The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  She hit the steering wheel with both hands. “I know, right? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why I asked you about your addiction, your process. Maybe you’ve hit on something’s got me flummoxed. It’s why we’re always talking. To get it out there, yeah, but each process is different, and every person’s got a different way of dealing. Your experience and insight might help me conquer my shit.”

  “Deal with the past,” I said, and it came out worse than I’d intended. I was staring out the window, keeping my eyes on the rapidly passing trees.

  She sighed, and it wasn’t without some effort. “I just don’t think that what happens to you is what drives you to drink, and I don’t think it’s irreversible. I’m a lot more hopeful than that, I guess.”

  I was dragged into memories I’d rather forget. A mother dying in childbirth. A man strung up by his neck. A dead body in an old juke joint. Someone getting set on fire right in front of me.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” I said, changing the subject. “What’s this party all about?”

  “It’s this guy I used to cop speed from. He’s all clean and sober, but he’s the same way as me – can’t be without a crowd around him. An old habit’s hard to break, I guess. Got used to entertaining half-wits high on crank, and he just kept doing it even after he sobered up. They used him for the drugs, and he used them for the company. Now they use him for his place. Cops don’t go out to his neighborhood unless they’re called, and it’s usually a burglary. Anyway, he’s got all this money from a settlement. A work-related thing, it seems like I remember him saying. Fell off a building or had a truck fall on him or something. The money he got is what keeps him afloat. He bought this house out in a nice part of the swamp, and people just show up to party. He doesn’t mind if people get a little rowdy, so long as they don’t bring their nonsense around him.”

  I ignored the fact that she’d said it would be a party of sober folks.

  She didn’t acknowledge my silence. “Sometimes people show up with booze or drugs, but it’s mostly just people hanging out, playing guitar or video games, and talking shit about the old days. The druggies skate off into the woods, or never even leave their cars. It’s just like his place is a magnet for the sorts of people he used to sell to.”

  “It’s his penance.”

  “I guess. What the hell is that?”

  “He’s working off his sins. If there is such a thing as karma, this is him working off all the bad, underhanded shit he’s done in the past.”

  “Do you believe in that stuff?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Seems like my life has been plagued by coincidences that force me to deal with shit I didn’t think I’d have to deal with.”

  She smiled. “Well, get this: his place is on the Isle of Hope.”

  * * *

  The Isle of Hope lay on a peninsula near Skidaway River. We drove for some time down a paved road with no sidewalks. The grass on either side was a near-neon color, and the road itself was so narrow, only a single car could pass at a time. I imagined people having to back up for miles to allow oncoming traffic to pass by. It was the very definition of picturesque Coastal Georgia, the sort of thing you’d see on a brochure or commercial, majestic even in the dying light of a weeknight.

  The house where “Richie” lived was a two story affair, the second story most notable for a three-hundred-sixty-degree screened-in porch. A beautiful, grand old house, one seemingly far out of reach for a drug dealer on disability. The architecture was immaculate. Columns and subtly off-white wood paneling, surrounded by a gorgeous plot of land, complete with the gnarled, ancient oaks common to southeastern coast.

  We parked, and she settled her sparkling eyes on me for a moment.

  “You ready for this? Last chance to turn back, my friend.”

  I looked at the house. I sincerely wanted to see the interior. Being more accustomed to trailer parks than beautiful Georgian (or was this Gothic?) residences, I was at least enthralled by the idea of a personal tour. Maybe a quick in-and-out, but also the thought of spending extra time with Allison, even in the wake of what could be an all-night bender, seemed appealing.

  “I’ve got nothing to lose but my sobriety.”

  “Or your life.” She winked.

  I followed Allison in. She wore a bright floral dress and wedges that made her seem like she might topple over at any moment. Her blonde hair fell to her shoulders in curls I didn’t remember her having last time I saw her. She turned once and smiled at me, waving for me to catch up, and I did. I was dressed in the only button-down shirt that didn’t make me feel like a hillbilly, punctuated with some older slacks and questionable shoes.

  She didn’t seem to mind me. When she picked me up, she’d given me an appreciable once-over.

  That first impression apparently hadn’t faded. “You look handsome,” she said, curling her arms through my outstretched elbow. “This’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said, but I think my anxiety shone through. The corner of her mouth tilted upward, and she pulled me in closer.

  I would normally look to get roaring drunk in this kind of situation. Knock back a shot and let the warmth flood over the front of my brain like a mental Niagara. The feeling – the need – began to pop and sizzle in my blood like pork skins in a deep fryer. I wasn’t the sort of man to ignore another southerner’s hospitality, and Richie sounded like the sort to extend his hand across the aisle to make someone comfortable.

  We crossed a front lawn filled with cars and stepped gingerly toward a small brick walkway.

  Allison’s warm touch calmed my mind, however. There was a kind of electricity between us, and it seemed less a metaphor than something actual. Maybe a little of the old magic shining off me, like the half-life of a burnt-down nuclear reactor. I had flashes of memories that weren’t my own, and I fended off my thoughts long enough to pull myself into the present.

  She knocked and then let herself in the front door. Music pumped from unseen speakers, along with sound effects that spoke the language of war. Rat-a-tatting machine guns, explosions galore, military-grade choppers, and the sort of on-screen banter found readily in pro-America shoot-em-ups of all stripes.

  The foyer was elegant but sparse: black-and-white checkered floors with runner rugs and hall tables of a type I couldn’t place. The ceilings ran twelve or fifteen feet and sported embedded lights that gave the entryway a gallery vibe.

  “Pretty showy, eh?” Allison asked. “Not the kind of pad a drug dealer would embrace.”

  “How many drug dealers do you know?”

  She held up her free hand and separated two fingers by the slimmest of margins.

  We moved into the main area.

  In a cavernous, lofty living room, complete with hardwood floors, sat a group of youngish people on couches. There weren’t very many of them, but through a nearby glass door, I could see the orange embers of cigarettes, so these few revellers weren’t alone.

  To Allison’s credit, they didn’t appear to be drunk. Stoned. Zonked on heroin, maybe. But definitely not drunk. They could have been Velcroed to their respective seats. Their eyes were glued to a gigantic television set depicting some kind of video game about people in sand-colored fatigues gunning one another down. There was a lot of shouting and running around, but the game looked amazing. Far from the Metroid I’d spent my youth engaged with.

  At first, not a soul turned to look. Part of me was glad. Other than the owner, who I assumed was the guy holding the Xbox controller and screaming, not a single one of them so much as glanced in my direction. A few of the boys looked at Allison, but that was rooted in something else entirely, and she seemed to notice it.

  “This is Rolson,” she said suddenly. “He’s new to Savannah, so I thought I’d show him around, maybe make him some new friends.”

  One of the girls gave me a curious look. She was a dark-haired woman, wearing a red top and cutoff jeans, one leg draped over the arm of the couch. A
pack of cigarettes and a lighter had been strategically placed on the front of her shorts. My heart quickened in my chest. She was something to behold.

  “Welcome. Aw, hell, sumbitch.”

  Richie, a cigarette dangling precariously from his lips, was engaged solely with the action on his television. On-screen, a soldier lugging an ominously big rifle shuffled through a desert in some far-flung Middle Eastern country. The well-equipped figure flailed and died amidst a flurry of bullets. A jittery character in sunglasses cut one way and then another, disappearing behind the rubble of a destroyed building.

  The occasional burst of gunfire from the surround-sound speakers rattled the walls, and it drowned out the cacophony of laughter that erupted whenever Richie took a shot to the dome.

  “You motherfuckers,” Richie said, eyes never leaving the screen. “Bunch of ten-year-olds. Got nothing to do but sit around and play Call of Duty because they’re not getting any.”

  “Richie, you’re not getting any,” a dude with a hazy-thick pot voice said. He was clad in a tight, sleeveless tee and jean shorts, his curly hair tied back in a ponytail.

  “Ask your sister,” Richie replied. He flicked his thumbs, and the onscreen avatar leaped off a tall building onto another tall building. Another set of thumb twitches, and he became busily engaged in a firefight with two other combatants.

  The pot guy said, “She said she never felt it go in, so it doesn’t count.”

  We stood there and watched the back-and-forth, me in a sort of utter amazement. I lingered there, wondering if this was the extent of the evening’s debauchery: video games and immature dozens-playing. Thankfully, Allison was there and seemed okay with the situation. Otherwise, I would have felt utterly without purpose in this situation.

  On the screen, Richie’s character leaped over a barricade and fled down a rubble-strewn corridor of a street, only to be gunned down by a sniper in front of a nearby church.

  “Goddamnit, did you see that? Ten-year-olds, man. Ten-year-olds.”

  As if on cue, a pre-pubescent bark of laughter echoed in the speakers. Richie raised his hands, palms up, a gesture of I told you so.

  “I used to be good, man,” Richie continued. “I used to be the best at this shit. The drugs – I mean, you know. Speed fucking, well, it speeds you up. These days, I feel like I’m moving in slow motion.”

  The peanut gallery held its collective jeers, and one guy dressed paradoxically in a suit jacket and Cannibal Corpse t-shirt got up and shuffled toward another brightly lit room. Another member of this entourage slid off the couch and casually moved on, as well, heading for a sliding glass door at the rear of the house. Outside, the huddled shadows of at least a dozen people were marked only by the glow of cigarette embers, their faces mere suggestions in the night.

  At some point during the deathmatch, Allison leaned against the couch. “Rolson’s the guy I told you about, Richie. The one with all the bad mojo from the podunk town in middle Georgia. No offense.”

  I shrugged, eyes never leaving the screen. It was my crutch.

  “There’s a whole spread in the kitchen,” said one of the other girls, who was covered in tattoos and whose hair had one purple stripe. Her voice was wispy, like the human embodiment of a cloud. “There’s wings and pizza, and god, other stuff, too.”

  Nothing inside looked real. Nobody seemed to touch anything that was not related to food or a television. It was like a lived-in museum, as though someone from Nintendo had moved into the Biltmore.

  “You do all the interior decoration?” I asked.

  Richie, whose eyes betrayed the concept of sobriety, said, “No, man. All that shit was here when I bought it. I didn’t want it to be empty, so I figured I’d just as well leave it alone.”

  He rubbed the sides of his arms to fend off the chill in the night’s air.

  “Aw, shit, hell,” continued the house’s owner. Moments later, he dropped the controller on the couch beside him, and a few long-haired guys scrambled for it. “Where are my manners?” he said, finding his feet. He was speaking in an exaggerated southern accent. “I’m Richie. This is my pile of bricks. Man, you need anything right now?”

  “Got everything I need but peace of mind,” I replied.

  He smiled. Surprisingly good teeth for a drug dealer. “It’s on the other side of the hot wings, between the celery and the carrots. You need anything, you come to me, hear?”

  He turned to Allison. “He? Is he–”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He’s got the holy affliction, just like the rest of us. Don’t know the extent of it just yet, because he won’t open up. He’s all knotted up; we just have to massage out the tension so’s he can learn to live with who he is.”

  He clapped both hands on my shoulders and laughed. Up close, you could see why he might have been a good-looking dude in another universe. The drugs – probably meth – had taken too much from him, though. He was preternaturally haggard, and no amount of sobriety would ever gift him his youthful good looks again.

  He noticed me noticing that about him and stopped laughing. “You’re in good company,” he said. “This ain’t some fucked-up drug den. Now, I can’t keep an eye on every corner of the property, but these folks I can trust won’t do me wrong. Ain’t that right?”

  There was a half-hearted cheer from the couches. Either they were high or genetically predisposed to lethargy. Neither would surprise me.

  Already the walls began to rattle with the commencement of another round of video games. It was loud, unsettling. Couldn’t quite figure out how they could stand the sudden bursts of gunfire. Then it occurred to me: most of them, probably all of them, had never experienced the real thing.

  Allison must have sensed my unease, because she said, “We’re going to take a self-guided tour, if it’s all the same to you.”

  This guy, Richie, leaned out and touched her elbow. “You want a tour guide? You want someone to take y’all down to the water, maybe show you the upstairs?”

  Pulling her elbow free, firmly but without a sense of anger, she said, “No I think we got this. Thanks for everything, though.”

  He lingered there for a moment, watching us step away, before returning to the expanse of his television, which, beyond the Jumbotrons in professional stadiums, was larger than any TV I’d ever seen in my life.

  Allison led me outside, where a group of way-too-young kids were smoking cigarettes. Not just that. They were furiously smoking, talking about some band or another I’d never heard of. The only illumination out here came from someone’s iPhone, the girl to whom it was attached frantically typing something. She had a lip ring and a cigarette smoked all the way to the filter, but she wasn’t paying attention to it.

  “You a cop?” one of the kids said as we walked away, snickering to his friends.

  I turned and said, “They kicked me off the force for shooting a bunch of teenagers.”

  I tried to make it sound jokey, but it didn’t. Sobriety hadn’t quite released its grip on my sense of humor, I guess, so everything came off a whole lot more serious than I’d hoped.

  “Whatever, man,” he said, and then fuck you, asshole under his breath.

  Allison was leading a brisk charge down the backyard to the dock, where another group of folks were hanging out, doing much of nothing but talking. They, too, were young, but the difference was that this group was most definitely stoned. Out of their minds.

  One of them, in giant owl-eyed spectacles, was holding the rest of the group in a kind of awed fascination. “You ever think, you know, ‘what if none of this is real?’ Right? Like, what if – and I’m not saying it is – but what if all of human experience is in somebody else’s head or something? What if we’re all just shadows on a cave wall?”

  “Whoa,” said a guy in a Black Keys tee. His eyes widened,

  “Then, whatever you do, even if it’s the most heinous shit, wouldn’t be your fault. It would be that guy’s fault, because he, you know, thought of you doing it.”


  The guy in the Black Keys shirt shifted on his feet. “But then – whoa. Fuck, man.”

  A blonde holding a cigarette and leaning against the fence unloaded a lungful of smoke. “I don’t want that to be true,” she said. “I don’t want my actions to be somebody else’s fault. That ruins the whole idea of having a conscience.”

  “But what you want to be true and what is true are sometimes two different things,” said the conversation’s leader.

  The rest of the group nodded, as if this were some profound idea. They were all puffing away on cigarettes, and they took this opportunity to ash, almost in unison.

  “Like, fucking dreams, man. I’ve had – and this is no bullshit, man – but I’ve had dreams that came true in real life. I had something happen when I was sleeping, and not even the next day, but sometime later, poof, it just happened. How would you explain that?”

  “Being really fucking high,” said the Black Keys guy, and the whole group burst into gales of unselfconscious laugher.

  Allison leaned in. “The house is full of crazies tonight.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I was paying special attention to the group’s leader, because I didn’t think he was that far off the truth. Allison tried to pull me away, but I lingered for just another moment.

  The guy said, “I’m saying, sometimes I think I believe all the stories in Savannah about ghosts.”

  “What does that have to do with dreams?”

  “It doesn’t, but it’s all related. I used to believe ghosts were our own projections of guilt about the nature of the world – again, shadows on a cave wall – but now I’m convinced they actually do exist, and we as human beings are not, um, evolved enough to be able to see them.”

  Finally, we ventured past them, basically ignoring one husky voice asking us if we were, indeed, just projections on the inside of his head, before plopping down on the end of the dock.

  “Feet in the water,” Allison said. She kicked her wedges aside and sat down.