CONTENTS

Title Page

Prologue

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

About the Author

TIN CITY TINDER

David Macinnis Gill

PROLOGUE

1

On Monday morning, May 4, 0600 hours, near the town of Tin City in the North Carolina Mountains, Stumpy Meeks was on the couch, sleeping off a meal of Bud, stale donuts, and month-old beef jerky when an explosion threw him ass-first to the floor of his trailer.

“Come in,” he said before he realized nobody had knocked.

His brain was working slower than usual. Eating for the first time in three days had that kind of effect on a man with diabetes. He scribbled a mental note—next time, only eat half the package of jerky.

Just as he crawled up to the couch and rested his head on the cushions, another blast ripped through the night. The shock wave buckled the walls and cracked the windows in the living room. Stumpy crawled screaming under the couch as glass collapsed out of the frames and sprinkled the orange shag carpet.

This time, he knew it wasn’t echoes in his head. Something really had exploded.

He was torn between hiding under the couch or going outside to take a look around. It really wasn’t a tough decision. Having more curiosity than sense, he waited a minute or two and then stumbled to the door.

He clicked on the porch light and squinted into the night.

The Blevins place had blown all to hell, and a line of burning debris littered the sandy ground leading up to his yard.

“Jesus Christ Jones on a crutch,” he whispered as he stepped onto the patio. “What the fuck is going on?”

The concrete felt clammy on his bare feet. The smell of gunpowder had burned the air, and though it was a cool and wet May night, he could’ve sworn it was the Fourth of July. He shuffled a step, then felt something warm and hard on the sole of his foot.

Stumpy picked the thing up and held it to the porch light to get a better look. It was a human finger severed below a gold wedding band. He screamed and dropped it, then scrambled back into his living room and slammed the door behind him.

Panting, he tossed his head side-to-side and squeezed both eyes tight. “It wasn’t no finger. Dear Lord, let it be my hallucinations again. Please, don’t let it be real.”

After a mumbled prayer, he peeked outside. There it lay, right where he had dropped it. It was a finger, all right. No mistake. It had to belong to somebody, and probably, they would want it back.

“Now, Stumpy,” he scolded himself, “if it was your finger, you’d want somebody to do right by you.”

After extracting a pair of hotdog tongs and a sandwich baggie out of the junk drawer, Stumpy headed down the rickety steps. He stood over the severed digit for a few seconds, clicking the tongs and thinking of the best way to go about extracting it.

“It’s no different than a hot dog on the grill. ” He popped the finger into the baggie and sealed the strip so that red and blue made purple.

Inside, he dropped the baggie in the freezer next to the ice cube tray and grabbed a cold beer for the trip back to the couch. He popped the tab, took a long swallow, and wondered who had busted out the glass in the front windows. Seemed like there was something else he needed to do, somebody he ought to call, but the phone was all the way down the hall in the bedroom, and whatever it was could surely wait until later.

Stumpy leaned back on the couch and was snoring before he could finish the beer.

MONDAY

1

Three hours after Stumpy Meeks fell back into a boozy stupor, I was training my eyes to see molecules. That’s what I told people when I was in hyper-attentive mode, bent over an experiment, eyes pinched tight and focused so intently that I seemed to be looking straight through an object of interest, which in this case was a preserved rat pinned to a dissection tray.

In reality, I wasn’t in the least interested in the critter. What got my attention was my Biology 102 lab assistant, a girl named Cedar Galloway. She sat next to me on a high stool, wearing a white lab coat over a yellow sundress that had ridden up her thighs. Cedar was captain of Allegheny Community College’s tennis team, and even though she was barely five-two, those long, lean legs seemed to go on forever.

The rest of her wasn’t so bad, either.

Cedar had hazel eyes, and a heart-shaped face complimented perfectly by a pixie cut. Even her perfume, which I could smell as she leaned close to reposition the pins holding the rat open, cut through the stinky preservative that filled the lab.

“What are you looking at so hard, Boone?” she asked.

Four years in the Navy had taught my brain that a direct question is given a direct answer, so even though I was now a civilian studying forensics on the GI Bill, I almost blurted out the truth.

“This.” I grabbed the beeper clipped to my belt. “This. I keep waiting for it to go off.”

It was only a partial lie. For almost a week, since I finished the volunteer firefighter training program, I had been waiting for The Call. The beeper went everywhere with me. Even when I had to hit the head.

“Wrong answer, Mr. Childress.” Cedar picked up a pair of scissors. “Time to clip those testicles.”

“Excuse me?”

“The rat’s testicles,” she said. “The instructions say to remove them? Dr. K was just demonstrating the technique to the rest of the class?”

“Right.” I took the scissors. “I’ll do the snipping.”

“Thank you. You’re an officer and a gentleman.”

“Petty Officer Second Class. I was enlisted, so I worked for a living.”

My blonde hair was still cropped short, and years of regular PT had me strong and fit for any duty. Including neutering a dead rodent.

“What’re you waiting for?” Cedar nudged me. “Those testicles aren’t going to snip themselves.”

“Did you know that the Bible says any man without his yarbles cannot enter the house of the Lord? I’m paraphrasing.”

“Mice don’t go to heaven.”

“Good thing this isn’t a church mouse, then. Think of all the time it would’ve wasted.”

“You mean like you are?”

“Shh!” I said. “I’m training myself to see testicles.”

“Thought that was molecules.”

I flipped down the magnifying visor. Cedar’s nose got huge. “In this case, same size.”

A minute later, I was in the middle of removing the rat’s left nut and formulating a plan for asking Cedar on a date when a string of preserved bowels sailed across the room.