Leslie Parrish - Fade To Black

“Sheriff, if you’re there, please respond. Over.”

They exchanged a glance. “Mitch,” she explained before answering.

Mitch said only a few words. But they were disappointing ones. “Randy Covey’s not at his house. Over.”

She barked a quick response. “Where is he?”

“Somebody called in a few minutes ago. A neighbor of Randy’s saw a story on the news and wanted to see if we knew anything about it. I just got off the phone with the state police and they confirmed. Randy was involved in a serious wreck just before dawn somewhere down near Richmond. Over.”

Before dawn. Before the Reaper’s latest auction? “He was in surgery for hours, but they think he’s going to make it. Over.”

Good for Randy. Not good for their case.

Stacey had obviously reached the same conclusion. Because as she slowly returned the radio handset to the dash, her hand shook. “I was so sure…”

“Me, too. But it’s not true. Covey’s not the Reaper.”

Really, he was doing the kid a favor.

Watching the unconscious boy as he lay on a cot the Reaper had set up in one of his secret rooms, he started to think that what he was going to do to him was for the best. His life was pure shit, his mother a bitch.

A blond bitch. A screeching, abusive, white-trash blond bitch.

He had heard what she’d said to the boy, Nicky, in the parking lot of the campground. He’d seen her hit him. Yeah, the kid was better off dead than growing up with that woman.

It had been easy to watch for his chance, sitting in his truck up on the ridge above the parking lot close to the family’s campsite. Mothers like that never paid attention to their kids. When the boy had set off through the woods for the public restroom, he had simply looped around to the other side of it, made sure nobody else was in there, then waited for Nicky to skip back out.

He hadn’t meant to hit him so hard-hard enough to draw blood. But he had needed to knock him unconscious. The kid hadn’t been too badly hurt and had come around eventually. Not for long. Forcing Nicky to swallow a Coke with some crushed-up sleeping pills had taken care of that.

Now it was just a matter of waiting for the first half of the money to show up. Then he could finish this. He had plucked the boy from that hard life and, in the morning, would be delivering him from it.

This was merciful compared to what Nicky would experience if he remained with his dirty, filthy mother. So it was all good. What he was going to do was right for everyone.

“And don’t you worry,” he told the unconscious boy. “I’m not some fag child molester.” He wouldn’t do the deviant stuff; that was just sick.

Fortunately, the buyer couldn’t expect him to actually rape the kid, risking his own exposure on the video. He snorted, wondering if somebody had invented dick identification.

Didn’t matter. He wasn’t pulling his out. This Lovesprettyboys scum would have to settle for whatever tools he had lying around that he could use on the kid.

But all of that was for the morning. After he had his cash.

“Maybe it won’t come to that,” he mumbled as he cleaned his rifle, one eye on the cot, watching for any sign of movement. Maybe he could just kill the boy and dump the body, without any of the extra stuff.

There was still the chance he could get Warren Lee. If he didn’t have to pay the blackmail money, he would have no need for all that cash. He could waste the boy, offering a rebate or something to the buyer for not doing all the dirty shit, and everything could go back to normal.

After all, it wasn’t as though he really needed the bucks for himself. Money in this world meant nothing. It was useless. It wouldn’t add rooms to his beautiful dark mansion, which hovered over the Playground like a scavenging bird of prey. It wouldn’t pay for more sharp and bloody toys with which to play. Wouldn’t help in any way at all in his world.

How he wanted to disappear inside it. To step into the picture like some kind of fantasy movie. He would give just about anything to immerse himself in that life and never come out.

Just about anything.

Exhausted, defeated, and confused, Stacey realized she’d had enough for one day. It was nearly two in the morning; she had slept for no more than a few hours a night for the past week. And her brain didn’t want to function anymore.

After they had heard about Randy, she and Dean sat in her squad care for a while, at the end of her dad’s driveway. They both called off the reinforcements, then fell silent, not driving forward, not backing up. Before cutting the engines, she opened her window and he did the same. A night breeze washed through the car, floating across her skin, carrying a hint of coolness, a promise of relief from the never-ending summer heat.

The silence deepened. They were utterly still, both looking out the window into the night.

She knew in his mind he was picturing the same things she was. A little boy and a monster. Wishing for the dawn of a new day, when, please God, they could get the financial information they needed to track that monster and save that boy.

For him, it had to be a hundred times worse. Because he was a father. He had a child to fear for, a child whose loss would surely crush his soul. For the first time, she wondered what the boy looked like. If he was dark haired and dark eyed like Dean. If he shared the stubborn jaw, the hidden sense of humor.

She wondered whether Dean had ever had to pick him up when he had fallen off a bike. If he had cleaned Jared’s cuts and wiped his tears and tucked him into bed.

Of course he had . She’d been on one side of his sweet good-night conversation with his son. The love had been clear. There was nothing the amazing man beside her would not do to keep his child, or anyone he cared about, safe from harm.

Stacey could only wonder how, in his profession, he hadn’t yet realized that was an impossible goal.

She sniffed.

“You okay?”

In the darkness, his hand reached out for hers. She clasped it, twining her soft fingers between his rougher ones.

She liked his hands. They were masculine and strong, yet, she knew from experience, capable of giving such pleasure. Such eroticism.

And, right now, such tenderness. That hand in the dark was like a lifeline she could cling to, a path through the tangled web of horror and memory and emotion that had buried itself inside her. As if as long as he was holding her hand, she could come out to the other side whole and unscathed.

“I feel like I’ve known you for a long time,” she admitted softly.

“Me, too.”

He leaned closer, and it was the most natural thing in the world for her to meet him halfway and rest her head on his shoulder. The feel of a soft kiss brushed on her temple soothed and warmed her. Offered safety and sanity.

Maybe because of that simple caress and the silence disturbed only by the cry of cicadas outside the open window, she was able to speak. Something made her want to try to make him see that her choice to come back here, to stay here, where he was so convinced she didn’t belong, wasn’t out of fear. But out of grief.

“I was on patrol when the first call came in,” she whispered.

He said nothing, but his hand squeezed the tiniest bit.

“The radio traffic was insane. Reports that a student was shot in the dorm, then that the shooter was long gone, then that the school was under attack. Nobody knew what was happening.”

He kissed her hair again. And the grip on her hand grew tighter as she kept speaking.

The words came fast now. They had been building for a long time. People knew the basic story, but she’d never shared what it had felt like being there, bearing witness. And once she started to speak, she felt almost unable to stop.