The Silver Tongued Devil Chapter 1: Chapter 1 - Country road take me... home?

Read chapter 1 of The Silver Tongued Devil by The Vilkas on NovelPedia.

On a dreary Tuesday, everything lined up just right for once. The day was winding down, the last check had cleared, and Matas was headed home with enough time to actually sit down to dinner instead of inhaling it over the sink. He sat behind the wheel of a Chevy cargo van, ladders rattling on the roof and nails rolling around in the back, every inch the overwhelmed contractor he felt like. Low-key stoner, brown hair mashed flat from the day's grind, shoulders sore from hauling shingles up pitches no sane person enjoyed. This drive was muscle memory. Matas had run the route home from West Elm Street to his place in Beach Park roughly four hundred times in the past three years. He could've driven it with his eyes closed—and some nights, after a brutal double-shift, he'd half-wondered if he actually had. The van knew the turns. His body knew the turns. After seven hours hauling shingles and calculating loads and worrying about whether the plywood beneath would hold when the wind kicked up, the drive was his decompression chamber. His shoulders began to unknot the moment he hit the straightaway past the last job site. The tension that had lived in his neck since sunrise—tension born from heights and responsibility and the knowledge that one miscalculation meant someone's roof leaking in January—started to drain out through his hands and into the steering wheel. By the time he'd passed the Mobil station, his jaw had unclenched. By the time he'd hit the residential stretch with the old Victorians, he was close to human again. Roads were like rooflines, he'd always thought. You learned the load paths. Where the stress collected—the valleys, the eaves, the transition points where one plane met another at an angle. You understood where water would flow, where ice would grip, where a gust could shear the whole thing sideways if the structure wasn't sound. McHenry's roads he knew like he knew his own roof: the grades and curves and shoulders that held weight, the places where asphalt had settled into familiar patterns. He trusted them because they'd never betrayed him. They were constant. They had rules that didn't change. The van's suspension settled into its usual rhythm as he downshifted into that familiar stretch of tree-lined single lane. Almost home. The thought came with its own release—endorphins, maybe, or just the certainty of Alea's borscht waiting. Either way, his free foot tapped against the floor mat in time with Bob Seger's voice on the Bluetooth speaker. Rain again. Those first misty drops started peppering the windshield, and the corner of his mouth twitched up anyway. The weather made him glance at the sky. Big grey clouds rolled in from Wisconsin, covering McHenry in a blanket of shadow and mist, like the land itself was turning in for the night. He'd worked roofs in this exact kind of rain maybe a hundred times. Not heavy enough to shut down a job, just heavy enough to be a bastard—slick decking, nails harder to seat, every footfall a calculated risk. The van's roof would be drumming with it by the time he got home, that soft metallic patter that sounded like ten thousand tiny fingers tapping in rhythm. He liked that sound. It meant shelter. It meant he was inside and the storm was outside and the only thing he had to worry about was the gutters backing up. In weather like this, the road usually turned quiet. Traffic thinned out. People either stayed home or moved faster, eager to get somewhere dry. In another twenty minutes, this drizzle would probably become a proper storm—the kind that sent people's insurance premiums up by checking weather reports. He'd probably have to sit in the driveway for a bit, let the worst of it pass before heading inside. Alea hated when he tracked water across her good floor. The clouds above shifted slightly, pressing down lower. The light turned greenish-grey, that particular shade that meant the system had real teeth. Matas adjusted his headlights to full beam and kept his speed stead