by Jack Quaid
“I know,” Megan said, climbing out of her seat and putting the couple of dishes they had on the table into the sink. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“In Columbia Falls, Montana. About a decade ago. Have you seen her since then?”
“I have.” Megan put her hands on the sink and drew a breath. “What if she doesn’t want to be found, Corey? Have you thought of that?”
“Something’s happened, and I can’t take care of it myself. I’ve tried. I need her.”
Megan turned around. “Do you have a cigarette?”
“Does a bear shit on a Catholic?” He pulled out two cigarettes, lit them, and passed one to Megan.
She pulled back on a drag, gave a little cough, and smiled. “I haven’t had one of these in years. If Tom found out, he’d kill me.”
“Megan,” Corey said, bringing her attention back. “There’s a slimeball out there killing people, and every day I spend looking for Parker, he’s just out there hacking more people to pieces. If you know where she is, I need to know.”
Megan let out a long sigh. “Parker came through this way maybe eight or nine years ago. She needed a place to stay.”
“How long was she here?”
“About three weeks. I tended to wounds, gave her some fresh clothes, and when she was well enough, that was it. She just left.”
“Did she say where she came from?”
Megan shook her head. “Wherever it was, it wasn’t good.”
“How could you tell?”
“Look at my face, Corey. I’ve been there,” Megan said. “I told her she could stay as long as she wanted, but I got the sense that there was somewhere she needed to be.”
“Where was that?”
Megan hesitated. “Slaughter Beach, Delaware.”
He snuffed out his cigarette in what was left of his coffee and stood. “Thanks, Megan.”
Corey was halfway to the door when Megan called out, “Hey, Corey.”
He stopped and turned.
“If she’s happy, let her be happy.”
Fourteen
Jacob Wilson was the first person in Slaughter Beach to see Corey Hayes cruise into town in his big red Cadillac Eldorado. Teddy was sitting on the veranda of the house his great-granddaddy had built with his bare hands way back in 1893. It was sometime after four in the afternoon; he knew that because every day for the past fifty years, Jacob had made his way out to the veranda at three o’clock in the afternoon, sat in his favorite chair with a can of Coors, and watched the sun set and waves roll in on the beach.
The house was nothing much more than a one-bedroom shack, but Jacob would bet his entire fortune—that wasn’t a lot, but it was all he had—that the view from his veranda was the best in all of Delaware. Not many Delaware residents would have the grit to take him up on that either. Jacob didn’t even mind that the main road into town ran straight past his house and any passing cars or trucks or motorcycles ran right through his view.
As it was, Slaughter Beach wasn’t like many of the other big towns along the Delaware Bay. Truth of it was, Slaughter Beach was somewhat of a hidden little town on the map of America, and that was the way the people of Slaughter Beach liked it. The city had grown over the past few hundred years to a few thousand: 4,736, to be exact. They had themselves a festival every fall, a Christmas parade for the kiddies, a town hall, a sheriff, and a couple of diners that both claimed to have the best apple pie in Delaware. Hell, Slaughter Beach even had a Dunkin’ Donuts like they did over in Wilmington, which some people in town thought made them a bit too cosmopolitan. They had it now, and there was not much those folks could do about it. Jacob had even caught a couple of those folks who did bitch and moan about it occasionally sneaking on out with a bear claw or two clutched in their hands.
Slaughter Beach was a funny old town. A funny old town indeed, Jacob thought to himself. Nobody even knew where the name had come from, because any which way it was cut, Slaughter Beach didn’t exactly have a welcoming ring to it. The story of how the town came to be changed with whomever was doing the telling, but there were at least three versions of the town’s origins that people generally subscribed to as the truth.
The first was that the town had simply been named after the postmaster, William Slaughter, sometime in the nineteenth century. Jacob considered that version pretty boring, and not many people really, truly believed it.
The second version claimed the name came from the horseshoe crabs that washed up on shore and died each year. Every October, without fail, those poor crabs came up on the beach to lay their eggs, and when the low tide rolled on out again, hundreds of those poor bastards were stranded and died. Jacob always thought they would learn, but they never did.
The third theory, which had been handed down from generation to generation and wasn’t in any history book, was probably the darkest of all. Apparently, one of the founding members of Slaughter Beach had come across the patch of land by the sea, where a number of American Indians were already enjoying the land, the ocean, and the sand. Instead of politely asking them to leave, he’d climbed back onto his ship and cannonballed the living hell out of anyone and everyone on the beach. And those events had earned Slaughter Beach its name.
Jacob didn’t know if there was any truth to any of the stories. He just knew that every afternoon at four o’clock, he sat on his veranda, watched the sun dip in the sky and the waves roll in, and enjoyed the cold can of Coors in his hand. It was on one of those afternoons when he saw Corey Hayes’s Eldorado cruise along DE-9, blasting some god-awful racket out of its speakers, and although he didn’t know who Corey Hayes was at the time or what had brought him to Slaughter Beach that fine afternoon, he did lean forward and watch. The chrome glistened in the sun, and Jacob thought to himself, That there is going to lead to some very interesting developments, indeed. He didn’t know why he thought that; he just knew that somewhere deep in his belly, he was right.
Jacob Wilson leaned back in his chair, took a sip of his Coors, and watched those waves roll in and back out again. An hour later, the tide was out, and all along the beach were hundreds of horseshoes crabs, lying there on their backs, kicking their little feet in the air as they died.
Jacob finished his beer and climbed to his feet. “Some creatures just never learn.”
Fifteen
The Eldorado blasted down the empty road, with the ocean on one side, a few scattered houses on the other, and not much else in between. He had half a tank of gas, but Corey was in the habit of always making sure he had a full tank, especially whenever he turned up to a new town. He’d learned from experience not to be in a position where he was the new face in a small town that had experienced a string of recent murders. In the event that he had to get the hell out of Dodge in one hell of a hurry, he didn’t want to be caught without any gas in the tank.
So as he rolled up onto the outskirts of Slaughter Beach, Corey kept his eyes peeled for a gas station, and a few miles later, he leaned forward, peered through the dusty windshield, and spotted the First & Last Roadhouse. He eased off the gas and let the Eldorado cruise into the old station before bringing it to a stop just by the one and only pump. By the look of things, the years hadn’t been kind to the First & Last. The sea air drifting off the ocean had faded the paint and rusted the steel, and if it hadn’t been for the sign on the door, Corey would have picked the place for some failed business that had died years before. But the sign on the door said they were open, so Corey climbed out of the car as a warm breeze pushed across his face.
“Hello?” Corey called out. He closed his eyes to listen for a response, but the only sound on the air was the whistle of the wind and the crash of the ocean breaking against the shore. “Is anyone there?”
Nothing.
He had been in enough situations to know something smelled like shit. He had a .45 strapped to his hip, and he made sure his hand never strayed far from it as he made his way over the cracked concrete and up to the small building. Corey got an angle on one of t
he windows and tried to peek inside, but there were no lights on, and except for the neon Gulf Oil light flashing in the corner of the service station, he couldn’t see anything at all.
Corey pulled the .45, let it dangle low by his thigh as he pushed through the glass door, and stepped inside. The smell hit him like a slap in the face. There was no mistaking it was the smell of rotting human flash.
Over by the ancient cash register, he spotted a body on the floor. Three feet away, by the bait locker, was that body’s head. By the smell and the look of the whole thing, Corey figured the poor bastard had already been dead at least twenty-four hours. His name was Lloyd, or so the name tag on his shirt said.
Corey lit a cigarette and looked over the scene. It could have been a robbery gone wrong or some other kind of bad luck, but there was one thing that bad luck stories and robberies didn’t usually have—a severed head. But for a slasher, removing a head from a body was second nature.
“Well,” Corey said as he holstered the .45. “At least I know I’m in the right town.”
Yep, there were no two ways about it. Hurricane Williams was in Slaughter Beach, and it was just a matter of time before the son of a bitch found Parker Ames. Corey flipped the Open sign on the door and got the hell out of there. It was a little after four o’clock in the afternoon. In a couple of hours, it would be dark, and as soon as the sun went down, all the things that go bump in the night would get a hell of a lot more adventurous. From what he remembered of Hurricane Williams, the slasher wasn’t exactly of the patient variety. If Hurricane came to find Parker Ames and cause a ruckus, that was exactly what he was going to do. There was no doubt about it—anybody who stood in his way was going to come to the same fate as poor Lloyd and most likely lose their head.
Corey jumped behind the wheel of the Eldorado, cranked up the big V-8 engine, and sped out of the First & Last Roadhouse parking lot like a bat out of hell. Ten minutes later, he was in the township of Slaughter Beach and pulling the Eldorado over to the side of the road on Main Street.
Slaughter Beach was one of those towns that, not unlike hundreds of others peppered across the United States, hadn’t changed since the 1950s. At a glance, Corey counted two diners, a barber, a couple of antique stores, and the sheriff’s station. An American flag hung outside each and every one of them. It was Happy Days on steroids.
Corey looked up at the banner that ran from the fire hall all the way over the road to the post office. In big orange-and-black lettering, the words Happy Halloween shifted in the breeze.
“Of course it is,” Corey said to himself.
He walked half a block to the Northside Diner, and when he pushed through the double doors, it was as if he had walked straight into a time warp. Wood paneling covered the walls, the vinyl seats in the booths were all a mustard brown, and the waitress behind the counter wore a maroon uniform.
He took a stool at the counter.
Maybelline looked over at him, closed the TV Guide she was reading, and made her way over with an order pad in her hand. “What can I get you, darlin’?”
“What’s good here?” Corey asked as he gave the menu a glance.
“The sweet potato casserole,” she said. “The best damn sweet potato casserole this side of the Chesapeake Bay. Which puts it in the running to be the best damn sweet potato casserole in the country.”
Corey had been to Fort Mitchell, Nebraska, where they claimed to have the biggest cheeseburger in all fifty states. He had been to Blackfoot, Idaho, whose residents prided themselves on their baked potatoes, and he had been to Chesterton, where, according to Joe Freddy, they had the best damn roadkill pie in all of Kentucky. But he had never, not once in all his travels across the United States of America, been to a town that claimed to have the best sweet potato casserole in the entire Northeast.
“It would be pretty ordinary of me to not have some sweet potato casserole after a recommendation such as that.”
“You won’t be sorry.”
“I’m sure I won’t,” he said.
Maybelline came back a couple of minutes later and slid a plate of sweet potato casserole in front of him. “There you go, sweetie.” Then she bent over the counter, settled her chin in the palm of her hand, and watched as Corey took his first mouthful. “It’s good, isn’t it?”
Corey leaned back on the stool. “I’m not going to lie to you, Maybelline. This may very well be the best damn sweet potato casserole I’ve ever tasted.”
“Told you that you wouldn’t be sorry,” she said. “Did you just get into town?”
“How could you tell?”
“I’ve been in Slaughter Beach all of my nineteen years, and in those nineteen years, I haven’t laid eyes on you even once.” With her chin still in her hand, she pointed at the Eldorado parked out in the street with her little finger. “And that’s not exactly subtle, if you know what I mean.”
Corey glanced at the car. “No, she is not. Look, Maybelline, I don’t know if you might be able to help me.”
“Why don’t you give it a try, sweetie?”
“I’m looking for my sister. She came up here maybe nine or ten years ago. We’re not terribly close, me being from another marriage and all, and I thought it was time to change that. She sent me a letter a little while back, which like the damn fool I am, I went and lost. But I did remember the name of the town on the return address: Slaughter Beach, Delaware. She’s about five eleven, blond. Has a tendency to rub people the wrong way most of the time.” He patted himself down, pulled a photograph from his coat pocket, and placed it on the counter. The thing was old, bent, and creased, and it could have easily been the photograph of anyone fitting the description he’d just given her.
Maybelline studied the photograph. “Sorry, sweetie. Not really ringing any bells.” She handed it back. “Sorry.”
At the end of the counter, an old fisherman raised his coffee cup to get Maybelline’s attention and a refill. She excused herself, and as she walked away, Corey slipped the photograph back into his pocket.
Corey spent the next two hours walking into each and every store along Main Street. As it turned out there were a hell of a lot more stores than he’d first anticipated. He went to Heather’s B&B, Elwood’s, and even a Ralph’s, and in each store, he ran through the same routine as he had with Maybelline. Over the course of retelling the story, he added in a few more details, like his wife, Mary Jo, and kids, William and Max, who were dying to meet their sister-in-law and aunt. After a good twenty or thirty times, he had perfected the performance. He knew when to pause for those heartfelt moments, when to choke up and push back a tear or two, and when to put on a manufactured brave face.
No matter how good his fake story was or how well he delivered it, after two hours, Corey was back where he’d started; standing on the street in Slaughter Beach, without the faintest clue as to where Parker Ames was.
He slumped down onto the bench outside the barber shop and lit a cigarette. The streets were starting to fill with kids goofing off after school in their Halloween costumes and parents rushing around with bags of groceries, getting ready for that night’s dinner.
Corey rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands; he was beat. He had been on the road chasing Parker Ames for weeks, sleeping in the back of the Eldorado and eating burgers from whatever greasy spoon he found along the road, and he still hadn’t recovered fully from his injuries when Hurricane Williams tossed him around like a rag doll in Columbia Falls. His ribs hurt every single time he drew in a breath, two of his fingers were sprained, and his knees were killing him. He was just about starting to think that Parker Ames had never been to Slaughter Beach, and if she had, she’d likely moved on long ago. That was until he put the cigarette to death under the ball of his boot and looked up.
It was just a flash, nothing more than a fraction of a fraction of a second. Across the street, through the people on the sidewalk and the traffic, Corey saw Parker Ames. He jumped to his feet, pushed past a handful of high school kids
on the sidewalk, dodged a couple of cars on the road, and found himself on the other side of the street. By the time he’d made it that far, she was a few shops away, making her way down the street.
“Hey!” Corey called out. “Parker.”
The woman looked over her shoulder, gave him a confused glance, then kept on moving.
“Parker?” Corey said more to himself than for anybody else to hear. His steps turned into a jog then into a run, and within a few seconds, he was right behind her. He wrapped his fingers around her arm, spinning her around. “Parker—”
“Let go!” she yelled.
Up close, Corey could see that the poor woman he was hassling didn’t even come close to resembling Parker Ames. But that wasn’t the only mistake Corey had made.
He felt a hand grip his shoulder, and what he did next, he didn’t give so much as a second thought to. He just clenched his fist and swung. It was pure instinct. He really should have given it that second thought, because when that punch landed, it did so on the jaw of Joe Turner. Sheriff Joe Turner of Slaughter Beach, Delaware.
Corey took one look at him and knew the trouble he was in. “Ah, shit, dude.”
“I’d say that’s exactly what you’re in.” The sheriff wasn’t a big or menacing guy. In fact, he didn’t even look like a sheriff at all. He looked more like the coach of the high school basketball team who didn’t take things too seriously. He was that kind of guy. Joe was getting on close to forty years old but didn’t look a day over thirty, and instead of wearing the uniform of the Slaughter Beach Sheriff’s Department, he wore jeans and a collared shirt. He didn’t even carry a gun. They only reason Corey knew he was a sheriff was the badge on that shirt, and in the end, Corey knew he wasn’t going to talk his way out of that one.
“All right,” Joe said. “Assume the position.”
Corey knew the position and turned around with his hands on the wall of the Hero Bakery and spread his legs, shaking his head at his own stupidity.