PANIC by J.A. Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

encourage fellow miners to agitate against the company. There was no trial.
    Private detectives surrounded their flat, removed them bodily and hanged them with burlap sacks on their heads on an early Sunday morning, while most people in the town were rising for Mass. No one in the town showed to watch this summary execution and the bodies hanged there for ten days. A month later, the mayor was angrily ousted by a mob for his inaction during the crisis. For a while, the minehead was guarded at gunpoint.
    It looks benign now, a faded, off white mock Roman forum. The municipal plaza holds a fountain now, a generic design commissioned by a town council on a budget.

THEY RIDE PAST Galloway Auto Body, crossing northeast to a rise in the valley. This is where most of the houses in town were, all low, one story on wide streets with rounded curbs.
    In 1956, it used to be adjacent to a junkyard, where the guys could work on cars in peace. Some of the older people in town remember the day they found Molly Stone sitting on the curb in front of Galloway’s, her pumps, stockings and felt skirt stained with fresh blood. It was already the color of rust by the time they arrived. They all just stood and stared like that.
    Everyone looked for Old Man Galloway to speak first, it being his shop and all.
    “Well now, girly,” he said, flabbergasted. “Just what in hell happened here?”
    She just sat there muttering and mumbling through blubbery tears, not looking up at the crowd gathering around her.
    Officer Duncan and the new guy pushed through the crowd to find her. They took her into the shop and shut the blinds, keeping their voices low. After a while, the new guy went out to the back, round the junkyard. A hydraulic jack lay splayed out, as if knocked loose by a sledgehammer. Sure enough, a gas pipe as thick as a two by four peeked out from the grass nearby, recently employed. A ‘48 Commodore lay flat on the ground, lacking its wheels.
    The brain failed to register it right away, the gravel around the human figure was soaked through, cranberry red. All he could see were legs, like the Wicked Witch. They were already stiff and purple with blood. They bulged in the hot summer sun. The poor son of a bitch didn’t have a chance.
    It was that foreign girl, the one who spoke softly because her English was bad. She came to turn over the house sometimes, even though Molly was perfectly capable of doing it herself. She’d stopped coming around because she’d gotten pregnant.
    She never said who but her eyes couldn’t lie.
    Now, it was a playground like so many former junkyards and landfills and wellsites.

THEY REACH THE outer perimeter of town and start up the hill, standing up on their bikes to pump their legs to maintain speed. This hill overlooking the valley is where the Koenigsmann mansion used to be. The hill is now home to a new development, with its rows and rows of identical townhouses, garages, lawns and most extravagantly, pools.
    John Koenigsmann III had an indoor spa built in his father’s manse on the the first floor. In the 30’s, everybody who was anybody in the county either knew the Koenigsmanns or worked for them and regularly attended parties thrown by his wife, Marta. His workers fondly called him “Major” because of his stoic attitude and neat style of dress.
    At first, they were the star of the town, which used to be named for John’s grandfather. Soon, it became apparent that her lavish balls and parties were just an excuse for her increasingly constant indulgence. He was always away on business and could never keep an eye on her. A man so disciplined and upright couldn’t conceive of her illness but he bore up anyway.
    He had forbidden her drinking after their son was born and, dutifully, she kept right on. She’d reek not ten minutes after she was awake, favoring white wine and brandy.
    John Koenigsmann IV had been born with a sunken skull and a heart murmur, the two were no doubt related.
    Until he was