The Devil Came Calling (Rolson McKane Mystery Book 2)

by T. Braddy

  In the distance, I saw the flickering image of a man walking along the edge of the water. He was no more than a hazy blur, but he was there.

  I said, “The last time I saw him – the last two times – he was zonked out on speed. Sniffing and twitching like something was crawling on him.”

  “He’s going to die. He nearly killed himself the last time he spiraled like this. He was doubling up on speed and painkillers. I think he got addicted to the addiction. Finding ways of getting new meds, mixing them with old meds. Like some goddamned mad scientist.”

  She paused in a way that told me Jess wasn’t the only one who had a past with Richie.

  “He’s cycled back around once,” I said. “He can do it again.”

  “Why did he see you again, and more than once?”

  “He’s going to take me.”

  She sighed. “To speak with Bellerose.”

  “Right.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Don’t do it.”

  “Allison–”

  “Don’t. There are other ways of you finding out about your fucked up relationship with your fucked up ex-wife.” She rubbed her hand, sliding the other one across it as if she were scrubbing any remnant of me off of it. “I’m sorry.”

  “It ain’t the worst I’ve heard,” I said.

  “I just know that if you start getting tangled up with that lunatic, you’re the only one who’s going to get hurt. You, and maybe Richie. Probably Richie. Throw me and Jess in there for good measure. But I guarantee you’ll get hurt.”

  “I’ve been hurt before.” I thought of the lingering scar on my stomach.

  “I don’t mean emotionally,” she said, “and these aren’t the backwoods smack dealers you had the displeasure of trucking with, up in Middle Georgia. This guy is for real. He got his start slitting people’s throats in New Orleans. He’s a real bad dude.”

  “I take your meaning.”

  The man in black approached, face gaunt and the color of stained wood. He looked straight ahead, never so much as acknowledging that Allison and I were there. But I felt him, watching us.

  “Hello,” I said, and the guy in the thin, black suit doffed his hat at me.

  Allison looked up at me. “Hello?”

  I glanced back, and the black man was gone.

  “Sorry.”

  “What was that?”

  My heart skipped. “Nothing. Just a senior moment, I guess.”

  “Don’t go and start having those on me, now. You can’t go breaking down, now that I’ve forgiven you.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Just promise me you won’t go off in search of Vanessa’s ghost, especially not with Bellerose. I want to find out who you are before you get carried off in a coffin, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “Now promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise me you won’t get involved with Bellerose.”

  “I promise I won’t get involved with Bellerose.”

  Allison nuzzled in next to me, and we kept the silence to swat away all the things we probably shouldn’t have left unsaid.

  * * *

  The thing with Jess, well, that had been momentary, an example of how a time and a place sometimes just feels right. And I suppose it had been right. I didn’t suspect it would happen again, but I also didn’t know. Things happen.

  But I liked Allison. Really liked her. She didn’t represent anything to me. She wasn’t a moment of weakness. She just was, and I wanted to get to know her.

  Shitty timing. In the back of my mind, I figured I was dragging her into something horrible. Something dangerous. Only, I couldn’t help myself. This was how my addiction was manifesting itself, I guess.

  I held out until the next day and then called Allison. Invited her to a blues-and-jazz festival of sorts just off the main drag in downtown Savannah.

  “You think I’m the kind of girl who likes the blues?” she said. I could hear a smile in her voice.

  “Maybe jazz is more your thing,” I said, “but I’m willing to find out.”

  She said she’d think about it, to give her a call closer to the evening, and I said I might just show up on her doorstep. “I can call 911 just as easy as I can say ‘yes’ to a date with you,” she said then, and hung up. I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

  I went for a long run, avoiding the house that gave me the hippie hippie shakes something awful, and I kept running until I thought my legs might collapse under me. I had worked up to a good three mile pace and was getting better with each passing week. I didn’t keep up with the numbers or the splits just yet, but I felt faster. I knew I was running easier, and it was a more natural experience than when I’d first started. The pain in my back had largely subsided, but one of my knees eventually would demand surgery, I presumed. For now, though, the exercise provided me with peace of mind.

  Gave me time to think, too. Some people meditate, and some people play guitar or go shopping, but me, I’d found the way to inner tranquility through pounding the pavement. I discovered that sitting around the house got me bored, and when I got bored, I started peeking in the fridge. When I peeked in the fridge, it wasn’t normally food I was seeking out.

  Running kept my senses charged, too. I found myself experiencing a little jolt when passing by a cemetery, or this house or that one. I steered clear of the Williams House, after I nearly had a conniption the first time I ventured to run by it. Too much darkness in that place pushed me to arm’s length, and probably for good reason.

  There were other places, too. Places where the souls of the lost and the damned congregated and tried to make sense of the afterlife, whatever that happened to be. It wasn’t the same as before – I wasn’t really seeing as many things anymore – but I could divine some kind of presence, and Savannah was a town full of old ghosts, ghosts as old as the country itself. Alice Riley and the Pirate’s House, the Sorrell Weed House, the Bonaventure Cemetery. It was ironic: they were both exploited for being haunted by money-grubbing tour companies, but they were also about as haunted as physical locations could be. Each building practically dripped with supernatural force.

  The difference was that the truth of those claims was much more mundane than the frame that surrounds the speculation around the lingering dead. They don’t exist in the wispy barrier between life and death for the sake of photographs and cheap thrills. Nor are they the electronics prodigies professional ghost hunters profess them to be. They don’t futz with digital photography or open cabinet doors. They are, in essence, personifications of human guilt and suffering. A manifestation of one’s guilt over the things that went awry or simply didn’t happen at all.

  All of my superstitions tucked away for the night, I picked Allison up in my junker and had Winston and Yaelis meet us at the venue, a little club in the basement of a bar that was on the verge of shutting down. Didn’t seem like the kind of place that’d be able to stay open much longer, but maybe it had been that way for decades. Gave it a kind of charm.

  The interior was smoky and soaked in beer, but the wild-eyed man on stage spewing bent notes was well worth the price of admission. He was blowing his way through a sped-up version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “I Ain’t Superstitious,” and every note he played was as grimy and gravelly as the old blues master’s voice had been. It was low-key, but it was also hardcore. Every face that paid attention paid extra close attention. You could tell who in this crowd really appreciated the artform. The clientele ran older than I’d expected, but in a lot of ways, I considered myself an old soul. Men in ragged suits sipped tall drinks of amber, while their female counterparts sipped goblets of cheap wine. Some members of the audience had moved to a small square of a dance floor to jerk and nod their heads, but most people either bopped to the song at their seats or stood shaking next to their tables.

  “I don’t think this is the kind of place for you, baby,” Winston said, as soon as we were seated. A couple two tables over had ju
st lit something that was not a cigarette.

  “Dad, this place is exactly for me,” she said. “I love live music.” She picked up the menu which had been placed in front of her. “And barbecue.”

  We ordered a round of ginger ales, and Allison lit a cigarette, blowing the first cloud of smoke toward the ceiling.

  “This is a different kind of date,” she said, looking around. “Never been to a blues joint before.”

  “We don’t have anything like this back in my hometown.”

  “Right,” Allison said. “You always been into the blues? That one of your quirks?”

  “Guess so. In high school, I listened to a lot of aggressive music. Metallica, Slayer, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, so you were a metal-head, huh? Got any pictures of you with long hair, making the devil horns at the camera?”

  “Don’t believe so,” I said.

  “Well, that’s disappointing.”

  “I was into my twenties before that changed. Some time after, I heard a song by Robert Johnson, ‘Hellhound on my Trail.’ You ever heard that one?”

  She shook her head, took another drag on her cigarette. “Sounds creepy.”

  “It was. Still is. Changed the whole way I looked at music. All the evil-sounding stuff with distorted guitars wasn’t the same as hearing this guy, with this high-pitched wail, and it actually sounded like he was getting chased by something.”

  Winston, looking around, said, “Y, I don’t see anybody your age in here. You sure you can be in here?”

  “It’ll be fine, dad,” she said. “At some point, I’ll have to be on my own.”

  Her dad frowned. “Hopefully not soon,” he said. “You know how Robert Johnson died, Allison?”

  Again, she shook her head.

  Yaelis sipped her ginger ale. “The devil caught up with him, gave him the old stabby-stabby with his pitchfork.”

  She giggled at the wit of her own answer.

  “Some people think that,” I said. A waitress passed nearby, and I flagged her down. “Said he sold his soul to the devil, and the devil came calling.”

  The waitress saw me and held up one finger, an I’ll be there in a sec, hon kind of gesture.

  “Whoa,” Yaelis said. “Do you believe that?”

  Winston waffled one hand in the air in front of him. “He got pretty famous playing guitar. They say he couldn’t play a lick at one point, and then he came back from his famous dealings with the dark side, and it was Holy Jumping Jesus, Katy bar the door.”

  “No one had seen a slide player like that–”

  “That’s when they play with the glass thing on their finger,” said Yaelis.

  “Yeah, or metal,” Winston added.

  “Huh,” Allison said, acknowledging the information but not giving an indication of her level of interest.

  “And he died at a young age,” I said. “Twenty-seven, I think. So many great musicians die at twenty-seven.”

  “Like Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison.”

  Winston steepled his fingers over his ginger ale. “And Jimi Hendrix.”

  “And Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse,” said Yaelis.

  “That’s creepy as hell,” Allison said. “I never knew that. What do you think is up with that age?”

  “It’s cursed,” Yaelis said. “Or, statistically, we pay much more attention to the patterns we see than those we don’t. Musicians die at all ages, but we don’t make a club for them.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass, Y,” Winston said.

  “No, dad, I’m serious. And maybe Jim Morrison and the rest of them were famous beforehand, but they were super famous after they died. It might be that dying put them all on a, like, a different plane of existence. Or death. A plane of death.”

  Allison said, “Yeah, that makes sense. But what does that have to do with this blues guy?”

  “Nothing,” I replied. “But getting to his death, yeah, a lot of people think the devil took his soul. He was one of the bluesmen who perpetuated the ‘crossroads’ myth.”

  “Oh,” Allison said, “like, he went to this intersection, and the devil appeared? That sort of thing?”

  “Yeah. Met him at midnight and all that. A soul, in exchange for a little bit of talent.”

  Yaelis swirled the liquid in her cup with a straw. “Modern-day Faustian bargain,” she said. “We learned about it in English class. Teacher brought up all the people who made those kinds of deals in literature. It’s actually kind of interesting. Sell the devil your soul, and eventually he comes calling for it.”

  Winston said, “It’s a whole heck of a lot easier to sell your soul to the devil than to actually relinquish the goods.”

  It made me think of the guy from the bar. The dude with the neck tattoo. He easily could have been a representative of Ol’ Scratch Himself.

  “Yeah, well,” I said, “it’s more likely that Robert Johnson died a way more pedestrian death than that. He was a womanizer and a drunk, apparently, and they think some jealous husband poisoned him. Just up and got rid of him in one fell swoop.”

  “Doesn’t mean the Devil didn’t have something to do with it,” Yaelis said. She was looking at her menu. “I think I’m going to have a barbecue sandwich. Do you think the cole slaw is mayo-based?”

  Winston said, “Devil makes the best propositions. Spent most of my adult life trying to claw my way away from him.”

  On stage, the bluesman fiddled with his tuner keys and smiled. Leaned into the microphone and said, “Got some old Delta Blues fans over here, so my next one goes out to them.”

  He launched into a blistering version of “Standing at the Crossroads,” originally done by the inimitable Elmore James. This guy wasn’t a bad second fiddle to the long-dead bluesman, however, and his slide playing rivaled anybody I’d seen live. When he slapped those higher frets with his glass slide, it drowned out the bass, the drums, the murmuring crowd. He tilted his head back, eyes rolling white, and rattled off a series of notes that could be a master class in cold, hard blues playing.

  “Hell of a story,” Winston said.

  “Dad.”

  “Heck of a story. Still, man, got to say, Rolson, that you seem like a man with a hellhound on your trail. You truck in any of that supernatural business?”

  For a second, the blues man looked a whole hell of a lot like Emmitt Laveau. Maybe a little bit like his great uncle Kweku. “Little bit, I reckon,” I said. “Sometimes I get the feeling like somebody’s got me locked up in a curse, but hell, don’t everybody?”

  “And now look at how domestic you are,” Winston said. “Out on the town with a deadbeat dad and his goober of a daughter.”

  The waitress had wandered over, and Yaelis said, “My deadbeat dad will be paying for a barbecue sandwich, side of slaw – how is it, by the way?”

  The waitress: “The slaw? It’s all right. Kinda vinegar-y.”

  “Ew. Okay, hold the slaw. Double order of mac ’n’ cheese?”

  She scribbled on her pad and asked, still writing, “Anybody else need some extra time?”

  “Sandwich for me, too,” Allison said. “Add pickles to that, and give me the double mac, as well.”

  “Same here,” Winston said. “Since my soon-to-be emancipated daughter insists I pay.”

  “Emancipated? Why, you’re my meal ticket, old man.”

  I passed my menu across to the dark-haired, dark-eyed woman. “Same for me, I guess. All around the table.”

  She took her leave with the menus, said she’d return with more ginger ale for the table, and we returned to the music.

  The song finished up, and the silence at the table was something approaching deafening. This guy could really play, and my ears were beginning to feel it.

  The older man up on the stool flicked up the brim of his trilby and used a handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow. He leaned down and retrieved a beer from his feet, which he finished in a few lengthy tugs. “Now,” he said, holding the spent bottle for the bartender to see
, “See here, I met the real King – and by that, I mean B.B. – back in 1970, not long after he recorded ‘The Thrill is Gone,’ and I tell you what: I ain’t never seen nobody play a guitar like I seen him do that night. He told me after the show, he said to me, ‘Boozy Jon’ – and see now, I was just a kid, maybe twenty years old – but he told me, he said, ‘Boozy Jon, you go on up there and you play with your guts, man. Don’t worry about your fingers, because they come with sitting on the stage, but your guts, man. That’s how the blues came to be. They started with the guts, and the music came out of that.’”

  Boozy Jon smiled, and he almost looked happy. He wiped more sweat from his temples as the beer at his feet was replaced, and he said, “B.B. passed on not too long ago, and I want to play you one still hits me right where B.B. said I should play from. Hope you enjoy it.”

  He leaned back from the microphone, then leaned back in as if he’d forgotten something. “I know I stick mostly to the Delta, but we gonna take a little trip up to Chicago for a few minutes. Y’all all right with that?”

  A smattering of applause and a few woots filled the room. I clapped, and that was that.

  The song started up, slow and measured, but when he cut into his first solo, I recognized it almost immediately.

  “Quiz, Rolson,” Winston said.

  “I don’t know much,” I said, “but I do know that song. ‘It’s My Own Fault,’ and man alive, I tell you, I listened to that one a lot when things dipped southward for me some years ago.”

  The blues man on the stage, towering over all of us, glanced at me and winked, as though he’d heard me, and then he went growling into the vocals. B.B. had always conveyed a smooth, almost velvety approach to his vocals, but this was darker, angrier, the result of a man leveled by his personal relationships with women.

  I looked at Allison, who smiled at me. In some other ways, I could sympathize with the blues, but here’s where I hoped it would change. Maybe Boozy Jon would understand.

  “Can’t blame yourself for everything forever, McKane,” Allison said. “Dragging all that guilt around has got you bent sideways, and it don’t wear well on you.”