A knowing smile. Yellow, pointed teeth.
The man raised his eyebrows, tipped his hat, and turned on his heel.
The sedan roared from the parking lot in a plume of exhaust. The sound barely registered over the pounding of his heart.
CHAPTER
TWELVE
The next morning,Jack used the pay phone at the train station, where the pile of spare change awaited him. He worried that he might be too memorable so early in the morning, when the station was far from busy, and the employees looked at him like something that had been scraped off the tracks. But he was hesitant to use the phone in his room. If this was what actually broke the loop, he didn’t want the police to easily trace him.
His hands shook so badly that he nearly missed the buttons. Afraid to trust them further, he cradled the phone between chin and shoulder. As it rang, bile sped up his throat, foul taste lingering in the back of his mouth.
A deep, raspy voice answered. “Hidden Cove police department. What’s your emergency?”
“Oh, um, hello,” said Jack. Only once in living memory had he called 911, and he was terribly out of practice. For all the crime he’d witnessed downtown, he was never the first to reach a phone in an emergency. “Yes, I’d like to report a… well, I think it’s a body.”
“You reporting a crime or ordering a pizza?” the voice demanded. “Tell me more. Where’s it located?”
Definitely a smoker on the other line, Jack decided. Possibly a woman. An irrelevant detail either way. “I—It’s just off the trail south of town. If you take the Red Line trail toward the GreenLine trail, there’s some trampled bushes and drag marks. About fifty feet into the forest, there’s, um, a mound under a tree, and it’s?—”
“We don’t investigate mounds,” the voice interrupted.
“But there’s drag marks?—”
“Nah, you gotta have more proof than that.”
“Can’t you send someone over?”
“No,” the voice snapped. “Have a good day.” A pause. “Or don’t. I don’t care.”
“Wait—” Jack began.
Only the dial tone answered.
“Your police force,”Jack spat, slamming his coffee down onto Boris’s desk, “is the worst police force I’ve ever encountered.”
Boris looked from the dripping mug to Jack, wearing an expression of confused disgust that might’ve been comical under other circumstances. “Ain’tmypolice force. I don’t work for them.”
“This whole fucking town!” Jack seized his mug and brandished it. Coffee flew. In a profound panic, Boris snatched up the magazine and shoved it between the file cabinet and the desk. “You’re all so fucking weird. It’s like none of you have ever interacted with a real person before.”
“I’m a real person,” said Boris, growing more annoyed by the second. “What the fuck do you mean, we aren’t real people? You’re the weird one, buddy.”
“They won’t let me on the train because the date on my ticket is wrong, your police won’t investigate the body I found, everyone here is horribly rude and obtuse?—”
Boris held up his hands, palms facing out. “Wait, wait, wait. You found a fucking body?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Jack grumbled, slurping from the mug. Coffee slopped down the front of his shirt, lukewarm and sludgy. “And your police won’t do anything about it!”
“You, uh, you got a little something there, buddy,” said Boris, gesturing to his own chest.
“Iknowthat!” Jack snarled.
“Just saying. You don’t look like you can afford a dry cleaner.”
“Well, this whole fucking place is cursed, so I don’t need one!”
“Cursed?” Boris’s eyebrows lifted.
