Page 1 of Dead Love
PartOne
CHAPTER1
Vincent
THREE YEARS EARLIER
I still wantedto burn the bastard. But eight feet deep into the ground, I ran through the motions: bury the man like he wanted, give him the respect he deserved. Like I had been taught. But as I stabbed my shovel into the dirt, the urge to ruin perfection simmered inside of me. To break and destroy all the fake virtue rising above us.
I grunted, leaning my weight on the metal to go deeper. The healing cuts on my palm ached and the plot was more than big enough, but I kept digging anyway.I don’t want to become a painting on your wall,my older brother had said.I don’t want to watch you live your life while I’m stuck on a canvas.He shoved my shoulder.Don’t you dare burn me, asshole.
You wouldn’t feel it,I said.
His lips pinched together.That’s not the point.
An unsettling sensation crawled in my gut. I couldn’t stop myself from digging. Wouldn’t let myself.
“Cops are here again,” a voice said.
My employee’s shadow hovered in my peripherals, watching from above. The employee was new; she had been at the funeral home for a few months now, but eventually, she would move on too. I kept digging; the dirt caking my face. At this depth, you had to toss it high over your shoulder, and if you weren’t careful, some of it rained back down on you. I threw another scoop up to the ground and she darted out of the way.
“What was that for?” she asked, as if I was trying to aim for her. I didn’t care that much.
The rectangular hole of blue sky had finally begun to darken. The sides of her head were shaved, the short gray dyed hairs glowing like peach fuzz in the dim light.
“I could get the excavator,” she said.
I sucked down a scowl. We had machinery that could do this, but I preferred to do it by hand. I liked keeping myself occupied.
“The sheriff?” I finally asked.
“Nah. The other one. White hair. I always forget his name.”
I touched up the grave with the back of my shovel, smoothing the edges. I should have hired a contractor to dig his grave. Should have needed to take time off. But I was removed from it. Guns. Overdose. Disease. It was all the same. I’d rather go with a knife, the blood leaking out of me. Or better yet, a fire so that I burned with every possible agony in those last seconds. But in the end, it didn’t matter how you went. Life continued on. I felt nothing, only an emptiness that I filled with work.
“I’ll stay here,” she said. “You need the time off. Go. Mourn. Take care of that officer. I’ll finish up here.”
“You’ll stay until sunrise?” I asked. She nodded. Not being around on Halloween—a night where the teenagers in Punica loved to vandalize the cemetery—was a reprieve I would not pass up. She could learn the hard way about Halloween. I climbed up the ladder.
“You want tomorrow off?” I asked.
“That’s a given.”
I muttered my thanks, then went inside the funeral home. A young officer in full blues waited in the lobby, his thumbs in his belt loops.
“Evening, Erickson,” he said. My scalp prickled; we weren’t on familiar terms, but he and his sheriff had been around a lot lately. He tipped the imaginary hat above his white hair. “The toxicology report came back. Heroin.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.
“Didn’t you have an incident a few years ago?”
I had been out at a bar when a fight broke out over some drugs. The charges were dropped, but that didn’t mean that there weren’t arrest records out there. The officer must have been digging around to find that.
“Almost a decade has passed,” I shrugged. “But yeah. There was an incident.”
The officer tilted his head. “Coincidental,” he said.
“Lots of people do drugs.” My jaw stiffened. “But you know that, don’t you? And we both know my brother did.”
