Friday's Child

By Joe Martelle

On a warm spring night in 1983, murder gives birth to something even more terrible. Seven men sit down for a friendly game of poker, just as they do every week. Only this night, death is in the cards. Fate is ready to deal them a hand that will haunt them...and hunt them... for the rest of their lives. Friday’s Child is about to come to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joe Martelle
• Release date: Aug 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9780978080020

Joe Martelle

Joe Martelle is a Christian author, freelance writer, husband and father of three residing in rural Eastern Ontario.

Book preview

FRIDAY’S CHILD

JOE MARTELLE

Copyright 2013 © Joe Martelle

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidences are the products of the authors' imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or people, living or dead is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any other – without the prior permission of the author.

Published by Joe Martelle in conjunction with Beach Road Press.

www.joemartelle.com

ISBN: 978-0-9780800-5-1

Digital ISBN: 978-0-9780800-2-0

John, Adam, Bev, Dawna, Kurtis, JT, Dad and Granny

Memories of the past live on within.

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

― Jack London

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Friday’s Child

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Acknowledgements

About The Author

About The Book

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Chapter One

I’ve never claimed to be much of a storyteller. Danny was the author of the group but he doesn’t do much writing where he is now—at least, none the rest of us can read. Sometimes it’s not about who is best suited for a job, but simply who’s available. Sometimes it’s the last man standing who remembers what happened. Sometimes that man wants to set the record straight before it’s too late. It’s very close to being too late for me now.

Most days I can remember that spring night in eighty-three better than can I recall last night. It is a funny thing how the human mind works like that. Maybe funny is the wrong word. Funny has never been a word any of us associated with March 18th.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan was the leader of the free world, Rocky Balboa still ruled at the box office, the space shuttle Challenger was gearing up for her first flight, the Internet and satellite TV had yet to invade our minds, crack cocaine had yet to invade our streets, and minivans and SUVs had yet to begin to litter our roads. Maybe I sound like an old man saying times were better back then, but then again, I guess I’m not that far from being an old man, am I? I’m certainly an old man inside. I wasn’t always. I was very much a young man on the night it happened.

Spring came early to our part of the country that year. We were riding an unseasonably long wave of warm days that had already diminished most of the snow from the landscape’s open areas. It was that special time of the year when the mornings are frozen with the night’s cold but as the day moves forward, the sun brings the world to life, melting away the crusts of frost, softening the soil, shining down with the promise of better days just around the corner.

That feeling was everywhere that night. I tasted it in the air, between deals as we stretched our legs and polluted our lungs in the parking lot behind the shop. We were all so young then, young like the season, young like the night, young and strong and eager for glorious days ahead. How beautifully sweet was the taste on the air that night and how quickly it shattered.

All six of us were there that night. That was unusual. We played almost every Friday night back then, but rarely did we all show up every week. Jon would often work the late shift at the paper, or Stan would be needed on the farm (his old man had the habit of falling into the bottle and forgetting about milking time), or I would be off rescuing some tourist broken down on the highway. Three or four of us was the norm, sometimes even less. Sure, the gods of poker would always seem to fill in the empty chairs with somebody’s cousin or somebody’s friend—the show must go on after all—but it was a memorable rarity on those precious nights that just the six of us regulars sat down at that table at Steve’s Garage. March 18th was an exception.

And, of course, there was the kid. Young James made it seven warm bodies present and accounted for. He wasn’t a player. He was just hanging out, drinking a few underage beers and puffing on the occasional hand-rolled smoke.

Petey told me later that the kid needed to be there. He said we needed to have seven because seven was somehow a biblical number. He said that, in God’s great plan, we needed to have seven souls on our side of the equation. I never really understood what he meant but I always put a bit of stock in him being right. Petey was pretty tight with his God. We all rode the coattails of his faith. Maybe it gave us all a small sense of purpose in a bad situation. Or maybe it just eased the guilt a little.

Damn, I can still remember the music. That’s another gift from the past that keeps on giving, living in that dead space between songs, ever ready to leap from the speakers right into the deep recesses of your mind, just to drag out the foul stench of bad memory. Danny’s widow told me he did the same thing. She said he called them songs from his Friday’s coming-hit parade.

Music was always a point of contention on poker night. Most of us leaned toward the rock legends of the seventies and eighties that defined our generation, but Jon and Stan tended to lean more toward country. John Cougar had been around that night to remind us that love Hurts So Good, Joan Jett had played a couple of different tunes, and Loverboy was telling everyone who would listen about Working for the Weekend. Stan hung back on one of the smoke breaks, changed the station, and snuck Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton into the mix. Willie Nelson had barely launched into Always on My Mind when all hell broke loose.

Steve’s Garage was a little more remote back in the eighties. The highway was still only two lanes then and the river was pretty much the end of civilized life. Once you crossed the bridge and scooted over the highway only a handful of homes stood north of town, mostly farms and a couple of rural businesses. Old man Gilmore had the Massey dealership just up the road from Stan’s farm and a little farther out was Steve’s.

Of course, that’s all gone now. Little tractor dealers and family farms vanished with cassette tapes and corner stores, never to see the landscape again. Today we all shop at those big-box stores and drive vehicles made halfway around the world. Once the highway went to four lanes in the nineties, bedroom communities popped up all along it. That was when all the farmland north of town became gated communities and strip malls. Progress, they called it. You don’t want to know what I call it.

Steve’s little garage survived progress. It’s still standing right there where his father planted it. Not too many of those old-fashioned cinderblock garages left in this world, and hardly any still have the gas pumps out front. Steve fought like hell with those simple bastards from the Environmental Agency to keep his in, and God bless him, he pulled it off. Gotta pump your own everywhere now. Kids will never know what it’s like to stop at the neighborhood garage to fill up. I can still see Steve, walking out from under one of the hoists, wiping his hands on a rag while asking the customer how much they wanted. He kept those pumps rolling right up until the end. The new owner will probably cave to the big boys and dig up the old fuel tanks, join the rest of the herd. Progress, my ass.

We always parked out back, away from the pumps, on poker night. Steve had a picnic table set up just outside the rear door we used to smoke at. He was a stickler for safety, he was. No working in the shop without steel toes. No working under anything without a safety stand, not even just to change a tire—that stand needed to be under that car before a wrench touched that wheel. And absolutely no smoking around the pumps or any place in the shop. Stan, who could be a genuine ass when he wanted to be, would light up inside now and then just to peeve Steve off a little but the rest of us had enough sense to keep it out back. Hell, most of what we smoked in those days was better smoked outside anyway.

Jon was already there by the time I wheeled my old wrecker onto the lot behind the shop that night. He and Steve were popping the tops of the first beers of the evening and loading the rest of the case into the fridge. We played in the upper part of the shop, a kind of half-assed loft where Steve stored tires and parts he’d salvaged along the way. Hidden away from the working area, this was a part of the building few customers ever got to see. I think Steve liked it that way. The three work bays and the little machine shop off to the side might be public domain, but this little room was Steve’s space, the place where the coveralls could come off and the man inside could sit with friends and just be Steve. Not that Friday-night Steve was a hell of a lot different from everyday Steve. They were both pretty decent guys.

Anyway, we were the first three guys to arrive that night (and I guess the last three to leave for good, as it turns out). Young James was downstairs, sweeping the day’s mess from the floors and putting the tools all back in their proper places for when the shop opened up again on Monday. Most weeks he would have been gone by then but this particular Friday business must have run late, because it was after six and he was still cleaning up. Most days he booked out shortly after the doors rolled down at five o’clock. Fate, or maybe Petey’s God, can play some tricks on you.

In all honesty, James wasn’t a bad kid. He’d taken to hanging around the shop in his high school years. Once he’d given up hopes of surviving school long enough to graduate, the garage had become his second home. He wasn’t quite retarded (we could say retarded back then), but he was pretty damned slow. I guess in today’s day and age they would have gotten him into some special needs program and managed to give him some kind of education, but back in the day, the school system let him fall off the wagon. In my opinion, one method is as cruel as the other. At least back then he knew where he stood when he dropped out. We have a way of trying to deceive ourselves about what reality is in our world these days.

Anyway, the long and the short of it was that Steve had a soft spot for the kid. He hired him on for changing oil, washing cars; stuff like that. And the kid didn’t mind working. I’ll take a hard-working idiot over a lazy genius any day. It was the kid’s work ethic, I think, that endeared him to the bunch of us. Stan, again always a potential jerk at the drop of a hat, was the only one to ever give James much grief, and even he kept it mild. By that spring, at the ripe old age of sixteen, James had begun to enjoy the occasional beer after hours. He might have even snuck in a puff or two. I guess that’s how he ended up staying to watch us play that night.

The three of us waited for the others to show, shooting the bull and downing a few pints while the kid busied himself downstairs. Life in a small town didn’t come with many headlines to discuss. The big news that year, and a good portion of the previous one, had been The Bandit.

Someone had been burglarizing homes in and around town. Breaking and entering might not be a big deal in the big city, but in a rural town where the biggest newspaper headlines usually bounce back and forth between the crops and the weather, a rash of home robberies was sensational news. The creative minds at The Ledger pooled their collective efforts to come up with the name The Bandit.

By March of eighty-three, The Bandit had hit close to forty homes and at least a dozen businesses. Town police (all three of them) had long since handed the case over to the larger, better-equipped state police. Now, busting into a few homes—maybe even a dozen—wasn’t that big a deal, especially in a time when breaking in was as easy as turning the doorknob in many country homes, but accomplishing the task over fifty times was no small matter. You have to remember this was a small community where most people knew how often their neighbor changed his undies. Police reports had The Bandit nearing the hundred-thousand-dollar mark in goods and cash, all of it gone, never to resurface and no one the wiser.

Jon’s position with the paper made him privy to both news and police details on the case, giving us the inside scoop on next week’s headlines, letting us feel ahead of the rumor mill. He had very little for us that particular night. The newly formed neighborhood watch program was still coming up empty. State police were still adamant that the town police’s methods would end up building a vigilante mentality. The juiciest tidbit Jon had that day was that The Bandit’s notoriety was drawing interest from some of the larger regional papers. Our turkey town might actually be put on a map somewhere because of this serial petty thief. That, the weather, and the exploits of Steve’s garage life filled the void until the rest of the crew rolled in. Like I said, big news is scarce in a small town.

Danny and Petey pulled up around seven and parked beside my old wrecker. They were in Danny’s big Dodge truck. That thing was damned near new then. If you ask me, the big 4×4 never suited Danny but he sure was proud of it. Fully loaded, big tires, all the bells and whistles. It was a leftover on the dealer’s lot from the previous sales year and, to hear him talk, he got a hell of a deal on it.

His wife would tell a different story, of how they had wasted their money on a gas-guzzling toy when they could have had a new Reliant at a fraction of the cost. Carol was a hard woman. Heavyset with wide shoulders, she was more suited to the truck than Danny, all one hundred and twenty pounds of him. They could have been the poster couple to prove that old adage of opposites attracting: Carol large, bold, and outspoken, Danny the very picture of meek and mild, right down to his neatly trimmed nails and wire-rimmed glasses.

I always wondered how she found the moment of weakness to actually