Consumption and Other vices

By Tyler Dempsey

Bloomington. A town where on the surface nothing really happens. Where men at the diner never flip the page of the paper held in front of them. Where pointer fingers rise from the steering wheel of every passing car. Finds itself irrevocably changed after two of its own wind up dead. But, Detective Andews and partner Shupbert know what it takes to dig deep. Like their lives depend on it. A whirlwind of drugs, deception, sex, and an unusual dark energy lurks below the surface of this quaint town, and it's a race against the clock to catch our killer before the walls of their sanity crumble down. A supernatural whodunit told in a vignette-style at breakneck speed, Consumption & Other Vices, will leave you gasping for breath, checking the locks on your house at night.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Death of Print
• Release date: Apr 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223042525

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Consumption and Other Vices | A novel by Tyler Dempsey | Published by Death of Print | ©2023 Tyler Dempsey | Cover by Tex Gresham

Consumption and Other Vices

A novel by Tyler Dempsey

Published by Death of Print

©2023 Tyler Dempsey

Cover by Tex Gresham

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WHAT STANDS OUT IS HER PUCKERED-UP LIPS. Her lips puckered, and it lifting like this. See this pen on your desk here. Just like this. A pen is where I hid the thing naughty girls like best.

Tonight, this night, of which we’re talking, the night I brought over Jane. I knew she knew. Being from a wooded, hole-in-the-wall place, a place where roads curl like curlicues and people don’t live in the large houses set way back in the woods—a girl like this brings company.

Does she get down. This is what I asked.

I asked and Jane and the girl, Clara, they looked at each other in the cab of my big brown truck. Giggling. She gets down is how Jane answered. They brought it to their lips and lifted.

And like this—I grinned and revved the engine. Leaves on the dirt road swirled. Me and Jane and Clara in my truck on a road where people don’t live in large houses set way back in the woods. Good, is how I answered.

Don’t worry, Jane said. She placed a palm on my oily jeans. You girls are going to get in trouble. They looked at each other like two naughty robbers. You could be sisters, I said.

Giggling giggled by their puckered-up cheeks. There, in the cab of my big brown truck. As the roads straightened.

Roads that were dirt started being built with rock.

Houses, peopled with people houses, sit right up on roads like this.

It’s like this—with dirt, and rock, with peopled with people houses. With types of roads, with houses, and how they’re peopled—this is the way the road talks to me— puckered and whispering, like it does, to a person like me.

What it was telling me was that us, in the truck, were closer to Papa’s house.

Where I live.

MONDAY. SUNSET.

Andrews crosscut by shadows of branches stretching over the field. His ears ringing. In the key of A-minor. That’s new. Pheasants take flight through oranges and pinks, becoming dots on the horizon.

He saw nothing. There was nothing. Nothing.

The Chase Bank. Two miles back. You see that, Shup? Check to see if there’s cameras.

Shupbert writes in a leather-bound.

Settling into the freshly turned dirt, the body lies face down, arms a pretzel beneath.

Female.

A fly crawls in and out of her mouth. Stab wounds— forty-two. Victim One.

Warm. To memory.

LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AGO, SHE VIDEO-TEXTED SHAUN. Fingernails painted at his house between flared hips. Shaun—late-shift—squatting with his phone out, pants down in the janitor’s closet.

Fuck. What I’d do to you.

The victim’s cell phone, caked in dirt, drops in a plastic bag being passed to forensics.