He remained silent for a couple of minutes while he ate, emotions playing over his face. “I’ll worry about you no matter what. But I’m real proud of you for fixing yourself up so good.” He set the fork down. “I’m trying real hard to make you proud of me, baby.” I could see the faint tremble in his hands. He wanted a drink. Wanted it bad.
I didn’t even think about it, just got up and came around the counter and put my arms around him from behind. He gave a brief start of surprise, then let out a soft sigh and relaxed while I leaned my head against his back. He felt so fragile, bone and skin held together by sheer will and meanness. I’d known him as a bastard for so long, it almost felt like if he lost that there’d be nothing left of him, nothing to hold him together and keep him real.
God, I hoped I was wrong.
“I am proud of you, Dad.” He shivered, and I realized with a shock that he was crying. I gave him a light squeeze, then turned away and headed toward the front door. I knew he didn’t want me to see him cry.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to see it. I stepped out onto the porch and gently closed the door behind me. Yeah, that was the hard truth. I was the weak one right now. I couldn’t be in there with him, watching him fight the need for a drink every second. I’d never fought it the way he was now. I had it easy. Become a zombie and presto, all your old addictions are swept away by one big new one.
I shivered as I walked down to the driveway, wishing I could shake off the worry and doubt and fear as easily. And also wishing that I’d grabbed a jacket on my way out. Yeah, we were in the deep South, but it was early December, and it could still get damn nippy down here.
But an entirely different sort of cold grabbed me as Ed Quinn stepped out from behind my dad’s truck.
Chapter 13
My heart slammed at the sight of the gun leveled at me. I’d learned a bit about guns in the past couple of months and a few dozen crime scenes. This one was an automatic, possibly a Glock. No idea what the caliber was, except that it wasn’t something tiny like a .22. Either way it was going to suck ass when he shot me. I’m screwed, I thought in near panic. I didn’t have a stash of brains on me like the last time. As soon as he slowed me down, he’d be able to take my head off at his leisure. And I wasn’t tanked up. There was no way I’d be able to reach him before he could pull the trigger.
I clamped down on the urge to shriek or yell for help. The last thing I wanted was for my dad to come out here and be in danger as well. But, oh god, was Ed going to shoot me right here? Would my dad come out at the sound of gunshots? Or come out to find my body?
Except…Ed didn’t shoot me. I swallowed hard, still braced for the feel of lead tearing through me, but he remained frozen, gun on me. I managed to pull my eyes away from the gun and actually look at his face. I was expecting him to look angry, or crazy or maybe even agonized. But instead he looked…puzzled?
And goth, I suddenly realized. Or maybe it was emo. I never could keep those straight. He’d died his hair black and spiked it except for one longer lock that hung down over his forehead. He had on black jeans that were about a size too big for him, a faded Led Zeppelin t-shirt, and a dark grey hoodie patterned with black skulls and lightning bolts. He also had several piercings—eyebrow, lip, and ears—and I had no idea if they were real or not. I had to admit, as a change of appearance, it certainly worked.
I licked my lips uncertainly. “Hey, Ed. Long time no see.” What the hell. If he was going to kill me, I might as well be a smart ass about it.
“Hey, Angel,” he said, his voice so close to normal it made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “Angel…” I could see his throat bob as he swallowed. “Why didn’t you kill me?”
I blinked, then frowned. “Huh? Why? Did you want me to?”
He scowled. “No. Of course not.” Then he grimaced, swiped at his forehead with his free hand. “Fuck. These past few weeks have been…I dunno. Everything’s so fucked up.” He shifted and leaned against the cab of the truck, but the gun never wavered from pointing at me. I glanced toward the house. Ed was angled so that if my dad were to look outside he wouldn’t see Ed and certainly wouldn’t see that I was being held at gunpoint. “Why didn’t you kill me?” he repeated. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“Are you kidding me?” I replied with a flare of annoyance. “How does it not make sense? You’ve seen me and Marcus walking around all the time and not beating people over the head and killing them. I mean, how can you seriously think that?” I had to fight to keep my voice down. The last thing I wanted was for my dad to hear and come outside. “How the fuck did you get it into your head that we were monsters? Ed, I didn’t kill you because I’ve never killed anyone in my entire life, and I’m sure as hell not going to start with someone who I thought was my friend, even if he did shoot me and his best friend!”
“You said you’d kill me if you ever saw me again. You said—”
“Oh for fuck’s sake, Ed. I say a lot of things.” I scowled. “Now would you please stop pointing that damn gun at me? It’s kinda freaking me out.”
He slowly lowered it and held it alongside his thigh. Technically, it wasn’t still pointed at me, but it would only take a twitch of his hands to do so. “Nothing makes sense, Angel,” he said, looking off at nothing. “Everything’s so messed up. I didn’t kill Marianne. I swear to god. But the others…I thought I was doing a great thing. I mean, my parents…but then you two…” He shuddered and passed a hand over his face. “I screwed up bad.”
“What do you want from me, Ed?” I said, probably a lot more bluntly than I should have. Okay, I could probably cross “hostage negotiator” off my career plans.
“Answers…?” he said with a sigh.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “From me? Ed, I’m a clueless moron.”
He shook his head and began to speak, but then we both heard the creak of the front door. A frisson of terror shot through me as Ed lifted the gun again. Maybe he truly was completely off the deep end, and this brief semi-normal was just a lull in his psychosis.
“Don’t hurt my dad,” I blurted. “And…and if you’re going to kill me please don’t do it where he’ll find my body. Please.”
Ed gave me a confused look, then his eyes dropped down to the gun in his hand. He swallowed hard.
“I’ll find you later,” he said, voice hoarse, and then he took off at a run down the road. Within a few seconds I lost sight of him in the gloom. Find me later? To talk to me? Or kill me?
“Angel?” my dad said as he came down the steps. “Who was that?” He had a jacket in his hand. My jacket. He was worried I’d be cold. Or maybe it was an excuse to come after me. Either way it damn near made me cry from the fierce joy of it.
“Neighbor from up the road,” I told him as I walked back up to the house. “Looking for his dog. Nothing to worry about.”
Chapter 14
Not surprisingly, I slept like absolute shit. Hell, it’s possible I didn’t sleep at all. I finally gave up long before dawn and grabbed a shower. I didn’t have to work, but—also, not surprisingly—I suddenly had a zillion questions about Ed and his appearance last night.
Add those to the zillion questions I had about Sofia and the shit at the lab, and I had a full day of detective work planned. Instead of simply throwing on the first piece of clean clothing I could find, I dressed with care—simple black shirt, khaki pants, and low black boots. I brushed my hair back into as neat a ponytail as I could manage, dousing it with plenty of hairspray to try to control the rampant frizz, and spent nearly fifteen minutes on my makeup, doing my best to be conservative yet “fresh!” as the magazine covers would say.
For the final touch, I downed some brains to make absolutely sure I didn’t smell.
Since it was still far too early in the day to do anything related to the lab, I chose instead to go to the morgue and do what research I could there. I brought my study guide with me in case anyone wondered why I was coming in to the office on my day off. It was e
asy enough to say that I needed a quiet place to study. Most people there knew that my home life was less than ideal, so it’d be a believable excuse.
As expected, it was nicely deserted, though the ever-present aroma of formalin greeted me upon entering. After logging on to the computer in the morgue, I pulled up a web browser and checked to see what was publicly available as far as information about Ed’s parents. It would have been a thousand times easier to simply look them up on Lexis Nexis, but unfortunately I hadn’t yet been trusted with the username and password for that. Damn it.
I had to wade through several pages of search results having to do with Ed as a suspect in the beheadings, but finally managed to reach a page—probably intended for genealogy searches—that gave me his parents’ full names, along with dates of birth and death.
Sam and Dawn Quinn. They had the same date of death, slightly over ten years ago, but no other information. A search for online obituaries yielded a little more information, but only useless stuff like where they went to school and shit like that.
I ended up scouring online information for close to an hour before I finally found an article that gave me some info that was worth a shit.
Fiery boat accident claims two lives
Two people were killed late Saturday night when their boat apparently lost control on the Tchefuncte River and struck a concrete pier, catching fire upon impact. Investigators believe that the boat was traveling at a high rate of speed, possibly due to a malfunctioning throttle, although full reports are still pending. Divers recovered the remains of two bodies from the wreckage and, using dental records, the St. Tammany coroner’s office was able to identify them as husband and wife, Sam and Dawn Quinn, of Covington, LA.
I finished the article, leaned back in the chair and blew out my breath. Now that was damn interesting. Marianne had once told me that Ed’s dad died in a boating accident and that his mother later committed suicide. Had Ed lied to her? Was this fire some sort of cover-up? And if so, who did it? Ed? Ed was twenty-seven now, which meant he was seventeen when it happened. Not completely impossible to imagine, but still fairly hard to believe. And why would he have done it?
Puzzled, I returned to the page of search results to see if there were any articles that had more details. There were some older results from various society functions, but I skimmed through those quickly, not terribly interested in the fact that they’d attended a fundraiser for the preservation of wetlands. I clicked on the next search result, then abruptly paused and returned to the previous page.
Frowning, I took a closer look at the pictures alongside the article. Halfway down was a picture of the two—at least if the caption was to be believed. Drs. Sam and Dawn Quinn. Good-looking couple. Both of them tall, lean, and blond. Interesting that his parents were both doctors. Was that why he decided to become a paramedic?
I scrolled down to see if there were any other pictures of them. There was one more, with a third person as well.
A Mr. Pietro Ivanov.
I frowned. I wanted for that to be some sort of big reveal, some sort of “Aha!” moment, but the more I thought about it the more I had to accept it really wasn’t that much of a surprise. Marcus and Ed had known each other since they were kids, and Pietro had taken them on hunting trips every year, so it would make perfect sense that he was friends with Ed’s parents.
Skimming through the rest of the articles, I found a few more pages with pictures of them at various fundraisers or other functions. These people sure did love their society page shit. A few more pics of them with Pietro, but there were also some of them with another, shorter, woman who looked vaguely familiar, but the name in the caption, Dr. Kristi Burke, didn’t ring any bells. Probably just someone she worked with. If she was a doctor it was possible she worked at a hospital around here now, and perhaps I’d seen her in passing one of the many times I picked up a body there. Still, I went ahead and stuck the name Kristi Burke into another internet search, disappointed when nothing came up but the same old society page shit.
Disgruntled over my lack of any sort of real information, I continued to pore through search results, eventually giving up when the results were nothing but odd combinations of names that had zero relation to the actual people. What I needed now was to see the actual accident report of the Quinns’ deaths. Or the death investigation report? I perked up, then just as quickly wilted. The supposed boating accident had been in St. Tammany parish, not here. I’d have to find time to drive over there and get the reports myself—if they were even public record.
Scowling, I cleared the browser history—a trick Nick had inadvertently taught me quite some time ago—logged off and pushed away from the computer. Derrel or another death investigator would no doubt be able to get copies of the reports, but then I’d surely have to answer a number of questions as to why on earth I was interested in this. And what the heck was I supposed to say? “I think they were killed by a zombie, and the fire was set to cover that up.” Yeah, that would go over really well.
As usual, I hadn’t managed to find answers to any of my questions, and had only managed to raise more.
I glanced at the time. Seven thirty a.m. I still wanted to see what I could find out at NuQuesCor, but my slightly brilliant plan to infiltrate required that I wait until normal business hours.
With more than a little reluctance, I pulled out the GED study guide and started paging through it. By the time I’d leafed through the Language Arts section, I was uncomfortably aware that simply buying a study guide probably wasn’t going to cut it. I needed to enroll in a proper study program with actual teachers and shit. All the faith-in-myself in the world wouldn’t help me teach myself this crap, even with a big, fancy study guide.
Still, I stubbornly made myself read through the guide, though I skipped ahead to the math section.
I was still struggling over the section on fractions when Nick came in.
“Cripes, Angel,” he said with a frown. “Do you fucking sleep here?”
“Yep,” I responded. “Top shelf of the cooler. It’s soooo comfy!”
He hmmfed, possibly not completely sure if I was joking, then tilted his head. “You look nice,” he stated with a frown, in the same way someone might say, “My cat has worms.”
“Um. Thanks…?”
He came to peer over my shoulder. “Dividing fractions, huh?”
“Yeah, and it fucking sucks ass,” I snarled.
“‘Ours is not to reason why, just invert and multiply,’” he intoned. I stared at him blankly. He seized a sheet of paper from the printer, snagged a pencil from the cup by the computer, and proceeded to scrawl numbers. “My dad was a math whiz, taught me all sorts of tricks. See, it’s the same as multiplying, but you have to flip it.” His pencil flew across the paper as I stared. “So, dividing nine by one third is the same as multiplying it by three. See?”
I peered down at the numbers, and suddenly something miraculous occurred.
I understood it.
“Holy shit, Nick. That’s easy!”
He grinned. “You just have to know how to look at it.”
“Yeah, well that’s my problem,” I said, grimacing. “I usually don’t even know where to start looking.”
He plopped into the seat beside me. “I’ll tutor you if you want.”
I gave him a doubtful look. “I can’t really afford to pay—”
He waved a hand. “Nah, I’ll do it gratis.”
I started to ask him why, but stopped myself. Hell, if he was willing to tutor me for free, I wasn’t about to argue. Nick the Prick was getting less and less prickish the longer I knew him.
Then again, I knew that there’d be some sort of catch. After all, this was Nick. Okay, so the number one catch would be that I’d have to spend lots of time with Nick. But for now, I could live with it. I hoped. ’Cause I needed all the help I could get.
Chapter 15
There was a time when I’d liked math and even thought I was pretty good at it. But s
omewhere around fourth grade someone noticed that my reading speed sucked shit, and I was put into the “remedial” track. It was supposed to be a program where kids like me could actually learn at their own speed, where maybe the teacher could figure out why the hell I read at a snail’s pace. Instead it ended up being a place to dump any kid who wasn’t a well-behaved model student. This meant that the teachers actually spent most of the class time dealing with disruptive little shits and, since at that time I was pretty damn docile, I was left alone. Which might not have been so bad except that they put me in remedial classes for all subjects, including math which I’d been fairly decent in. By the end of that year I was so goddamn bored with being taught math concepts I’d learned two years before, that I stopped paying attention to anything.
Nick could be a pompous ass, but he was a pretty good teacher, with a knack for explaining the math concepts in a way that actually made sense. He was even darn good at the grammar end of things too, and with his help I finally understood the difference between “your” and “you’re” as well as “lose” and “loose,” and “its” and “it’s.”
That being said, I damn near cheered when, after an hour of tutoring, Nick got a call to go pick up a body. Even Nick on his best behavior was a lot to take.
I packed up my stuff—including the study guide, the pages and pages of problems I’d worked under Nick’s watchful eye, and the “homework” he’d assigned me—and headed to NuQuesCor.
As angry as I was at Marcus, I wasn’t stupid enough to ignore what he’d said about violating my probation. I knew something weird was going on at that lab, but any attempt to sneak in would definitely rank up there with some of the stupider things I’d done in my life—and I’d done some hugely stupid shit, trust me.
Therefore I wasn’t going to do any sneaking at all. Well, maybe a teensy bit. But I wasn’t going to break any laws. Or at least I wasn’t planning to break any laws. With my history, it was probably best not to make sweeping statements like, This will be totally legal!
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