It was moving. Railspan by railspan passing below the turning wheels, taking them God only knew where.
Aaron was kneeling in front of him. The cowboy stared at Ken with concern.
“I bet you’d like to know what’s going on,” he said.
END OF BOOK FOUR
THE SAGA WILL CONTINUE IN BOOK FIVE
THE COLONY: SHIFT
Also, check out this excerpt from MbC’s newest paranormal thriller, CRIME SEEN:
Evan White looked at his hands again, as though this time he might see something different. As though this time they might hold answers; might tell him where his life had gone and how everything had turned to crap so very quickly.
For the briefest instant it seemed like he was on the edge of an epiphany. An understanding that would shift not merely his perception but his existence.
“I’m the one you’ve been looking for.”
The voice sounded in Evan’s head, the memory bouncing around like a bullet in his skull, ripping apart bits of his mind. Peeling away his brain a layer at a time, drilling deep, revealing… what?
The call had come on his cell phone. Just one more call, like so many that had come in the wake of… in the wake of what had happened.
Tragedy brings out the worst in humanity. It brings out the leeches and the sycophants and the crazies. At first Evan thought that the call came from another one of the latter: just one more nut-job who had seen the case in the paper and wanted five seconds of vicarious fame. In a world where heiresses could sex their way to stardom and ninety percent of prime time news seemed to be devoted to what some anorexic starlet was wearing, Evan shouldn’t have been surprised. Shouldn’t have been disappointed.
But he was. He felt his spirit die a bit with every call.
“Do you have a name?” he said.
The phone had sat silent in his hand for a moment. That was the first time he thought he might be talking to someone out of the ordinary. Not that he believed for a second it was the someone. No. But maybe not a nutter, either. Nutters talked too much, answered too quickly. A simple “Do you have a name?” would have been an invitation for a torrent of crazy, a deluge of insanity.
Not silence.
Finally, the man on the other end of the phone said, “That’s not important. What’s important is the look on your wife’s face when she died.”
Evan went cold when he heard those words. Maybe the man on the phone was a kook. But Evan had to know.
He had to.
“Is this a joke to you?” he said.
The man laughed. And the laugh was the thing that cinched it, the thing that guaranteed that Evan would go where the man wanted him to go, on the off chance that he actually knew something.
Because whether this man was involved in the murder of Evan’s wife or not, the laugh was the scraping, scratching howl of a madman. The shriek of a devil who hadn’t quite figured out the best way to destroy his fill of happiness, to quench his fill of joy.
Evan didn’t know what the man wanted, exactly. But the laugh told him that it involved pain. Misery.
Death.
The conversation played over and over in Evan’s mind. It kept on turning and returning, spinning around until he had checked it from all angles, listening to it until he could hear no more.
Again he felt like he was on the edge of something, some realization that would… matter. That would even, perhaps, take away the image of his wife’s face as it had been when he saw her last.
Then he realized it wasn’t epiphany he perched on the edge of. No, just a barstool. Backless, the kind that would let you spin around on a whim. In better places that might be because you were hoping to find a romantic attachment, maybe just people-watch. Here, though, you could probably spin around forever and never find anything good to look at. Torn faux leather gouged at Evan’s thighs and buttocks, biting through the cheap fabric of his suit pants, and a backless stool in this kind of place just meant you had a good chance of cracking your head open after the night’s bender stole your backbone.
Evan looked at his drink again. Wondered if he should drink the rest. Probably not. He wasn’t even sure what it was. This wasn’t the kind of place you came to drink high-quality booze, it was the kind of place you came to drink angry and get angrier. The kind of place you came to get drunk, but what you ended up doing more often than not was getting in a fight.
It was small, poorly lit even by the low standards for this kind of place. A few tables – one or two even had chairs – and the bar. The bar itself was sticky, made of a wood that had been burnt and stained by countless old cigarette butts and spilled drinks and blood until it was a dark, grainless brown that might be oak or cherry or walnut or Formica laminate for all Evan could tell.