Burn Scars, Eddie Generous [read full novel txt] 📗

he kept handy because Rebekah Talbot often stood topless before her open window—according to Eric, she saw him several times looking at her through the binoculars and those were the times she would strip. He wanted to make sure I added that.

“I told the guys to come over, but they didn’t come right away. A second car parked in front of the police car. It was a big, dark sedan. Possibly an Oldsmobile or a Buick. The officer was in uniform and out of his car, and then the second individual got out of his car. The officer looked at the Talbot house. He then turned back to the dark sedan, and with the help of the other individual, the officer laid an unconscious man on the lawn. The man was Larry Talbot; we have zero doubts about it as we all grew up in town and Larry was very well known, infamous even. I thought he was dead at first, but didn’t say so for fear of sounding stupid.

“After dragging Leroy to the lawn, the second individual went to the trunk of his car and retrieved a jerry can—assumedly full of gasoline. He gave it to the officer and they then forced entry into the home. That was when we hurried down the ladder and into—”

Rusty hit pause. His body began a sickly thrumming from his cells outward, like it was ravenous for something beyond food, and not only his guts, everywhere inside, down to his bone marrow, he’d been scooped empty and needed to feed or fall apart. He swallowed and put a shaky hand over his pants pocket and cigarette pack. Out of the corner of his eye, exiting the side door of the school, was Mr. Beaman. Rusty took a deep breath, swallowed saliva as sticky as tar, and hit play, his hand returning to the rectangular form pushing through the material of his pant leg..

“—Eric’s basement. Before we came down, we agreed that the officer out the window was the older brother to a boy we knew: Willie Lawrence was the boy and the officer was Landon Lawrence.”

Rusty began shaking and his jaw began moving minutely, as if he was about to cry, but the emotion didn’t match.

“Less than thirty minutes after settling into our sleeping bags in the basement, Eric’s father, Johnathan Morris Simons, born June ninth, nineteen-forty-one, deceased July seventeenth, nineteen-ninety-nine, told us to come upstairs. Once we got there, we discovered the home was on fire and the two vehicles, the police cruiser and the dark sedan, were gone from the scene. The fire trucks arrived first, and then the chief of police, I believe his name was Winston Gretchel. The chief managed to get Leroy mostly upright, but he was too drunk to stand on his own.

“From what we saw, it appeared very, very unlikely that Leroy Talbot set his own home ablaze, and given that Landon Lawrence, now detective Landon Lawrence, and an unknown assailant entered the home with a container of accelerant, that it is much more likely that they set the fire that killed two people, scarred a third, and sent a man to prison to serve a sixty-year sentence.”

Rusty was done, even if the disc was not, and ejected it. Christine’s father had destroyed his family. His girlfriend’s father had murdered Rusty’s family. He fumbled into his pocket for his cigarettes as Mr. Beaman approached and then knocked on the passenger’s window. Rusty automatically reached over and tugged the silver nub upward to disengage the lock. Mr. Beaman opened the door, bent, and handed in the coffee. “Can I sit?” he asked.

The words weren’t there, so Rusty nodded.

“It’s true, you know. We’ll do whatever you think is right. We’ll testify, we’ll keep quiet, we’ll do whatever you want. Your father wasn’t a great guy, if any of the stories are true, but he doesn’t deserve what they did to him.”

Rusty sipped from the porcelain mug with a rubber lid. One side featured the Pearl County School Board crest, the other side was blank. The coffee inside was so hot he barely tasted it.

Mr. Beaman began rubbing his hands together. “I don’t know…well, yeah, I do. I know why we never told. Police are supposed to be the good guys. Back then, nobody said anything against a cop. There were no Rodney King videos, there was nothing even close to that, cops were all Starsky and Hutch and Officer Friendly, and we were just kids and we weren’t supposed to be out that late.” He stopped rubbing his hands together and began rubbing his legs through wool pants. “We could’ve come at any time and helped your dad, but we didn’t think. Everybody called him scum and maybe we believed it, or chose to believe it. It wasn’t until I had you in the class that the guilt got to me. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Rusty dragged Mariana’s Trench deep on his Matinee cigarette and exhaled heavily through his nose—cartoon bull about to blow a bovine gasket. “Detective Lawrence. That sonofabitch. He’s fucked with me for…I’ll kill him.”

“Rusty, you have to be sensible. If you want to get him, you have to be sensible.”

“Christ, Christine,” Rusty said after a few quiet moments and then after a few more added, “I need to talk to my dad. I need to see my dad.”

“Okay, I can help you. I sent your name and address to your father last week, to put on a list of visitors, just in case you wanted to see him. I figured you had gone through the motions, after you told me, so I went and did it. I can help you drive. I can take you. I can give you gas money. You’ll have to been put on the list for sure, so if they did that, maybe in a month or you can call—but I can help