Free A Welcome Grave by Michael Koryta

he sun was a smashed ball of red in my rearview mirror when I reached Cleveland. I made one stop for lunch, as I’d missed out on a tasty jail breakfast, but otherwise stayed on the road and kept the speed up, not really caring if I got pulled over. When you’re a suspected murderer, tickets don’t mean a damn thing. Lincoln Perry, highway rebel. I needed to get a tommy gun, be ready to go down in a hail of gunfire if it came to that.
    I came up I-71 into the city, heading for the west side, and home. When I got to Brookpark, though, I pulled off onto I-480 and started east. I was wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before, unshaven and tired and stiff, but I wasn’t ready to go home just yet. After seeing a guy blow his brains into a pond and spending a night in jail, waiting for some cop to lock his fingers into my arm and call me a murderer, I had a few questions of my own. A detour to Pepper Pike seemed very much to be the order of the evening.
    The house and all its windows were gleaming in the sunlight when I pulled into the drive, the glass reflecting a crimson glow back into my eyes. I got out of the truck and laid my hand against the hood, feeling the searing heat of an engine that had been driven long and hard. The longer you spend around a machine, the more human it begins to seem. Like that old Steve McQueen movie where he’s the engineer on the navy ship.
Sand Pebbles
, was it? Good movie. He loved that damn ship engine. McQueen dies at the end, though.Trying to save a woman, if I recall correctly. Probably should have stuck to the engine room.
    I walked up the path to the house and onto the porch with my head down, thoughts of McQueen and engines running through my head, and when I reached the door I saw it was already open, Karen looking at me with red-rimmed eyes.
    “I heard you drive in.”
    “Yeah?” I went in without waiting for an invitation, walked past her, and into the living room. I dropped down into the same couch I’d taken on my last visit and waited for her to join me.
    She came in a minute later, after shutting the front door and fastening all the locks. I heard her do it—the snap of the dead bolt, the rattle of the security chain. I listened to that and thought about the way she’d rushed to the door at the sound of my truck and how she’d spilled the wine during my last visit when the phone rang. Pretty damn jumpy.
    “They told me what happened,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, but they were the sort of jeans and sweatshirt that you pay three hundred bucks for in a store where all of the employees have their nails done weekly and none of them has ever purchased a rock album.
    “Who did?”
    “The police in Indiana. They called me last night.”
    “Did they tell you they were keeping me in jail?”
    Her eyes went wide. “No. What? No. They just said . . . the detective said that he needed to get your statement and needed me to verify that what you said was true.”
    I grinned. “They took their time verifying it. Thoughtful enough to allow me a comfortable cot behind bars while they sorted it out, though.”
    She tugged the sleeves of the fancy sweatshirt down past her wrists.
    “Lincoln, I’m sorry. I didn’t know this would happen. You hadn’t even told me you were going to Indiana.”
    “For the amount of money you were throwing around, I thought I should make the notification in person.”
    “I understand. I just can’t believe what happened.” Her hands now out of sight, tucked into the sleeves, she folded her arms across her chest, hugged them under her breasts. Her eyes passed over me only in flitting glances before settling on some more reassuring, inanimate object in the room. The base of the floor lamp seemed to be her favorite.
    “It was pretty surprising,” I agreed, watching her with a hard stare. “Thecrazy bastard put the gun in his mouth and blew out a nice chunk of his skull. He was closer to me than you are now when he