Shadow Roll Read Free Page B

missing limbs.  Especially erase the sight of the piteous schnook with no arms or legs.
    Since it had to be someone intact and also someone who worked here, that someone must know the place and where to get rid of the evidence.  Who worked here?  Kitchen staff.  Cleaners.  So it was down to the basement.  Where better to get rid of a sheet and maybe a pair of pants with blood on the knees than the basement furnace?  Little hope of finding anything like that, but some hope of finding something, anything, to help me out here.
    Pulling the string that switched on the overhead bulb, I found myself frozen, standing at the top of the narrow wooden stairs.  I was staring, I was stuck in place, if I didn’t get moving, I was lost.
    The brick building with its four towers looked like Dracula’s New York City address, but the basement looked like the Inquisition’s tool shed.  Always knew the Zawadzkis were bats, but this about beat all.  Right below me had to be an altar.  Over to the left was a confessional, no doubt about it.  The rest of the space was filled up with me, several piles of varied scary junk, about seventy statues of JC plus friends.
    And the furnace.
     

Chapter 5
     
    Took me awhile, but I finally got the furnace door open, one too small for an entire body to fit through—seemed logical that if one could of been, it would of been—when someone cleared his throat behind me.  I must have jumped a foot straight up in the air.
    When I got back down, I gasped, “Holy smoke, it’s you.  You spooked me.”
    Mister’d come out of the dark, one eye squinted like Popeye due to the smoke traveling up his narrow face from the butt stuck between his thin lips.  “Work here.”
    “Of course you do.”
    “You don’t.”
    “Never a truer word spoken.”
    “So whatchoo doin’ here?”
    “A stroll down memory lane?”
    “Oh yeah?  And whatchoo remember about the basement?”
    “Aside from the shed where you used to listen to the radio, you were always down here.”
    “You got that right.  Still do.  Like the radio.  Now I like Jack Benny most.  And after him, I like The Burns and Allen Show .”
    “Makes sense.  Gracie being dumb and all, and George being smart.”
    Mister gave me a cagey look.  Was that an insult?  A compliment?  Since he didn’t know and never would, he said, “You said it.”
    “Not a great day for the old school, Mister.”
    “Whatchoo mean?”
    “A child killed.”
    Mister spat out the butt.  It landed on the filthy cement floor and died there.  “That one.  That wasn’t no child.  Not no more.”
    “She was a child, Mister.”
    “Not in the eyes of God.  And don’t no one got bigger eyes than God.”
    “Excuse me, but what are you saying?  You saying she had it coming?”
    “Ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”
    I’d seen it before.  Seen it over and over when I was growing up.  Mister was getting hinky.  And when Mister got hinky, us kids usually took a powder.  The guy wasn’t a gem at the best of times.  At the worst of times, a kid didn’t want to be anywhere near.
    He was leaning over, picking something out of a pile of somethings, but his pale gooseberry eyes never left my face.  He’d shut his mouth, but those eyes were still talking to me.  They were saying: you bet she deserved it.
    “You do it, Mister?”
    “Do what?”
    “Put her in the family way?”
    Mister’d found what he’d been looking for, an old tire iron.  Faster than I could get the gun out of my pocket, he’d swung at me hard as he could.  Missed me by about a foot, but he was shouting so loud his spittle made it all the way to the sleeve of my favorite jacket.  “Full of the Devil, that’s you!  That was always you whatever your real name is!  You haven’t even got a real name, nope, never.  Me and Flo didn’t even bother to give you one, not if God didn’t.  Bastard born and bred.  Why I didn’t send you back to Him when you was liddle, I’ll never