South Village (Ash McKenna) Read Online Free PDF Page A

me like he’s looking for a weak point. I want to tell him that no, it’s not worth it, but that’d be throwing gasoline on a trash fire. I hold his jade green eyes for what seems like a moment too long, and finally he shakes his head and looks around me to Tibo. “This doesn’t smell right.”
    Tibo still won’t make eye contact with him. Marx spins around and stalks off. We watch him until he disappears, and then it’s the two of us.
    And Pete, lying on the ground.
    “That dude is a giant walking bag of dicks,” I say, nodding after Marx.
    “That’s a strange analogy,” Tibo says. “I’d just call him an asshole.”
    We turn, survey the scene. The bridge. The body. Look up at the tree house.
    “Can you get up there?” Tibo asks.
    “Cannabelle is the resident climber. Want me to go get her?”
    “I need you to go up there.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I trust you.”
    I put my hands on my hips, look at Tibo. “What’s going on?”
    “I need to know Pete wasn’t stashing any drugs,” Tibo says. “Anything hard, at least. We don’t have long until the sheriff gets here.”
    “What happened, anyway?”
    “No one saw it. Sunny found him. I think the scene is pretty self-explanatory.”
    “Snap, fall, snap.”
    “It’s my fault.” Tibo says. He takes a big breath and sighs. “It’s my fault.”
    “It’s not your fault.”
    He looks at me sideways. “I’m in charge. It’s my fault.”
    “Let’s put that aside for right now.”
    Tibo arches an eyebrow, leans forward, and sniffs. “Little early to be drinking, isn’t it?”
    “Only if you lack resolve.”
    He rolls his eyes and hurries off, so I circle the tree, give the body a wide berth, look for a place to get a handhold. There doesn’t seem to be a very good one until I get all the way around to the other side, and find a branch low enough that I can catch it and thick enough that, hopefully, it won’t break under my weight.
    Hopefully. One broken neck is enough.
    Wait, no. One is too many.
    I take a long drink from my flask, cram it back in my pocket, take a few steps and jump, grab the branch. The wood cuts into my palms and the branch dips toward me but it doesn’t break, so I pull myself up and wrap my legs around it, twist myself over until I’m lying on top of it. I slide down toward the base of the tree, to where the branch is thicker, and there are enough branches around it I can get up to a standing position.
    Once I’m upright it’s a simple task of climbing the branches like a crooked ladder until I’m at a window of the tree house. It’s not netted, thankfully, so I don’t have to rip anything down. I climb onto the platform with Crusty Pete’s sleeping bag, which reeks of body odor and old food.
    Oh Crusty Pete and your wildly accurate nickname.
    I push the sour-smelling bag aside, climb across and onto the floor. It’s sparse and dim, this tree house not wired for electricity, so there’s nothing to turn on. The air is thick, the breeze apparently not coming through the window or the door enough to clear it out. There’s the platform, a chair, and a small table, everything roughed out from plywood by an amateur hand, unfinished and not painted. On the table there’s a paper plate, two shiny black water bugs feasting on the crumbs of whatever was left.
    Motherfucker. I will never get used to seeing these things. Not here. Seeing them crawl out of a sewer grate or disappear under the fridge is at least familiar. I didn’t expect to find them in the woods. These are worse than New York roaches, too, because they’re bigger and sometimes fly at your face.
    They pay me no attention, so I crouch down, to Pete’s worn and tattered duffel bag. It’s full of dirty clothing and a small plastic baggie of shriveled brown shrooms, which I shove into the back pocket of my jeans. On the sleeping platform, there’s a small pile of papers and books. Mostly books.
    Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, 1984 by George Orwell,