Cole counted the caterer’s trucks from across the street.
Three a white van with “Forever Yours Catering” scripted on the side, two pickups behind it.
Six hours until the wedding party arrived, and a dead man’s bones were still under the brewery’s basement floor, waiting to drop a ceiling on all of them.
Men were unloading folding chairs through the loading dock.
Nobody was watching the front door.
A hand appeared next to his elbow holding a glass of whiskey.
“You gonna go in,” the man said, “or you gonna stand here looking haunted all afternoon.”
Cole turned.
The man was sixty-something, Black, wearing a canvas jacket and a look that said he’d been a hunter longer than Cole had been alive.
He had a second glass of whiskey in his other hand.
“I’m waiting,” Cole said.
“For what.”
“The caterer to finish.”
The man drank.
“You know what’s in there.”
“Yeah.”
“You know it’s gonna drop the ceiling on a hundred people if you let it sit till tonight.”
“I know.”
“Then quit waiting and go salt the damn bones.” The man looked at him.
“Unless you don’t know where they are.
In which case, get out of town and let somebody else work it.”
Cole took the glass.
“Who are you.”
“Rufus Turner.
I don’t shake hands with men I might have to salt-and-burn later.”
“Fair.”
“You got a name?”
“Not one you’re getting today.”
Rufus smiled, thin.
“All right.
Go do your job, kid.
I’ll watch the street.”
Cole drank the whiskey in one go and handed the glass back.
It burned clean.
He crossed the street and went around the back of the brewery to the service entrance the caterers hadn’t found yet.
The door was unlocked.
He slipped inside.
The air was old and damp and tasted like rust.
The main floor was a wide open space with cast-iron columns holding up a ceiling that had started to bow in the center.
The caterers had set up round tables in neat rows and strung white lights from hooks that might have held hops a hundred years ago.
It looked like a picture from a magazine.
It looked like a place you’d want to get married.
Cole did not look up at the ceiling.
He found the basement stairs and went down.
The cold hit him halfway down.
Not air-cold. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The other kind.
The basement was smaller than the floor above and divided into storage rooms with brick walls and wooden doors that had swollen in their frames.
The floor was dirt in some places and poured concrete in others.
Cole pulled a flashlight from his jacket and clicked it on.
The bone was under the floorboards in the third room.
He could feel it before he saw it.
The cold had a direction.
He knelt and pried up three boards with a screwdriver he’d bought at a gas station that morning.
The dirt underneath was loose.
Something had been digging here.
Raccoons, maybe, or rats.
Or the thing that used to be a man.
The skeleton was shallow.
Incomplete.
Just a ribcage and a skull and one long arm-bone.
The rest had been scattered or hauled off.
It didn’t matter.
The skull was enough.
Cole pulled a Ziploc bag of salt from his jacket and a small bottle of lighter fluid.
He poured the salt into the dirt around the bones in a ring.
Then he soaked the bones until the bottle was empty.
The smell was sharp and chemical and wrong in a place this old.
He struck a match.
The fire caught fast.
The bones went up blue-white and the cold in the room spiked and then snapped.
The skull cracked down the middle with a sound like ice on a windshield.
The flames burned for thirty seconds and then went low and orange and normal.
Cole waited until the bones were ash.
Then he scooped the ash into the Ziploc bag, poured more salt over the dirt, and replaced the floorboards.
The cold was gone.
The room felt like a basement again.
He climbed the stairs and came out into the main floor.
The caterers were gone.
The tables sat empty under the white lights.
The ceiling had stopped bowing.
It would hold now.
Cole walked out the front door into the afternoon sun.
Rufus was sitting on the curb across the street with his arms on his knees.
He watched Cole cross the street and stop next to him.
“It done?” Rufus said.
“Yeah.”
“Wedding’s gonna go fine, then.”
“Yeah.”
Rufus stood and brushed off his jeans.
“You know what I’ve been doing,” he said, “is watching you work this circuit for three weeks.
Marshalltown.
Cedar Rapids.
That thing in Hannibal.
Now here.
You got a real gift for showing up right when a case is about to go bad and fixing it before anybody notices it was broken.”
Cole said nothing.
“Worked out like a story,” Rufus said.
“Every time.
Like somebody wrote it down and handed it to you and said ‘here, go make this one work.'”
“I get lucky.”
“Nobody gets that lucky.” Rufus looked at the brewery.
“But you don’t work sloppy.
I’ll give you that.
You don’t waste people and you don’t make a mess.
So I’m gonna let you keep your name.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me.
I’m keeping an eye on you.” Rufus pulled a card from his jacket and held it out.
“You get in over your head, you call that number.
Somebody’ll answer.”
Cole took the card.
It had a phone number and nothing else.
“You gonna tell me your name now?” Rufus said.
“No.”
Rufus smiled.
“Good.
Don’t trust anybody who gives it up easy.” He turned and walked toward a truck parked two blocks down.
He did not look back.
Cole stood on the curb and watched him go.
His throat was cold.
Not cold like the basement.
Cold like the air he was breathing had frost in it.
He swallowed and the cold stayed.
He got in the Civic and started the engine.
The wedding would start at seven and the ceiling would hold and nobody would ever know a man had been buried in the basement for sixty years.
Rufus Turner had his face now and an opinion about how his cases landed, and there was nothing Cole could do about either.
The cold in his throat would last a week.
He could feel it settling in.
Lorebind left marks.
Small ones, mostly.
This one would fade.
Probably.
He drove south with Rufus Turner’s card in his shirt pocket and no plan to use the number soon.
Iowa was next a missing hiker, a cave shut for thirty years, three days already gone and he kept his eyes on the road and let the rest of it wait its turn.