Edward Lee Read Free Page A

turned people’s lives inside out. But Cummings had a plan for that too.

    Cummings was a Special Agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Russell County Field Office, in Lewisburg, Virginia. He’d worked the gig 10 years now, busting bootleggers and moonshiners, busting stills, setting up stings. At first, he’d even believed in his work — until Kath had gotten sick.

    I gotta come through for her , he thought desperately, I can’t let her down .

    Nobody else gave a shit, so why should he? And he swore to himself, once Kath was better, he’d go off the pad...

    “Hey, Stew.”

    “J.L.” Cummings dropped his gunbelt in the field office, hot weight off his waist. J.L. Peerce was a Special Agent in Charge of the FO, and he knew the ropes; Peerce grew up out here, was a rube himself until he got out and got himself an education. Slicked-back black hair, chopburns, and an Elvis sneer. Cummings didn’t have much of a problem with him.

    “We’se be goin’ to Washington next month, fer a training session at Buzzards Point.” he declared. “Party hard in D.C. strip joints every night, all on the lamb.”

    “Sounds good to me.”

    “So how was your watch?”

    Cummings eased down in an opposing metal folding chair, lit up another Lucky. “Squat. Nothin’. Checked all those still sites we busted last winter, and the sites are dry. Checked all the back trails, and — nothing. But I’m finding a little activity in some of the old McKully sites. Should be ready to drop hammer on them soon.”

    “Good,” Peerce said from his own chair across a U.S. Government gray-metal desk. “How’s the wife, by the way?”

    The question felt like a sudden fish hook sunk into Cummings’ check. “The same. Goddamn medicine is killing me. Four-fifty a month, and it’s going up.”

    “Don’t know how ya do it, Stew. Yer a good man.”

    Not as good as you might think , Cummings thought.

    ........

    Ten years now, and all they were paying him was a piddly 32.5 a year. Different raise prerequisites and time-in-service stats, save for a pissant COLA every now and then. Cummings reasoned it was their fault that he had to do what he did. If they paid him what he was worth — that would be different.

    Wouldn’t it?

    The sun was sinking. State Route 154 ribboned through treelines and dead pastures, taking him home. Sometimes he had to pull over and masturbate — another thing he didn’t fell too good about — because, despite his primal male needs, he knew it wouldn’t be right to be going home and jumping Kath’s bones, sick as she was. But whenever he did it, every single time in fact, he thought about Kath...

    She was always tired, always run down. He knew she tried hard to stay up for him every night, but lately she didn’t even have the energy to do that. Sometimes she cried about it.

    Don’t think about it , he cut off the thought. Be a man. Do the right thing. Take care of your wife, because you know goddamn well if it was you who was sick, she’d be bending over backwards to take care of you .

    That was about all it took.

    He was about to take the turnoff, then, when he saw the flashing red and blue lights up in Cotter’s Field...

    ........

    Travis lay back in bed, sighin’ yet wide-eyed. Moonlight hung in the winder, and throwed light like purdy ribbons on the wood floor, and there were a ruckus of crickets and peepers.

    Headers , he thought.

    Yessir, he’d had hisself a mighty fine header tonight.

    Grandpap had showed him how ta do it. A’corse, he’d hadda snatch hisself a splittail first, but that were easy. “Make shore it’s from a family who done us wrong,” Grandpap had instructed from his wheelchair.

    Well, in the past, back when his maw and daddy was still livin’. it weren’t just the Caudills who’d have ‘em a bad time, jackin’ their sheep an’ all. One time, he remembered, a coupla Reid’s dirty rube kids’d plucked all the apples offa one of