Chapter 9
She abandoned the email answering a few minutes later and, on the theory that a little exercise might burn off her restless mood, began washing the walls in preparation for painting them.
And then she saw them: the Bluetooth speakers she’d hauled in from her trunk, the ones she was supposed to give to Corbin. They were a dazzling bit of technology that could make your house sound like Coachella was trapped inside.
Or... outside.
She abandoned the wall washing.
And set to work with the cool-headed purpose of an assassin assembling a bomb.
She was just ahead of him, so close her hair flew out behind her and lashed his face. His lungs burned with the effort to keep up.
She scrambled up Devil’s Leap as nimbly as a mountain goat, and he was just about to reach out, to drag his fingertips along her shoulder blades in a tag, to make her turn around so he could pull her into his arms. Something seized him by both arms and yanked him back so hard his head snapped; he looked down upon the strong hands of his father, that old gold wedding ring, the hairy forearms, the tendons straining as they gripped him fast. And as he fought to free himself, Avalon stopped and looked at him then, her eyes radiating warmth. She stretched out her hand and uncurled her fingers; in her palm was the little stone heart he’d found for Trixie the Squirrel’s grave. Then she spun around and hurled it far, far out into the water. It sank below.
She leaped in after it. She sank. And didn’t come up.
“Avalon!” he screamed, his feet scrabbling in place like Fred Flintstone in his little car. And finally his father’s hands were gone. Instead, one of his favorite goats, Baaa Baaaa O’Riley, was standing up there with him.
“You win some, you lose some,” the goat said.
Which struck Mac as a pretty cavalier thing for a talking goat to say. “That’s not very nice,” he said, quite stung.
And then the goat opened its mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed.
Holy fucking—!
Mac jackknifed out of deep sleep into a sitting position, his heart pounding like a floor tom, his arms helicoptering around his head reflexively to ward off an attack.
He was panting as if he’d actually made that run all the way up to the rock.
That was it:nomore pizza before bedtime.
His lungs were still heaving. Which was why it took him another millisecond to become aware that it wasn’t a goat scream that had terrified him out of sleep. Rather anactual, keening, tormented cry had sliced right through his dreams like an icy cutlass.
Gooseflesh raced over his body. All the hairs on his skin leaped erect.
What the fuckinghellwas that?
A... siren? An air raid?
No. No siren could sound so sort of...personallyanguished.
The sound was definitely human.
In a single fluid motion he scrambled nudely up out of bed, seized his twelve-gage shotgun, shoved the window up, and cocked the gun.
The sound rose and fell. Dirgelike.
It was actually another second or two before his violated senses and assaulted nerves could reassemble and work together to draw a conclusion. And when he did he slammed the window shut again and stared at it blankly.
Oh, yeah. It was human, all right.
A very particular human: Melissa Manchester.
More specifically, it was the Melissa Manchester song “Don’t Cry Out Loud.”
From the sound of things, broadcast through speakers the size of boxcars.
