Sean Joye is a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War. He wants nothing more than to start a clean, new life in America, free of supernatural misadventures and shoot-on-sight orders. He takes what he thinks is an easy job as bodyguard for a St. Louis judge, driving him to Missouri’s infamous state penitentiary to witness an execution.
The appointed day is clear and fine. A perfect day for a hanging. Yet as soon as they arrive at the prison, Sean realizes his back is up over something. Maybe it’s just the summer heat or Sean’s memories of his own time as a prisoner of war, but psychic premonitions of trouble are more likely. He soon finds himself a pawn in a jailhouse preacher’s mountain-magic-fueled escape attempt. Sean must rise to the occasion, evading rioting convicts, trigger-happy guards, and a preternatural cyclone to rescue both the judge and an unjustly condemned prisoner from the resurrectionist.
The Resurrectionist is a Dashiell-Hammett-style supernatural noir novella replete with mystery, monsters, and mayhem. A self-contained story, its events occur prior those of my other Sean Joye Investigations: The Big Cinch and Water of Life. These three books can be read in any order without confusion. Here for your reading pleasure is a brief sample of The Resurrectionist.
The Resurrectionist: Arrival
Turn here,” the Judge said from the back seat as he tapped me on the shoulder. “You’re about to miss the prison entrance.” Obedient ever, I veered left, the Model T skidding across the melting asphalt only to lurch over the gravel road’s ruts. At the sight of a chain gang marching toward us, I slammed the brake, and the tires spewed a cloud of dust into the air. The walking boss—on horseback today, no fool in the summer heat—tipped his hat and hurried them along.
A Burial
Four denim-clad white men stumbled over the gravel and their chains but managed to hang onto the rectangular pine box they carried. Another inmate, a tall, freckled ginger laden with shovels and pickaxes, hurried behind them.
“You’d think they’d assign trusties to the burial detail,” the Judge said. “Then they wouldn’t have to chain them together.”
At the time, I’d only been in the States a few months. All I knew about the American penal system was the getting nicked part, but I’d heard somewhere that convicts could gain special status and privileges, even authority over other inmates, through the trusty system. Whether the grift operated on good behavior, bribes, or extraordinary kowtowing, I couldn’t say. “Maybe they don’t trust all that many prisoners.”
I continued to watch the men as they made for a small burial plot atop a rise about fifty feet off the road. The ugliest tree I’d ever seen in my life—half-dead, misshapen, and sprouting wicked thorns at odd intervals—crowned the hilltop but provided not a whit of shade from the noonday sun. Crumbling limestone grave markers poked out of its base. I pictured the roots, slow but sure, crushing the flimsy pine boxes and the poor sods under the hillside.
Just thinking on the fella they were about to plant among strangers in this godforsaken place gave me the heebie-jeebies. A wisp of a cloud must have passed over the sun; shadows covered the graveyard for a moment. But what should have been a small blessing felt like a threat.
“Anytime now, Sean,” the Judge said. The walking boss and his horse had trotted across the road while I’d been worrying over a dead tree and a dead man.
A Guest of the State
“Sorry.” I stepped on the gear shift and gave the car some petrol. “Thought that cloud might bring us some rain.”
“Rain’s unlikely,” the Judge said. I drove another hundred yards or so and then stopped at the prison gate. My palms, damp with sweat, stuck to the steering wheel. Of course, I’m sweating, I told myself. The day’s hot as hell. Got nothing to do with my pounding heart or a dead man crossing my path.
While I waited for a guard to decide to open the gates, I watched the burial detail in the rearview window. The men had set down their burden, and three of them commenced to digging. The boss got off his horse and motioned the other two cons over to the pine box. They dragged themselves and their chains to the boss, giving the coffin a wide berth. There was a bit of conversation, and the ginger seemed to offer to take over the digging. The boss knocked him up the side of the head and again pointed at the box. The inmate slowly walked over to it and even more slowly lifted the lid for the boss to peek in.
I about jumped out of my skin at a tapping noise on the windscreen. “How’s y’all doing today?” said the gate guard as he motioned me out of the car. He wore a name badge that said “Gillespie” and a sweat-stained khaki uniform. “Come for the hanging?”
I nodded. “This here’s the Judge. From St. Louis.”
“Well, youse right welcome here.” Gillespie consulted a list, peered in at the Judge, and nodded. “I’ll just check you for weapons,” he said to me, “and y’all can be on your way.”
I leaned, arms outstretched, across the car’s hood. On the Judge’s order, I hadn’t even brought a gun—it wouldn’t be allowed inside the prison. Driving all the way from St. Louis to Jefferson City without a weapon was foolish, and the risk had set me on edge for half the day already. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
The guard chuckled in my ear. “I might think you done this before.”
Quite true and none of his business. I watched the Judge through the windscreen, comfortable and out of the sun in the car’s back seat. He avoided my eyes.
Gillespie searched me right quick, all the while yammering about the hanging. “This should be a good’un. Yes, sir, the whole state of Missourah will sleep better once that—that—sumbitch nun-killer swings.”
The Judge gazed at the rows of prison factory buildings in the near distance where the unpaid labor churned out everything from shoes to buggy whips.
“Well, this is the judge what sentenced him,” I told the guard as I opened the car door.
“Did he now?” Gillespie took another look at His Honor, Judge James Dolan of the Twenty-Second Circuit Court. “He done us a public service then, sure enough.”
The Prison
The quality of the frisk was second-rate at best, and I slid back behind the steering wheel with a folding knife in my coat pocket and a garrote in my hat lining. A hydraulic mechanism pulled up the gate, and Gillespie motioned us forward. But I sat there like an eejit. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember how to drive.
As I muttered a quick Hail Mary to calm myself, I felt the weight of the Judge’s large hand grab my shoulder. “Steady, boy. Nothing to be afraid of. See the guards in the towers?”
I sucked in a deep breath. “Ain’t we perfectly safe then?” Maybe he rightly feared a prisoner’s attack, but what I didn’t much like was the prison itself. I’d spent six months of 1921 in Belfast’s Crumlin Road Gaol while the Irish armed struggle against the English staggered to a stalemate. There I cooled my heels, awaiting the king’s pleasure for my own hanging.
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If you enjoyed reading this exert, you might like an excerpt from my new novel, The Big Cinch.
The Big Cinch from Montag Press, is an award-winning supernatural noir adventure by Kathy L. Brown. Sean Joye, a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean, new life in America. Until he asks the wrong questions..
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