The Angry Dream by Gil Brewer Read Free Book Online Page A

surely is a bad thing to have happen,” he said. “I surely do sympathize with you, Harper.”
    “Something’s got to be done!”
    “I surely do sympathize. That’s a fact.”
    “Who do I go to about a thing like this?” I tried to keep from shouting but I was close to it.
    “Well,” Luckham said quietly, “me, I guess. I’m the law, here, I guess—I figure you see me, Harper.”
    “All right,” I said. “I want to file a complaint.”
    “Against who?”
    We stared at each other.
    He said, “Against Pine Springs?”
    I turned and walked over to the window and stood there staring outside into the snowing night. It was still early. It wasn’t snowing so hard now. The ground was covered a few inches deep. There was no snow on the hood of Sheriff Luckham’s sedan.
    “You’d better come out and look at the place,” I said.
    “Like to do that,” he said. “But I can’t. Something else on the books for tonight. Really should be home—usually am.”
    “How come you’re here, then?”
    “Oh, I don’t know—figured maybe somebody like you might just happen along with some complaint, or something.”
    He blinked at me, the gray eyes slowly folding closed and open, the uptilted lip-corners maddeningly still.
    “Do you let things like this go on around here?”
    “Why, no, sir. I certainly don’t,” he said.
    “Why don’t you do something?”
    The door behind me opened. A stocky man in a black jacket and gray felt hat walked in, glanced at me, raised his eyebrows at Luckham, then moved over to the far wall and leaned there, looking at me. The room was very still. The man took his cap off, jammed it into a pocket of the jacket, found a handkerchief and loudly blew his nose.
    “Cole,” Luckham said to the man, “this here fellow’s name is Harper.” Luckham glanced at me. “Cole’s my number one deputy.”
    Luckham, speaking mildly to the scarred plank floor between his feet, repeated all that I’d told him about the house and the slain hound. “It’s pretty awful,” he said.
    “Mighty awful,” Cole said. His voice was hoarse.
    “He wants I should do something,” Luckham said.
    “Well, he certainly would,” Cole said. “I’d sure as hell want to do something. Thing like that.” Cole shook his head, his gaze momentarily on the girly calendar. “One person couldn’t have done all that.”
    “No,” Luckham said. “It was more than one person, all right.”
    “Probably a lot of people,” Cole said. “Must of been riled mightily. Never heard of such a thing.”
    I was looking at Cole when his gaze met mine and held.
    “Why doesn’t he just leave town?” Cole said quietly, in that hoarse voice. “Then he wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
    “Now, that’s a good solution,” Luckham said. His head turned up to me, the muddy eyes blinking calmly. “Why don’t you try that, Harper?”
    I said nothing, and they watched me with their self-satisfied faces, with all their wonderful, shining knowledge inside them. I went over to the door and started out.
    “That’s mighty good advice, Harper,” Luckham said.
    I went on out and closed the door.
    Climbing into the coupé, I noticed a dark, weaving shadow standing in snow-clotted grass beside the sheriff’s office. I turned the car’s lights on and they shone blindingly on the figure of a man. The man started running violently in a veering diagonal across the street through the thinly falling snow, lurching from side to side. It was Herb Spash again. I turned the car and followed him.
    He thought he was hidden behind a tree on the corner of a vacant lot. I drove up beside the tree, turning in suddenly, without warning.
    “Spash!” I said. “What do you want?”
    He stood rigid in the snow, his breath steaming in the night. He looked cold and wretched.
    “Nothing, damn you!” he shouted. “Nothing! Leave me alone!”
    He turned and ran off across the lot.
    I turned the engine off and sat there. Snow sifted across the