Crimes in Southern Indiana Read Online Free PDF Page A

the factory. A hot toddy sipped to break the mucus of a head or chest cold. Bacon for a bee sting until the stinger showed enough to be tweezed free from the flesh. Fresh-squeezed tomato pulp with canned pickle juice and a shot of Everclear to nurse a hangover. And if shehad a hound who’d not received his vaccination quick enough but instead acquired parvo, she’d end his suffering by placing the barrel of a gun to his skull to prepare him for burial. She’d helped her daddy do it more than once.
    Deets had been raised by the same old ways. He crushed large squares of ice and packed them into the bath. He held warm Jell-O in a coffee cup to her lips to help keepher hydrated and break the fever. The fever that would last longer than the labor of a child. Days, not hours.
    At first he feared her brain would be damaged. He’d heard the stories his mother had told him as a child, men and women whose fevers weren’t broken quickly enough, held for too long, their brains frying like the rabbits he coated with buttermilk to stick to the wheat flour, then placedinto a skillet of lard and fried to a crisp.
    Once her fever broke, she was unable to remember names and faces, places and times. Her speech was slurred for a while, as though her jaws had been pistol-whipped by the butt of a .38.
    But Brockman prescribed his vitamins and assured Deets that Elizabeth would recover. And as the days added up on the calendar, she gradually returned to being the samewoman he’d married some years before.
    But what he later told himself was that he shouldn’t have trusted him with her. Shouldn’t have trusted Brockman with his wife. But he had.
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    The woman talking to Dispatch came out onto the sidewalk, wobbled to a pace, disappeared down past the Dollar Store, around the corner past the bank. But the marshal hadn’t shown up. He was what Deets’s daddy wouldhave referred to as so poke-ass he was probably late for his own conception.
    But he’d wait. One thing Deets had was time. He’d passed through so many towns he couldn’t remember if this was his tenth town or his twentieth job. They were all the same. What he could remember were the four characteristics that built a small town: a post office, a sheriff or marshal’s station, a bank, and a graveyard.He’d always check the post office, pulling the wanted posters of a man who haunted him, collecting them from each and every town. An identity that wouldn’t let him forget. That wouldn’t let him start over.
    By day he’d pass the bank, the marshal’s station, and at night he’d walk the graveyards, wondering how the dead had passed. By accident, sickness, or the hands of their loved ones, their kin.
    He’d been down as far south as Greenville, Alabama. Traveled back through Dayton, Tennessee. Manchester, Milan, and Dyersburg. Crossed over into Poplar Bluff and Garwood, Missouri. But he’d backtracked over the years through Illinois, Indiana, and back into Kentucky. Through Owensboro, Elizabethtown, Bardstown, Mount Sterling, traveling into the polarization of the hills. Traveling to Morehead,then back into Pine Ridge, Campton, Jackson, Hazard. And Whitesburg, where everybody knew your kin’s family tree, fished with dynamite, and hunted with a double-barrel .12-gauge. Your daddy either owned a lot of land or worked a coal mine in a surrounding county like Harlan that paid well. You always attended church on Sunday, and no matter how much you did or didn’t contribute to the offering plate,it was a place where people lived a simple and straightforward life. And it was here that Deets realized he’d traveled so long he’d forgotten who he was, and what he was running from.
    From town to town some had heard the story. Had read it in the papers if they could read or heard it on the television if they owned one with an antenna. Had seen the features of the young man he once was, clean-shavenand