Page 51 of A Future To Remember

“I remember.”

The sheriff opened his mouth like he was about to say something but caught himself before he asked, “You sure you didn’t read about that somewhere?”

“My man, I’m not sure about anything. But go on and ask me if I want to help you solve your dad’s murder. I’ll wait,” I said smugly.

Again, Cash appeared thunderstruck. “How do you do that?”

I shrugged. “Shidirt just comes to me. I dunno.”

“When you say it comes to you, describe it for me.”

I paused my fry-dunking and munching long enough to consider his question and how I might best explain it. I decided to offer him an example. “Okay, so you know I like guessing drink orders, right?”

“No, but go on.”

“I like guessing drink orders, and my guesses are right maybe eighty-five to ninety percent of the time.”

He nodded like he could believe that.

“So, my method is to approach the table, write down what I think they’ll be ordering in a counterclockwise pattern, then I ask them what they want to drink, and if they order what I think they’ll say, then I give myself one point per person.”

“You make a game of it.”

“Exactly. Anyway, today, during lunch, I waited on fifty-eight people and racked up fifty-four points.”

“Impressive.”

I grinned. “I’d like to think so. Sometimes I’ll see something like a pot of coffee flash across my mind’s eye, and other times it’s a combo, like I’ll think of the word seven, but feel like I’m going up. Like, in an elevator.”

Cash’s eyes lit with understanding. “7Up?”

I nodded. “Yep.”

“Why wouldn’t you just see the logo from one of the cans?”

I shrugged again. “Don’t know. It comes how it comes, Cash. If I overthink it, I get it wrong.”

“Okay, so what did you get when you looked at that curb the other day?”

I thought back. “Well, let’s see…I had this unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach, and when that gave me pause, I literally stopped to consider it, and then there was a series of images playing like a video in my mind.”

“What were the images?”

“I saw a gun, then felt like a sting right here.” I tapped the center of my breastbone. “Then I saw a headstone and a grave, then a bronze sheriff’s star. And that’s when you caught me just standing on that spot, staring off into space, and I asked you who’d been shot there. After that, in my mind’s eye, I saw a hand holding up three fingers.” I paused to hold my hand up and curl my pinkie and thumb over my palm to show him what I’d seen in my mind’s eye. “And then one last image floated across my mind, and that was a dusty banker’s box, sitting on a shelf with the word unsolved written across it in red ink.”

“Wow,” he said when I was finished. “You really saw all that?”

“Yeah. It played like a movie in my mind.”

He shook his head slightly, like he couldn’t believe it, but then he nodded and said, “Three shots hit my dad. Two of the three would’ve been immediately fatal. He wouldn’t have survived even if we’d been standing right there.”

As he spoke, Cash’s mouth was twisted slightly, telling me it was painful to recount how his father had died.

“I’m so sorry,” I told him. And I was.

Cash cast his gaze toward his lap, nodding as if he needed a moment to compose himself. Then he lifted his focus back to me and leaned forward while gripping his mug tightly. “Any other details?”

“Like what?”