Free Burn What Will Burn by C. B. McKenzie Page A

my invalid mother. I found him collapsed in his car, Jim Beam in hand.
    â€œHe choked to death on his own vomit,” I recalled, wiped the sweat sheen off the bald spot at the back of my head.
    Baxter nodded.
    â€œHe was a chronic alcoholic, Sheriff. An affliction I’m sure you’re familiar with.”
    I knew that was pushing it, but I was mad.
    Baxter just narrowed his eyes.
    â€œYour mother managed to die of natural causes, I hope, Mister Reynolds.”
    I nodded.
    My mother followed her husband into the grave pretty much, pausing only long enough to put her strange affairs in order. Codependents my parents would be called currently, though not, perhaps, in most conventional senses were they …
    Enablers.
    As they did not really enable each other, but quite the opposite. They, sort of, eventually, killed one another.
    That was another one of their mistakes I had not repeated. I had not let my wife kill me.
    â€œHeart failure,” I said.
    It had always been my understanding that Momma loved me like she did him, but her sudden departure from my continuing scene led me to believe otherwise. She did leave me most of her money, which had been my daddy’s money, which had been his daddy’s money. But she allowed me my full inheritance, one hundred percent, only after I swore on one of her many Holy Bibles to keep her storefront church open …
    Which I did not do.
    Because I do not, really, believe in Promises.
    Semper Fi, you can have it.
    â€œMy momma died in the hospital,” I said.
    Baxter nodded, as if he knew that that was a lie from me even though he was not sure because he had not done that much background check on me.
    Actually, my mother had died at home with me in the house. She had a heart attack and drowned facedown in her oatmeal bowl.
    The sheriff looked over my shoulder at the fenced-in “compound” over on the south side of The Little Piney, then he looked back at me, stared at me.
    â€œYou know what ‘modus operandi’ is, Mister?”
    â€œIt’s the way a fella has of doing something that is peculiar to that particular fella,” I answered. “More or less.”
    â€œSo…,” he said, hitched up his pistol-weighted belt. “Let’s just say if a man does turn up dead by drowning nearby, you’re going to be first on my list of prime suspects for putting him there, Mister Reynolds. So if I was you, I’d forget about this particular fantasy of yours of finding a dead man in The Little Piney right here.”
    â€œAll right,” I said, not looking his way, looking at the creek, right at the spot where I knew I thought I’d seen the dead man, “Buck.”
    â€œAnd, out of courtesy, Mister Reynolds, I will remind you once more that I’m High Sheriff of Poe County. And ask you plainly if you get my drift about what that might mean for you.”
    I nodded. “I get your drift, Sheriff Baxter,” I said, because I did.
    â€œJust a word to the wise, Mister.”
    â€œI got it,” I said. “High Sheriff,” I repeated. “Poe County. Word to the wise should be sufficient.”
    â€œWe’re on the same page so far, Mister Reynolds.”
    If the High Sheriff of Poe County and I were on the same page that would be the first time in a long time I had been on the same page with anybody, so I doubted that we really were. But I did not argue with Sam Baxter about where we were relative to one another. The High Sheriff of Poe County was not someone I wanted to arrest me or book me, and I surely did not want to become to him any sort of Person of Interest.
    Sheriff Sam Baxter got in his car, shut the door, backed off the bridge, turned the Tan-and-White around in County Road 615 and drove east in a cloud of red dust.
    He didn’t ask me if I wanted a ride.
    I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.

 
    CHAPTER 5
    I stood on the bridge, blinking. According to my dead watch it