Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery Read online

  Boogie House

  A Rolson McKane Novel

  T. Blake Braddy

  A Jinx Protocol

  Publication

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by T. Blake Braddy. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Contact the author at www.tblakebraddy.com for questions or inquiries regarding fair use.

  First Edition, December 2014

  For Johnny Anderson,

  the first reader

  Acknowledgements

  The following people made this book more than just something I talked about to make myself feel smart: Zach Fishel, Josiah Shoup, Tommy Stubblefield, Jan & Bill Owens, Wallace Braddy, Leah Newman, Mary Coleman Palmer, Randy Cone, Roy Felts, Linda Wall, Jeanna Wheeler, Scott Sigler, Drew Wheeler, Bryan Center, Mike Swartzwelder, Justin Swartzwelder, Rick Gotwald, and – of course – Kate Blackmon.

  First Chapter

  I woke a little after midnight, gulped directly from the kitchen faucet, and tried to go back to sleep. Everything smelled like whiskey, and the gentle, watery tilt of the room kept me up, so I flipped to a channel I didn't want to watch and muted the volume. I thought about putting on music, but slide guitar was as appealing to me as fork tines on a dry dinner plate.

  I tried desperately to become unconscious. I curled up on my stomach. Pressed my face to the cool side of the pillow. Stared at a show about dead celebrities. The screen’s glow aggravated my looming hangover, so I killed the TV and padded through the house, looking for anything to distract me from how bad my head hurt. I tripped over a bag of clothes someone who used to live here left behind. The shirts and jeans still smelled like her.

  I noticed a sliver of light peeking between the front door and the jamb. I had left it unlocked again. No real surprise. The bad dreams had started up again, ever since the accident, and they put me in a bad headspace, even when I was awake.

  I sat on the porch in my boxers and smoked the last two cigarettes in my pack, watching the fireflies jitter and dance among the deflated azaleas. Every so often, the sky lit up and somewhere miles off a troubling crash split the darkness. The air smelled like coming rain, brought on by clouds black as spilled ink.

  I stubbed the cigarette on the steps and flicked the butt out into the azaleas. (Which was probably not helping them.) I stood up, ready to go back inside, when an indistinct echo came out of the woods across the road.

  I strained my ears toward the sound, which could have been a voice calling for help. Could have been a whole lot of things. Out in the country, sounds mutate and become something otherworldly.

  Or it could have been my imagination.

  The county where I live isn't big, and yet dirt roads cut through thousands of tree-lined acres, acting as cover for people who take driving sober as mere suggestion. Drunks occasionally flip their pickups winding a sharp curve and crush something vital. Usually they'll phone a buddy, though not always. I had sometimes spied grown men ambling like zombies down the road in search of sympathetic strangers, hoping aloud they weren’t bleeding to death.

  Such is the way of life in a small town.

  There was desperation in that voice I heard. Or thought I heard. Reality had been inconsistent for me, of late. Too much drinking. Too many bad dreams. And there was also the thunder, which cut right through the silence, so I couldn’t get a handle on what it was, exactly.

  I grabbed my .45 from the house, put on some dusty running shoes and jeans, and headed in that direction.

  I couldn't sleep anyway.

  Across the road, I entered a dark copse of pines. Even under a full moon, the limbs, like old, gnarled fingers, obscured any trace of light, like walking into a windowless room at midnight. Occasionally, I stopped and listened, hearing nothing, smelling sap and tree rot in the air.

  I went about my business cautiously, since I was trespassing on Leland Brickmeyer's property. This broken, forgotten patch of land wasn’t even the beginning of their total holdings, but their laces were tied a little too straight for them to abide me traipsing around like this after midnight.

  The Brickmeyers had built their wealth on the backs of free labor during Reconstruction. Lumber Junction didn’t really even become a place until the railroads were completed, but there had always been white people gracious enough to work poor and displaced minorities to death when it suited their interests.

  Leland’s father had bestowed on him a small fortune and a thriving timber business, but that last name was the old man’s most important gift. Every town has a family like them. Local royalty, like the Kennedys with a country drawl. Most people who despised them just wanted a backstage pass.

  Leland had used his last name to great effect, landing opportunities that would have otherwise eluded him. But reality is often harsher than perception. The mismanagement of this tract of land was just the tip of an ever-growing iceberg. He was not his daddy, and the stress fractures in the foundation were beginning to show. He had a bit of a political muscle he wanted to flex, and I’m sure he hoped it was more toned than his entrepreneurial one.

  Brickmeyer and I had only spoken a few times, and only in an official capacity. Otherwise, I don’t know that I could have stomached his glad-handing, empty charisma. He was transparent as a haint on All Hallow’s Eve, but nobody seemed to care, so long as there was money involved.

  A clap of thunder snapped me out of my thoughts. I descended a small hill and came to a man-made clearing.

  I stopped in what used to be a gravel parking lot and watched in a sickened awe. The remnants of a smallish shack leaned to one side in the distance. What had once been a black-owned juke called the Boogie House was now just a rotten shell of a building, and though the doors had officially been closed for decades, tonight the Boogie House lived again.

  And I'll be damned if it weren't alive.

  The sound of piano and guitar swelled through the door, and silhouettes of women in knee-length dresses cut through the bright, even light within. I might have even smelled whiskey in the air if I weren’t still fairly plastered.

  A young woman stopped in the doorway, her lithe figure blocking the dance floor. She was light-skinned, beautiful. She bounced to the music, smoking a long, thin cigarette, a frizzy bob undulating atop her head. Her neck was wet with sweat, her red, flower-print dress whipping in a nonexistent breeze. she turned and looked in my direction but did not seem to see me.

  I saw her, but only for a moment. She was blinking in and out, a light with a dimming bulb. A bad fuse box wasn’t to blame; these were the spirits of the Boogie House. I had heard dark stories about this place but had thought it to be mostly old gossip gone wild.

  The ghosts of decades past lingered there for a while, mixing together in a seductive dance. Dancing to music that wasn’t really there. Showing out for me, I suppose. I was sweating despite the breeze, charged with a peculiar energy.

  I approached the building, sneaking through the woods as if trailing spooked deer, hoping for something, but the whole scene flickered and died. There was a kind of beautiful flash, making blank silhouettes out of the patrons, and then the world went dark. Once again the shack was old and decrepit and condemnable. Just what it had been long as I’d been alive.

  I stalked unevenly through the dark and pressed myself against the front of the Boogie House. Standing outside
the entrance with a trembling finger on the trigger, I waited for my courage to catch up. The air smelled electric and burnt, like ozone but more raw. My nostrils ached from the burning.

  I felt no immediate danger, but something jerked my instincts taut, and the dull throb of a hangover sharpened my senses. With the moon blocked off by clouds, the Boogie House itself sank into the blackness. It was like staring into mud.

  I turned into the doorway, pointed my weapon at nothing in particular. The voice itself had disappeared, leaving only the illusion of its existence in my head.

  “Hello,” I said, a half-question, “my name is Officer Rolson McKane. Lumber Junction PD. Come on out now, hear?”

  It was a mostly untrue statement but gave me comfort anyway. I received only silence in return. The air and everything in it was still and silent. Another step forward yielded a patch of soggy wood. I tested my footing and placed some weight on it.

  I must’ve been worried too much about myself, because I got caught unawares by what happened next. A human shape emerged from the far corner of the Boogie House, where the wall-length bar would have been. He fired before I could respond. The explosion of sound set off a series of reactions in me. I raised my weapon and dropped to one knee simultaneously, intending on returning fire. That was, until the boards holding me buckled, sending me off-balance and knee-deep into the ground below.

  "Stop right there," I yelled, raising the weapon and struggling mightily to regain balance, but it was too late. The figure kicked out an old window and jumped through it, disappearing into the night in a single, graceless leap.

  It was in that moment I saw his size. Beast could have been a pro ball player, maybe a wrestler or MMA fighter of some kind.

  I pulled myself from the hole and backed out of that place. My heart kicked into a higher gear. Blood hummed in my ears. Chasing drunks down Highway 221 and kicking in the doors at suspected meth labs was as exciting as small-town cop life usually got.

  I hoofed drunkenly through the rows and rows of pines, organized eerily like crosses in a long-forgotten graveyard. Ahead of me, footsteps sliding on loose straw drew me forward. I couldn't very well stop now. Fundamental fear and anger made my feet pump harder than I thought they could.

  The hulk of a man slammed into a low-hanging branch, sending pine needles everywhere. He cursed, and I ducked just before he opened fire again. His accent was thick, country, but it wasn’t a voice I readily identified, and the gun bursts erased my memory. The flashes from the muzzle gave me a brief view of his face, but the darkness obscured all but the most fleeting glances.

  "Damnit," I said, firing two rounds at where he had been. I was sure I hadn’t hit him, but I also didn’t wait around to find out.

  Taillights appeared out of nowhere, followed in quick succession by a slamming door and gurgling engine. White lights indicated the transmission slipping over reverse into drive, and then the engine roared, propelling the truck through the pines toward an undisclosed exit.

  I fired two more rounds, hoping to hit something vital. I had to settle for watching the vehicle make its getaway.

  "That wasn't a drunk looking for a lift at all," I said to the emptiness.

  I returned home, constantly glancing about me and rubbing my arms. I had tied my t-shirt to a tree so I could find the spot in the morning.

  The front door was open when I got back. The dreams that had dominated my psyche populated my imagination with all sorts of monsters. I went inside and put my face in every corner of the house before my heart began to slow down.

  After I was sure I was alone, I sat on the couch in the dark. I used my ancient flip phone like a stress ball, flicking it open and shutting it repeatedly, compulsively. I couldn't force myself to call the station. The chief had made it clear my relationship with the force was to be of a “don’t call us; we’ll call you” sort of situation.

  Tonight was making it not easier for me. Since I had trespassed without probable cause and had only jumpy hands as proof I’d been shot at, I decided to keep it to myself. For now.

  Sleep was slow in coming, and my dreams unsettled me. Some I remembered in the morning, and a few revolved around my mother, standing in the kitchen amidst steamy dishes, her face smiling down at me through a haze of three decades.

  Mostly, though, I dreamed of the Boogie House. One in particular, which dealt with the guy who owned the land across the way, sent me reaching for my .45, squinting into the doorway of my bedroom. I ended up pointing it at nothing but the vague apparitions spilling out of my head. Though I didn’t have an indication that Leland Brickmeyer had anything to do with me getting shot at, I awoke in the dark with his face hovering over me, and I very nearly fired my pistol at it.

  Second Chapter

  The next morning I overcooked a pot of cheese grits and ate joylessly in the doorway, nursing a pretty vicious hangover as I stared at the woods. Made me feel like I was bickering with an upset neighbor. I guess I sort of was, only Brickmeyer didn’t know what the quarrel was just yet.

  In my head, as I thought about last night, I tiptoed around the word ghost (and also the word crazy). I wasn’t some half-baked lunatic, but I also couldn’t help but acknowledge what I had seen. I had been drunk but not high. I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing, but...shit, I didn’t know. The whole thing reminded me of a piece of Gonzo journalism.

  What I thought was out there made me more jittery than my two cups of coffee. And the weather wasn’t helping. It was pouring down outside, like it does late in the spring, and the rain was busily erasing the truck’s tire tracks from last night.

  It almost hurt to believe it was the truth. Sometimes things happen to drunks, and they have to accept that reality, even if it doesn’t quite measure up with what a sane, sober man might see. A drunk man’s truth is still his truth, even if it isn’t the truth.

  Everybody needs something to convince him to get out of the bed in the morning.

  I finished the grits and placed the bowl in the sink with the other grimy dishes before dressing for a muddy trek. I rescued a shirt from the bottom of the dirty pile and also a pair of jeans - tucking the .45 discreetly into them of course - and then I donned a jacket and slogged through the muck and the rain for the Boogie House.

  The smell in there bent me over like a swift kick to the guts. I ran outside to be sick. Something had happened overnight. Being drunk makes you immune to some smells, but this was beyond even that. It wasn't hot outside, but the humidity had excited the decomposition of something. A four year degree wasn’t necessary to identify the smell of something dead and rotting.

  Once all my breakfast was on my shoes, I returned to the front entrance, weapon drawn for good measure, and scanned the inside of the juke joint. Nobody hiding here today. Couldn't take the smell, I’m sure. Not now. Not today.

  It was then I found the reason the giant who tried to kill me had been here in the first place.

  He - at least I thought it a he - lay sprawled in the corner, against the base of what used to be a serving bar. One arm stretched out above the body, giving the illusion of pointing, both legs screwed in awkward, rag-doll positions. Dead no longer accurately described his condition. He had gone to the far end of dead and then some. Georgia can be brutal on a body if the weather’s hot and wet enough.

  Medical examiner was going to have a field day. He’d probably had no experience with anything worse than a hunting or car accident in years.

  "'Lo?" I said. No answer. Some birds fluttered in the rafters and flew away.

  “Hello?” I repeated. Nothing. Outside, the rain played an improvised, striding rhythm on the partially caved-in roof.

  I stepped inside, covering my mouth and nose with the front of my shirt, and approached the body. The stench seeped through the fibers of my tee. In eyeing the body, I tripped and nearly went waist-deep in the floor. Again.

  One of the floorboards was loose. It wasn’t like the others, which had rotted, so I had to be careful to get around i
t. No telling what kind of diseases and conditions were gestating on the ends of the old, rusted nails.

  The victim was African-American. Young guy, maybe twenty or twenty-five, though I couldn't be entirely certain. Somebody'd given him the white sheet treatment, if I had to guess.

  “Goddamn,” I said. “That’s a goddamn shame.”

  I leaned in, examining the face. Poor bastard had been knocked around pretty good, so that identification would be difficult. The two halves of his face looked mismatched. Could’ve been two different heads, so far as I knew.

  A piercing sound made me jump, and I thought my skin would crawl off the muscle. I turned to find an old piano in the corner, swollen and rotted and incapable of producing sound of that caliber. But it had. Someone or something had played a chord of immense and simple beauty.

  The tone suspended in the air for a few moments and then faded. A brief image of last night came back to me, but I shrugged it off. Maybe a rat or something, I told myself.

  Haha. The lies we tell ourselves for the sake of self-preservation.

  I returned my attention to the young man. He had suffered unimaginable torment. Not only that, but he had to endure the indignity of decomposing in an abandoned gin club. It was a fate befitting a child molester, or an abusive husband, not...whoever this turned out to be.

  The Chief was going to have a fit when he found out I had turned up this body.

  "No one deserves this," I said into my shirt, looking at the face, whose eyes stared at nothing. There was almost something knowing in them, a kind of death wisdom. And the lifeless orbs were staring directly at me. A fly lit upon one of the lids and then skittered across the open eye.

  I shuddered. I felt myself being pulled into something against my will, but that could have just been the supernatural effect of the Boogie House.