Burial Ground: Writer's Cut: Alex Rourke, #3

By John Rickards

Twelve people. One night. No way out.

Troubled private detective Alex Rourke comes to Tennessee mountain country on a thin lead to a past killing, the deaths covered up and unavenged. When the night comes down and people start dying, it's not just those around him he's looking to save in the storm-blasted valley in the middle of nowhere; he's desperately trying to hold on to his own crumbling sanity as he teeters on the edge of a complete psychotic break.

Trapped in the run-down rest stop at the valley's heart, killers both outside and in, nowhere safe and no one to turn to, Alex is going to have to sort the real from the imagined, truth from fiction, fast if anyone's going to live to see morning...

Originally released by Penguin in 2008, this 'writer's cut' version has been almost completely rewritten from the ground up to turn it into the story it should've been, and not the story it was.


PRAISE FOR JOHN RICKARDS:

"Rickards is a master of tension and pacing. In Rourke he has created a brilliant anti-hero lead on a par with John Connolly’s Charlie Parker." - Crimespree Magazine

"Rickards is one author who doesn’t pull punches." - Spinetingler

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Rickards
• Release date: Mar 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507047767

Book preview

Copyright & Credits

Copyright John Rickards 2014. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License. You’re free to share this work with others however you want, and to remix or create derivative works from it. Just give an attribution to the author, and don’t use it for commercial purposes. Enjoy!

This book should be free. If the place you’re viewing this message/that you got this book from charges money for it, use the report a lower price link (if there is one; Amazon has them, other retailers may too) to tell them to drop the price, claim a refund if you can, and head to seancregan.com, where you can at least get the others for nothing.

Cover image:

Man Awakening by Timothy Krause, with broken glass textures by archaii, Perpetual Studios and geverto, all used under a cc-by license or attribution terms.

1.

Blue Ridge Mountains, TN.

2005.

She’s pointing a gun at the big man. The big man’s got one on the old guy whose revolver is twitching between the two of them. I’m the only one in the room who isn’t armed and any of the three of them might shoot me. Everyone’s waiting to see who’ll be the first to blink. Waiting for fear to trump hesitation and the killing to happen. This is how it ends.

Everyone has secrets. Some are worse than others. Some we admit. Some we allow to fester until they consume us. Some fade and disappear with time.

What’s buried has a way of coming out. What’s hidden has a way of being found. What’s unforgiven has a way of being avenged.

Everyone has secrets. Some we kill for. Some we die for.

2.

Boston, MA.

2004.

Nine months earlier I’d walked away from a police cell and a possible murder charge, and out into the night air a free man.

I wasn’t guilty, not of that killing at least, but it had taken a long, tiresome interrogation to convince them. A frame-up, and a clumsy one at that. There were records — phone calls, credit card receipts, CCTV footage — that gave me an alibi and my attorney a field day with the two cops working the case, Detectives Perigo and Morton; if either ever used his first name around me, I never heard it. Morton had let Perigo do most of the talking. He hadn’t sounded happy, but he had the kind of voice that never would. Morton had been harder to read. But both of them had been jerks. I’d been to a murder scene after the fact and I hadn’t reported it to the cops, but that wasn’t a crime, and that was that. They’d wasted days looking for me because they’d been short on leads and were lazy as all hell. I’d turned myself in. Faced the music. Danced for a while.

When they’d done with their questions, a uniformed cop had taken me back down the sterile concrete corridors to my holding cell. The place had echoed with the unintelligible voices of other inmates, overwhelmed now and again by the shouting of a drunk guy somewhere further within. The sound had bounced and warped like insane whale song. The place had smelled of sweat and old, dead air, the scent of crushed dreams.

It had taken a long time, it seemed, but the lock on my door eventually ratcheted back and another uniform had taken me upstairs again, this time out to the front of the building. I’d known Perigo and Morton must have finished checking my story because they’d been waiting for me by the desk, and they had not looked happy to see me.

Okay, Mr Rourke, Morton had said. "You’re free to go – for now. We’re not charging you with anything yet. Yet."

Perigo had just smiled wolfishly. Be seeing you.

You know where to find my lawyer, I’d said.

The charges were never raised again, not by the cops and not by anyone else. There was nothing more to pin on me, and they had only been after me for want of a better suspect. Because they had jack all else to go on, and the real killers of Brian Tucker would never surface. I knew that because chances were they’d died themselves in a shootout with me and a near-stranger called Kris not long after they’d murdered Tucker. The cops knew none of that. None of what had come before, or happened after. At least, not that any of it had been connected. None of the blood that had truly been on my hands. They’d needed to show some signs of progress in their murder case, and I’d been that sign. That was all. Maybe they knew it too, maybe not, but it didn’t matter.

Mud sticks, though. You found that out fast. Not so much for the arrest, though that hadn’t helped, but more for avoiding it for so long before turning myself in. Allowing them to splash my name on the news. That was bad for business if you were a private investigator.

Not that I was sure I was one of those any more. My old boss couldn’t take me back at the agency. I didn’t know if I’d want him to anyway. It wasn’t just the charges, but everything that had come before and around them. Events that had made me look again at what I was, at what I’d been.

At what I’d done.

I had some savings, I had insurance money from the fire that hit my old apartment. I rented a new place, and I drifted for a while. Let everything slide in the search for that elusive something I’d lost. Something I’d given away by choice. Lines that I’d chosen to cross, never to go back. For a while, it felt like being back in the asylum, years ago. The same feeling of having already passed a deep point of change, trying to trace it and understand it through the ripples left behind on the surface. Of stepping into a world outside the one I’d known, with no way of knowing what I’d find there.

All horseshit, of course. Back then, the brave new world was one in which my parents had died in front of me, I’d committed a cardinal sin as a law enforcement agent and gotten away with it, and my Bureau career was over. Short-lived existential angst you either got over, or died trying. Life went on. The world was still the same place when I opened my eyes every morning and I was still a part of it, like it or not.

You should get back to work, my former colleague Sophie told me over coffee one morning. Get back to what you’re good at.

Am I any good at it, though? You know how it panned out last time.

So you didn’t find that girl.

I didn’t tell her the truth. Hadn’t and wouldn’t tell it to anyone. And nearly got you killed, I said instead. A lot of blood for nothing good.

That’s bullshit. You’re just feeling guilty for things you shouldn’t.

If I’m feeling guilty, it’s for things I damn sure should be guilty for.

It’ll pass, and it’ll do it more easily if you’re busy. Look, maybe Rob could…

No, I said. Not yet. Probably not ever.

She pouted. Said nothing. Probably mostly for show, her way of trying to get me to see reason, but I could see she was genuinely upset beneath. She cared.

I shrugged, said, Right now it feels like that’s all past history.

It doesn’t have to be.

Seems like an era that’s over. And it should stay that way. I can get used to what’s coming, not what’s been. Move on.

This is just some mid-life crisis thing, you know that, right?

That’s not the first time you’ve told me that.

Maybe one day you’ll believe me.

I smiled. Didn’t feel like it much, but I smiled anyway. When I grow the ponytail and start dating the stripper, then you can say ‘I told you so’.

Maybe. You’ve got to sort something out at some point, though. You can’t live on nothing but air, y’know.

She was right. I started to think about it properly a couple of nights later. I stood down by the Charles River, watching a couple of storehouses on the opposite bank burn, great twisting streaks of orange and red lashing at the sky like dancers. Thought about letting everything go up in smoke around me too. Instead, the next day I phoned around, called some people I knew in the investigation-stroke-security business. Work contacts, acquaintances. Names I knew from business cards or websites. Friends of friends of friends. Went back into the world.

3.

Blue Ridge Mountains, TN.

2005.

It was full-blown night and howling like all heaven was come to hunt on earth by the time I swung the crumbling Chevy into the parking lot of a rest stop in the ass end of nowhere and killed the engine. I’d been regretting paying cash for the damn thing, five years and fifty thousand miles past the time it should have been turned into scrap, for most of the journey from Kansas City, but it had got me here, to this valley with no name, in spite of its age and the conditions outside. Rain sluiced down the windshield in front of me. Movie rain, the sort of impossible downpour you only got from the most violent of storms, the sort that ended up sweeping your farmhouse clear to Oz.

Exactly the sort of storm that was covering the valley, between the marching foothills either side all the way from the reaches of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the east and the central Tennessee flatlands it spilled down into westwards. Like the metal execution cap on an electric chair, lacing the drowning land below with lightning until all life was gone.

This was where I’d been told the killings had happened.

The sign out front said: ‘ISAAC’S BAR AND GRILL’. Beneath it, a local wit had added: ‘POP: 6’. As well as the bar, there was a small gas station, a pair of houses probably dating from Truman’s day, a couple of trailers set back from the highway. Other than that, the valley was nothing but fields, mostly long-fallow and empty, bracketed on either flank by river clefts running down from the high ground, and split in two by the road that ran arrow-straight north to south like it was in a hurry to get out.

If I was wrong, if the message was a lie and this was some kind of set up, I could die here and I’d disappear so totally it’d be like I was plucked from the face of the planet.

Lightning shrieked across the sky over the darkened parking lot, flash-freezing the world in place for a second, as I hunkered under my coat and headed for the bar. Glanced around as the strobe-stopped raindrops went back to smashing against the gravel. There were a few other vehicles here. Nothing that looked like anything much. The wind howled, ripped into strange eddies by the storm thrashing above, as I shouldered my way indoors.

Crackling country music was playing on a radio in the corner, its static-shredded warbling barely audible over the noise outside. There were a half dozen people in the bar including its owner, a guy built like a Viking warrior or a leather sack stuff with rocks, standing guard behind the counter like it was the last line of defense against the world beyond. The storm was doing its best to get in on the party as well, and each time a fresh gust of wind crashed into the front windows everyone couldn’t help but jump a little, turn to look at the glass to see if this time, at last, it was about to crack and burst inwards under the pressure. First the windows. Then the walls. Until everything and everyone was gone and the valley was scoured clean.

What’ll it be? Isaac — I assumed — said when I took a stool.

A beer, thanks.

What kind?

Does it matter, night like this? Bud’s fine. I’m not fussy.

Flicker of a grin. Sure. You driving on far tonight? Weather’s gotta be making the road hell.

Not far, I said. I don’t think so anyway. I’ll survive.

The parking lot outside turned stark white for a moment as the glare from a big rig’s lights turned the driving rain into a luminescent fog of flickering neon, an impenetrable blanket of light around the front of the building. Then the glare died and the world outside the glass turned black again.

Isaac left me to my drink and went to serve a blonde woman in a puffy all-weather coat. The old man perched at the end of the counter with a steaming mug of coffee shook his head and said to the world in general, It’s a bad one all right.

Yeah, Isaac said. Real bad.

That shack MacBride built to keep his tools in is gone. Totally gone. There were pieces of it blown all over when I left the house.

MacBride never was any good with his hands.

A dark-haired woman playing darts with two guys in the corner chuckled. Mid thirties, maybe, and weathered. Used to working outside. Lines forming at the corners of her eyes. That’s what his wife said at his funeral, she called out.

The old man gave the obligatory snort. Thanks, Hailey. I heard she’s remarried down in Florida. Some feller who sells hurricane fencing.

We could do with some of that round here if this keeps up. Isaac glanced at the windows again.

Hurricane fencing. Can you believe that? She was a strange one, Marcia.

I saw it coming this afternoon, the barman said. Away down the valley, getting bigger all the time.

Like that time she was going to get all those chickens. Seen something on the TV about them being good for the soil and all of a sudden wanted dozens of them running free.

I swear that cloud looked like a goddamn atomic bomb had gone off. Boiling up and angry. And I mean it looked angry.

The old man nodded. It must be sitting across the whole valley by now. Maybe even further if it’s high enough to reach over the mountains.

Maybe so.

The old man’s wife, sitting next to him, sighed as he repeated, Ayuh. It’s a bad one.

The front door banged open and a bearded guy strode inside, pinching the rain from his eyes with one meaty hand. Keys jangled from the other, half a dozen of them dangling from a fob marked with the Peterbilt logo. The music on the radio, already struggling, took the opportunity to finally sputter and die in a burst of static. The trucker eyed the place for a moment, like he was looking for someone, or making sure there was no one here he didn’t want to meet. Whatever he was searching for, he didn’t seem to find it. He walked up to the bar, dropped onto a stool a little way along from where I sat, and asked for a coffee.

Sure, it’ll just be a couple of minutes, the barman said. He turned as a bright, mousey brunette came through the door behind the counter and dropped her keys next to the register. Hey, Ashley. You find that sweater okay?

She gestured at her chest and the blue woolen number that covered it. Swept damp hair back out of her face. Yeah. Shit, it’s really bad out there. The wind’s built up something fierce.

That’s what Will was just saying. We can hear it in here.

We sure can. The old man raised his mug and smiled, comfortable and easy. Like he was settling into a well-worn chair. Nothing like ’75 though.

Nothing ever is, Will. You know that.

Damn straight. That storm was so bad…

Ashley smiled wryly at the barman and started whispering a fraction ahead of the old man, Harry Dillon’s house blew down.

… the wind blew Harry Dillon’s house clean apart…

"Only