November Mourns by Tom Piccirilli Read Free Book Online

Back then, it had bordered on something like reverence. Now Shad didn’t know what it was. Maybe the same thing.
    After joining the local police force at eighteen, Dave had broken up the Boxcars ring in Okra County, all on his own. Over on Route 12, with the whores’ rusty trailers out back, the hole in the wall barroom had become a hot spot of loaded gambling and contaminated moon in the space of six months. The white slavery ring had brought in underage girls from as far off as Poverhoe City. The Southern mob guys would come around for some fun and go off their nuts, and they still held lynching raids when they got drunk enough.
    Dave had kicked it all down in about two hours. Killed three men and the madam, who’d just finished beating a teenage girl unconscious with a car antenna for not being perky enough with a businessman from Memphis. He arrested seven other thugs before Sheriff Increase Wintel even showed up. Dave had been shot twice in the thigh by a .22 and it hadn’t slowed him up a step. He received a commendation and had his photo taken with the governor.
    “I’ve never been out this way,” Shad admitted.
    “Not even when you were blocking moonrunners for Luppy Joe Anson?”
    “I only did it for one summer, and he had no buyers anywhere near here.”
    “None of them do, but sometimes when they’re trying to slip the highway patrol, they come out because of the turnoffs, hide in the brush or around the creeks. Powder the cops’ faces tearing along the dirt roads and kicking up dust.”
    “It doesn’t work. I stuck closer to town.”
    “That’s why you never got caught.”
    Some of the runners, they were only in it for the game. If the police weren’t involved, coming at them from all sides and putting up roadblocks, it just wasn’t any fun.
    “What’s over that way?” Shad asked, looking up the trail. It annoyed him that he didn’t know the lay of the land here, as if it had been hidden from him. “Is it just the trestle leading to the other side of the gorge?”
    “Pretty much. The road heads into the mountains, threads north to the trestle bridge. There’s a trail on the other side of Jonah Ridge that peters out in some bramble forests. Used to be sort of a lovers’ lane, a hundred forty or so years ago, before the war and the outbreak of yellow fever. They’d go courting and bring their whole families. There’s nice grasslands around in summer, wildflowers all over. Horse and buggies would head up toward the gorge and couples would picnic after church, quote scripture and sing gospels.”
    His mother telling him,
They die up there.
    Shad got that feeling again, that someone was focusing on him, calling up their forces and aiming their intent. He wavered on his feet and began to sweat. He saw nothing, but still sensed movement around him—flitting, dancing even. The back of his neck warmed and his ears were suddenly burning. He concentrated but couldn’t center himself. It took a minute for the November breeze to cool him.
    Dave asked, “You okay?”
    “Yes.”
    Leaning back against his patrol car, Dave said, “Probably started getting its reputation right around the time of the Battle of Chickamauga. Some captured Union troops were corralled up there by the Rebs and tossed into the gorge.”
    Shad hadn’t thought of that in a long time, but now that he heard it, he abruptly remembered the story. “I almost forgot about that.”
    “It’s not the kind of Civil War moment people put plaques up about to commemorate. After that, the hollow had its share of epidemics. Yellow fever in 1885. Cholera in 1915. When the disease reached its worst they’d bring whole wagons of the sick into the hills and leave them there.”
    “Jesus.”
    Dave spoke with great clarity, completely without emotion. “Suicides would come up this way too.”
    “That’s right.”
    “The lonely, the elderly. They’d throw themselves off the precipice.”
    Shad caught vague, fleeting impressions of Mags