Slow Burn (Book 7): City of Stin Read Free Page A

cupboard, it won’t matter anyway. It could be raccoon meat and we wouldn’t know the difference.”
    “Ugh,” Murphy replied, then changed the subject. “You getting restless?”
    “Why?” I turned and shot an irritated look at Murphy. “What do you mean?”
    “I see you out there every day looking at those helicopters.”
    “And?”
    Murphy laughed. “Sometimes you act like you’re the only smart person in the world. You watch the helicopters come and go, and every day I can tell you’re getting more and more curious. I know you’re going to tell me one day you want to head south and see where they’re going, or head north and see where they’re coming from. I know you.”
    I wanted to deny it, but Murphy was right. I knew in my heart I should probably get as far away from the helicopters as I possibly could, but still, some little part of me wanted to believe they represented a return to normalcy—hot food every day, Starbucks, bottled beer, hot showers, civilization. I hesitated to answer. “I am curious about the helicopters.”
    Murphy leaned on a counter. “Stop playing with that fish. Wash your hands and let’s talk about this.”
    I held up my hands and looked at them. Okay, I shouldn’t have touched the raw fish. Still, clean hands were another one of those luxuries left behind. I wiped them on my pants. “Good enough, mom?”
    Murphy glanced into a kettle we kept beside the sink. We shared the chore of filling it from the lake, but didn’t boil it so it wasn’t for drinking. It was for pouring over dirty hands or dirty dishes, and unfortunately, I’d used the last of it cleaning up the dinner dishes. Murphy said, “If you get sick, don’t blame me.”
    I looked at my hands. “I’m conditioning my weak immune system for a dirty world.”
    “Whatever.”
    I smiled. “So what did you want to say about the helicopters?”
    “Civilization is out there somewhere,” Murphy pointed toward the lake, “wherever those helicopters are taking off from and landing.”
    “I’m with you so far.”
    “Every day I see those,” he said, “I wonder about Rachel.”
    “Do you worry whether she and the others made it out to Balmorhea?” I asked.
    “I don’t know that answer,” Murphy frowned. “I can only guess, and guesses aren’t worth shit.”
    “Yup.” I took a moment before I asked. “Do you think that by finding the folks with the helicopters you can get in touch with Rachel and Dalhover somehow?”
    “Yes,” Murphy answered. “I gotta believe these guys with the helicopters are setting up some kind of communication network at least. Maybe they’re trying to reestablish order. If that’s the case, at some point, they’ll come into contact with Rachel and the others.”
    “Murphy, you’re being unemotional about Rachel and kind of ignoring the underlying question.”
    “Which is?” he asked.
    “Whether you made a mistake in staying here with me. Whether I made a mistake in choosing to remain.”
    Murphy shook his head in instant response. “Rachel’s tough. She’s smart. She doesn’t need me to protect her. Sure, I would have liked to stay with her but—” Murphy cut off his words for no apparent reason.
    “But what?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
    He frowned again. “What you said that night on the pontoon boat.”
    “That we’ll always be different?” I asked.
    “Yeah,” Murphy nodded. “If we hadn’t showed up that night and saved Rachel and her hillbilly friends, I think they would have made it out of that cove. Hell, I’m sure Rachel and Freitag would have made it out anyway. Everything that happened after, happened because you and me are Whites. Regular people are afraid of us.” Murphy jumped up and sat on the counter.
    “You think what happened was our fault?”
    “Yeah.” He nodded again. “Some of it, all of it, I don’t know. Maybe eventually, Jay and his crazy brother would have backstabbed everyone anyway.”
    “Those guys were nuts.”