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  GONE DEAD ON YOU

  A Grifter’s Song Episode 7

  Eryk Pruitt

  Series Created and Edited

  by Frank Zafiro

  Copyright © 2020 by Eryk Pruitt

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Zach McCain

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Gone Dead on You

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from the eighth episode of A Grifter’s Song

  Upgrade by Asa Maria Bradley

  Dale Newsom had driven his daddy’s pickup truck up one end of Lawles County and down the other damn near long enough before Deputy Jack Slade finally pulled up his county car behind him and flipped the lights. Dale pulled over and killed the engine. It took a solid moment for the truck to quit rattling, but Slade had yet to quit his cruiser.

  “He does that to gin up your nerves,” Dale’s daddy would have told him, if he were sitting in the passenger seat alongside him. “He wants you running everything through your head. He wants you to make a mistake.”

  “He forgets I’m the son of a cop,” Dale said to the empty seat. “Or at least, I was.”

  “Oh, he ain’t forgot,” Dale’s daddy would remind him. “Why do you think he’s here?”

  Dale watched through the rearview as Slade climbed out of the county car. His boots crunched gravel as he took his sweet time strolling the asphalt between the two vehicles. Slade was a classic Lawles County boy: bullet-headed, beefy, and brute. He filled the driver’s side window frame and motioned with a sausage of a finger for Dale to roll it down.

  “Afternoon, Uncle Jack.” Dale nearly bit his tongue clean in two, getting the words out. “What seems to be the—”

  “I thought I told you it was best if you left town,” said Slade. Dale couldn’t see his eyes behind the mirrored sunglasses. “You remember me telling you that?”

  “I’m working on it,” said Dale. “I quit my job at the 809 and packed all my things. I had this old truck pointed toward the highway, but I couldn’t bring myself to pull the trigger. Not yet.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “It feels like I have unfinished business here.”

  Slade turned his turret of a head toward the loblolly pines lining the road and stared into them, as if he might suss an answer on what to do next.

  “If you’re trying to squeeze me for any more money…”

  “Oh no, Uncle Jack,” Dale said, a little too fast. “I didn’t want that money you gave me to begin with. I didn’t feel I deserved—”

  “Me and your daddy made a promise. We said if anything ever happened to one of us, the other one would make sure their family is taken care of.”

  “I know, Uncle Jack. I didn’t mean—”

  “That money is me taking care of you. Nothing ground your daddy down more than you working at that damned bar, so if I got your narrow ass out of Lake Castor where maybe the options weren’t so limited…”

  An errant wind slipped through the passenger window. It caught a scrap of paper and rolled it around in the floorboard. Dale did his best to ignore it.

  “But to be honest,” said Slade, “I’m glad you ain’t left yet. Turns out there’s a little something you can help me with.”

  “I’d love to, Uncle Jack, but—”

  “I knew you would.” Slade opened the door to Dale’s daddy’s pickup truck. “Climb on out. You can ride with me.”

  “How about if I just follow—”

  “Don’t be an asshole. Let’s go.”

  “But the truck—”

  “Tick Tock may be dead, but there’s still nobody in this county dumb enough to touch his truck. Come on.”

  Slade didn’t wait for Dale to comply. He spun on the heel of his Ariat boots and crunched gravel all the way back to his county car. Dale stepped down out of the cab and watched after him for a moment.

  If his daddy was still there, he’d tell him, “This is what you wanted. This is your grand idea coming to fruition.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Dale said aloud.

  “That would be the first time,” his daddy would say, if he were there.

  But his daddy was not there.

  His daddy was dead.

  Dale knew where Slade was driving them. The backroads of Lawles County were engrained in his DNA, but none more so than the drive out to the deer lease Slade shared with his daddy. Dale reckoned he could count every poplar tree, every telephone pole, every single pothole.

  “Me and your daddy,” said Slade, “we thought we were invincible. Couldn’t nothing touch me and Tick Tock. He ever tell you how he got that nickname? It’s because anybody does wrong in Lawles County, it’s only a matter of time before he lays hands on them. Me and Tick Tock, man, we could dance between the raindrops.”

  Dale watched the last vestige of civilization—an old, crumbling gas station he’d never known to be operating—fall away in favor of long stretches of dense, Virginia thicket. Soon the asphalt would give way to roads of red clay and fallen pine needle.

  Soon they would be alone.

  “But we weren’t invincible. Nobody is. We all know that. Your daddy proved it when he charged into that meth lab and got his ass blown up with both the Tillotson brothers. Goddammit.”

  Dale balled his fists so tight he could feel his fingernails slicing half-moons into the meat of his palms. He wanted to swing those fists, but kept them fast at his side.

  “That’s part of why I need you to leave town,” said Slade. “As much as I loved Tick Tock, I don’t like to be reminded of him. Seeing you reminds me of him, and that ain’t none of us invincible. I can’t have that.”

  “There’s so much more to it than that,” Dale’s daddy would say, were he riding along with them. “Don’t you dare get suckered by this piece of shit.”

  Dale wished to high heavens he had more time with his father, if for no reason other than to finally convince him that he’s not as dumb as the old man always reckoned him to be. In the meantime, however…

  “If you’re so hell bent on getting me out of town,” said Dale, “then why the hell are we riding out to the old deer lease?”

  “That’s quite the story, you see.” Slade kept both hands at ten and two, his eyes, behind the reflector shades, fixed rigid on the road before them. “I started seeing this old girl a couple of days ago. She’s a pip. A real looker. Obviously from out of town, because we don’t grow them like that out here. She’s got these eyes, man…They don’t see the same things you and me see.”

  Dale watched a trio of buzzards float circles in the updrafts. “Good for you,” he muttered.

  “Only thing is, she’s a little bit more woo-woo than I usually like them. Don’t get me wrong, when I see a woman wearing a crystal necklace or talking astrological signs or whatnot, it tends to put an itch in my undercarriage. Those kind of ladies are real free, you know, sexually. The best blowjob I ever got in my life was after a tarot card reading where th
is girl turned over the Lovers card and I asked her if maybe it was saying we should try something like those two skeletons were doing on the card and next thing you know, right there in the candlelight, me and that girl were on the floor rut—”

  “Again, I was hoping we could get to the part where this has anything to do with me,” said Dale, who would rather think of anything but Deputy Jack Slade and his meaty hooks on any woman.

  “Calm your tits, little man.” Slade turned onto the road leading to the property. The average Lawles County citizen might never realize it was there, as it was little more than a skinny dirt path cutting between two swaths of loblolly pine. Blink and you miss it. Leave it and you’ll forget it was ever there. Only two people left on this earth ever knew to look for it there.

  “However,” Dale’s daddy would have reminded him, “there once was a third.”

  “Yes, Dad,” Dale would have answered. “There certainly was.”

  “Anyway,” said Slade, “this lady shows up at the sheriff’s office saying she had an important message that needed to be delivered to me in person. I was out on a call, but she said she’d wait. And she did. You know if there’s one thing I love about a woman, it’s persistence. I had this one old girl who could milk a dry cow with—”

  “Uncle Jack…”

  “Yeah, yeah. Anyway. I meet up with this lady and… man, you’d think she didn’t wait for nothing her entire life. She had legs clear up to Montana. Lips like pillows. And eyes the color of faded denim. She says to me that she feels an energy between us. I tell her that’s good because I’m certainly throwing one out there. She says, ‘I’m serious,’ and I say so am I, and if she wants to feel a little more of that energy, I got a break coming up.”

  “This girl waited at the sheriff’s office so she could flirt with you?” asked Dale sideways.

  “No,” said Slade. “Like I said, she told me she’d come to deliver a message to me, and only to me. I ask her who it’s from and you know what she says?”

  “I’m on the edge of my seat.”

  “She says it’s from Tick Tock Newsom.”

  Up ahead, the cabin on the deer lease came into view. Slade and Dale’s daddy had it built fifteen years earlier and had done a heck of a job keeping it up. The lumber looked just as fresh as it had the day it was hewn.

  “That’s impossible,” Dale said. “Daddy’s dead.”

  “I know he is.” Slade pulled the truck into the pea gravel drive alongside the cabin. He killed the engine and turned to face Dale. “But this lady—”

  “She’s gotta be a fake,” Dale spat. “One of those TV psychics trying to get rich off people who miss their loved ones.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” Dale’s daddy would tell him, were he still alive. “Slade can smell a lie like a fart in a car, so be careful.”

  “I didn’t believe her either,” Slade said. “Trust me, don’t none of it make a lick of sense. But she knows things, man. She knows things she couldn’t possibly know.”

  “They dig through your trash,” Dale hissed. “They look on the internet. These people are very resourceful. They come up with ways to get that information and they use it—”

  “I may have been born at night,” Slade told him, “but I wasn’t born last night. You think I’m some run of the mill idiot that a psychic scammer can pull one over on? Trust me. I’ve checked into this little lady and she’s got the goods.”

  Dale slumped in his seat and crossed his arms. “So what does this have to do with me?”

  “Come on inside.”

  “I’m not in the mood for any surprises.”

  Slade opened the door and climbed out. He took note that Dale had yet to move.

  “That’s the only time I’m going to ask you nicely,” he said.

  Dale sloughed his way out of the county car. He followed Slade to the front door of the cabin. The sun had not yet set, but was already headed down below the towering pines surrounding the deer lease. For this reason, he noticed the flickering orange candlelight inside the living room window.

  “This little lady,” said Slade, as they stepped onto the wood planked porch, “told me that if we were to communicate with your father, we would need to bring something very close to him.”

  Slade slipped his key into the lock and turned the knob. From inside, Dale could smell sage. Incense. Patchouli. Candles burned from all corners of the living room. Two people—a man and a woman—sat at a table, set for four, in the middle of the room.

  Between them was a Ouija board.

  “I know you and Tick Tock had your differences,” said Slade, “but I hardly reckon there is anything in this world closer to him than his own son.”

  Dale shook his head slowly. “You can’t be serious…”

  The woman rose from her seat at the table. As Slade had promised, she was indeed beautiful. She ran her palms along her thighs atop a pretty sundress before offering one for Dale to shake.

  “Hello,” she said. “You must be Dale. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Your father sends his regards.”

  Dale laughed sideways. “I told you this was bullshit,” Dale said. “If my father were here, I know exactly what he’d say.”

  Said the woman, “Dale, I know how all of this must feel—”

  “I highly doubt you do.”

  “I do,” she said. “I have been doing this for a long time and there is always an initial period of distrust. You see, I’m what people would call a paranormal—”

  “I know what you are,” said Dale. “You’re the type of person who digs through people’s trash cans and hopes to get—”

  The man stood from his chair and held out a hand. “Now wait just a minute,” he said.

  “I’ve had enough.”

  Dale turned, but came face to face with the barrel chest of Jack Slade.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” he said. “You’re going to take a seat and play nice. There are some things I need to ask your daddy and you are going to sit there and let me ask them.”

  Dale bucked, but it was no use. Jack Slade was a big guy and needed only one hand to guide him to the seat at the table.

  “How about we give introductions?” Slade offered.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Dale. “I could give two shits less about a pair of hucksters who have conned you into donating your time to their services.”

  With that, the evening commenced.

  But Dale had another, more nefarious reason for wishing to eschew the introductions.

  He didn’t need them.

  For he and Sam and Rachel had already met.

  It was four days earlier. Dale had spotted them while sitting all day long at the Lake Castor bus terminal. He’d been trying to gin up the gumption to board a bus to anywhere when he spotted the woman cleverly pick the pocket of a man who’d stop to help her read a map. Anyone else would have missed it, but not the son of Tick Tock Newsom.

  “Keep an eye on her hand,” Dale’s daddy would have said, were he sitting on that bus stop bench alongside him. “Not the one holding the map. That one’s a distraction. Watch her other hand. The left one.”

  Had his daddy been sitting there alongside him, Dale would have told him to shush. He would have reminded him that growing up under the same roof with one of Lawles County’s shrewdest law enforcement officials, and his tenure at Club 809, one of the meanest saloons in the state, had given Dale an eye for misdeeds.

  But Dale’s daddy was not sitting there.

  Dale’s daddy had long gone to Glory.

  Dale was alone.

  He sat on the bench and watched the woman work the small crowd which ebbed and flowed between the buses. It didn’t take long for him to spy her confederate: a severe, yet handsome man, who had no qualms plucking from the purses of any woman caught unawares by the spark in his eyes or the ease of his smile.

  They did not tarry
long at the bus station. No sooner had they struck, than did they depart. Quickly, they headed for the parking lot where they climbed into a dusty economy car. Dale followed them at a distance, curious just as much by their egress as he had been with their appearance at all.

  “The smart ones know when to quit,” his daddy would have reminded him.

  “I’m not half as dumb as you think I am, Daddy,” said Dale to the empty air around him.

  “The smart ones would get on the first bus out of town.”

  Dale, bless his heart, did not do as such. Instead, he raced to his father’s truck, left abandoned in the bus station parking lot, and followed the mysterious couple to the Starlite Inn on the far side of town.

  The Starlite made sense to anyone who wanted to lay low, and Dale spent the majority of that evening parked within direct view of the front door to their motel room while he swiped and scanned through various internet pages. Using his father’s access to different law enforcement databases, as well as information gleaned from blogs, podcasts, message boards, chat rooms, comment sections, and archived newspapers, he began to put together a story.

  This story dealt with several other bus stops along the route which led to that bus station in Lake Castor. Places like Bristol, Tennessee. Hohenwald. Heber Springs, Arkansas. Each and every one of them reported a rash of complaints about items missing or stolen.

  Picked straight from their pockets by a beautiful woman, some of the victims claimed. Others described a handsome and dashing man.

  That trail ended just outside of Missouri.

  From there, Dale picked up another one.

  Arkansas.

  “This is a bad idea,” Dale’s daddy would have said.

  Dale, instead, kept scrolling.

  Once Dale felt like he had gathered more than enough information on the two con artists in his crosshairs, he pounded hard against that motel room door and told the man who answered: “The two of you are going to help me or I’ll be dropping a phone call to a certain spaghetti-eater in Philadelphia.”