Bait Dog An Atlanta Burns Novel - By Chuck Wendig Page 0,37
ground.
Lanky mumbles. Feels around the grass for the joint.
Russo blinks his bloodshot eyes. “You bitch.”
“That’s me.”
“Should learn to mind your own business.”
“Yeah. Probably. But I’m going to need you to shut the fuck up when it comes to my friend.” She feels tears threaten the corners of her eyes once more—not now, don’t cry in front of these assholes quit it. “Chris was cool. The coolest. And it’s things like this that make people feel bad just for being who they are, just for living in the world they way they got to. Anybody should off themselves it should be you dumb shits.”
Russo takes a step toward her, but again she swipes the knife. It cuts the air with a hiss.
“Don’t,” she says. “I’ll pop you like a water balloon.”
“You don’t got the balls,” he says.
“Don’t much need ‘em.”
From the ground, Lanky moans. “She’ll do it. Dude. Dude.” He tilts his head toward her. “We’re sorry. Okay?”
But Russo doesn’t agree.
“You’ll get yours,” he tells her.
“I figure you’re right about that.”
And then she backs away. Heart pounding. Throat tight. Eyes hot and raw.
She turns and runs home.
* * *
Home. A dilapidated old farmhouse with a boozy lean to it. Shows in all the doorways—each tilted off-kilter like something out of a carnival funhouse. Floor aren’t level, either. Atlanta one time put a cat’s eye marble on the floor and it rolled away, down the hall and into an old iron floor grate. She never got that marble back.
The house sits between fallow cornfields, fields now peppered with sprigs of green. Next door—not right next door but a couple-few acres down the road—is the cat lady’s house. Atlanta’s not sure of her name. But she’s old and frail, like a bundle of sticks draped in a moth-eaten bedsheet. All her cats look that way, too. She remembers Chris saying something about how she probably turns into a cat on the full-moon. Wailing and slinking about. Gulping down moles and voles and mice.
Atlanta walks down the long driveway toward their house, boots crunching on loose limestone gravel, dust kicking up since it hasn’t rained in a couple weeks.
In the distance, in the woods far beyond the house, plump cloud-bulges rise into the sky. Steam from the PP&L power plant behind the woods. Winter time comes and the leaves fall you can see the cooling towers. Now it’s all green and you have to squint to see the shapes.
Sometimes the clouds coming up out of there look like things. Hands or fists. Faces. Vegetables. Animals. Right now they just look like lumpy piles of stuffing cut out of a pillow.
As she gets closer, she sees someone sitting on the steps outside the ratty screened-in porch.
A girl. Familiar but not too familiar. White-blonde hair. Nice white sweater. Jeans, but not trashy jeans that hang low and show off the whale-tail of a thong. Pink lipstick. Good shoes. Rich girl, by the looks of her.
She’s sporting an infinite stare. Looking off at a fixed point in-between worlds. Almost like there’s nobody home in those eyes.
Atlanta lifts her chin in a bro-nod. “’Sup.”
Blondie twitches, jarred from her reverie. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. You lost?”
“Are you Atlanta?” The girl stands.
“Maybe. Yeah. Why?”
“I’m Jenny. Jenny Whitsett.” The girl thrusts out her hand. It’s like a mannequin’s hand it looks so nice. Atlanta figures on not being rude so she takes it. Blondie—er, Jenny—has a mannequin’s handshake, too. Stiff, limp, lifeless. “I’d like to talk to you about something.”
Atlanta rolls her eyes. “Listen, I believe in Jesus, I just don’t know if he believes in me and I try to be good but I’m not always so good at being good so whatever it is you want to preach it’s gonna fall on deaf ears—“
“It’s not about Jesus.”
“Well, who else is there? You believe in some kind of space god, like Tom Cruise?”
“What? No.” A flash of irritation. “I want your help.”
Atlanta frowns, then gives in. She drops her book-bag on the ground, goes and hooks a piece-of-shit white plastic patio chair with her toe, drags it closer, plops her butt down on it. Chin to her chest. Red tangle of hair over her shoulders.
“I need you to solve a murder,” Jenny tells her.
Atlanta’s whole body tightens. A flash of Chris’ face in her mind’s eye. “Murder.”
“Yes. Murder. My dog. My dog was murdered.”
She can’t help it, but she laughs. It’s not that she thinks dead murdered dogs are funny—but her brain concocts a really weird version of the board game Clue