. The bouncer showed little interest, watching from afar while he sipped from his warm mug and greeted a couple of truckers who arrived separately.