Gone Dead on You Read online

  Her name was Rachel, or so she said. The man called himself Sam. The both of them kept their true names as dealing with Slade, much as they did sitting on both sides of the Ouija board on that table at the cabin on the deer lease. The flicker of candlelight did nothing for their sinister appearance, except further shroud their faces in shadow and cast flame into the sparkles of their eyes.

  “I encourage you to keep your eye on these two,” Dale’s daddy would urge him, were he standing alongside him at the deer lease. “The second they catch sight of the upper hand, I expect them to pounce.”

  Dale swatted the air beside him, but said nothing aloud. Instead, he took his seat across from the empty chair, with Sam on his left and Rachel at his right.

  “I understand your hesitation,” Rachel said in a soft, soothing voice. “I, too, was hesitant when I first came to realize I had these gifts. My mother could commune with the dead, as could her mother before her. I resisted, but after my own father passed—”

  “If it’s all the same,” Dale grumbled, “I’d prefer to skip any prologues. I’m more concerned about getting back to my truck and heading out of town, as Mister Slade insisted in the first place.”

  Of course, it was Dale’s duty to feign impatience and skepticism. Such had been assigned over a bottle of corn liquor at the seedy room back at the Starlite.

  “Jack Slade is not inclined to fall for the woo-woo,” Dale had informed Rachel and Sam. That night, she sat atop the motel bed in an oversized Rolling Stones shirt with one bare foot tucked beneath her and the other dangling just above the flattened shag carpet. Sam spent most the evening pacing the floor and flicking open and shut his silver Zippo lighter.

  “We’ve got an ace up our sleeve,” Sam had told him.

  “Oh yeah? And what’s that?”

  Sam nodded toward Rachel. Her smile shifted demure and, for a moment, Dale forgot his own name.

  “See what I mean?” Sam grinned. “She’s a mystic.”

  Dale did what he could to shove her smile out of his head. “So you propose some chance encounter with Jack Slade, then you casually introduce the concept of nether-talking?”

  “Sweetheart,” said Rachel, in a voice that dripped like treacle, “there are no such things as chance encounters.”

  They called the grift The Pine Hill Haint. It was a maneuver they had perfected down in Auburn, Alabama. Using a confederate, they obtain information on someone close to the mark, then use that information to ferret out even more. The location of a secret safe deposit box or the password to a hidden bank account. Any number of things.

  Dale, of course, would be the confederate.

  Jack Slade was the mark.

  Sam and Rachel, on the other hand…

  Fast forward to the deer lease and there they sat, on opposite ends of the Ouija board. Sam maintained a stoic countenance while Rachel, more beatific, upturned her head to the ceiling and closed her eyes.

  And of the heavens, she asked, “Shall we begin?”

  If Dale had any fear that Rachel might possibly summon his father, he could easily lay it to rest. All of the information she had gleaned for the supposed séance had come directly from Dale himself.

  In the two days since their meeting at the Starlite, Dale had rehearsed every bit of information about the exploits of deputies Tick Tock Newsom and Jack Slade. Dale recounted every piece of personal information which might prove useful in swaying Slade. He told them of his father’s every gesture and nuance.

  Even still, he had to admit it was chilling to watch Rachel once she finally got to work.

  “Let us all take hands,” she instructed. She accepted Slade’s with her right and, after a fair amount of feigned begrudgment, Dale’s with her left. She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath. “I need everyone to focus. All of our thoughts now are to be on Deputy Newsom. Let us relax, breathe, and fill our hearts and minds with memories of Tick Tock.”

  In that moment, Dale felt himself grateful for the deception, as there was little else in this life he wanted less than to think further of his father. Bad enough, Dale thought, that he had been cursed to hear the man’s words alongside his every move since he had died.

  Instead, he grumbled a few words of indignation before closing his eyes along with the rest of them and pretended to think fond memories of his father.

  Were there any? Not hardly, Dale thought, with more than a couple pangs of regret. Dale never had any desire to follow his father’s footsteps into law enforcement, which resulted in a quiet discomfort between the two men in that motherless household. The alienation only increased when Dale announced he had taken a job at Club 809, out past the county highway, as a bartender. This haven for ne’er-do-wells and scofflaws had been a frequent point of interest for Slade and Dale’s daddy, which in no way endeared the father to the son.

  Life, for Dale and his daddy, had been nothing but a series of disappointments in each other.

  And now Tick Tock was dead.

  “If I was still alive,” his daddy would say, “I would slap the dogshit out of you for associating with all three of these bastards at this table. Playing with a goddamn Ouija board, no less. If you want to know what I’d really say, all you have to do is think back to everything I ever—”

  “I can feel his presence,” Rachel murmured to the room. “He is here with us.”

  Slade leaned forward in his seat. “Can I ask him something?”

  “Not yet,” Rachel whispered, her voice distracted. “He still straddles both planes. His presence is very strong, yes, but he has not completely entered our plane.”

  Dale thought his eyes might roll out the back of his head. Sam gripped his left hand tighter and squinted through closed eyes at him, a tacit warning to keep cool. Dale nodded curt.

  “Tick Tock Newsom,” said Rachel, “we have summoned you here in a place you constructed with your own two hands. A place built from your own blood, tears, and toil. We have brought with us your eldest son, who loves you very much. And also with us, your dearest friend, Deputy Jack Sla—”

  Before Rachel could finish the words, two candles at the two table corners closest to Slade quickly fluttered out. Where once there had been flame, there was only a whisper of smoke curling to the cedar rafter beams.

  “Holy—” Slade leaned back in his seat, then looked at Dale. “Did you see that?”

  “Do not break the circle,” warned Rachel. “Not while Tick Tock is still entering our plane. To do so would be disastrous.”

  “Why did those candles blow out?” Slade wanted to know. Tiny droplets of perspiration freckled the lines in his forehead. “Did Tick Tock do that?”

  “Concentrate,” Rachel hushed. “Keep your thoughts positive.”

  Slade did as instructed. He closed his eyes tight, but peeked out the left, then the right, to read the faces on either side of him.

  “Now,” said Rachel, “let us place our hands lightly on the planchette.”

  “The what?” asked Slade.

  “That wooden instrument in the middle of the Ouija board,” said Sam.

  “The pointer?”

  Sam nodded, keeping shut his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “The pointer.”

  The four of them gently released each other’s hands and placed their fingertips gingerly atop the wooden planchette left in the center of the message board. Dale admired the handiwork of the piece, which had been hand carved by a couple pals from woodshop in high school. It was a custom job. One of a kind. The planchette burned from a white oak tree from the edge of Blood Holler.

  If it wasn’t haunted, thought Dale, it sure fucking should be.

  The wooden planchette pointed directly to the center between the YES and NO.

  To the room, Rachel said, “Tick Tock Newsom, are you in the room with us?”

  Dale held his breath and waited for something to happen. His part was to act indignant and resistant to the entire affair. To be dragged to the deer lease by Jack Slade and pretend to want nothing more to do with any of it. As far as any mechanics…

  “Tick Tock Newsom, do you hear me?”

  Dale’s part was not to move the planchette. He was to act skeptical at every turn, which he believed should prove no problem. In fact, when those candles blew out, he’d fought the urge to fly back in his seat, even further back than Jack Slade. He had no idea how that had been done, but admired the touch all the same.

  “Don’t you worry about the hows and the whens of it all,” Sam had told him, back at the Starlite, when they planned this caper. “That’s where I come in. Slade will let us into the cabin and, after he leaves to run fetch you off whatever grit-eating road, I’ll have that place wired up better than Abbey Road. It’s much better Kabuki if you don’t know what’s coming.”

  So he kept still, paused on bated breath with his fingertips lightly atop the planchette and counted every second, every ticking of the grandfather clock in the front vestibule of the cabin, and waited for the movement that inevitably would come.

  “Tick Tock, I can sense you are here.” Rachel kept her voice low. “I know you have not left this plane because there is still unfinished business. We are here to help you complete that business. Please, let your presence be known.”

  Nothing.

  “I don’t know about all this,” said Dale. “I told you it was all—”

  “Hush, goddammit,” barked Slade. “You need to close your eyes and concentrate. This is important.”

  “You think if Daddy would have shown himself to anyone, it would have been me. These two hucksters can’t just walk in here and all of a sudden Daddy is going to—”

  Slade didn’t dare take his fingertips from the planchette, but he glared hate-fire into Dal
e from across the table.

  “I swear, boy,” he growled, “get your damn hands back on the pointer thing and think positive thoughts about your daddy. Maybe if you’d have done that once in your damned life, he’d still be alive.”

  Dale recoiled, as if slapped. “You bastard,” he hissed. “The sack on you, to talk about something you don’t know a goddamned thing about.”

  “I know plenty,” said Slade. “I listened to that man hoot and holler for years about how you could work from sunup to sundown to disappoint him. Getting caught at school when you was little with a marijuana cigarette. You, the son of Tick Tock Newsom. The meanest lawman this county had ever seen, and there’s his boy caught with a reefer. Or you taking up at the 809.”

  “It was a job.”

  “If it was a job you wanted,” Slade said, “all you had to do was put on the badge. He hung his head in shame every damned day after you started pouring drinks up there. That place was a den of iniquity, and you wallowed in it like a sow in slop. Now put your damn fingers on the pointy thing.”

  Dale reached across, but stopped his hands just shy of the planchette.

  “You didn’t know him,” Dale said in a low voice.

  “If I didn’t, then nobody did. You trying to tell me you knew something I didn’t.”

  “I know who killed him.”

  Jack Slade narrowed his eyes. “If you got something to say, boy, then maybe you ought to say it. Your daddy was killed kicking in the door to a meth lab. I know. I was there. Anybody has anything different to say about that, maybe they ought to—”

  No sooner had Dale’s fingers touched the planchette than did it rocket across the Ouija board to the word NO.

  Slade and Dale both ripped their fingertips from the top of the planchette. They looked at each other in pale-faced horror.

  “You little wise-ass,” Slade growled.

  “I didn’t do that,” Dale insisted.

  “I have half a mind to—”

  “To what, Uncle Jack?” Dale kept eyes locked on the deputy. “You have half a mind to what? Have me killed?”

  Slade dusted his hands together, then licked his lips. He looked to Sam, then to Rachel. If either of them registered the little dust-up between the two men, they did not let on.

  “If we can keep his hi-jinks to a minimum,” Slade said to them, “I’d like to continue.”

  “I would remind everyone,” said Rachel, “to keep the energy positive in this room.”

  With that, everyone took a deep breath and returned their fingertips to the planchette.

  Rachel spoke in a hushed voice, almost sing-song, and directed to where the ceiling vaulted in the middle of the room.

  “Deputy Newsom…Can you hear us?”

  Dale watched the planchette and waited for it to move, still unsure how Sam orchestrated these machinations.

  The planchette did not move.

  “Tick Tock,” said Rachel, “we know you yearn to move forward. We understand you long to settle unfinished business, so that you may leave this plane. We wish to help you with this.”

  “Hell yeah, we do,” muttered Slade.

  Rachel ignored him. “This is a safe space, Deputy Newsom. You are among those who love you. We want the same thing you want, so we extend to you this opportunity to communicate with us, so that we may bring you closure.”

  At that moment, every candle in the room flickered, with no passing breeze to assist them.

  “Is that him?” Slade wanted to know. “Tick Tock, old buddy, is that you?”

  “Do not break concentration,” said Rachel. Her smile looked beatific, almost enraptured. She kept her pretty blue eyes closed. “Tick Tock? Do you wish to speak to us?”

  Beneath Dale’s fingertips, he felt the planchette tremble. Not from the pressure of Sam or Rachel, or even Slade, but seeming from somewhere else.

  How are they doing that?

  “Keep your focus, son,” his daddy would say, were he really there in the deer lease. “These two are seasoned grifters. They’ve got all the angles covered.”

  For once, Dale found himself grateful for his father’s interference. He stole a peek at Slade, who appeared to concentrate as if trying to suss out the details of a BBQ menu. Slade could hardly contain himself as he watched the planchette shake and shimmy, then slowly slide toward YES.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed. “Holy dick-sliding shit. Y’all swear y’all ain’t pushing that plancher thing?”

  “Concentrate,” Rachel hushed. “We can’t break the connection.”

  “Shit,” Slade said, “I am concentrating. Can I ask him something? Just to make sure it’s Tick Tock and not some other spirit?”

  “Deputy Newsom,” said Rachel, “may we ask you questions?”

  The planchette eased off the YES, then returned to it.

  Rachel nodded to Slade. He licked his lips and leaned forward.

  “Hey, buddy,” Tick Tock said, “I’m real sorry about what happened to you.”

  Nothing moved. Not even the candles.

  “You believe me, don’t you, buddy?”

  The planchette trembled, but did not move.

  “Don’t you?”

  Out blew all the candles.

  During his lifetime, Deputy Tick Tock Newsom ran a strict household. However, without a woman to help raise his boy, it was natural for Dale to rebel. While growing up, it was near impossible for him to cop so much as a joint from his pals in high school, for fear they might end up on some long drive down a back road with Tick Tock and Slade, then never return. This, of course, caused great consternation at home and a solid rift between the father and son.

  Still, when he received news that his father had been killed during a raid of a meth lab, he couldn’t help but feel something was amiss. That something, Dale reckoned, had everything to do with his daddy’s partner, Deputy Jack Slade.

  Back at the 809, where Dale bartended, word had gotten around about a new batch of heroin going around that folks were calling cocoa cinnamon. Cut with something special from China, it delivered a high with a sledgehammer. All was well and good, so long as it was kept to the black part of town. However, once white kids started ODing on it, Tick Tock and Slade decided time was up.

  Around this time, Dale had noticed a couple of Mexicans who came to the 809. They kept to themselves, mostly. Ordered tequila by the bottle and tipped well. After a while, they flashed more and more money to the girls. Took liberties during lap dances. Drew attention to themselves.

  It was only a matter of time.

  Dale remembered it like it was yesterday.

  One night, the Mexicans had done their usual. Lapdances, bottle of tequila, big tips. They left with little incident. Perhaps about twenty minutes later, Dale lugged two trash bags full of beer bottles and bar napkins out the back door, only to find the Mexicans at the wrong end of his daddy’s boot heel.

  “Where’s the stash house?” Slade was asking them.

  When the first Mexican didn’t answer fast enough, he got a boot to the face. Dale could hear the jawbone crack from twenty feet away, where he stood.

  “Tell me where’s the stash house,” Slade repeated.

  “Me no speak—”

  That one didn’t get out another word. This time, Slade grabbed his face and positioned the Mexican’s lips at the end of the bumper of their county cruiser. Tick Tock lifted his boot heel.

  Dale screamed.

  Too late.

  Tick Tock knocked the Mexican out of that boy. He sent his teeth skittering in all directions of that red clay parking lot.

  But he’d also heard his son scream.

  “Get the fuck back inside!” Slade ordered.

  Dale did.

  That night, he was the last one to leave the 809. He stayed at one of the dancer’s apartment. He didn’t dare go home to his daddy.

  Shortly after that, cocoa cinnamon quit showing up. Of course, so did the Mexicans.

  Word around the 809 was that Tick Tock and Slade had found their stash house.

  There was never any word of it on the news.

  Slade could hardly contain himself while sitting before that Ouija board at the deer lease. His leg shook so bad he nearly rattled the planchette straight off the table. He nervously darted his eyes from Rachel to Dale to Sam.