Page 31 of Psycho

I frowned. The back of my neck prickled with uneasiness. Something felt…wrong.

“And you are…?” I prompted.

The woman’s smile turned icy.

“Courtney Chase.”

An expectant pause lingered in the air. I shook my head with a shrug.

“Do we know each other?”

“Actually, I’m a friend of a friend,” she replied, rummaging around in her pink leather purse. “He told me to stop by and say hello.”

I heard a metallic click.

Gun.

Lunging at Courtney, I grabbed her arm and grappled for the—

“Holy shit,” I rasped.

She didn’t have a pistol. She had a fucking pipe bomb.

In a flash, Trooper was at my side, helping me wrestle Courtney to the ground. I stripped the pipe bomb out of her hands, maintaining pressure on the switch that she had tripped. Courtney shrieked in fury, her face twisted with rage.

“Let me guess,” I said, breathing hard. “Huxley put you up to this.”

“I volunteered,” she shot back. “None of you would recognize me, so I could catch you off guard.”

I tested the weight of the pipe bomb in my hand. It was sickening to think about the damage it would do if Courtney had actually succeeded in setting it off.

“You were really prepared to kill someone?” I said. “For Huxley, of all people?”

Courtney jutted her chin out with defiance while Trooper kept her pinned to the pavement.

“I started writing letters to him in jail,” she said. “We fell in love. When his wife left him, he promised to break out of prison and marry me. Then we would run away and live happily ever after.”

“Oh, boy,” Trooper groaned. “You bought that hook, line, and sinker, didn’t you?”

But I didn’t say anything. Courtney had waited a long time for the man she loved. And she would do anything to secure their happy ending. I might not understand why she aligned herself with a man like Huxley, but I understood what it was like to do crazy things for love.

I crouched down in front of Courtney and retrieved my phone from my back pocket.

“It’s a tragedy to keep lovers separated,” I said. “I’m sure Sheriff Whitfield will get you and Huxley back together again. And he can take this bomb off my hands.”

Courtney cracked under pressure in no time. She told the cops that Huxley had been hiding out in an RV park on the edge of town ever since his jailbreak.

I watched from a distance as the cops swarmed the place. Courtney was handcuffed in the back of Sheriff Whitfield’s cruiser. When Huxley spotted her, he flushed five different shades of red with the realization that she was his downfall.

I wish you could see the look on your face, I thought.

A week after Huxley’s arrest, October arrived and the clubhouse had been transformed with decorations for Halloween—pumpkins, floating bats, orange and black streamers, and a skeleton in the corner, dressed in biker gear, with sunglasses and a beer in hand.

“Who wants candy?” I announced when I walked in the door.

Mia and Casey swarmed around me with grasping, sticky hands. Tucked into the crook of my arm, I had a giant green bucket in the shape of Frankenstein’s head, filled with all kinds of candy. I deposited treats into their waiting palms until candy spilled through their fingers as they raced off with their loot.

“You owe me something,” Bruiser declared, holding his hand out. He pressed a bag of frozen peas to his black eye. The swelling had gone down by now, but it was still a vicious purple. “We have three more weeks of toilet-scrubbing duty.”