My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(44)

“Did you spill gas on your…” She jabs the rolled coveralls with the button of her pen.

“I don’t drive,” Jade tells her, voice creaky at first. “And they don’t trust me with the lawnmowers.”

“Probably a wise precaution,” Meg says as if to herself, and turns to some task on her computer.

A hundred and thirty stuffed envelopes later, the fourth pile of them teetering in most dangerous fashion, Hardy steps in as if through the batwing doors of a saloon.

“Megan, I need you to—” he starts, is stopped just as fast by Jade’s presence.

“Sheriff,” she says, repaying the jumpscare he gave her last night.

“What you doing here?” he asks.

“Community service?” Jade asks right back.

“She’s stuffing envelopes, sir,” Meg says, looking up over her glasses to show Hardy that he’s making a nuisance of himself in the front office, when his job is obviously not the front office.

“I see, okay, okay,” he says, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand, his six-hours-old five o’clock shadow raspy and loud against the stiff cuff of his shirt.

“Is everything…?” Meg asks, completing the sentence with her eyes.

“Staties are here,” Hardy says with a shrug, like he didn’t want the dead-Founder case anyway. To show how all right he is with it, he hangs his brown coat on the un stolen coatrack, puts his flat-brimmed official hat on top of that, and then swings his belt off, crashes it down on a lateral filing cabinet hard enough that Jade expects the service revolver to fire into her gut.

“You don’t have to stay,” Hardy says to Meg. “Gonna be a long night.”

“And miss all the excitement?” Meg says back with a grin.

“Don’t know what I’d do without you,” Hardy tells her, and, passing by her desk, works something stubby and black up from his shirt pocket, deposits it in a wire-screen pencil holder on Meg’s desk, tapping the lip of the pencil holder twice.

“If anybody calls—” Hardy starts, “Route them through Dispatch,” Meg finishes. “And then tell you who they are, of course.”

“My Girl Friday,” Hardy says, sweeping past.

Jade has no idea what kind of pornographic pet name that might be, and doesn’t think she wants to know.

Hardy stops at the hall, loosening the brown tie she’s only now realizing he’s got on.

“You were supposed to start tomorrow,” he tells her, his voice booming through the station.

“Early bird gets the maggot,” Jade says, flashing an evil smile.

“Eat what you will, eat what you will…” Hardy says in farewell, fading down the hall, still working on his tie.

“Very proper for a young lady,” Meg tells Jade without having to look over to say it.

“I’m a woman, hear me roar,” Jade says back, and licks the next envelope with as much attitude as she can pack into it, imagining her tongue lacerated by a thousand cuts, her teeth coating in blood.

An hour later Jade’s on stack seven of infinity, and every time she looks up, her vision is stained pale green. The corner in the wall over by the copy machine is actually a giant fold in-process, and Jade, inside that white envelope, has checkboxes for eyes. The stool she’s stuck on has a sticky surface some greater tongue has already licked. Meg is a greasy black hair that’s fallen into the works to mess everything up, one Jade can’t quite pinch up or flick away.

She raises her hand and Meg calls on her.

“Yes?”

“Bathroom?”

“Complete sentence, please?”

“May I visit the single stall women’s restroom whose toilet I know better than I want to already?” Jade says with full-on defeat. “The one I’ve been scrubbing already for the past—”

Meg chaperones her down the hall.

“Receptionista and ladies’ room attendant,” Jade says. “This is a full-service station, isn’t it?”

“Feel free to wiggle out the window in there,” Meg says.

“It’s rusted open.”

“The night is an embryo…” Jade says, leaning in. Washing her hands, she catches a flash of herself in the mirror.

“Nightmare Girl to the rescue,” she says, “up up and—”

Meg escorts her back to her station that feels like a cell, in the town that’s definitely a prison.

This is such a great plan for glomming onto information about whatever happened in Terra Nova, yes. But, on the sulky way past Meg’s desk, Jade does at least clock that wire-screen pencil holder that Hardy deposited some thing into: TRANSCRIPTIONS.

Well well well.

“There anything else I can do instead?” Jade whines to Meg.

“When you’re done with the referendums you can apply postage, yes,” Meg says, her eyes holding on to Jade’s, maybe to see her flinch.

“More licking, yay,” Jade says, and takes her stool.

For the next two stacks she imagines going fast enough that she sweats, fast enough that she can rub the tacky backside of the eventual stamps into her swampy armpits before applying them to the envelopes.

Get your entertainment where you can find it, right?

For now Jade has to make do with the grey smudges her stained fingers are still leaving on the pristine white envelopes, which she guesses will make the people of Proofrock aware these are hand-stuffed, not machine-.