My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(67)

“That’s from Jaws,” Shooting Glasses says, checking her eyes to be sure he’s right.

“Good enough for Spielberg, good enough for me,” Jade says back.

Shooting Glasses just sits there. Which is to say, he’s not leaving, not sloping off to whisper to his buds about how weird this girl is with all her throwback references, all the horror, all the gore. Jade’s face heats up, and, praying her voice won’t crack, and only saying it after she’s gone over it and over it in her head, she says, “I could like you, I think.”

When Shooting Glasses looks over for more, the Dr Pepper can to his lower lip, she adds in quick, “As somebody to talk to, I mean.”

“Where was I your last four years?” he sort of quotes.

“Why’d you come over, shine your headlights like that?”

Jade asks. “Did you know it was me?”

“There’s supposed to be a bear around. Bears like trash.”

“This one likes human innards, supposedly.”

“Supposedly?”

“It’s all setup, distraction, red herrings.”

“Thought there were just trout up this high.”

Jade has to grin a tolerant grin about this.

“I’m not supposed to be there on Saturday, even,” she says all wistfully, changing direction.

“Independence Day? The movie on the lake thing they do?”

“We do.”

“You do.”

Jade can feel Shooting Glasses’s eyes on her again. “Lot of people are going to, you know,” she says, looking up to see how he takes this: “Die.”

“Said the girl looking for murder weapons in the junk pile.”

“No, you’re right,” Jade has to admit. “I’m definitely a suspect, the reddest herring.”

“Better than being a trout.”

Jade hits his arm with the back of her hand and he rolls with it into his door, making a show of keeping his spit can level.

“You told that old sheriff about this big wilderness massacre only you know about?” he asks.

“Doesn’t believe me.”

“Because of your hair, your… history.”

“Among other bullshit reasons.”

“Your taste in movies?” Shooting Glasses guesses.

“My good taste in movies,” Jade says, flashing her eyes at him and also, for a snapshot of an instant, seeing the two of them through the windshield: two kids playfighting, making eyes behind the feeble jabs.

And she doesn’t even know his real name.

Shooting Glasses holds his hands up in surrender.

“But if it’s not you,” he says, running with this just to keep her talking, it feels like, “then who? Is it that… who were you talking about? That janitor who caught fire? Cropsy?”

“Cropsy’s strictly Staten Island,” Jade says. “That’s New York City.”

“Jason, Freddy, that other one?”

“Michael,” Jade fills in, shaking her head no. “I already—”

“No, the one who eats people.”

“Leatherface. Bzzzt, not a slasher, sorry. It’s not about revenge with him, just—there’s nobody to get revenge against.

Who’s he supposed to come after, the Texas economy that forced his family into cannibalism?”

“Other one who eats people, I mean,” Shooting Glasses says.

“Hannibal Lecter,” Jade fills in. “Bzzt, not a slasher either, but partial credit because he also wears a face of human skin.

He just likes how people taste, right? Anybody else before we move on? Terminator, Alien, Fatal Attraction?”

“You can do this all night, can’t you?”

“What I was saying,” Jade tries to continue, “is that I already explained all this slasher stuff to who needs to know the most.”

“Did he buy into it?”

“She.” Jade shakes her head no, sadly, Letha didn’t. “Wait, though. I think it’s gonna be someone dressing up like our local legend, Stacey Graves.”

“Good name,” Shooting Glasses says, having to rush the Dr Pepper can in to wrangle a grainy line of spit that won’t break.

“Speaking of good names…” Jade says, looking past his current situation with the can to his yellow-tinted eyes.

He gets it, smiles, says when he can, “Greyson?”

“Greyson Brust,” Jade completes, showing off that she still has that rattling around in her head. “I never heard the end of that story.”

“I told you the beginning?”

“Never heard any of it.”

“Because you… jumped out of the car?”

“Had to,” Jade tells him. “You were about to spill, and I couldn’t know this particular backstory yet.”

“Because it matters?”

“At this stage we don’t know what matters.”

“But you think what happened to Greyson does?”

“I think you’re stalling,” Jade says. “What happened to him? There any reason not to tell me?”

Shooting Glasses looks down into the crusty mouth of his Dr Pepper can, kind of shrugs, says, “Sort of?”