Free Easy Death by Daniel Boyd Page B

practice. “Most of us, if we got a book some way, we just used it for toilet paper or to roll cigarettes, but my brother, he loved to read.”
    “That’s the one you’re going to visit?”
    “Going to visit his wife. And the kids. He dead.”
    “That’s right.” Eddie tried to sound solemn talking about the dead. “You said it was a long time back?”
    “Few years back,” Walter said tonelessly. “They burned him up.”
    “Burned him up? He burned to death, your brother?”
    “They burned him,” Walter repeated. “Kids out of high school or not much older. Used to tear around the county that summer, making wild, driving reckless up and down the back roads, just going crazy ’cause they wasn’t in school no more, and making trouble.”
    “And they set fire to your brother?”
    “He hadn’t done nothing. And nobody ever said for sure they did it. It was just they had the chance, and I guess they wanted to see how it felt like to do a thing like that. Like they’d heard about folks doing back in the day.”
    “They go to jail for it?” Eddie knew the answer already but he asked anyway. “Anybody ever arrest them?”
    “Nobody never tried,” Walter said patiently. “His wife, she talked to the sheriff and the chief of police, but nobody took them to law. Never got the chance, maybe they would have, but it didn’t look like they was going to.”
    “Never got the chance?”
    “Those boys, they got cracked up in that car of theirs. They used to go tearing up and down the same old back roads late at night, like I said, and one night they run smack into a car somebody had stole and left it over a hill where they couldn’t see it till too late to stop. Run smack into it. Catch fire, sure did.”
    “Killed them all?” Again, Eddie thought he knew the answer.
    “None of them lived,” Walter said simply.
    “Nice work.”
    “Yeah, but I had to beat feet out of there, and sudden, too. Would’ve liked to take my brother’s wife and the kids with me, but no time for that.”
    “That’s when you come North?”
    “And ended up working for Brother Sweetie, yeah.”
    “Probably better for a black man up here anyway.”
    “You reckon like that?” Walter worked the clutch again, on a sharper curve this time, and both men held their breath as the rear wheels slid, then bit back at the snow, regaining control.
    Eddie gave a silent sigh of relief. Then,
    “You mean it ain’t?” he asked. “It ain’t any easier for a black man up here than down South?”
    “It’s different, some, but—” Walter squinted, and Eddie couldn’t tell if he was groping for the right words or just trying to see better through the pummeling snow. “Well, it’s like down South they got signs up, Whites Only, No Blacks Allowed. Like that. I don’t read maybe, but I learn to know those signs quick enough. They got places a black man don’t go and they say it plain. Up here, they don’t got the signs maybe, but they got the same places where a black man don’t go, and they got ways of saying it. Just different, that’s all. And no signs. You got to just look at a place and try to figure if—”
    He stopped. Stared straight ahead.
    From the side of the road, a massive, grey-brown buck with antlers like a hat rack rose up from cover that couldn’t have hid a rabbit and walked out into the road in front of them.
    And then just stood there in front of the oncoming car.
    “Oh hell. Hell!” Walter slammed in the clutch, fanned the brakes and spun the wheel. The heavy car slid sideways, cross-ways, backwards, and past the buck, who gave it a wide-eyed stare and disappeared again.
    “Damn, Eddie, I’m sorry!” Walter just had time to shout it as the car kept sliding in slow motion, off the road and into a drain-ditch.

Chapter 19
Three Hours and Fifteen Minutes After the Robbery
    December 20, 1951
    12:15 PM
    Slimmy and the Cop
    Slimmy sat in the back of the patrol car, contemplating his tragic fate and reflecting on the