My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(18)

Jade has to look down into her lap to keep her eyes hidden.

“Go on, go on,” Amber says to Mr. Holmes, just to get Tiara’s bikini away from the front of the classroom, and Mr.

Holmes, having old man fingers, of course cues ahead and then stabs the pause in again, this time holding on the shaky-guilty image of his left hand, a cigarette cocked between the fingers—cigarettes it’s common knowledge he’s promised his wife he’s done with forever. Cigarettes that Jade has to guess fall down out of the sky all over Proofrock. Cigarettes that could be anybody’s, but aren’t.

The dirty dog.

It kind of gives Jade a new respect for him. Never mind his complete inability to cue the recording past that image. At least it gets him to usher them all gone before last bell. Jade walks out into the parking lot alone, already unwinding the gauze from her wrist. She lets it trail behind her all the way over to Golding Elementary. It’s not usually her beat, but that’s where Main Supplies is: her next pair of coveralls.

“Bye, now,” she says to the gauze, watching it dance higher and higher in the breeze, a long skinny ghost.

Jade goes into the elementary the back way, finds Main Supplies first try—this was her school for six years—and has her pick of the leftover coveralls. Yay. She steps into the least stained of them, stands into the shoulders, and shoots her arms down through the sleeves. They’re too big again, smell like whoever wore them last, but whatever. At least the zipper works.

She uses her Crüe earrings to pin her name-patch to the chest, over the thread-holes from the last unlucky soul.

“So it begins,” she says, tying her hair back as best she can, as short as it is, and ducked ahead like that, she sees the old timecard rack behind the open door, a relic of more analog times. Rexall, the janitor for these parts—he’s a natural with throwup—has his phone tucked in there, charging.

It reminds Jade of the mystery phone still in her back pocket.

Moving quietly now, as if that makes a difference, she unplugs Rexall’s, starts this pink one charging on its cable.

Three forever minutes later, Jade tapping energy into the floor the phone can have if it wants, it powers on. Five minutes later, Jade can’t even dream what the passcode might be. “SVEN”—7836—is a fail, as is 1234, 4321, and all the corners and diamonds both ways. She’s about to shrug and say screw it, go outside and do some drop tests because why not, but then… she palms her own phone, goes to the last call, the one to the non-U.S. number, and redials, ready to hang up to duck any overseas charges.

The phone she’s holding doesn’t ring. Of course. If your if-found number rings the phone that’s just been found, then you don’t deserve to get your phone back. And if you were thinking that was going to happen, well, Jade isn’t sure what she deserves.

She sits on the stool that’s right there, starts punching a flurry of random codes with both thumbs, is probably ninety seconds into it before she realizes she’s not alone, that there’s a shape looming beside her, and sort of behind. A shape with a distinctly acrid scent, undercut with… is that Jergens?

“Trying to give me a fucking heart attack, man?” she says to Rexall.

He steps forward, his coveralls matching hers. Before this exact moment, and counting all the nights he spends passed out on the couch fifteen feet from her bed, she’s always managed to avoid being in tight places alone with him.

“You’ll never get it that way, Blue,” Rexall says about the phone, his breath some sort of minty, which doesn’t fit with the rest of how he presents.

“Just forgot the code,” Jade mumbles. “Trying all my usual ones.”

“That’s why you’re two-fisting it?” Rexall says about the fact that she’s holding more than one phone. He licks his lips long and slow, presumably so they won’t crack when he grins the lecherous grin Jade knows is coming.

“You know,” she says to him, resetting, “here in a little bit, Hardy’s going to be looking for suspects for… for something that’s about to start happening. You’re maybe going to be at the top of that list, might want to have your alibis in order.”

“I didn’t even know her, Your Honor,” Rexall says, holding his Boy Scout fingers up but then leaning over to take a profane sniff of the back of his middle finger.

“Just remembered,” Jade says, “I don’t talk to you anymore.”

Rexall holds his left hand out for the pink phone, snaps twice when Jade doesn’t give it.

“What for?” she asks.

“She said without talking to him,” Rexall halfway-quotes back to her, and—what the hell—it’s either surrender it or continue this conversation. “Wouldn’t believe how many of these get permanently lost over here,” he goes on, stepping over to a PC buried under about fifteen half-done computer repair jobs. “I crack them, wipe them, jailbreak them, they go for hundred and fifty each, easy like Sunday morning.”

“I’m not looking to sell it, I’m just—”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s your backup phone,” Rexall says, plugging it into the PC, tabbing over to a terminal window. “Fifty dollars.”

“I don’t have fifty dollars, Rexall. I don’t even have fifty cents.”

“Show me a little something then?” he says. “Couple of…