Read Online Lake Charles by Ed Lynskey - Free Book Online

hell.
    * * *
     
    The clack of metal on metal startled me. Keys twisted and doors dragged. Hearing the shoes scuffle heightened my awareness. My heart thudded behind my eyes focusing on a pair of men watching me behind the zebra stripes. One was a uniformed meatball, and the civilian came in woodsy Eddie Bauer.
    “Is this the punk ass?” asked the civilian through his Van Dyke beard. Gray eyes alit on me as his fingers combed down the beard. His droopy lower lip quivered as if something mean and nasty gave him a hard on.
    “Ready and waiting, Mr. Sizemore,” replied the sheriff’s deputy, a big fan of the Krispy Kremes Club.
    “You got no confession yet, eh?”
    “Not yet but we’re softening him up for you.”
    “Much obliged.” Sizemore jerked a hand. “Cuff his ass.”
    Eager to please, the sheriff’s deputy tromped into my prison cell and manacled me to the bunk’s steel frame before I could react. “Just bang his skull on the wall if you want out.”
    “If anything is left, I’ll do that.”
    “He’s all yours. There’s no hurry. His bail hearing isn’t until Tuesday.” The sheriff’s deputy stitched on a sadistic leer before he turned and huffed down the hallway.
    Ralph Sizemore, Ashleigh’s angry father, poured through my cell door. I coped with the same meltdown of fear as the residents at Three Mile Island must have on that scary day last March.
    “You’re my little girl’s killer.” His eyes skittered left to right. We had no eyewitnesses here.
    “Look, I only reported her death. It’d be stupid for me to kill her and then tip off the authorities.”
    “Nice try but I’m a trial attorney.” He hulked inches away from me, and I recoiled from the whiskey rancid on his breath. “You phoned the sheriff to make it look good, but I can see through it.”
    My babbling was uncontrollable. “Some physical evidence is there to prove my innocence. Fingerprints were left on the doorknob maybe.”
    “You wiped down Room 7.”
    “I did no such thing. I woke up, and Ashleigh was dead. I made a beeline to the phone outside and notified the sheriff. It even cost me two dimes. I returned and waited until the law showed and pounded on the door.”
    “Touching. Why didn’t you fetch an ambulance?”
    “I thought of it, but she’d been a goner for a while.”
    His lip quivering, he tugged out a palm sap from his hip pocket. “I won this in a stud poker game at Fort Hood.” He gave the palm sap a practice swing and grinned like a giant raptor down at me.
    I shifted, the handcuffs biting into my wrist.
    “Better say your prayers.” He stepped into me, his arm slinging the palm sap with his weight hefted behind its swat.
    I grunted at the monster pain exploding in a galaxy of pinwheels behind my eyes. The harder blows pummeled me. Maybe I heard a snicker. Then it was lights out. My splashdown into the inky black ocean of unconsciousness didn’t resurface to daylight.
    No, I weathered a concussion in a Yellow Snake hospital bed. It was some hours before I saw daylight again. At an agonizing turn in the bed, I spotted the two shiny dimes left on the bed table. I’d had a visitor. He’d reimbursed me for the phone call I’d made to report his daughter’s death to the sheriff. I didn’t appreciate his perverse sense of humor.

CHAPTER NINE
     
    Against all odds, I bonded out of the Yellow Snake prison with Herzog as my counsel. First, the intern doctor discharged me with a whopping bill, and I arrived early at the Yellow Snake courthouse for my bail hearing. A nickel-plated bracelet hogtied my wrists. A bulkier one reduced my ankles to an old man’s waddle. A belly chain jangled around me modeling the penal orange. A furtive peek at the courtroom’s Peanut Gallery revealed we played to a packed house. Pain ravaged my swollen head, and my lower back muscles felt tied in knots from the tension.
    Sheriff’s Deputies Ramsey and Wines deposited me to sit at the defense table. A brass desk lamp