Chapter Eight
Hell House Client Brief: The kitchen is fully stocked. Help yourself to snacks.
Kel tossed the whiskey back,
Usually that would make him cough as the heat caught the back of his throat. Today he barely noticed it. Compared to the scald of smoke he could still taste on the back of his tongue, the liquor went down like honey.
“...I swear, I had her like this,” Kel gloated. He held his hand out, palm up, to demonstrate. Then closed his fingers quickly. “I could have talked her into anything, Ruby.”
His grandmother didn’t look impressed.
Kel shrugged that off. It just meant that she was and didn’t want him to know. He reached over the table for the whiskey as Ruby pulled her specs out of her purse and unfolded the legs. She waited until the tortoiseshell frames were balanced on her nose to give him a disapproving look over them.
“What happened to one drink being your limit?” she asked, eyebrows crooked up under her bangs.
The bottle was already tipped over Kel’s glass. He hesitated for a moment at the reminder and then laughed as he tilted it a bit further to let a fresh shot glug.
“I’m celebrating,” he said.
Ruby snorted as she ran her eye over the paperwork that Kel had hastily drawn up. She pursed her lips and shook her head.
“Celebrating what?” she asked as she waved it at him. “You went out there to get some money, and came back with first refusal on a farm you don’t want, can’t afford, and that will belong to the bank shortly? The job is to sell her a pipe dream, not fall for one yourself.”
For a moment Kel doubted himself.
It was, he supposed, possible that she had a point. He’d levied a lot of sweet talk to get Sandra to sign over the lien, but it had been candy floss and spun sugar. Kel hadn’t actually gotten into the taffy of anything that was actually actionable.
But no.
Ruby just couldn’t see the potential. And OK, neither could Kel right now. It was there, though. A glob of something he knew he’d really want once he knew what it was. All he had to do to bring it into focus was keep talking.
He tasted the spice and smoke of that conviction on the tip of his tongue as he told Ruby, “Just wait. I know what I’m doing.”
She snorted.
“I’ve heard that before.”
From him. The smoke pulled the unsaid part of that statement from where it lived behind Ruby’s face. It slipped it discreetly into Kel’s ear. He appreciated the assist, but it didn’t need to have bothered.
That one he could pick up on his own.
“I’m not my dad,” he said. This time the mouthful of whiskey tasted flat and gingery on his tongue. Medicinal. He meant to stop there, but the words slipped out of him like smoke. “I’m not my grandad either.”
Ruby flinched. She pulled her glasses off her face and pointed them at him.
“You can leave him out of whatever this is,” she said. “Your grandfather might not have been a good man, but he was a smart one.”
Kel stretched his legs out under the kitchen table. The heels of his boots scraped over the lino. Despite his best efforts, Ruby’s mood had soured his, popping the heady feeling that had stuck to him since he left Milligan’s farm.
“Yeah, well, like I said…I’m not him. Or Dad,” he said. He turned the whiskey glass in his hand and watched the light flicker in the honey-gold liquid. “They got the hell out of Marble Falls.”
Ruby set her glasses down on top of the Milligan lien and got up from the table. She started to clear away the dishes with sharp, irritated movements.
“Your grandad, Ezekiel, was run out of town on a rail by the Maddens, so they wouldn’t have to pay their debts,” she said as she brushed crumbs onto the floor with a swipe of a weather-beaten hand.
“And your dad…well, he ran away from you and your mom, but maybe that’s because he never had a father of his own.
Never had an example. So you can’t blame them.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the Maddens. ”
With that, she snatched the whiskey off Kel and stalked away over the kitchen to shove it back into a cupboard.
She tried to slam the door on it, too, but the frame was warped, and it stuck.
The best Ruby could manage was giving it an irritated shove with the heel of her hand until it wedged into place.
Kel tilted his glass. He watched the reflection of the overhead light sparkle in the liquor.
“I did,” he said.
That was why he’d made Dio Madden’s life a misery after all. The various petty cons and ‘it can stop if you pay me to stop it’ harassment hadn’t just been for a payday; it had been payback. The retaliation for the generational insults the Maddens had doled out to his family over the years.
Because what they’d done to Ezekiel was bad enough, but then Dio Madden had come back to Marble Falls. Like he just had to rub in the fact that he got a choice about it.
His moment of introspection was interrupted by Ruby’s annoyed sniff.
“Oh, you did, did you,” she said. “What changed?”
Kel lifted the glass to his mouth. He tasted the whiskey, cheap and sharp, as the rim touched his lower lip.
“Me,” he said, as he drained the glass. This time he felt the bite of it in the back of his throat. He stood up and set the glass down neatly on the table, the base clicking against the use-scarred Formica. “I am a Madden now, remember?”
Then he left. He was outside getting into his truck when he heard the door slam open behind him.
“You’re a Laker,” Ruby yelled after him. Fuck the neighbors, apparently. To be fair, they’d never cared who they woke up with their fights. “Any chance you had to be anything—anyone—else left town with Ezekiel. Get used to it.”
No.
Kel started the truck, gripped the wheel tightly, and peeled out of the yard in search of something (someone) to repair his mood.
Warwick was out of uniform.
She propped up the bar at The Quarry in jeans and a low-cut top, freckles on display, as she waited for the barman to get her beer. The look she gave Kel was unfriendly.
“You know what, Kel,” she said. “You’re not as smart as you think you are. Never have been.”
Smoke eddied around her mouth as she spoke. The murmur of it inside Kel’s head was clearer than Warwick’s voice was, unmuddled by the noise of the jukebox or the other patrons.
No one’s as smart as you think you are, still too smart for your own good.
Kel leaned his elbow on the bar. “No one’s as smart as I think I am.”
He ignored Warwick’s suspicious look at hearing her own thoughts in his mouth. Why not? What was she going to do, accuse him of reading her mind? That was ridiculous.
Even Kel, riding high on a good run of luck, knew that.
The barman came over. He flicked the rag over his shoulder and leaned across the counter to be heard.
“What do you want?”
“Whiskey,” Kel said.
The barman gave him a once-over to weigh the odds that Kel would be the sort of drunk to cause problems. He apparently decided that he was worth the risk as he turned around to grab a bottle of Jack from the speed rack behind the bar.
“Didn’t you learn your lesson about drinking and driving last time?” Warwick asked.
The reminder made Kel shift his weight from habit. It was habit. It had never helped much. Both knees hurt either way.
Not so much tonight, though. They still ached a bit, and he could feel the gritty resistance of bone as it grated on bone as he moved. It just wasn’t as bad as usual.
Like what he’d thought recovery would be like, instead of the nails between the joints reality. If it was this easy, maybe he should rethink becoming a drunk.
He tabled that thought for later as the barman brought back his drink.
“I’ve got a ride,” Kel told Warwick. Well, in theory. He took the glass and tilted his head toward Warwick. “It’s on her.”
Annoyance creased Warwick’s face. “The fuck it is.”
Kel turned and leaned back against the bar, elbows braced on the wooden surface.
He watched the bar as he idly swirled liquor around the glass, watching people stagger across the dance floor, dig into meals, or drink with grim intent.
Some of them had threads of ‘smoke’ already threaded through their hair and caught in their teeth.
He wondered what they’d have to say if he went to talk to them.
For now though, he cut his gaze sideways to check on Warwick.
“Us being friends gives you an excuse to keep talking to me.”
“Not really a goal of mine,” Warwick said sourly. But the smoke told him she knew he was right, and she pulled her wallet out to pay even as she grumbled. “OK, then, if you’re feeling chatty. You really think anyone is going to buy that you aren’t a fucking Laker to your bones?”
“You didn’t mind fucking a Laker,” he pointed out.
“Yeah, ask him how quickly I realized that was a mistake,” Warwick said.
The smoke around her mouth thickened, dark and heavy as a grease fire as she exhaled. It licked at her lips hungrily before it mouthed.
Ask her if she knows how quickly I realised, the smoke said. If she knows I never thought it about her.
Kel choked on a mouthful of whiskey. It itched in the back of his sinuses as it splashed in directions other than down. Somehow he knew who the her was and…OK, he guessed Warwick just liked to cast her line in the Laker gene pool.
Warwick brushed the spray of liquor off her sleeve and gave him an annoyed look.
“I know I paid for it; I don’t need it back,” she said sourly.
“Yeah, well,” Kel said. “I assumed you’d know Freddie wasn’t the Laker I meant.”
Warwick went still for a beat. Then she visibly restarted with a quick, shallow breath that jerked her chest.
“You’re drunk,” she said. “Go home.”
The smoke clung to her mouth and cheeks like a mask—caul, something in the back of Kel’s head corrected him. He ignored it—until he almost couldn’t see her through it.
Did she tell you? Does she talk about me? When? Is it real?
Kel breathed in and caught the smoke on the back of his tongue. It had bite, like hot honey on charred meat, and it clung to his mouth. He wanted…
…