“Oh, God, oh, God, oh …” Gasping, she sped across the clearing to the path. Breathing hard, she scrambled over brambles and vines, tripping once, then again before she got to the old Chevy. What the hell? What the … She threw herself inside the car, switched on the engine, and rammed the gearshift into reverse. Feeling as if Lucifer himself was chasing her, she pressed on the accelerator, the tires spinning, as she looked over her shoulder and expected some ghoul or axe murderer to leap out at her at any second.
Go. Go. Go!
What if someone was in the back seat?
She hadn’t checked.
Or the trunk?
She’d left the keys in the ignition. Anyone could have gotten in and—
“Oh, please Jesus, if you’re listening, help me,” she prayed aloud.
Pushing on the accelerator, she kept reversing, swerving, driving like a bat out of hell down the long driveway, looking over her shoulder, the car bouncing and shuddering in the rutted lane. Branches scraped the doors and windows, tires hit rocks and potholes. She didn’t let up, just backed through the gate, not slowing down as she reached the road. There she jammed the gear into drive and hit the gas to fly down the highway, the engine rumbling, tires humming.
That woman!
That dead woman!
That effing dead woman!
Hanging like that, neck crooked, eyes bulging, blood draining from a hole in her neck!
Spooked out of her mind, Chalice took a corner too fast, and the car skidded into the oncoming lane, where a pickup, heading in the opposite direction, nearly collided with her. She cranked the Impala back into her lane as the driver of the truck laid on the horn and flipped her off.
She barely noticed, just kept driving.
Faster!
Faster!
For what seemed like miles.
“Help me, Lord Jesus,” she whispered, just as she spied a gas station at the next corner. With an eye on the rearview mirror, as if she expected to see the monster who had hung that poor woman like an animal carcass in a slaughterhouse, she hit the brakes and squealed to a stop under the fuel-island canopy, slamming the car into park. Without cutting the engine, she raced, stumbling into the mini-mart, where a pimple-faced kid in a uniform stared, gape-mouthed, at her.
“Call the police,” she ordered, breathless and panting, feeling as if she were jumping out of her own skin. “Call them.” When the kid didn’t move, she pounded the counter, making a jar of pickles jump, “Right now! Call them! 911.”
“But—”
“I said call them!” The kid, pale and staring at her as if she was out of her mind, backed up.
“Do it!” Chalice was frantic. “I just saw a dead woman! Hanging from a damned beam, in a hut out there in the swamp!” She gestured wildly to the tall windows that faced the gas pumps that were illuminated by the fluorescent lights and where Dotty’s scratched Impala idled. She advanced on the kid and grabbed his shirt, bunching it in her fist. A plastic tag with the name Gary was pinned to his shirt. “Listen, Gary, if you don’t call the goddamned police, I will.” She dropped her death grip on his uniform, then spying the phone on the counter, snapped the receiver up.
The kid, terrified, backed up farther, probably to hit a security button or a camera or maybe to grab a pistol from under the cigarette counter. She didn’t care. With shaking fingers, she punched out the number. “Don’t even think about grabbing some kind of gun andshooting me,” she said, and the kid froze, eyes wide beneath a fringe of dark hair. Chalice pointed to the vials of e-liquid near him with her free hand and motioned frantically at the vape juice. “And, and give me two of those—the caramel-vanilla ones.”
“Wha—what size?”
“I don’t care! Any size! Do it!” Chalice ordered.
The kid jumped as the 911 operator answered, and Chalice sank to her knees.
Thank the ever-lovin’ Lord!
Chapter 25
“Looks like another one,” Sol said, stating the obvious as she and Reed stared up at the corpse hanging from a crossbeam in this shack filled with all kinds of weird, religious artifacts, a mixture of Christian and pagan. Though they had not verified the cause of death, the hole in the dead woman’s neck appeared consistent with the murders of Billy Huber and Mavis Greenlee. “I bet if we search hard enough, we’ll find another stone with a number scratched into it.”
“Lots of stones here,” Reed said, eying what appeared to be an altar for the occult or some kind of fortune-telling or witchcraft, with all of the dead animal skulls, candles, and altar positioned around a fire pit.
