The Summer I Died: A Thriller by Ryan C. Thomas, Cody Goodfellow Read Free Book Online Page B

ain’t seen him sober in a while but he don’t bug me either so . . . . He says God will take care of him, and then he starts preaching to me about faith and I have to run out of the house. He quit working at the mill a few months ago and filed for workman’s comp when a log fell on his leg. You don’t need to be Kreskin to know he was drunk and caused the thing to fall on himself. ”
    I couldn’t imagine what it must be like to live with his father, watching the man seep down through the floorboards of degradation before your eyes. But that was the life Tooth chose and, thus far, he hadn’t seemed to mind it let alone try to fix the problem. I guess some problems were too big to fix and you just hoped they would take care of themselves. I felt uncomfortable for having brought it up so I changed the subject. “ Batman doesn’t have horns, he has ears. ”
    “ What? ”
    “ Batman has ears, not horns. You said I had to know how to draw horns. ”
    “ Man , you’re a geek sometimes. C’mon, this is clean enough. Grab the 9mm and let’s go. ”
    Tooth put the case with the .44 in it back behind the dresser, slid the dresser back in place, then went into the kitchen and grabbed some beers. We walked out of the stifling house into equally stifling afternoon dust. A cloud of gnats trying to fly through the screen door turned their attention to our eyes and mouths and Tooth swatted them with his cap. Mr. Elliot was back sitting in his place on the porch. As we walked by, I kept my head down, pretending to be wrapped up in my sneakers so he wouldn’t talk to me.
    “ Got to have a purpose in life, ” he said as I opened the car door. I was still pre tending to be interested in my feet when Tooth started the car and we sped away.
     
     
    CHAPTER 7
     
    The Camaro rumbled down the road like a metallic fart with a purp ose. Heat wave r ose off the baking blacktop as I searched for a radio station worth listening to. In the part of the county we were in, I knew we wouldn’t get much but country music — which explain ed all the goth kids and wannabe punks who infest ed the shops along main street, just begging for an alternative. Only way we’d get any good radio would be to head north toward Canada or a few hours south toward Boston.
    I kept flipping stations, hoping something would come up I could hum along to, but the best I could find was some song about a man whose woman left him and took the dog when she did . I looked at the CD player and sighed. If it weren’t for online CD distributors I’d have gone Charlie Manson a long time ago. But we couldn’t use CDs in the Camaro because Tooth had fucked up the player trying to fix it.
    I finally just turned it off and stuck my hand out the window instead, let it catch the wind and swim up and down like a dolphin. We took a lesser-traveled back route that ran under the trees and offered sporadic shade. Crooked limbs criss-crossed overhead like giant arthritic fingers. The blazing sun stabbed through them here and there creating a kind of flicker effect as we drove.
    “ Where to? ” Tooth asked.
    “ I don’t know. Let’s go up toward Bobcat and see what we find. Should be pretty secluded and we can shoot all we want. ”
    He reached into his pocket and brought out the bag of weed and tossed it in my lap.
    “ I bought you a coming home present. Roll a nice fatty for us. ”
    Shaking the bag in front of my eyes, I thought, fuck yeah, this is the shit that makes coming home worth it. I opened the bag and took a whiff and holy shit was it bad. “ This stinks like a hobo’s asshole. Is it even good? ”
    “ Probably not, but it’s weed, ain’t it? Who cares what it smells like long as it gets us fucked up, right? ”
    I took a B ud out and crunched it up in my lap. The wind whipped some of it up and stuck it to my Silver Surfer T-shirt. The papers were in the bag as well and I took one out and rolled it as best I could despite the wind. It looked rather