Where All Light Tends to Go Read Online Free Page B

never even seen the dope the Mexicans were bringing in nowadays. He’d been on the payroll for a long time, though, driving in different rigs for high-price oil changes and such, and he had a pretty good idea of how it all worked. When the deputies had taken him in, it was a bull on the payroll, a “family friend” as Daddy called them, who conducted the interview. Without even a line of questioning building up to it, Robbie went to spilling beans that shouldn’t be spilled.
    He’d been up for nearly a week at that point and was starting to come down. That coming down was always the hardest, it seemed, and when the hole got deep, folks lashed for any rope they could find to drag themselves out. That’s what separated the crankers from any other type of drug addict I’d ever been around. Folks on pills or cocaine or methadone or any other kind of dope could hold it together when they were in that hole. I’d done everything under the sun and never had any mind to start snitching. Crank, on the other hand, seemed to bring on a certain paranoia. After a week or so running that high, no dreams to let you regain any sort of grasp that you ever had, the mind starts going places that minds oughtn’t go. After that, those lips’ll say just about anything to get back some sort of clarity. That’s why Robbie was here. That’s why this had to be done. If he told one, he’d tell them all, and there wasn’t any way of knowing who those others might be. Some dogs had to be put to sleep.
    “What in the fuck are you talking about, Jacob, you know me and I’ve known you for a long time now, hell, your daddy has known me for a long time, and I ain’t ever been nothing but good to none of y’all, and now you’re going to treat me like this, saying I said something to somebody, and I ain’t said nothing.” All of that rambling left him out of breath, but Robbie sat still from the waist down. It was his neck and head that were in a constant wrestling match, his head wanting to spin off like a top.
    “You said something all right.” I knelt down and tilted the spotlight out of his eyes and beamed it onto his chest so that he could look me square while I approached. His scruffy, thin face jittered, but those big dark eyes that were popping hung on to me as I spoke. “It’s not a question of whether or not you said
something
. We know you said
something
. What we need to know is who all you said it to.”
    I don’t know if it was me moving closer or Robbie finally being able to see something other than white light that triggered it, but at that moment he convulsed every which way with those wires cutting into him like razor blades. “I ain’t said nothing!” he screamed over and over, the blood pooling on the floor now as the wires cut deeper and the blood ran down and dripped from his elbows and fingertips.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jeremy rush forward and Gerald start back-stepping fast, and before I knew what the hell was happening, Jeremy had splashed something all over Robbie’s face and the screams electrified the room. It was like Jeremy had just run a high-voltage line into that little old shack and all of a sudden everything was bright. Robbie was screaming till the veins bulged out of his neck, and after four or five of those screams that bellowed till there was no air left for fuel, the skin on his face started whitening and peeling off like wetted tissue. I was a hunk of granite during all of that commotion. I couldn’t have moved to step away from the gallows. But Gerald moseyed casually across the room and grabbed a tin pail from the corner. There was no hurry in his step while he strolled, nor when he dumped what must’ve been water overtop Robbie’s head.
    “What the fuck was that?”
    “Wasn’t saying nothing,” Jeremy said. He had a wild look about him, like a kid that had just slapped a frog against the concrete. “Had to kick it up.”
    “No, I mean what the fuck was that? What the