Free Thief River Falls by Brian Freeman

going.”
    Lisa accelerated again. The telephone poles sped by beside them. A solitary truck carrying a load of timber passed going the opposite way. Not long after, she reached an intersection at a single-lane dirt road. There were no structures and no traffic nearby, just two empty roads cutting across each other. She turned right, traveling past farm fields that had already been plowed over for the winter season. Fall colors painted the trees that grew along the ribbon of a creek.
    “So you write books?” Purdue asked, breaking the silence.
    “Yes, I do.”
    “What kind of books?”
    “Thrillers.”
    “You mean like where people get killed and stuff?”
    Lisa smiled. “Sometimes.”
    “Is it hard to write a book?”
    “It’s very hard.”
    “So why do you do it?”
    She found herself slowing the pickup, watching the furrows of black dirt in the fields. “Well, I don’t really have a choice. That’s how my brain is wired.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Lisa pointed out the window. “What do you see out there?”
    “Nothing.”
    She pulled the truck onto the shoulder. Her wheels splashed through the puddles as she drifted to a stop. “No, seriously. Tell me exactly what you see.”
    Purdue folded his arms together as if he were working on a school assignment. “I see tire ruts, like from a tractor. Mud, because it’s been raining. Bits of old cornstalks. Evergreens way far down on the other end of the field. A little bit of smoke going up in the sky, like somebody has a fire. Is that right?”
    “Yes, that’s right, but that’s not what I see.”
    The boy frowned. “What do you see?”
    “I see something pretty scary. Maybe too scary for you.”
    “No, tell me.”
    “I see a dead body in the field. A woman. She’s wearing a red blouse that makes a splash of color against the black soil. I don’t know who she is yet, but I’m wondering who was cruel enough to leave her in this remote place. I see a sheriff’s car coming down the highway toward us at high speed. I can see its red lights from a mile away. There’s a man inside. He’s a good man, a handsome man, but he’s afraid, because this woman isn’t the first victim, and he knows what he’s going to find when he examines her body. An arrow, black, with white feathers, stuck in the woman’s mouth and going through the back of her neck into the mud. There’s a single word painted on the shaft of the arrow in tiny ancient script like you’d find in an old Bible. The word is Demon .”
    Purdue’s mouth hung open. “Seriously? That’s what you see?”
    “Yup. Scary, right?”
    “Yeah, but scary stories are fun. I like them. What does it all mean?”
    “I don’t know. I won’t know until I write the book. But all my life, those are the things I’ve seen wherever I go. I don’t look at the world the way other people do. I live somewhere else. To me, every place turns into stories and crimes and characters and mysteries.”
    “That sounds pretty cool.”
    “It is. Although honestly, there are days when I wish I could see nothing but tractor ruts, just like you.”
    She gave Purdue a grin. With a scrape of rock under her tires, she guided the pickup back onto the dirt road and headed east. Another mile passed. She could see the boy staring through the window, deep in thought, as if he was trying to see the things that she saw. Thriller things. Mystery things. And maybe he could. Children had the gift, the second sight, the sixth sense. Sometimes she wondered if most writers were really just children who’d never grown up.
    At the next dirt road, she turned again.
    That was when Purdue shouted, “There! That’s it!”
    Lisa tapped the brakes. She leaned across the pickup, her stare following the direction where the boy was pointing. A quarter mile away, she saw a cluster of farm buildings on the border of an old cornfield. The property had seen better days, the white paint on the house flaking away, an old snowmobile rusting in the