Table of Contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
HOWLERS
MARKET STREET BOOKS
Copyright © 2015 Kent Harrington
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Email: [email protected]
COVER ART BY
Anni Hengesbach-Gomes
FIRST EBOOK EDITION
SEPTEMBER 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9858083-3 (EBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014916771
For more information about Kent Harrington please visit:
www.kentharrington.com
Other Books by Kent Harrington
Dark Ride (1996)
Dia De Los Muertos (1997)
The American Boys (2000)
The Tattooed Muse (2001)
Red Jungle (2005)
The Good Physician (2008)
The Rat Machine (2012)
Tabloid Circus (French Edition 2014)
Lola Knows Best (2015)
Dedicated to the children of Fukushima Prefecture.
“It’s unreasonable to make such a big deal over the death of a fisherman.”—EdwardTeller, father of the Hydrogen bomb—on hearing that a Japanese fisherman had died as a result of America’s first live-fire test of the Hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
CHAPTER 1
Timberline, California
Population 1,500
Elevation 7,000 feet
Six a.m. Willis Good, on the cusp of madness and still wearing the bloodstained clothes he’d been arrested in, picked up a pencil stub he’d found on the floor. On suicide watch, the jail cell’s dim light had been kept on throughout the night; he’d not slept or even tried to. The pencil’s blunt tip made a scratching music as he wrote on the wall, just under a small window with a second-story view of Timberline’s Main Street.
Willis—slight, sandy-haired, father, lawyer, son of the town drunk, Cambridge scholar, and the boy that no one thought would make good—wrote deliberately, something he remembered from his Latin classes at Cambridge:
In hac lacrimarum valle.
In this valley of tears. Under it, he wrote his name: Willis Good, Year of Our Lord, 2014, in a firm hand. Then he threw the pencil violently across the cell, afraid that if he started to write down what had happened to him he might not be able to stop—that he would tell his terrifying story to the cell wall.
And if he did that, it would surely mean he was mad.
Willis stepped back to the window and stared out at the multi-colored Christmas lights strung across Main Street, kept up by the “city fathers” until the end of February. He’d done the same as a child when his mother’s alcoholism had proven too much to bear. He would escape their poverty-and-alcohol-wrecked life and walk the streets of the mountain town at midnight in winter, wearing only a thin secondhand jacket. On those spectacularly beautiful nights, the town seemed like a great empty cathedral, with lamp-stars hung above it, perhaps hung by some benevolent god of the Sierra Madre. He’d felt then, as a small boy, completely protected. He’d grown to love Timberline and the Sierra Madre. No matter where he’d traveled in the world, this town was his home. Of course he’d come back.
He watched dawn break over the snow-bound high Sierra town. A sad platinum light reached into the granite-block jail, which dated back to the Gold Rush. His second day in hell would start with this weak and struggling-against-the-snow dawn. It made him feel sick.
Despite himself, he once again prayed that this was all just a terrible nightmare. He put both palms on the cell’s cold wall and tried to will himself awake. If only I could just wake up! He lowered his forehead onto the wall and closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he saw his young wife lying asleep in their bed and very much alive.
If only I could wake up.
Without realizing it, he yelled his wife’s name. The two deputies downstairs heard him yelling, but ignored it.
Willis had been arrested the day before for murdering his wife and their two little boys in cold blood. The irony was that he had stood in this very jail cell many times with clients, advising them in his capacity as their defense lawyer.
“Tell the truth. Be honest. Lying will only hurt your chances of a successful conclusion,” he’d warn them in his distant but earnest manner, pulling off his gold wire-rim glasses to look at them, searching their faces for the truth. At 32, Good was remarkably youthful looking, which put some clients off. Usually the client—a miner, or truck driver, or waitress—would lie to him anyway, incapable of anything but the most childish and pathetic defense for their crimes, which were serious if they were seeing him and not the county’s public defender. He was the only good—and perhaps more importantly, the only sober—lawyer within fifty miles of Reno.