Killing Down the Roman Line by Tim McGregor Read Free Book Online Page A

judging by the damage he’d wrought with the poker. Jim dropped an octave, injecting authority into his tone. “Can I help you with something? This is private property.”
    “Private?” The man finally turned. Jim ballparked his age at forty or so, the features deeply etched. Eyes that bored into Jim’s and wouldn’t let go. Big shoulders and raw looking hands. “It looks like it’s been used as a public toilet,” he said.
    “It’s been empty a long time. You scavenging for antiques or something?”
    The stranger sized Jim up and down but said nothing. Locking that weird stare onto him. Creepy was the word that sprang to mind. “Couple places in town for antiques. Regular shops instead of trespassing.” Jim stressed the trespassing part, impatient to hustle this weirdo on his way.
    “No trespasser here, sir.” The man grinned wide, like someone clutching a flush. “Except you maybe.”
    “Beg your pardon?”
    The man passed the iron rod from his right hand to his left and stepped closer. “You live next door, yeah? What’s your name?” He thrust his hand out to shake.
    “Jim. Jim Hawkshaw.” Without thinking, taking the hand and shaking.
    “Will Corrigan.” The man pumped Jim’s hand. Watched his face for a reaction.
    Jim creased his brow, the name bouncing around inside his head but not making any sense. Corrigan. That’s the name of this derelict tinderbox. The ‘old Corrigan place’. A term he’d heard since he was a kid but never stopped to ask what it meant or who the Corrigans were. Like asking who Santa Claus was. It just was.
    “Corrigan?” Jim stumbled over the name, saying it aloud. “No, that’s the name of this place. Or it used to be—”
    Will Corrigan squeezed Jim’s hand. “The very same. Pleased to meet you, Jim.”
    Jim pulled his hand away. Something didn’t add up, he thought. There are no Corrigans.
    “I’ve come to claim the family homestead. Or at least what’s left of the fucking place.” Corrigan tossed the poker to the floor where it crashed against a mess of broken plates. “Guess that makes us neighbours.”
    ~
    “Get outta here! Shoo!”
    The damn goats. Emma chased the pair of them from her vegetable garden, where they had devoured the tomato shoots and the flowering bell peppers. The slat fence Jim had put up to keep them out lay trampled in the dirt. Unlike horses, goats didn’t spook and bolt. The goats, whom Jim had named It and Shit, just worked their jaws and watched her bellow with their slit eyes. A swift kick to the hind end and the animals brayed and meandered off slowly. Plodding to the weed border of the yard and nipping at the clover, looking back at her with what Emma could only read as resentment.
    “You two can be sold,” she scolded them. “In a heartbeat.”
    The goats lowered their heads and chewed, turning their behinds towards her.
    Emma kneeled down to inspect the damage. The tomatoes might survive but the peppers would never bear fruit now, the stalks devoured up along with the buds. She brushed her hands off and straightened up, catching sight of the pickup roaring onto the road and pluming dust as it steered towards town.
    Where the hell was Jim going?
    She dug her phone from a back pocket and hit the number for Jim’s cell.
    “Yeah.” His voice crackly down the line.
    “Where are you going?” Emma strode out of the rows, angling the phone for a better reception. “Is everything okay?”
    “I gotta talk to Kate. Somebody just screwed us over.”
    Click. The line gone dead. She hated it when he got cryptic. Was she supposed to guess what that meant?
    To hell with it. Emma knelt back down to uproot the mangled pepper plants.

5
    THE OAK STEM Diner was the place where business was conducted over eggs and bottomless cups of coffee, had been since the sixties. Business had slackened the last few years when the new Tim Hortons coffee shop landed further out on the strip, siphoning off customers but the Oak Stem held its own