Free Benefit of the Doubt: A Novel by Neal Griffin

scalding hot. While the tub filled, he sat on the closed toilet and breezed through the copy of Hustler he’d brought along to help set the mood. Once she floated an inch off the bottom, he turned off the spigot. The hole in her forehead bubbled and her long hair turned a darker auburn and looped about her in the water. Her mouth, erotic earlier in the day, hung slack jawed, the still-tender tongue sticking out like a fat red worm. Her wide-open eyes stared at him from under the steaming water as if to ask what in the world had become of her.
    “Ya look like a frickin’ retard.” He spoke as if to admonish. “If you’re a whore again in your next life, keep to your work and don’t talk so damn much.”
    Harlan went to the door, looked out the peephole, and saw no one. He walked out and pulled the door shut behind him. The stolen car he’d arrived in still sat in the lot, clean of prints, and that’s where it’ll stay, he thought. Harlan figured this was as good a time as any to get reacquainted with walking.
    Five minutes later he strolled into the Greyhound station. He pulled the dead girl’s hard-earned cash from his pocket and slapped down $42 for a one-way ticket. He checked the electronic board that listed departure and arrival times and saw that his trip would take a little over four hours. He’d get there and grab a room. Order in. Lay low. Alone, he told himself, now aware that his trip to Chippewa Falls had involved a foolish indiscretion. Years of planning nearly wasted for an afternoon hummer from a local hooker.
    Harlan boarded the bus and found an empty seat toward the back. By the time the Greyhound reached cruising speed, his eyes were closed. The past several days had been intense, and he welcomed the opportunity to drift. His mind wandered back to the endless forest of his boyhood, to years of lean but purposeful living followed by law trouble, arrest, and finally prison. His thought of his father, dead for nearly a decade.
    Pa.
    Jedidiah Lee had been a cantankerous sixty-year-old recluse the day a half-breed Chippewa temptress barely of legal age wandered into his shack in the deepest woods of Florence County. Near ruined but well trained by all the substantial forms of reservation abuse, the girl sought only safety and shelter in exchange for an enthusiastic brand of companionship she willingly demonstrated within moments of their initial meeting. Jedidiah always referred fondly to those early romps and said though the couple rarely spoke, their nightly coupling left both spent but agreeable to one more day of their shared but separate existence.
    The first indication of her pregnancy marked the end of their relationship, and two weeks after giving birth she was gone, leaving father and newborn son behind. Jedidiah claimed he never harbored a shred of ill will against Harlan’s mother; far from it. He was thankful to her for the establishment of his legacy. From his first day of parenthood, Jedidiah devoted his life to his only child.
    Harlan stared out the window at the passing signposts, barns, and cornfields, and thought about how he came to live the outlaw life. His father had always boasted that the Lee gene for emotional indifference and legal irreverence had been passed on to his son. Jedidiah and Harlan were as much notorious partners in crime as they were father and son. With Harlan’s youth and Jedidiah’s guile, they turned the hundred-and-sixty-acre family homestead into the most sophisticated and profitable marijuana grow east of the Mississippi. The Lees were just hitting their stride when it all came to a sudden end.
    A rival dope dealer found dead. Arrested, jailed and with a sham of a trial looming, Harlan pled guilty. He got twenty-five to life. Game over.
    The old man grew feeble while the state kept Harlan penned up like dairy stock. At the last visit Jedidiah managed to make, they spoke of years past, of old scores and outlaw associates.
    As he left, the old man had