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“Everything,” he said. “Make, model, plate… VIN… everything…”
“You know where it’s going?”
“I know where it’s going, when it’s going, the route it’s going to be on, and who will be driving.”
“You just became my favorite person in the world,” the detective said. “Not so hard to do, huh?”
He felt good about himself. Sort of. Trading in the club sucked. Not part of his plan in life, but that’s how things went. Everyone knew that in this life.
‘This life…’
He wasn’t even sure what that actually meant anymore. All he had was a vision. A small town near the Canadian border. North Dakota. Montana. (Did those states touch the fucking border…?)Didn’t matter to him. That’s where he wanted to be.
A small cabin. Some land. Animals. Nothing else.
“Hey, don’t go daydreaming on me right now,” the detective said. “I’ve seen that look a million times. Guys get way too far ahead of themselves and start picking out what kind of fucking bathmats they want, right? Next thing you know, they have bullet holes where eyes used to be.”
That snapped him out of his trance.
He knew what would happen if Cyrus found out…
Or maybe he didn’t.
There had been issues before, but not like this.
He rubbed his forehead.
The detective walked up to him and patted his shoulder. “Hey, I’m not trying to scare you too much. I’m just saying we need complete focus. You’re right. These things are messy. Fair enough. I’ll give you that much credit. And, hey, sorry about that beating you took. I was in a bad mood. Could have been worse. I could have shot you!”
The detective started to laugh. He noted the look in the detective’s eyes. Bloodshot eyes. Tired eyes. The eyes of a psycho. Someone way off the normal set of standard job duties.
That’s when he knew he was fucked… in reality… totally fucked. No matter what.
Shit, at this point… he started to wonder if he should just swallow a bullet on his own.
Chapter Seventeen
Spooky Shit
The antique store had a certain feel to it at night. Nelle knew the place was haunted just based on the items. But when you stepped back and considered everything… even the building itself.Built back in the 1800’s. Used as a farmhouse. Then used for medical services. Then used as the caretaker’s house for a fucking cemetery…
Oh, yeah. The cemetery. The one you couldn’t see when you walked across it because for some reason all the headstones had been removed.
Apparently some shady businessman bought the property and wanted to sell it for a big profit so he removed the headstones. The man swore he had the bodies properly exhumed and buried elsewhere, but that was total bullshit.
How did Nelle know this? Last year she stumbled across a story about the property and fell down a rabbit hole. She ended up recording a four-part series, each video posted on a Monday in October, prime for spooky season, which resulted in a ton of views, shares, and people using her videos to make their own, comparing and contrasting what was real versus fake. Those videos sort of set up for what became this year of videos that made decent money to keep Bucky happy.
Nelle was used to creaks, cracks, groans and moans around the building. It was old. The wood was tired. The slightest of breezes rattled the windows. And sometimes objects… well, they just fell over. Nelle made her peace with it a long time ago.
There was one doll she refused to touch. Her name was Bethy and she sat on the top shelf, on a wall, but at least ten times a year Bethy wouldfalloff the shelf.
In other words, those were common noises for Nelle. The uncommon noise—the one that woke her from a sound sleep—was the sound of something outside.
Ghosts pissed about their headstones missing?
Zombies climbing up from the dirt ready to eat some brains?
Nelle climbed out of bed, walked to the window and looked out. The land was flat, clear, totally normal looking unless someone told you the ground was filled with dead bodies.Well, skeletons now…
