by Jack Quaid
As Joe began the pat down, he turned to the woman. “You okay, Lea?”
“I’ll live,” Lea said.
“What’s this all about?”
“He just mistook me for somebody else; that’s all.”
“Is that true?” Joe asked Corey.
Corey threw the woman a look. “Yeah, I was looking for some other lady.”
“If it’s just a case of mistaken identity,” Joe said, “and if I can forgive the punch, then I don’t see any reason to take this any…” And that was when Joe patted something hard on Corey’s hip, and his whole body stiffened up. He slipped a hand under Corey’s leather jacket and pulled out a .45 from the holster on his hip.
“I’ve got a permit for that,” Corey said.
Joe ejected the magazine and the round from the chamber. “Is that so?”
Corey gave that some thought. “No, I don’t have a permit.”
Joe slipped the weapon into the waistband of his jeans. “Guess what, kid?”
“I’m going in the can?”
“That’s right,” Joe said. “You’re going in the can.”
The locals had all gathered around to see what the ruckus was about.
“What’s going on, Joe?” one of them said.
“Nothing to see here, folks,” the sheriff replied. “Just go on about your business.”
But none of them did. There wasn’t much action on the streets of Slaughter Beach, so as Joe walked Corey down the street to the station, they all watched.
Sixteen
Joe Turner pushed through the double doors of the Slaughter Beach sheriff’s station with Corey Hayes in cuffs. As far as sheriff’s stations went, Slaughter Beach had a pretty good one. It was only a couple of years old, and unlike the previous station, it had heating and cooling, which to Joe and his deputies was a very exciting development when they moved in. There were five or six desks and a good coffee machine. The bulletin board, which would have been reserved for wanted posters in any other station, was covered with drawings from the elementary kids who visited once a month. Joe didn’t mind, and the chances of any criminals on the FBI’s most wanted list walking into his little seaside town were slim. That was what he’d thought anyway, until he came across the kid out on Main Street with the .45 on his hip.
Joe had three deputies. Two were on their annual fishing trip in Maryland, which left only the rookie, Deputy Morgan, by his side.
She’d just celebrated her twenty-third birthday the day before, and when he walked in with Corey Hayes in cuffs, she looked up from a plate of day-old cake. “What did he do?”
“He had a bad day. He hassled Lea out on Main Street and punched me in the jaw,” Joe said as he pulled the gun from his waistband and placed it on the desk. “And he had that.”
Morgan looked from the gun to Corey. “You are having a bad day.”
“I’m going to get him settled,” Joe said as he led Corey across the floor of the station and into the cellblock. Joe always thought the name “cellblock” was overkill. They had three cells, each with its own bed, a basin, and a toilet. Never in the history of the three-year-old station had all three cells been occupied. Hell, Joe couldn’t even think of an occasion when they’d put anyone in those cells for anything more than drunk and disorderly. He opened the door to the first cell, led Corey Hayes inside, closed the door with a clunk, and undid his handcuffs through the bars of the cells.
Corey took a look at his surroundings, and judging by the expression on his face, he wasn’t exactly impressed. “How long am I going to be in here?”
Joe held up Corey’s wallet, which he’d taken out on the street. “That all depends what comes up when I run your name.”
Corey’s eyes dropped to the floor of the cell. “Shit,” he muttered. “I’m probably going to be in here for a while.”
Joe went to his desk and pulled the cards out of Corey’s wallet, placing them gently on the desk. He had three licenses under three different names, two bank cards under two more different names, and a Denny’s loyalty card under yet a different name.
“They’re probably all fake,” he told Morgan. “But run them anyway.”
“No problem,” she said as she handed him a piece of paper.
“What’s this?”
“Someone’s killed Big Al’s dogs,” she said. “It’ll probably pay to go over there. He sounded real shook up about it.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
Joe thought back to the last time he was at Al’s place, and in his mind, he tried to count how many dogs Al had. “He’s got six dogs,” Joe said. “They’re all dead?”
“I don’t know?” Morgan said. “I’m just telling you what he told me.” She watched him as he slipped the paper between his lips, took the coat from the hook by the door, and put it on. “You know what this is, don’t you?”
“Don’t start with this stuff again.”
She motioned to the calendar on the wall. “It’s Halloween. Bad stuff always happens on Halloween.”
Joe ignored her and headed for the door. “I’ll be back later. Call me if something bad happens.”
Morgan let out a sigh. “It’s Slaughter Beach. Nothing ever happens here.” Then she dropped her voice to a deep drawl. “Except on Halloween.” She added on an evil laugh to her words of warning.
Joe shook his head. “I’ll be back in an hour, Morgan. Keep an eye on our guest.”
He pushed through the doors, took the couple of steps down to his Jeep, climbed inside, and peeled off down the road.
Seventeen
Sitting across the street from Sheriff Joe’s office in a 1995 Toyota minivan, sipping from a Snapple and waiting for him to leave, was Parker Ames. Although, she hadn’t used that name in close to ten years.
If anybody went to Slaughter Beach, just like Corey had, and asked around town for Parker Ames, they would have been met with the same blank faces as Corey was. But if he had gone to Slaughter Beach and asked around town for Christine Turner, he would have gotten a very different response. Everybody in Slaughter Beach knew everybody, and they all knew Christine Turner. To some, she was the happy blonde who worked part-time at the video store. To others, she was the head of the Slaughter Beach PTA, and to many more, she was one of the ladies who sang in the church choir at Christmastime. And to Sheriff Joe Turner, she was his wife.
When Parker Ames rolled into Slaughter Beach sometime in early 1991, she had a stolen car with fake plates, a duffle bag of clothes that were all too small, a baby due at any minute, and not much else. She also had a bag filled with what she referred to as her “escape fund”—eighty thousand dollars in insurance money that the company paid out when her parents were murdered. She’d kept the money stashed away in over a dozen safety deposit boxes scattered all across the country, and she’d spent the better part of nine months driving around, collecting the cash, and working out what the hell she was going to do with the rest of her life.
One afternoon, while on her way to someplace else, she found herself cruising through Slaughter Beach, and from the very first moment she rolled down Main Street, she felt she was home. At the time, she didn’t know if it was the sun on her face, the sea air in her lungs, or a combination of both, but as soon as she pulled into town, the stress in her shoulders and that knot of fear in her stomach had faded and, for the first time in a long time, she felt safe.
Within a week, she had rented a nice little place on 9th Avenue with three rooms and one of those tires hanging from a tree in the backyard that Parker had thought only existed in television shows set in the ’60s. It wasn’t much more than a week after she moved in that Parker’s water broke, and when she struggled down the couple of steps of her new home and behind the wheel of her secondhand Honda and turned the key, the engine wouldn’t start. She slammed her hands on the wheel and cursed that car to all hell, but it quickly became apparent to her that all that cursing wasn’t going to get her to the hospital, so she made her way b
ack into the house and called 911. Slaughter Beach, being the small town that it was, used the station for all emergencies, and she was put straight through to the Sheriff’s Department and the sheriff himself, Joe Turner, answered the phone.
There was only one ambulance in Slaughter Beach, and it was out in Belltown, helping out with a three-car pileup, but to Joe Turner, that didn’t mean the young lady on the other end of the line wasn’t going to get to the hospital.
Within seconds of putting the phone back on the cradle, Sheriff Joe was behind the wheel of his Jeep and speeding down the road to the little house Parker Ames had rented. He got her to the hospital, and she gave birth right there in the waiting room, with Joe holding her hand the entire time.
She had a girl. Samantha Jane was her name, and she weighed six pounds and two ounces. She had all her fingers and toes and Parker’s cheeky grin.
The following decade wasn’t without its ups and downs, but there were certainly more ups than downs, and that was okay with Parker and Joe. They took things slow and eventually moved in together in Parker’s little house not too long after Sam’s first birthday. They spent their nights quietly and the weekends at the beach. Over time, all those years Parker had spent chasing slashers seemed like maybe it hadn’t happened at all.
It had been a long time since she had thought about the name Parker Ames, and even longer since she uttered it aloud. That was of course—until thirty minutes ago, when she was in Josie’s Groceries, picking up a few things for dinner, and overheard Josie gossiping with Nettie about some young man the sheriff had just arrested. out on the street. According to Josie—and Josie was one hell of a gossip, so more times than not, her stories were embellished well beyond recognition—that young man had spent the afternoon going up and down Main Street, looking for somebody called Parker Ames. Neither Josie nor Nettie knew who he or Parker Ames were or why in God’s name the young man had a gun on him, but that didn’t stop them making some wild assumptions about what the answers to those questions were.
Parker was pretty sure she knew the answers to all those questions, but she just paid for her groceries, kept her mouth shut and left. She went straight to her minivan, drove around the block, and parked right across the street from the sheriff’s station. She waited nervously for the next twenty minutes for Joe to get the hell out of the station.
“One down, one to go,” she muttered to herself as she watched the sheriff cruise on down the street in his Jeep.
She tapped her finger nervously on the wheel of her car. “Come on, Morgan. Go on patrol.”
Then, as if on cue, Deputy Morgan stepped out of the station and locked the door behind her.
“Bingo,” Parker said under her breath.
Once Deputy Morgan was in her patrol car and on the road, Parker knew she had twenty minutes, tops. That was if she was lucky. By the time Morgan’s patrol was halfway down Main Street, Parker was out of the minivan crossing the road and working her way up the couple of steps to the station’s entrance. She looked over her shoulder to make sure the coast was clear, and the coast looked exactly that. She slipped her hand into her shoulder bag and pulled out a lockpick. Within seconds, she’d picked the lock and was inside.
Parker headed straight to the cells, and when she pushed through the door, Corey jumped to his feet and cocked his head in confusion.
She knew why. The Parker Ames Corey knew wore leather jackets, Runaways T-shirts, and combat boots. She cut her own hair and kept her nails short. If she ever wore makeup, it was always dark and heavy. The woman standing in front of him was the complete opposite of that. She was wearing a dress, and her hair had been cut, colored, and styled by someone who knew what they were doing. Her nails were painted, and the shoes on her feet were pink. Despite all those changes, though, the faint scar that ran down the side of her face from her eye to her jawline was still visible. and nothing was covering up the years of scar tissue on her knuckles from battling the undead.
The confusion faded from his face and was replaced with an ear-to-ear grin. “I knew it… I knew you were here.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Parker snapped.
“I came to find you.”
“What makes you think I want to be found?”
“I just…” Corey stumbled to find the words. “I don’t know. I need your help with something.”
“The answer’s no.”
“What do you mean ‘no’? You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”
“There’s some sort of slasher out there that you can’t kill for whatever reason, and you want me to help you send him back to hell?” she said, putting her hand on her hips. “Is that about right?”
“Well, shit… yeah. That’s exactly it. But I—”
“‘But’ nothing,” she said in a loud whisper. “I’ve got a life here. I’ve got a husband, a family, a minivan. I’ve got PTA meetings on Tuesday nights. I don’t do that stuff anymore.”
“What the fuck is a PTA meeting?”
“It’s a committee that’s put together to—look, it doesn’t matter. You need to get out of town.”
“I’m in a cell, Parker,” he said. “There’s not much opportunity in here.”
“I can get you out of this cell, but you need to get the hell out of town and leave me alone.”
Corey’s eyes dipped to the floor, and when he raised them back up to meet Parker’s, the tone in his voice shifted to something more serious. “There’s a slasher out there.”
“There’s always a slasher out there.”
“This one is a particularly bad one. It’s Hurricane Williams.”
Every bad memory of every bad time with Hurricane Williams flashed through her mind all at once, and she went as white as a ghost. “Fudge.”
“I don’t know how, but he’s back and hacking away at people like it’s the good old days. I ran into him a couple of weeks ago in Columbia Falls, and I can’t beat him. I tried. I really tried. I even dropped a Lincoln Continental on him, and the slimeball still got up and went on the kill.” He pushed off the wall and slipped his hand through the bars of the cell to hold hers. “You’re the only one who’s ever killed him.”
Parker was silent for a long time. “I’m not that girl anymore. I’m just a mom now.”
Corey gave her a look as if she were a puzzle he couldn’t work out. “What happened to you?”
“I was pregnant. I couldn’t have a baby while slashers were trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill them. How would that have worked?”
“I don’t know. But you were my friend—my only friend—and you left me out there all by myself. You just walked out. I thought you were dead, and that’s not a thing friends should do to each other.”
“I know,” she said. “I just didn’t know what else to do.”
“It was a shitty thing to do,” Corey said. “You’re totally out of my cool books now.”
“It was a shitty thing to do, and I’m sorry.” She let that apology hang in the air for a moment. “I can help you get out of here, but I can’t go back to that life.” She slipped her fingers into the bag hanging over her shoulder, pulled out the lockpicking kit, and balanced it between a couple of bars of the cell. “Do you remember how to use that?”
“Of course.”
“Wait until seven o’clock. The station should be empty by then, and you should be able to sneak out without anyone seeing you.” She pushed her hand through the bars and put in on his shoulder. “Be safe.”
And with that she headed for the door.
“Hey, Parker,” Corey called out as he slipped the kit off the bar and into the back pocket of his Levi’s. “I’ll be at the First & Last Gas Station at eight thirty if you change your mind.”
“I’m sorry, Corey. You’re right,” she said. “The Parker Ames you knew died years ago.”
When Parker pushed through the doors of the cellblock and stepped into the main floor of the station, Sheriff Joe Turner was staring right at her. By the look
on his face, he was in search of an explanation as to what she was doing.
“I’ve been trying to get a hold of you,” he said. “The school called. Sam’s been in another fight.”
Parker still had slashers on her mind, and it took a moment for her to catch up. When she did, Parker looked at the ceiling and sighed. “Again? What did she do now? It’s the third one this week.”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Joe said. “Look, I can’t go get her, but somebody’s killed Big Al’s dogs, and I need to find out what’s going on with that. I was heading out there when this came up.”
“You should go,” Parker said as she leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll go over to the school.”
Parker was halfway to the door when Joe called back. “Christine, how did you get in?”
She paused, looked over her shoulder, and played dumb. “What?”
Joe sussed her out for a minute. “I guess Morgan forgot to lock the door again.”
“I guess,” Parker said and got the hell out of there.
Joe watched the empty space where she’d just been standing then shifted his gaze in the other direction… toward the kid in the cell.
Eighteen
Four ten-year-old boys sat in the principal’s office. Their names were Eric, Jacob, Kyle, and Charlie, and all four of those boys had either a bloody nose, a bloody lip, or the beginnings of what was most likely going to be a nasty black eye. Those four boys were against the wall and watching the back of the head of the nine-year-old girl sitting in front of them with blood on her knuckles. The girl was Samantha Turner, and although she couldn’t see the four boys looking at her from behind, she could feel their hatred burning into the back of her head.
Principal Gaunt was behind the desk, and when she looked up from her watch, Sam knew she was getting more annoyed with every passing minute. That annoyance was slightly relieved when Parker burst through the door, half out of breath from rushing to get there.