Free Holy Death by Anthony Neil Smith Page A

months. They had never gotten past small talk with him, though. In fact, he was pretty sure they didn’t know his name. He wasn’t sure he’d ever told them. It was a place to drink that wasn’t his cabin. Some food that wasn’t from a microwave. It wasn’t the sports bar up the hill from his cabin, a bar full of “bros”, white ones, and their bitches and a bunch of noise. Occasionally, retired white people staying at the lodge next door would wander into the sports bar, too, and listening to their conversations drove Rome up the wall—boring talk about boring things from boring people. None of them were ever rude to him, not directly, but no one ever tried to really talk to him.
    He didn’t blame them.
    *
    W hen the Lemon Wolf was ready to shut down for the evening, he stood from his seat at the bar and waited for the world to stop spinning. It took a couple minutes, always did. The ladies always told him “Good night.” They never asked if they could call him a cab—if there even were cabs in Beaver Bay—or get him a ride, even though he was obviously extremely inebriated. Perhaps they wished he would glide gracefully off Highway 61 into the depths of Superior, never to be heard from again. Not one worry in the world about the money they would lose—he was drinking a bottle of their bourbon per week alongside countless craft beers at a steep mark-up, especially in the off-season—as long as the lonely black gentleman no longer haunted their small café night after night.
    Once he felt up to walking, hands still braced on the short wood bar that looked as if it was made by one of the lady’s husbands in a garage, he fought down a burp and, as usual, gave the place one last look. In between tables were wooden dividers, each hung with local art for sale. None of it was much good. Lots of owls and bears and shit. But he liked the colors. He liked that someone was trying , for fuck’s sake.
    Out the door, a little stumble here, there, until his hands were on the hood of his Jeep Grand Cherokee. A lease. He kept hoping to hit a deer with it, but he hadn’t been so lucky yet. The next burp, he lost the fight. It came up loud and full of acid and he hated himself. This was his life now. His wife, Desiree, dead by Lafitte’s gun. His attempt at revenge, all fucked to hell and back. He had now made a new enemy in Colleen, who had been his closest ally in hating Lafitte. Whatever power he had as an FBI agent had evaporated, all favors revoked. No friends left, almost. The few who remained, he’d pushed away. No one had his new cell phone number. No one knew where his cabin was. No one.
    Or so he had thought, because as he somehow made it the couple miles back to his cabin, easing down the hill, ready to accelerate if a goddamned buck wanted to step up to the challenge, he found a car parked out front. A Chevy Malibu. Sitting on the trunk, an old friend. Wyatt had risen higher in the ranks of the State Police to Captain, but tonight he was just an older man in jeans and a plaid short-sleeved button-up. Rome didn’t want to see him, since, you know, he couldn’t think of Wyatt without thinking of what happened to Desiree in that hotel stairwell.
    Rome parked beside the Chevy, got out, shook Wyatt’s hand, hugged him. “You found me.”
    “You made it easy.”
    “I didn’t mean to. Come on in.”
    They went inside the cabin, which was pretty ritzy by cabin-standards. Seriously, Rome had sold almost everything that was worth anything to make sure he had enough for this place—three hundred thousand and change—and a modest retirement account for booze and microwave dinners, newspapers and wi-fi, a lease on a Jeep Grand Cherokee he hoped might one day be the end of him.
    Cozy, faux-wood cabin styling, one big living area, a bar separating it from the kitchenette, a loft for his bed, and a Jacuzzi tub in the far corner. Windows all around, a to-die-for view of the lake. The lake was Plan B if he never hit a