Thirty Miles South Of Dry County by Kealan Patrick Burke Page B

throat, but not removin’ his gaze from the five rows of pennies set out before him on the scorched table.
    “I’m lookin’ for my friends,” I told him. “Came here yesterday, one of them with a head of steam on him, lookin’ to square off against your mayor here. They ain’t been seen since.”
    He nodded his understandin’. “I can tell you where they are, but it’ll come with a price.”
    “So Iris told me. If it’s money…”
    “It ain’t,” he said, and indicated the pennies with a sweet of his hand. “This is all the money I need.”
    “Don’t look like much,” I said, in what I guess were an attempt to be funny, as I’d never met a man who not only didn’t smile, but looked like he’d never learned how to.
    “It’s more than you think,” he replied.
    “So what’s knowin’ goin’ to cost me then?”
    “Pretty much everythin’.”
    “Well I ain’t got much to begin with, so—”
    “It’ll mean acceptance of why you’re here and the things that brought you here.”
    I still didn’t get his meanin’, but after hours spent dealin’ with people who seemed to only know how to speak in riddles, I waved him on. “Just tell me.”
    He said nothin’ for a time, but plucked a penny from one of the towers and set it gently down on the table. We both stared at it. It looked out of place on its own among the stacks. Then Cadaver looked up at me, those pale eyes searchin’ mine.
    “Your friends are dead.”
    I felt like I’d been punched in the gut, but at the sight of my jaw droppin’ open and workin’ without makin’ a damn sound, Cadaver raised on of those withered hands, indicatin’ he weren’t done just yet.
    “Have been,” he said in that awful voice, “For quite a while.”
    “What? The hell is that supposed to—” I started to rise and his hand lashed out and grabbed my wrist. His grip were like someone had slapped a manacle on me and nailed it to the table. I gawped at it and started to say somethin’ else, but he forced me, with a painful squeeze that made my bones grind together, to sit back down. Unhappy, more than a little afraid now, but unwilling to put my body through any more physical pain than it had already managed to endure, I obeyed, heart hammering, scalp prickling with confusion.
    “Robert Waits—Old Dick, I believed you called him—died of a brain tumor last summer. A month later, Sven was shot dead by the drug dealers his brother owed money to when they came to collect and he put up a fight. You outlived them both, saw them both planted in the earth. But instead of wastin’ time with grief, you sat up there every day outside that liquor store, doin’ the same thing to your friends that nature was doin’ to the buildin’—takin’ it all back.”
    I chuckled at him and yanked my wrist free. “You’re full of shit, mister. Everyone in this crazy town is.”
    Cadaver shrugged. “Much better to believe that than to believe it’s you who went crazy.”
    I swallowed and aimed a forefinger at him. “I’d know. There would be some glimpses of the truth. Nobody is that completely insane.”
    “Is it insane to not want to be lonely? To try and pull back the things that have been taken from you? That’s what grief is, Warwick. Everybody loses somethin’; everybody would do anythin’ to get it back, even if it means sacrificin’ their mind to make it happen. Or appear to happen, in your case.”
    I didn’t believe him and he knew I didn’t. There weren’t no startlin’ revelations that proved he were tellin’ anythin’ but a ridiculous lie. But why? What did the people of this town stand to gain from it all? So I put that question to him.
    “If what you say is true, then why now? Why all of a sudden do I wake up one mornin’ and know they’re gone? Why, after all this time?”
    “Because Milestone wanted you here, and if Milestone wants you here, all it needs to do is find the cracks, the vulnerabilities that each and every one of us