Free Lamentation by Joe Clifford

say was asking?”
    Charlie and I looked at each other.
    The guys behind Bowman laughed some more.
    Then he turned to the boom box, a monstrosity from the ’80s,cranking the shrill noise louder, and went back to talking to his boys like we weren’t even there.
    “Did you know Pete?” Charlie shouted above the grind. “Pete Naginis?”
    I elbowed Charlie to shut up.
    “Because the cops just found his body,” Charlie said, “over by the truck stop.”
    That caught Bowman’s attention. He spun and stepped to Charlie, hard.
    “The fuck, you say?”
    “Nothing,” said Charlie, backing up.
    “He means the police called to tell me one of my brother’s friends had died,” I said, wedging in front of Charlie. “They’re looking for my brother. It’s better if I’m the one to tell him.”
    Bowman smirked. “Better for who?”

    Trace flurries drifted from a silver sky, wipers swishing in a lullaby. Fast cars whisked past us going in the opposite direction, as the sounds of spinning wet tires on pavement echoed down the valley boulevard, lost to the menacing tower of Lamentation Mountain.
    As we drove back to his place, Charlie and I didn’t speak. You grow up in a small town like ours and you develop a false sense of security; you forget that beyond county lines lurk predators much bigger than you. Bigger. Tougher. Meaner. And a helluva lot more dangerous.
    “What are you going to do?” Charlie asked as I pulled up his driveway.
    “I don’t know. Wait for my brother to call. Hope he does before the cops pick him up. Or maybe those guys at the shop will tell him I was looking for him.” I wanted to add, “if they don’t break his neck first,” but I was pretty sure that was implied.
    “You going to call Turley? Y’know, about what we saw?”
    “What did we see, Charlie? Nothing. A bunch of drug addicts and biker dudes.”
    “What about the chair?”
    “A chair with some rope? What do I say? There’s a bunch of junkies lying on the floor who aren’t looking so good? I told those guys my name. What’s going to happen when the cops show up half an hour after we left?”
    I lit a cigarette and gazed over his yard, which connected to an old farm, which connected to another old farm and another old farm, until the mountain range rose up to define our borders, like the glass walls of a snow globe. That’s what it felt like too. As if some prankster god had scooped up my world and given it a hearty shake, and now was sitting back, laughing.
    “I want to find my brother,” I said. “But going up there was a mistake. This really has nothing to do with me.”
    “You remember I was telling you about Fisher?”
    “What about him?”
    “He’s an investigator now.”
    “Fisher’s a cop?”
    “No. Like, for a private company. I’m not sure, exactly, but he’s definitely an investigator. He stopped in the Dubliner for a drink a couple weeks back. I was pretty hammered. Maybe he can do something.”
    “Like what?”
    “I don’t know,” Charlie said, exiting. “But I’ll give him a ring. Can’t hurt, right?”
    I didn’t bother to mention that I hadn’t talked to Fisher in years, or that the last time I had, I vividly recalled the dude hated my guts. I could hardly refuse the offer.
    Our trip to that shop had made one thing abundantly clear: my brother had sunk too deep into the muck this time for me to go wading in to pull out his ass on my own.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Next day, the murder was all over the front page of the
Herald
. The paper didn’t speculate on motive, nor did it delve too much into specifics beyond what Turley had already told me. The article didn’t come right out and say my brother was a suspect, only that he was wanted for questioning. Pretty much the same thing. The piece mostly broached hot-button peripherals like prostitution and dealing drugs at the TC, with several quotes from town officials proselytizing what needed to be done to eradicate the problems, including an