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Back Dead of Winter Save as PDF
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Once I’d dropped the shed door and locked it with my code, I started through the accumulation of snow to the back door of the house.

I didn’t make it.

24

24

Slowly, I regained consciousness.

As I did, I found myself simultaneously shivering from excessive cold and baking from a stinging heat.

It didn’t take my recovering consciousness long to find I was naked and tied to a wooden chair, its legs reinforced with rough-hewn wooden wedges nailed to the floor. My ankles and wrists were double zip-tied to the chair’s legs and arms.

There was no bottom to the chair, and I sat suspended by my thighs on the seat frame.

As the fog swirling behind my eyes cleared, I discovered why I was simultaneously freezing and baking: while two high-powered halogen work lights on tripods, powered by a portable generator, slow roasted the front of my body, I was exposed to a broken window behind me and to the left. Michigan’s icy and unrelenting winter winds rippled across my back.

“Good,” a silhouetted figure said, standing between the blinding work lamps. “You’re awake. ’Bout damned time.”

“Who—who are you?”

“I, my friend, am the ugly aftermath of a self-proclaimed honorable man,” the figure said, slowly approaching me. “The cold, grey ash blown away after a long-forgotten fire.”

The smell of this place—crumbling red brick, waterlogged concrete, rusted steel and rotting wood—was familiar . . .

I squinted at the silhouette as it approached. “You might want to be a little more specific?”

The man stopped a couple feet in front of me and leaned forward: a rugged Black man, maybe in his late forties, with chiseled features and dark, fathomless eyes. He grinned, exposing perfect white teeth.

“How’s this for ‘specific,’ Detective Snow?” he said.

I may have still been in a pharmaceutically induced fog, but I knew that face.

“Lieutenant Hayes?” I heard myself say.

“Bingo!” he said. “Detective Lieutenant Valentino Hayes, Fourteenth Precinct, mayor’s DPD protective detail, sir!” He suddenly came to attention and snapped a crisp salute. As he eased out of his salute, his steady dark eyes met mine. “Of course, you changed all of that, didn’t you? You changed everything.”

“I did what I had to do—”

A quick, jagged-knuckled right cross to my left cheek.

“You blew up the worlds of fifteen good men!” he growled. “You dug a trench, and one by one you threw their bodies in. Including me! Seven years! Seven fucking years in Jackson because of you and your smug, sanctimonious arrogance. You have any idea what a special hell prison is for somebody who gave blood, muscle and bone for a city he served and protected?”