Tom Piccirilli: The Fever Kill

"You were sheriff."

"Already breaking down, drinking too much. In debt because of your mother's hospital bills. My word against his. Nobody would've believed it, if I had said the truth."

"They didn't believe you anyway."

His father shuddered, moaned, and sobbed for less than a minute before he smiled with red teeth and finally died.

Two days later, at the cemetery, a priest who kept misquoting the Bible spoke for six minutes, immediately asked to be paid, complained about the cold, and strode away in his parka without shaking hands with Crease. No one else was in attendance. Crease had been naive. Stupid, even. He thought at least a few people his father had helped before his downfall might've shown up.

Dirtwater, the deaf-mute gravedigger, could only stare at Crease in fear and heartache from the safety of tall hedges fifty yards away, wanting to do the only thing that gave his life any definition, but too scared to grab up his shovel. A welt burnished the side of his face, and his eyes shifted to Sheriff Edwards parked up on the road.

Crease's father lay there in a pine coffin wearing his only suit and tie. There was no grave dug. There would be no headstone, Crease couldn't afford one, and the county wouldn't pay. The man wasn't a fallen hero. The man was hardly a man at all.

Edwards leaned up against his cruiser gnawing on a straw, the wraparound sunglasses giving him a fashionably hip appearance. He was alone and he was smirking like there were flashbulbs going off around him. Crease looked away, then looked, and finally walked over. He thought, No matter what happens, it'll be worth it so long as I see his blood.

The voice that wasn't his own was still with him, and he figured he was going to have to get used to it. There was no fire in it even though he wanted Edwards to appreciate his hatred. But the voice remained calm and perfectly level. "You didn't have to attack Dirtwater. He never hurt anyone."

"He chose his lot."

"How so?"

"He was saying kind things about your father and poor things about me."

"He's a mute."

"He said it with his eyes."

Edwards stood there, aware of how good he looked. His golden hair in the breeze, the light hitting him just right. Cocking his smile at the perfect angle, with his muscular shoulders shrugged so high that his brown deputy's shirt was drawn tightly over his muscular chest. Crease wondered why a man so graced would willfully become so callous.

"Your father was rotten through and through, that's the truth. You know it. Let me tell you something else. He killed that girl and should've been put in prison for it. He disappeared inside a whiskey bottle because he had to choke down his guilt and shame."

"He started drinking when my mother grew ill," Crease said. The voice betrayed no emotion, no humanity. "That's why he jumped the rails."

"You're not stupid, you know the truth. He ruined your life. You're glad he's dead."

Crease wouldn't be able to hit him. He would try and fail and Edwards would unleash a torrent of swift blows that would bring Crease to his knees. He saw it all clearly in his mind long before he threw a punch, realizing it wasn't a desperate act, or even a scornful one, so much as it was a choice between doing something and doing nothing.

His fist struck bone.

Edwards cried out with a loud yawp as blood gushed from his mouth. His bottom lip was torn and a jagged piece of broken tooth had speared his cheek. The sunglasses went flying. There were those hated blue eyes. How fulfilling to see them once more. Crease struck again, shocked by the speed of his own hands, and felt Edwards' nose snap. He knew the beautiful sheriff would never be beautiful from this day on.

He took another swing and Edwards yanked loose his billy club, rammed it into Crease's stomach and chopped him over the left ear. Crease never passed out, no matter how many times he was pummeled and kicked.

They threw him in a cell and took turns beating him for three days. It wasn't so bad. They never booked him, never fingerprinted him. On the fourth day they tossed him in the back of the cruiser and drove him halfway home, then shoved him out into the street.

When he got to the house he found his backpack and his father's suitcase already packed at the curb. They'd gotten somebody who knew him pretty well to do it. His favorite clothes were inside, along with a couple of important personal belongings, including his father's badge. Maybe it had been Rebecca Fortlow, who he'd been dating on and off the past year despite her family's protests. Someone who liked him but wouldn't shed more than two tears at his leaving. Yeah, probably Reb.

Most of the furniture had been taken. He saw evidence of the neighbors' culling across the lawn: shredded clothing, flung papers, shattered dishes. What one person didn't want was left for the rest to pick through.

He walked through the house and took a shower. The shower curtain had been stolen too. There were no towels left for him to dry himself. He looked at himself in the cracked bathroom mirror and saw that they had done a damn good job of working him over. The bruises and scrapes and abrasions were terrible to see. Somehow he'd just stopped feeling their fists after a while.

When he got to the cemetery his father was still there in his coffin. Crease didn't know how to drive the backhoe, so he had to dig the grave entirely by hand. The ground was too frozen though and after fifteen minutes Crease had barely broken the soil. He siphoned gas out of the backhoe and set the ground on fire, letting it burn and smelling the sickly sweet aroma of scorched earth. Eventually the dirt softened enough that he could dig his father's grave. It took Crease almost eight hours. His hands were raw at the end of it, but there still wasn't any pain.

Crease walked to the outskirts of town, past the Groell place. It was almost midnight. Old lady Virginny must've been asleep. The window that he'd come to think of as hers was empty. But in the other, the one that was Ellie's, he saw a brief movement behind the shade. Her silhouette seemed to wag its wrist at him, waving goodbye.

He would give himself six months to get smart and strong and learn how to use a gun. Then he'd return and take a stand against the town that was all he had ever known, all he'd ever cared about, but would never again be home. Six months, and he'd settle accounts.

Instead, it took ten years.

When he returned he had an ex-wife who still loved him, an eight-year-old son who hated his guts, a row of medals he wasn't allowed to show anybody, a drug czar named Tucco on his tail, and Crease had left Tucco's mistress pregnant.

He was still trying to figure out how it had all happened and what it all meant.

Now he was strong and knew how to use a gun, but he hadn't gotten a hell of a lot smarter during his time away. He was a bent cop, like his father. The difference was, Crease was allowed to be. He didn't even have to resist the temptations of life. The narc squad paid him to join the underworld and let his darker self cut free. The worse he acted the better he did his job. What more could you ask.

In the cherry '69 Mustang that he'd rebuilt himself, ninety miles over the Massachusetts-Vermont border, fifteen outside of Hangtree, with the window open to the rain and the October night air chopping through him like when he was a kid, but sweating like hell, he decided everything would be all right, the fever would get him through.

Beautiful as she was, with that red, storm-blown hair dripping across her throat, fiery eyes full of anger and faint dignity, Crease didn't really notice her until he saw the blood.

She moved to the ladies' room as he hung back in the corner of the dark hall at the back of the diner, talking on the pay phone trying to get Mimi to calm down. The woman opened the bathroom door by pressing her shoulder to it and letting out a small gasp of pain as she slid inside, leaving a small swath of red against the scarred wood.