Mark Spragg - Bone Fire

“You think you’re done with meth?”

“I’m trying to be,” she said. “You only got these four cells?”

“That’s it.”

Under the fluorescent lighting her face appeared hollowed, ghostly.

“I guess that’s all you need.” She tried to smile. “Unless you have to lock up your dispatcher and her friends.”

“Harley weekend’s a bonanza,” he said. “And the Fourth of July Rodeo.” He felt a wave of nausea rise and looked away, waiting for it to pass. He was careful when he swallowed. “You got any place to go?” he asked.

“I’m going back to Denver if you let me. My sister got me a job washing dishes at the restaurant where she works. She’s helping me study for my GED.”

“Come on out of there.”

She followed him back to his office. “Will I have to come back up here? To testify or something?”

“We’ll have to wait and see what you need to do. I’ll talk to the county attorney.”

“What time is it?”

He pointed at the clock on the wall. It was one-thirty.

“That was my girlfriend’s car I was driving,” she said. “She’ll need it for work in the morning.”

He took a form out of the file cabinet and handed it to her with a pen. “I want you to write out a statement,” he said. “Just what you told me about JC and Brady, and your sister’s address if that’s where you’re staying.”

She scooted the chair up to the corner of the desk. “Do you have a dictionary?”

“Just do the best you can.”

“My bus leaves out of Sheridan at three-fifteen.”

They both looked at the clock again.

“I’ll take you down there,” he said. “We’ll swing by and get your girlfriend’s car and drop that off, then I’ll run you down to Sheridan. We can get something to eat if you want. If you’re hungry.”

“Doesn’t your wife mind you working all night?”

“Not so much.” He pointed at the form. “Make sure everything’s printed out clear. So I can read it real easy.”

She bent over the lined, white paper, her tongue working at the ring in her lip.

HE WAS GOOD at paying attention. McEban only had to show him how to do something once and that was it, and he’d gone over the Google map twice and it really wasn’t that far. Most of the dogs had been brought in for the night or were tied up in their yards, so he didn’t have to worry about mean dogs that might bite, and for the first few blocks he was having fun.

He made believe all his warriors were holding steady behind him, relying on his superior scouting abilities. He listened for enemy movement, creeping along on his belly, on his hands and knees where the cover was better. All the hedges and bushes were grown up, and he nudged the basketball forward, butting it with the top of his head. He wished he’d thought to draw a friendly face on it before he left the house, like Tom Hanks had on his volleyball in Cast Away.

He made it undiscovered through the park and around the lake and into a yard on the corner of Shield and North Fourth. He was surprised how many streetlamps were burned out, and a lot of the ones still working cast a weak, fuzzy yellow light. The big thing to watch out for was headlights. Mainly cops’ headlights, but also people who were good citizens and might call the cops. He didn’t think drunks and college students posed the same kind of threat. If they spotted him they might just shake their heads, not believing an Indian scout had flashed in front of their car in the middle of the night, and anyway, he was small for his age, which was good, because white people didn’t get as tense and worried around kids as they did around grownup Indians. Sort of like you were just the cub of an animal that was going to grow up and be dangerous, but you were still more cuddly than vicious, and then he thought about something stalking him in the dark. Some bloodthirsty demon prowling around looking for kids to grab and rip their hearts out before they could even scream. He got so revved up he couldn’t shut his mind down, like he’d had three Mountain Dews in a row.

When he got to Third, which was the main street downtown, there were a few people out on the sidewalks and a lot more cars, so he wasn’t as worried about the demon realm. Then he remembered the story he’d heard about a college student who got beaten to death here because he was gay, and he wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t. He’d asked McEban, who said it was all wiring and he’d know soon enough, and when he asked how he’d know, McEban said if he was gay he’d get a hard-on when he looked at boys, and if not, then girls would do the trick. He was under the one-ton changing out the universal joint, and Kenneth was afraid to say that almost everything gave him a hard-on, but then McEban must have thought of it by himself, or remembered what it was like when he was a kid. He scooted out from underneath the truck and lay there looking up. “You’re just fine,” he said, “either way.”

He snuck along, crouching from car to car where they were parked at the curb, finally crossing Third on Sully, still north of most of the bars that were open this late. When he reached the far curb he heard a siren and stuffed his basketball up under his T-shirt, tucking it into his jeans, and ran as fast as he could for a block and a half, across a big vacant lot and out through a stretch of gravel and over some railroad tracks. He knelt under a parked train of flatbeds and stockcars, looking back across the empty lot and finally realizing the siren must have been for someone else. He was sucking at the air.

The odors of creosote and diesel and something he didn’t recognize were so strong they made his eyes burn. When he crawled out the other side, looking up at the boxcar he’d been hiding under, he counted four tiers of pigs packed in tight. They were all grunting and shifting, slobbering and shitting, and he remembered Westerns he’d seen on television where the good guys stampeded hundreds of cattle to cover their escape, and pigs would be just as good if he could climb up and pry away the locks and slide the gates open. Then the empty tracks filled with the rumble of an approaching train, and a yellow Union Pacific engine was chugging toward him. He trotted along the shoulder of Railroad Street until he hit Lyons and turned west. The basketball bouncing under his shirt made him think of Curtis Hanson’s beer belly. He kept running until he was across the street from an auto-parts store, and pressed the button on the side of his wristwatch to make the face glow. McEban had given him the watch and now it was only two in the morning, and the Greyhound station was supposed to be in the office of the auto-parts store, and here he was without anything having ripped his heart out.

When he looked in the window, there was only the man standing behind the counter and a woman sitting in a chair, nobody else, and he knew he needed to get lucky. He sat down between two cars at the edge of the parking lot to wait. He was still so keyed up that he wasn’t worried about falling asleep. He took one of the sandwiches out of his backpack and tore it in half, saving the rest for later. Then a car pulled through and a long-haired guy got out, saying thanks to whoever dropped him off, and went into the office. About fifteen minutes after that a pickup parked and the driver stood leaning against the sidewall smoking and finally slid a suitcase out of the bed and went inside. Kenneth followed right behind, slipping into a chair by the door, watching as he bought his ticket.

The woman and the long-haired guy were trying to doze, and when the man at the counter turned around Kenneth nodded at him. He nodded back like any good neighbor would and didn’t look like a demon or anything, just maybe like he had a job that didn’t pay very well. He was about as old as McEban and dressed pretty much like McEban would have if he was going somewhere on a bus. Kenneth waited until he went back outside to smoke, squeezing through the door before it closed to stand with him.