Boogie House: A Rolson McKane Mystery by T. Blake Braddy Page B

nobody in particular.
     
    *  *  *
     
                                                           
    When the sound of high-performance mufflers yanked me from sleep, I had been dreaming about a river that was made of money. Cars had never been the thing to haunt me - I’ve never cared for the woods too much - but now it seemed like I was living in some hellish Stephen King novel.
    I leaped up, grabbed the .45 from the bedside table, and went outside, aiming at nothing and everything. The truck had been nearby but was now tear-assing it down the road a ways. In the absence of a city, cars make a hell of an echoey racket, especially with glass pack mufflers on the back.
    As I swept the perimeter, a single image from my dream kept coming back to me: someone floating in the midst of all that cash. Going down through a swampy entrenchment in bare feet, I looked for just the right silhouette. Just the right combination of light and dark. Maybe the moon glinting off a windshield. Or a gun glinting against pale moonlight. It was not so dark that I wouldn’t have seen it.
    It took fifteen minutes for me to come to my senses.
    You're losing it, old buddy, I thought. Soon the fucking trees will be a threat. You cannot jump at every backfire, and there are a lot of backfires out here.
    After another few minutes of searching, I straightened up and headed back toward the house. What was I going to do, find a truck in the mud of a nearby field?
    I stopped in the middle of the road, glancing back and forth between my house and the Brickmeyer tract. Something pinged in my chest, sending shivers down my arms. The darkness of the woods was calling to me, and I considered a late-night walk.
    It was silly, devoid of any real logic, but it was more enticing than going back to bed. So I let my intuition drive me into the woods at midnight.
    I turned and walked toward the Boogie House. A slick wire tightened around my guts, and I felt my testicles draw up against me. A vaguely human shape was slinking between two rows of trees. I stopped cold. Could have been a lot of things, I tried to convince myself. A white-tailed deer, maybe. Or light playing tricks on me. But it wasn’t. It was a person.
    I moved quietly toward the woods, my mind filling with fantastically disturbing images. The woods, in turn, responded with silent awe. The chaotic weather of the last few days had subsided. There wasn't a breeze making branches rattle together. No cicadas or crickets. No raccoons scuttling about in the underbrush. Just me, the silence, and the Boogie House.
    And it happened again.
    The music started up, quietly at first. A guitar in the dark, playing a low blues chord progression. It was the sound of somebody warming up on a six string acoustic. I stopped and listened. The shadows around me grew into shapeless, watery pools. I kept going.
    They always get fear wrong in the movies. You don’t shit your pants and scream yourself blind when something happens. If you’re smart, you don’t do that. More likely, you convince yourself everything is all right until you’re convinced it’s not. And then, even then, you just sort of gulp it down and go on with your life. There’s no running and screaming, just a kind of halfhearted acceptance that you or the world is crazy.
    Word is, Robert Johnson gave over his soul to the devil to play slide guitar. Met up with a real mean fellow at the Crossroads and had him teach him the blues, and afterward the man just disappeared. Johnson came back a different man. A strange, drunken virtuoso. The rumor went that he played with his back to the audience so nobody could cop his style. He died under mysterious circumstances, and though most people believe he was poisoned by a jealous husband, some think his deal had dried up and the devil claimed his soul for Hell.
    This midnight rendezvous felt no different, complete with an authentic soundtrack. What devil was I handing