Vile Blood by Max Wilde Read Free Book Online Page A

hat and walked out the door.
     

9
     
     
     “Is this mess your doing?” the plum-ripe voice of the preacher man came through Drum’s phone as he idled along in the Ford Expedition, the shimmering blacktop lying like a bolo tie on the barren landscape.
    “And what mess would that be, Reverend?”
    “My wife is dead.”
    “And which wife would that be?” Drum asked, enjoying himself, knowing there was the only woman Tincup had legally hitched, the rest wives in name only.
    “Holly. She’s lying in her trailer with a needle in her.”
    “My condolences, Reverend.”
    “I need you here.”
     “Give me ten minutes.”
    Drum clicked off the phone and fed the Ford some juice, and he was over to the Milky Way in seven.
    He drove beneath the neon sign that was stunned to muteness by the hard sunlight, and parked the Ford beside what had been the manager’s office. Boarded up now, windows painted black, the dirt outside littered with debris—discarded rubber hoses, respiratory masks and latex gloves; empty antifreeze, drain cleaner and paint thinner containers; lithium batteries plundered of their innards—which hinted at the room’s new employment, and as he stepped down from the car Drum caught the stink of a batch of meth being cooked.
    He adjusted the hang of his pearl-handled Smith & Wesson, waved a fat, lazy fly away from his hat and headed for the last of the rooms which were arranged in a horseshoe around the empty swimming pool, concrete cracked and stained by the sun.
    Tincup appeared in the doorway of the room, dressed, as always, in a black suit and white shirt, clerical collar ringing his skinny neck. Tincup wasn’t a big man, but he had the hair of a movie star, combed away from his face, tumbling down in shining coils, dusted with gray. A movie star’s smile, too, not that he was using it now. But it was the voice that made him memorable, deep and slow, dripping with the promise of salvation.
    “Sheriff, did you visit with Holly last night?” he said.
    “Yessir, I did.”
    “To give her drugs?”
    “Nossir, I visited her for sentimental reasons. It saddened me to see her in decline.”
    “You’re lying.”
    Drum watched a buzzard lazily circling a far-off bluff. He hitched his pants leg and placed a boot on the low brick wall of the balcony, resting his arms on his knee. Fixed Tincup with a blank stare.
    “What am I to do with her?” the preacher asked.
    Drum shrugged. “Direct some of your flock to dump her in the desert.” He waited for an argument. When there was none forthcoming he said, “You alone?”
    “Sister Marisol is inside.”
    “Get rid of her.”
    Tincup said something in Spanish and woman in her twenties, brown-skinned with skiddy black eyes, came out wrapped in a printed cloth, her feet in high-heeled mules. Her toenails were painted yellow. She looked at Drum and he looked back, then she walked away, heels slapping the dirt, and disappeared into the room closest to the car park.
    “Those gunmen in the Dodge?” Drum said.
    “What of them?”
    “Holly brung them down here.”
     Tincup gaped at him. “That’s crazy talk.”
    Drum waited for a beat, then he drew from his pocket the phone he’d taken off the dead woman, the chrome flaring as it caught the sun, sending a hot little circle across the pitted surface of Tincup’s cheeks as the sheriff handed it to him.
    “This was in her trailer. Three calls made, all to a bar in the city. Last one night before last.”
     Tincup regarded the phone as if could rear up and bite him, then he laid it on the brick wall beside Drum’s boot.
    “And the men? What are we to do about them?”
    Drum made a performance of firing up a one of his little black cheroots , then he told Tincup that the bad mischief was over. The preacher man stood very still as Drum sketched the details, his dark, yellow-flecked pupils never leaving Drum’s face.
    “The hand of God.”
    “The Devil, more like.”
    “Were they killed by the