Paradise County Read Free Page B

been drinking. Especially the Whistledown horses. Especially with Charles Haywood in residence.
    It was so dark that it was difficult to be certain, but the motionless figure seemed unaware of him as Joe stopped no more than a yard away and stared hard at it. A flicker of doubt assailed him: maybe it wasn’t his dad after all. The man looked too big, too burly, but then maybe the dark was deceptive. Suddenly, the only thing he was sure of—fairly sure of—was that whoever it was, was a man. Shoes, pants, the individual’s sheer size—all looked masculine. Legs thrust stiffly out in front of him, the guy was sitting on the ground, head turned a little away, arms hanging at his sides, hands resting palms up on the ground. Joe thought his eyes were closed. Again, it was too dark to be sure, but he thought he would have seen a gleam of reflected light or something if the guy was looking at him.
    “Pop?” he said, although he was almost positive now that the sitting figure was not his father. He caught a whiff of another smell foreign to the barn. It was sharper and more acrid, if not as familiar, as the booze. His voice hardened, sharpened. “All right, get up!”
    The man didn’t move.
    The reddish-brown sawdust looked almost black in the darkness. But all around the man’s right side, in a circular shape that seemed to be spreading even as Joe stared at it, was a deeper, denser blackness, an oily-looking blackness… .
    Joe’s eyes narrowed as he strained to see through the darkness. Moving nearer, crouching, he laid a wary hand on the man’s shoulder. It was solid and resilient—but, like the man, totally unresponsive.
    “Hey,” Joe said, gripping the shoulder and shaking it. Then, louder: “Hey, you!”
    The man’s head flopped forward, and then his torso slumped bonelessly away from Joe, his leather coat making a slithering sound as it moved over the wood. He ended up bent sideways at the waist, limp as a rag doll, his head resting at the outermost edge of the oily-looking circle.
    That posture was definitely not natural, Joe thought. The man had to be dead drunk—or dead.
    Oh Jesus. Dead.
    All around him now horses stomped and snorted and called in a constant, agitated chorus. He could feel their nervousness, their recognition that something was wrong in their world. The hair on the back of his neck prickled as he felt it too: the sensation he had first experienced upon entering the barn. The best way he knew to describe it was the weight of another presence. Glancing swiftly over his shoulder only to see nothing but shadows and moonlight and the bobbing heads of horses behind him, it occurred to him just how very isolated the barn was.
    There was a movie Eli liked. Joe couldn’t remember the name of it right off the top of his head, but the tag line went something like this: In space they can’t hear you scream.
    That about summed up how he felt as he crouched there in the dark beside the slumped, motionless figure. He felt the touch of invisible eyes like icy fingers on his skin, and glanced around again. He could see nothing but the horses, and the shadows, and the moonlight pouring through the door. But a sudden fierce certainty that he was not alone seized him.
    “Who’s there?” he called sharply.
    There was no reply. Had he really expected that there would be? Mouth compressing, he turned his attention back to the man before him. Touching the oily sawdust he discovered, as he had suspected, that whatever had discolored it was sticky and wet—and warm.
    Blood. The sharp, rotting-meat stench of it was unmistakable as he held his fingers beneath his nose.
    “Jesus Christ,” Joe said aloud, wiping his fingers on the sawdust to clean them. Then he reached for the man’s neck, feeling for the carotid artery, for a pulse. Nothing, though the flesh was warm. At the same time he leaned over the still figure, squinting at the shadowed features.
    By that time, his eyes were as adjusted to the dark as