Текст книги "Supernatural Noir "

Автор книги: Paul Tremblay

Соавторы: Caitlin Rebekah Kiernan,Brian Evenson,Joe R. Lansdale,Lucius Shepard,Laird Barron,Nate Southard,Gregory Frost,John Langan,Richard Bowes,Tom Piccirilli
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

“Is he really dead this time?”

“Don’t know and don’t care. I’ve got a full clip. That’ll keep him down long enough.”

“Are those little statues doing this?” Sylvia asks.

“Probably.” Rossini casts another glance at the corpse thrashing on the carpet in the hall. “Asshole there got drunk one night and started bragging about these things. He called them the Pellis Icons, and he’d spent about twenty years hunting them down. He said they helped him master the flesh, whatever the hell that means. I know he used them to tear apart Tocci, because I was sitting with him in this room when he did it. They do something, and I figure I’ve got plenty of time to figure out exactly what that is.”

“How much are they worth?”

Rossini laughs and shakes his head. “By your definition, not a damn thing. There isn’t a fence on the continent who would know what to do with them.”

He turns away from Sylvia to take another look at the thrashing man. Sylvia pulls her gun and shoots the thief in the shoulder, sending him sprawling against the wall. He drops his gun and slides to his knees and looks at Sylvia, an expression of pained surprise on his face.

“What the fuck, Syl?” he says. He grasps the wound on his shoulder. Blood spills between his fingers in thick rivulets.

She doesn’t reply. Instead she keeps the gun aimed on Rossini’s face as she crosses to him and retrieves his weapon from the floor. She slips it into her pocket and walks to the safe. On the floor is Rossini’s canvas bag. Sylvia retrieves it and waves the sack in the air until it’s opened. Without looking at the thief, she pulls the meager amount of cash into the bag and then scoops the Pellis Icons on top of the bills. The disappointing void of the safe still feels wrong to her, and she convinces herself that Louis must have kept more. She reaches in and presses against the back wall, expecting a panel to pop free. She does this on every shelf, but the back of the safe is solid and hides no additional treasures. She gives the empty shelves a final look and then turns to leave.

In the hall, the dead man’s convulsions have stopped, and she is grateful for this, but Rossini has crawled away. He no longer sits by the door. Sylvia approaches the hall cautiously, gun raised, fingers tensed and ready to fire. The weapon trembles in her hand. When she reaches the threshold, she is shocked to see the condition of the body in the hall.

It isn’t Louis at all. Sylvia recognizes the corpse’s face, and it belongs to a low-level bookie who went by the name of Tap. His cheeks are red as if deeply sunburned. The collar of his dress shirt is laid wide, and his tie has been torn away and lies across the expensive carpet like a crimson tongue. Blood continues to seep from the two well-placed holes Rossini shot in the man’s chest. Sylvia absorbs this oddity and wonders how she could have mistaken this insignificant creep for Louis Towne.

A crash in the hallway sends her back into the den. Glass shatters, and a great weight hits the floor. Sylvia puts the canvas sack and her purse down and holds the gun in both hands, trying unsuccessfully to steady the weapon, which suddenly feels as heavy as a block of lead. A quieter thump comes from the hallway, and Sylvia swallows a moan.

Movement in the doorway causes Sylvia to fire two shots in rapid succession, but the flashing motion is too brief, like a flag whipping in a sudden breeze. Her bullets punch through the wall.

Then a man steps into view. Sylvia cannot fire her weapon; the abomination in the doorway makes no sense and the sight of it puts a clamp on her mind, rendering her incapable of comprehension or action.

The body is Rossini’s. He is unstable, rocking from foot to foot. One broad hand clutches the door frame for support; the other slaps at a sheathed knife hooked to his belt. He wears Louis Towne’s face like a mask. The cheeks are shiny, stretched tightly over the thief’s features, with tiny ears jutting from the side of the massive head. The rest of Louis’s skin, a sheet of bloodless flesh the color of bacon fat, hangs from Rossini’s chin like an untied butcher’s apron and swings as the thief rocks from side to side. Bony thorns ring the dangling sheet of skin like teeth. The flesh billows and slaps against the thief’s body, attempting to gain greater purchase, but it seems unable to secure itself to the fabric. Sylvia takes in every detail of the unnatural union before her and then repeats the process in a futile attempt to understand it.

Louis’s lips move and a hoarse mumble escapes Rossini’s throat. The attempt is made again. “Put them back,” come the words, though Sylvia can’t be certain who has made the request.

The thief finally frees the knife from its sheath at his belt, and Sylvia waits breathlessly for him to carve through Louis’s flapping skin. Instead, the thief cocks back his arm and hurls the blade at Sylvia.

It strikes her high on the right breast, sending her stumbling back. The air is knocked from her body, and she nearly drops her gun, but the attack brings clarity, supersedes the paralyzing awe. Desperate to keep her footing, Sylvia regains her balance and assumes a firing stance with the gun clamped in her hands, and she squeezes the trigger. A hole punches in the flapping belly of Louis’s skin and passes through to rip its way into Rossini’s gut. She squeezes again and again, every shot hitting home. The thief stumbles back to the corridor wall and slides to the carpet. Sylvia continues firing, and her final bullet pierces Louis Towne’s forehead and that of the man who wears him.

She drops to her knees and sobs. Grasping the hilt of the knife, she pulls it from her chest, and it feels like she’s ripping a bone from her body. She nearly faints from the sight of so much blood following the blade from the wound, and though she manages to remain conscious, her head spins with sickening speed. She collapses to the side and grinds her teeth against the pain, and she closes her eyes and inhales shallowly because she needs oxygen but the jabbing pain cuts off her respiration in midbreath. Sweat slathers her brow, chilling it. Her body shivers from the cold. She thinks if she can just rest for a few minutes, she will conquer the pain and make her escape. People had survived worse. A moment to recover from the shock and then downstairs and out the door and into Rossini’s car. At the emergency room she will make up a story about muggers, and the doctor will tell her she’s lucky to be alive, and she’ll thank him before painkillers carry her into comfortable sleep.

But she is not at the hospital yet, and she doesn’t feel safe. Sylvia fights to open her eyes.

Louis Towne’s skin slides over the carpet toward her. His head is raised like the hood of a cobra and Sylvia sees Mickey Rossini’s bloodstained corpse through the bullet holes and the empty eye sockets of the face.

Sylvia cries out and a burst of adrenaline provides sufficient fuel for her to rise to her knees. The knife is within her reach and she snatches it up, as the mask of Louis’s face bears down on her. Sylvia strikes out. The blade slices into Louis’s cheek, and she guides the weapon down with all of her force, nailing the flesh to the floor, and refusing to allow Louis to escape again, Sylvia crawls forward and kneels on the spongy sheet. She yanks the blade free, sending bolts of agony across her chest, and begins to slash at the rippling tissues. Chunks of skin come free and wriggle about on the floor like worms dropped on an electrified plate, and Sylvia slices and stabs and tears until Louis Towne’s remains amount to nothing more than a confetti of jittering meat.

Sylvia drops the knife and looks around the room, alert for any new threat that might target her, and her gaze lands on the canvas sack, and she considers what Rossini has told her about the mastery of flesh, and then she looks to the trembling tissue about her for confirmation. She crawls to the bag and empties its contents. In desperation she gathers up the ugly iron icons and holds them tightly in her hands, clutches them to her breast. She lies down on the carpet and lets her eyes close, and falls unconscious. She dies twenty minutes later.

–

I met Sylvia Newman some hours after her death. Louis had told me about the woman—went on in some detail about their affair—but to the best of my knowledge, I’d never set eyes on her before.

Needled by annoyance, I went to his house that morning to pick up the documents his wife had failed to messenger me before leaving for Miami, and upon finding the alarm system deactivated, decided to search the house for signs of burglary. Upstairs, I was met by the sight of Mickey Rossini sitting upright with seven holes in his body. Manny “Tap” Tappert lay on his back with two holes in his chest and a startled expression on his face. But the worst sight awaited me in Louis’s den. In the center of the room was a shifting mass that resembled a loose congregation of mealworms writhing excitedly, and next to this grotesque display was a skinless corpse.

Even partially clad in a black jacket and slacks, it seemed too small, too delicate to have been the remains of an adult. Eyes whiter than paper lay nestled in a field of deep red. Here and there, ridges of white bone showed through the crimson tissue of muscle and ligament. My stomach clenched, wondering who could perform such an atrocity on another human being and wondering what a victim might do to deserve such a desecration.

While I was absorbed by the grotesquerie, what I thought was a hood dropped over my head, startling me back, but my reflexes were no match for Sylvia. She must have been waiting on the ceiling, descending upon me as I stood rapt by the repulsive scene. Her face stretched over mine, and the thorny teeth ringing her skin bit into the back of my head like fingernails working their way into an orange rind. As the skin pulled across my brow and chin and those thorns tore their way in, her memories began flooding me, drowning my own thoughts with scenes from this woman’s life:

Sylvia Newman strolls along the boulevard.

Sylvia believes her lover is joking, except that he isn’t.

Sylvia is dead but alive in her skin, which she feels ripping like fabric, peeling in a single sheet from her muscles and bones.

A thousand such scenes play simultaneously in my mind. Amid this torrent of information I was lost: I was Sylvia.

Overwhelmed, I ceased what little struggles I’d engaged in and resigned myself to this mental infestation, viewing the torments and triumphs and carnal excesses that had molded Sylvia Newman. The skin of her neck stretched tightly around my throat, restricting my breath, and the tiny bones punctured the nape of my neck and scraped across my spine, and more information flooded in, so dense it cascaded through my head like photographs printed on raindrops.

When this downpour ceased, I remained standing in Louis Towne’s study. My clothes had been removed and Sylvia busied herself, stretching and wrapping and securing her flesh over mine. Her skin buckled my knees, and we stumbled forward and I grasped the drape for support, but fell nonetheless. The curtain rod snapped under my weight, bringing the window treatment down in a wave. We scurried back on my hands and knees, and then, with great effort, we regained our footing and stood, only to be startled by the sight greeting us.

With night as a backdrop, the window had become a perfect mirror. Sylvia’s face, still thick with makeup, had fused to mine; her full red lips formed a grotesque O around my own mouth. Her breasts sagged emptily against the skin of her stomach, which shined from such tension it looked as though it might rip at any moment, and the tip of my penis showed through the labial lips between her legs. It was this last that so enthralled me. Sylvia must have sensed my fascination because the skin there began to ripple and pull, caressing the head of my cock until it began to grow, and soon a library of erotic images—Towne fucking her and Rossini fucking her and Tocci and a dozen others—crowded my awestruck mind.

The rippling and pulling intensified. The reflection of this unnatural intercourse filled my eyes as I watched her skin creep along my shaft and then drag backward revealing the entirety of my erection. Soon I became aware of another sensation—I felt what Sylvia felt, an intense tingling in the lips of skin that eagerly stroked my cock. She willed my hands to her nipples, forced them to squeeze and pinch, dragging the empty sacks of her breasts away from our body. Sparks of pleasure shot like dry lightning through a desert, alighting the tissues and skipping off to some equally sensitive destination. The act repulsed me, and it excited me. Climax burst on us so quickly I cried out, or she did.

After, we stood breathless, staring at ourselves in the window. She spoke to me, moving my lips and forcing air from my lungs through the vocal cords and over my tongue.

“We’re very good together,” she said. “We can accomplish so much.”

I asked her what it was she hoped to accomplish, and she showed me the face of a bucktoothed man named Toady. His expression was tense and hateful. He drew back his fist and punched us in the cheek, and Sylvia’s loathing of the cretin became mine.

“There are others,” she said. “So many others. All we need are the icons.”

“And each other,” I said.

“Of course.”

–

We stand at the window, observing the crude bumps and tightly stretched planes of skin, and we whisper back and forth—plans and dreams and longings so deep we have never spoken them aloud to another soul. The words spill quietly from my lips and I observe their formation in the pane, and in one heart-stopping moment we fall silent.

I find us so beautiful I can’t speak another word.

–

Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary Award– and Bram Stoker Award–winning author of the novels Stained, Damage, and The Dust of Wonderland, and the short-story collection In the Closet, under the Bed. In addition to numerous magazines, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Darkness on the Edge, Dead Set, Horror Library Volume 4, and Inferno, among others. Current and forthcoming titles include the novellas The Black Sun Set, Crisis, and Focus (cowritten with Nate Southard). His latest novel, The German, was released by Lethe Press in April 2011.

| BUT FOR SCARS |

Tom Piccirilli

–

I woke up at four a.m. to a whistling, icy draft and found a teenage girl downstairs feeding my goldfish, Cecil. She’d been at it for a while. The box of fish food was empty, Cecil was dead, and she was scratching at her temple with an S&W popgun .22.

October rain slid against the living-room windows and brown, wet leaves clung thickly to the bottom of the open front door. There was a rusted key in the lock and an overturned rock at the foot of the porch steps. I hadn’t known about the hiding spot. I shut the door.

Emily Wright didn’t glance up.

I knew who she was even though I hadn’t seen her in six years. The chubby little girl had turned a delicate sixteen, with the pale and inviting face of a freshly sculpted young woman. Her once-vibrant blue eyes had grown smoky and muted. Seams around her mouth added a kind of evocative maturity that was already provocative. Men would consider her sexy as hell until she hit maybe twenty-five, and then she’d be downgraded to bruised fruit. By the time she was thirty the neighbors would be saying she hadn’t aged well.

She looked a lot like her mother, without the cruel lips and shamelessness.

I shivered at the bottom of the staircase, barefoot and shirtless, wearing only baggy sweatpants. Wisps of my breath curled through the air. I checked the thermostat. Emily had turned off the heat. I snapped it back on.

She wore wet Sojourner State pajamas and the tatters of ward slippers. Her feet were mucked with grime. The hospital was eight miles out of town, and she looked like she’d walked the whole way here in the rain. She kept tapping the empty box of fish food against the side of the aquarium with her left hand. In her right she now held the .22 loosely in her lap.

Her lips moved but she made no sound. She nodded, shook her head, and even shrugged as if deep in conversation.

I’d seen a few unstable teens in my time. I’d been one myself. I’d hit a bad patch during puberty after my parents died, and skidded into the wall. I’d stolen cars and driven all over the state trying to escape myself. I’d climbed water towers out of my head and broke into houses just to page through photo albums and pretend I was a part of the family. They used to find me curled under the blankets, holding dolls, wasted on crank and muttering, “Mommy.”

I was shopped around from one foster family to the next until they finally packed me off to the juvie detention wing of Sojourner State Psychiatric Facility. I spent two years in hell fighting my way out of gang rapes and forced body modification with broken razor blades. You had to be on your toes to avoid hydrotherapy, where more than a few kids drowned. The orderlies used to stage ward matches between the paranoids, the firebugs, chronic masturbators, bipolars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives. The only reason I ever got my shit together was because I possessed an unholy amount of survival instinct that I never realized I had.

Cecil floated in a tight circle on his side. Emily had finally put down the empty box and was dangling her fingers in the water, making ripples that kept Cecil chugging along. The hand in her lap danced nervously, the .22 swaying left and right, angled at my chest. She didn’t seem to be aware that she was holding it.

“You’ve got scars,” she said.

“Yes,” I admitted.

“Where’d you get them?”

“Lots of places.”

“Like where?”

“In juvie detention, alley fights, poker games gone sour.”

“They’re cool.”

Mottled pink and white scars, some of them as thick as a finger, might be considered a lot of things, but I’d never found them to be cool. I felt self-conscious being half-naked in front of this kid. I was also freezing. I went to the closet and put on a sweatshirt. When I turned back to her the gun had quit prancing and the barrel was pointed in the direction of my belly.

I was worried, but not too much. I’d been shot with a .22 before. At this distance it stung like hell but not much more. Besides, Emily had no beef with me. I knew what was on her mind. If I’d been in her place, six years in the state bin with nothing but blood on my mind, I’d have done the same thing. Except I wouldn’t have stolen a .22. I’d have made sure to grab something with real firepower. I wondered where she’d gotten the pistol. I wondered if she’d hurt anyone yet.

“I’m Emily Wright,” she said.

I nodded. “Emily, you shouldn’t be here.”

“My parents were murdered in this house.”

“I know.”

“Why would you buy a house where people were murdered?”

I told the truth, at least a part of it. “Because it was cheap.”

No one else had wanted the place. Houses where two people had been butchered tend to be off-putting. They’d stabbed her father, Ronnie, eight times. Katy’s face had been beaten in so badly that she’d choked on her own broken teeth before being gutted. Ron had been a towering, powerful man, but his hamstrings had been cut, along with the tendons in his forearms and wrists, so that he’d been left crawling on his belly in his own filth until he and his wife had died down there in the dark in the root cellar together.

I hoped Emily didn’t know anything about that.

She glanced around the living room, made a sweeping gesture with the pistol. “It’s a hundred years old, with three floors and five bedrooms. There’s a pantry and a root cellar and a large yard. Three thousand square feet, not including the half-finished attic.”

She sounded like John Acton—Remember, Acton means action for your Home Buying Needs!—the realtor who’d sold me the place.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s a lot of house.”

She removed her hand from the aquarium, and Cecil slowly quit spinning. She wiped her fingers on my couch and I felt an odd flush of anger. “But you live here alone.”

“I was engaged when I bought the place.”

“But you never got married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why?”

The muscles in the hinges of my jaw bunched. “She didn’t love me.”

“How do you know?”

“I found out.”

I knew that she’d been unfaithful to me. I knew that she’d been sleeping with a number of men in town. Including John Acton. While he was showing me the half-finished attic, scuffing the rat droppings aside while he shunted the flashlight beam across the wide, empty expanse, I thought about breaking his collarbone. But it wouldn’t have changed anything. She kept on stepping out, and Acton still worked the deal for me. Realtors, they never let anything get in the way of going to contract.

“Emily, you need to go back.”

“I’m home,” she said, and her voice lightened a bit. “Did you know my parents?”

“Yes. Everyone in town knew them.”

She nodded and smiled like she was remembering good times. I couldn’t imagine that she’d had many of them with Ron and Katy. “Did you work with them?”

“I was what was known as a ‘friend of the club.’ ”

“So you’re a criminal.”

Ronnie Wright had been the leader of the Brothers of Bedlam, the local motorcycle club. Mostly they’d controlled chop shops, run guns, and grown and distributed high-quality weed. That’s how it was at first. After the money started to pour in, so did trouble from the other clubs, crank dealers, syndicates, and greedy cops. More than a few of my scars had come from helping Ron out of jams.

Rain throbbed against the windows, sounding like small hands tapping at the glass, seeking attention. The breeze picked up and the timbers in the attic groaned and settled. The girl glanced at the ceiling like she thought her parents might be showering, getting ready to come down and sit with her.

She asked, “Tell me. Did you love or hate the brotherhood? Everybody in this town seems to have felt one way or the other.”

“I went back and forth.”

That got a giggle from her. It wasn’t a happy teenage-girl laugh but something that sounded like it was coming from an old woman getting ready for the inevitable lonely end. Emily’s chin came up, and she eyed me coolly. “Did you ever fuck my mother?”

I had. A lot. But most guys had. A lot.

I didn’t answer. I held my hand out. “Give me the gun.”

“I’m not going to shoot you.”

“Who are you going to shoot?”

“The person or people who murdered my parents.”

By implication that meant she figured I didn’t do it. I wasn’t sure how she’d come to that conclusion, but I was glad regardless.

“Where did you get the piece, Emily?”

She ignored the question. “It’s getting hot in here. It’s hard to breathe. I like it cold.”

“We have to get you back now.”

She met my eyes. The anguish I saw there was something I knew well. The house was still freezing but she was sweating. I knew feverish times like this, when your head is racing and you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. The windows clattered as branches gestured and drummed, and she shifted her gaze.

Sweat dripped from her upper lip. “She talks to me, you know. My mother. She lives under my bed at the hospital. She scratches at the springs. She crawls around in circles, saying my name.”

“Give me the gun, Emily.”

She checked the revolver and reared back like it was the first time she’d seen it in a very long time. “I can’t. I need it. I’ve got to use it. I think I’m going to kill someone.”

“Who?”

“I’m not sure.”

A scraping noise broke from the attic, followed by the skittering sounds of scampering feet, as if children were playing hide-and-seek.

“You’ve got rats in your walls,” she said.

“They’re squirrels,” I told her. “I got rid of the rats a long time ago.”

“If you say so.”

My cell phone was on my nightstand. “Emily, I’m going upstairs for a minute, okay? I just want to get my phone. We need to call the hospital.”

“I’ve been there for six years. I’ll be there the rest of my life if they have their way. They can’t help me. But my mother said you might be able to.”

Every time she mentioned her mother I flashed on Katy’s face: the dark burning-ember eyes, the arrogant grin. I was cold but a creeping warmth worked through my chest as I thought of her body. I heard her voice in my ear, telling me to be rougher, to leave marks. I would try to kiss her neck, and she’d huff in frustration and rake my chest and tear at my back. Two of my worst scars were from her gouges.

Emily was right about the doctors at Sojourner never being able to help her. Hospitals fed on the ill, making them sicker, draining their lives and will to leave. She’d grown up in the facility, had become a part of it, lived in its system like so much blood in its veins. If you couldn’t break out within a year or two, you never would.

The girl seemed lost in reflection, her eyes flitting from the root-cellar door to the staircase to the window. Her lips moved. I saw her mouth the word “Mommy.” It’s the word most of us would die with in our throats. I didn’t want to leave Emily alone down here in case she decided to run again, but I didn’t want to brace her and try to force her to give up the gun. I figured I could grab my phone, make the call, and return before she fully realized I’d been gone.

I moved to the staircase and took the steps three at a time. I turned into my bedroom and grabbed my cell and wondered who I should dial. Sending her back to Sojourner would be sending her back to hell. I started to tap out Dell’s number.

I turned and Emily was behind me, naked. I could see a trail of her clothes leading up the hall, the dirty slippers in the doorway. She was so cold that her skin was tinged with blue.

The curves were all in the right places, and she couldn’t help displaying herself for me. She stepped closer and her breasts jiggled. Her meaty thighs were soft but covered in muscle. Scars, bruises and scratches marbled her knees, belly, and back. Some marks appeared to be self-inflicted, others I couldn’t tell. I thought of the kind of self-hatred a ten-year-old girl must go through when her parents are torn from her and the natural, overwhelming grief that is somehow considered an insane thing.

She swept a hand through her hair and drew the damp bangs out of her eyes. The empowerment of her own sexuality was still a mostly unknown quality for her. She was trying to be seductive. She didn’t have to put so much effort into it.

“You can fuck me if you want,” she said. “It’s okay. I’m almost seventeen.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay.”

It got her grinning. It was her mother’s knowing smile. She put a hand on my belly and ran it up my chest. She tightened her fist in my chest hair and drew herself even closer. She ground against my groin and got the reaction she was after. She laughed. It was her father’s laugh. Heavy, low, and full of potential violence.

“Come on,” she said. “Take me to bed.”

I could have given her a sharp backhand and probably knocked her out, but her index finger was tight against the trigger and the gun still might fire. The time I’d been shot with a .22 had been from across a poker table. I’d been hit in the thigh, and it had barely bled. Gunrunners like the brotherhood laughed at pipsqueak weapons like this, but, up close, getting hit in the face or the chest would kill you just as dead as a magnum .44.

“You want me,” she said.

She was a kid, but she was a beautiful and alluring one, and she had the added draw of being her mother’s daughter. I heard a strange, moaning lament and realized it was coming from my throat. She laughed at me again. She kissed my throat and placed the gun under my ear. It made me groan louder. I had been helpless in the hands of her mother, and now it was happening all over again. Except this time instead of a crazed, adult carnal bitch I was being manipulated by a lonely, insecure girl. A part of me cared about the difference, and a part of me didn’t. I wasn’t a good man. I’d done a lot of things that I’d one day have to pay for, but I’d never done anything like this. I waited on the edge of the razor to see which half of myself would win.

She made the choice for me. She climbed into bed and laid across the sheets, trying to bewitch me, the laughter in her throat as ugly as her mother’s. I’d made love to Katy in this room, in her and Ronnie’s bed, wasted on coke and wine, with M-16s stacked in the closet. Katy had never brought a gun to bed with her, but she did like knives. She used to dig grooves and half-moon gashes along my ribs. Afterward the sheets would look like someone had been butchered.

Even as my erection grew my stomach tumbled. I laid beside her and pulled her to me. The pistol wavered between us. She kissed my chin and attempted some dirty talk, but I shushed her and held her, and kept holding her, until a wild sob welled inside her and finally broke free. She cried for twenty minutes straight while I rubbed her back. I took the gun away from her and put it in my nightstand drawer.

“Ghosts walk these rooms,” she said.

“That’s true of every house,” I said. “Not just this one.”

“But mine are here. They have been for years. They’re with us now. I can hear my mom.”

“Emily, you—”

“Can you hear her? She’s saying thank you. For helping me. She’s under your bed right now. She says you were always the nicest one of the guys she used to fuck.”

I gripped her by her shoulders and gave her one vicious shake. “Enough of that shit, all right?”

“I need to find who killed my parents,” she said.

It was generally believed that Dell Bishop, the number-two guy of the Brothers of Bedlam, had murdered Emily’s parents in order to take over the club. No one held it against him. Ron and Katy had been branching farther and farther out, making deals with the mob, the pushers, other clubs considered to be enemies of the brotherhood. The feds caught wind of the gunrunning. They were all over town for months, questioning the civilians, but they never found any hard evidence. The chop shops were raided and marijuana crops burned. There was no connection back to the brothers, but it stirred a lot of misery. The townsfolk, who’d once considered the club to be vigilantes protecting their borders, worried that even more problems were bound to come down on them.