Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless Read Free Book Online

There came a lull in the traffic. The world lay empty. Even the ghosts I’d brought back with me were gone, although I could hear the whisper of their passage across the pale, dead grass in Nik’s yard. I looked for the Sir in the tangled scrub oak in the field behind Nik’s yard, but there was only the rattle of the wind.
    I turned back, the familiar nausea in my gut. “Just this one thing, Nik. I’ll talk to the people at the camp. But we notify city police. And as soon as we have a lead, we step out, let them handle it. Deal?”
    He nodded. “That’s the way you want it.”
    But he was lying, and I knew it. Nik wouldn’t let this go. He’d track Tucker Rhodes to the ends of the earth. He’d hunt the boy down every rail line and road and dirt track until one of them finished it.

C HAPTER 4
    Why did I re-up? Because when I came home, I didn’t know how to be home. Didn’t know how to fit in anymore. Didn’t know what to do with myself. I missed the order. The adrenaline. The sense of larger purpose.
    War is a drug; it’ll call you back until it kills you.
    —Corporal Sydney Rose Parnell. Denver Post .
    January 13, 2010.
    The sky had lowered when Nik and I emerged from his house. Slow, fat flakes fell and melted on the asphalt. The air was raw. I opened the rear door of the Ford and Clyde jumped into his carrier. I got in behind the wheel. Nik stood on the other side of the truck, his forearms on the roof as he leaned into the closed door and stared at the curb where Gentry’s car had been parked thirty minutes earlier.
    Through the glass and the swirl of snow, Nik’s face looked as if someone had bulldozed the foundation of his cranial bones, the skin pocked and falling like a ruined house. It hit me that Nik was no longer young. And that maybe sometimes age comes in an instant. Nik had been fifty-nine years young right up until I sat at his kitchen table and told him about Elise.
    Now there was nothing young about him.
    After a moment, he slapped his open palm against the metal roof and climbed into the cab. I started the engine and backed out of the driveway as snow gathered on the grass. The warmth from the whiskey had fled, and I was both tired and painfully sharp, the way I had felt in Iraq after a shift processing the dead. In Camp Taqaddum, I’d walk outside into the 3:00 a.m. night, always with company because sometimes the male Marines weren’t my best friends. We’d stand outside and smoke, me and Bailor or Tomitsch. Sometimes the Sir. Whoever’d been with me on shift. We’d listen to the passage of ghosts, our senses scraped raw after handling flesh that would never know of our touch.
    “The hardest pounds,” Nik said.
    I glanced over, saw the Weight collect on him as he began his own walk with the dead. His hand cupped mine for an instant.
    “Glad it was you who brought the news, Sydney Rose.”

    At Hogan’s Alley, I pulled into the same patch of dirt where I’d parked that morning and turned off the engine. The snow hadn’t started to fall here, yet. A light wind blew. Trash Can’s tarp and the green pup tent were gone. I zipped my coat and grabbed my bag.
    “Wait here,” I said. “You’ll just intimidate everyone.”
    “To hell with that.”
    I shrugged and said, “Your show.”
    This time I leashed Clyde. On a lead or not, he’d feel my anxiety, and I didn’t want him deciding on his own if someone was a threat. It’s easier to call a dog out than to call him off.
    The camp was empty save for one person, a black woman in her forties with the road name Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane had been hopping trains for eight years; she had to be one tough bitch to have survived. Blacks on the rails were rarer than hen’s teeth, women near as scarce. A black woman stood out like a crow trying to hide in a flock of pigeons.
    Jane sat atop the picnic table, hunched over with forearms on thighs as she slowly swayed, a ratty quilt draped over her shoulders and a homemade cigarette