Free Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin Page B

Pretty soon, okay? Promise?”
    “I’ll just shoot me a few these squirrels,” Silas said. He sighted something high in a tree. “You got the bullets? The cartridges?”
    Larry unzipped his coat pocket and brought out both of the small white boxes and held them out to the black boy. Silas took them reverently and transferred them to his own coat pocket. Larry showed him how to load it and gave him pointers about aiming and shooting, the same lessons his father had given him. By the time he finished telling Silas how to clean the rifle, the sky outside the woods had reddened and the limbs were darker and the smoke from the cabin had quit.
    “Oh man,” Silas said, grabbing all the wood he could gather in one hand, gun in the other. “That fire go out my momma kill me dead.”
    With sticks pointing in every direction he raced toward the sun, and only when Larry could no longer discern the rifle barrel from sticks of firewood did he himself turn and walk back into the forest where night had already begun to gather its folds. He felt welcomed by it and full of air. The last thing he did was pull at the fingers of his gloves, removing the left one, the right, and erect a stick the shape of a Y in the cold mulch beneath the leaves. On each peg he left a glove.

four
    B AD,” ANGIE’S VOICE said of Larry Ott’s condition. They’d arrived, she reported, on scene to find him lying on his back in a puddle of blood. Single gunshot wound to the chest, pistol in his hand.
    He could hear the siren. “He gone make it?”
    “Don’t know yet.” Breathless.
    “Was anybody else there? Sign of a fight?”
    “We ain’t see nobody and the place ain’t look like no struggle. We left his gun on the floor.”
    Silas switched ears with his cell phone. In his headlights the slick blacktop two-lane ribboned up and down the razed hills like film unspooling, the Jeep riding the land.
    “Anything else?” he asked.
    “Not that we noticed. We was kinda busy, though.”
    “I know you was, sweetie. Thanks for going.”
    “You coming to the hospital?” she asked, and he knew she’d hang around if she could, maybe get a coffee with him in the cafeteria.
    “Naw, I’m going on over to Lar—to Ott’s, get a look around.”
    “See you tonight at the Bus?”
    “Might be hard.”
    “Damn, I hope so.”
    He laughed. “It ain’t no telling how late I’ll be out there.”
    Next he called French, in his office in Fulsom. The chief was chewing.
    “You shitting me,” he said.
    “Naw I ain’t. Shot in the chest.”
    “Rains it pours, don’t it.” French sounded annoyed. “How’d they know to go out yonder?”
    Silas slowed for a log truck in front of him on the road, its longest tree with limbs that still bore a few shivering needles. “I sent em.”
    A long beat. “You sent em.”
    “Yeah.”
    French waited. “Well?”
    He hesitated, aware of the word he was about to use. “On a hunch.”
    “A hunch ? What are you, Shaft?”
    Silas fed him the chain of events.
    “Shit, 32,” French said. “Track a cloud of buzzards to a floater in the morning and follow a ‘hunch’ to attempted murder in the afternoon. You after my job?”
    Silas signaled and passed the log truck, waving an absent hand out the window. “Just a pay raise. But Ott might be more than attempted murder.”
    “Right.” Chewing. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he won’t make it.”
    “That a oyster po’boy, Chief?”
    “Shrimp, smart-ass.” He belched.
    “Damn, I can smell that shit through the phone.”
    “I’ll go to the hospital,” French said, “get a look at the victim. You boogie on over to your friend’s and I’ll get there when I can. And don’t touch nothing.”
    He rogered and hung up, relieved not to have to go see Larry.
    By now it was darker and he turned on his lights, passed a run-down house with an old black man under his porch light in a rocking chair smoking a cigarette. Silas beeped his horn and the man waved back.
    Though