New Blood
Page 43
“We’ll see what she says,” I said. “I think we can probably all use a little therapy.”
“Not me,” Casey said and looked over at Kelly. “Me, neither,” Erin said.
“That makes three of us,” Kelly whispered into my ear.
“So what, that just leaves me?”
Kelly didn’t answer.
She opened up the picnic basket and began spreading things out onto the blanket: paper plates, plastic knives, a bucket of cold fried chicken, potato salad.
“I’m not hungry,” Erin said. “Can we eat later?”
“Whatever you girls want,” Kelly said. They ran off ahead and began climbing on the old, rusty jungle gym on the playground next to the levee.
“This is nice,” she said.
I looked at her. “It’s the only place I want to be.”
She smiled. “You talk to Tuan?”
“Yesterday,” I said. “He didn’t seem too upbeat.”
“Being an accessory to murder is bound to put a damper on your day,” Kelly said. “Anyway, can we not talk about this?”
“You brought it up,” I said.
“I know,” she said. She put her arm around me, and we watched a boat pulling a chain of kids on inner tubes speed by and then turn abruptly, swinging the kids off into cartwheels before they hit the water.
“So, have you given much thought about what we talked about?” Kelly asked.
“About what I’m going to do now?” I asked. “I thought we cleared that up. I’m staying here. With you. With the girls.”
She shook her head. “I know that, dummy. I mean for a job.”
“Do I need to do anything?” I asked. “Can’t I just go back to what I was doing before?” I’d called in sick on Monday, my one day of work a week, and I still had to make that up.
She laughed. We watched the girls clambering around on the metal structure. “You mean sitting in your basement doing work for a criminal corporation?”
“Which is a redundancy in terms,” I said. “Why not?”
“Is that really what you want to do with your life?” she asked.
“It more than pays the bills. I sell my soul once a week, and then I don’t have to worry about it the rest of the time.”
I scooted closer to her and kissed her on the lips. “I’m a prostitute, after all.”
She was quiet for a while. We sat and watched the girls as they climbed down and went over to the swings. The man in the boat pulled in his line once again, studied it for half a minute, and then reared back on his fishing pole and let it fly.
“Why?” I said, finally breaking the silence. “What do you think I should do?”
“I don’t know,” Kelly said. Her eyes were twinkling, and when she took a drink of Coke, she belched. She reached up and ran a hand through my hair, and then she bit me on the ear.
“They are looking for a new sheriff,” she murmured.
I shook my head.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
Sixty
She’d been on the road for three days, stopping to eat and to sleep in the car, pulling off down gravel roads and into the abandoned parking lots of the great American West.
She crossed a desert, found a brief green spot like a footnote, and then stopped in the middle of the next patch of dry, endless ground to urinate.
As she squatted by the side of the road and listened to the water drain out of her body, she inhaled the air.
It was crisp, almost acrid, and smelled like the burning of an oven, and the heat came down on all sides without the etherizing blanket of humidity.
She zipped up her pants and inhaled again.
There was no smell of fertility, no pollen, no seed, no invasion in the nostrils, no uninvited guests. Everything was baked red, like the crust of a distant planet’s moon. And it was dead, all dead.
She raised her face to the burning sky.
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Maddie is no stranger to death, or killing. Her father
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But does she want to go down that road? Does her
friend Lloyd play a role in all of that? Her
whole life is in front of her. Shouldn't
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Maddie begins and ends where New Blood leaves off.
For those of you who loved New Blood, Maddie
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If you enjoyed New Blood, and would like to hear more from Dana Hartman in the future, it would be much appreciated if you were able to leave a review.
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New Blood
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Thank you!
Shane
About the Author
Shane was born and raised in Tazewell County, Illinois, two and a half hours south of Chicago.
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Though he has been writing for most of his life, he has been, in short order: a drywall finisher, a movie theater concessions worker, a lawn mower, a cafeteria worker, a bartender, a copy boy, accountant, translator, teacher of English as a foreign language, and, finally, an IT consultant.
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He is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
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Shane lives in Vienna, Austria with his wife and three children. New Blood is his first published novel.
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He’s at home online at www.shanelusher.com, and you should send him an email at shane@shane-lusher.com if you want.
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You can also connect with him at any of these places:
Acknowledgments
Writing is a lonely business, and yadda-yadda-yadda. You sit down, you write, and at the end you look up, and you notice the number of human beings who have ensured your sanity so that something can finally come of all this nonsense. Everyone listed below has contributed in major ways in helping me see this through to completion.
Special thanks to my wife, Barbara, for putting up with me all of these years, and to Isabel, for keeping me alive, even though you may not have known you were doing it.
Thanks to the following, in no special order of degree or contribution: Bernhard Bauer, Sabine Bauer, Matthias Svane, Brent Keesey, Fred Loniello, Geoffrey Repo, Jennifer Repo, Elisabeth Eliasch, Maria Eliasch, Lük (Nachnamen?), Wolfgang Ringhofer, Klaus Stöger, Erin Loniello, Cindy Chisholm, Bill “Jefferson” Chisholm, Christian Kern, Harald Stumpf, Manfred Gold, Michael Madonick, Richard Powers, Hartwig Schuen, Andjela Bawaert, Judith Seiwald, …
Should I have forgotten any of you, please forgive me. It’s due to the aging of my brain, and not my h
eart.
Author’s Note
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This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed herein are, as such, not based on real people or events, and although Tazewell County and the municipalities that form the setting for this novel are real places, the people, businesses and institutions to be found within, as well as their policies, are entirely fictional.
Copyright © 2015 by Shane Lusher
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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