My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(68)

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that one way to look at it is that—it’s that we sold him, I guess.”

“How much?”

“Eight hundred each. That church guy, he counted it out in cash. We had to sign the accident report the way he wrote it up.”

“Church guy?” Jade has to ask. “Old-timey preacher, white hair and crazy eyes, big-ass hands, name rhymes with Bezekiel?”

“What? No, no—the… his name. That one the bear—”

“Deacon Samuels,” Jade fills in. “The church of the flipped house.”

“He paid us off. Now if we say anything, it’s like perjury.”

“Not sure that’s really how it works.”

“That’s how he’ll make it work.”

“He told you this?”

“Didn’t have to.”

“But he’s dead now.”

“And my signature’s still on that report,” Shooting Glasses says, leaning forward to rest his chin on the top of the padded steering wheel.

“So the report’s a lie, I take it.”

“It wasn’t supposed to matter,” Shooting Glasses says. “We thought he was gonna be dead on the ambulance ride, I mean.

But Greyson—”

“I really do like that name.”

“You can have it,” Shooting Glasses says, leaning back and looking out his window, his face right there in the reflection for Jade. “He’s pretty much done with it.”

“This is the part where you tell me,” Jade tells him.

“What, am I hypnotized?” Shooting Glasses asks.

“I’ll trade,” Jade hears herself tell him back.

He looks over to her, says after a beat, “Trade what?”

“Not what you’re thinking,” she says, sure to hold his eyes for that. “Ever since… since we first met. That night. You’ve been wondering why I did it.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” he says. “It’s—I know there’s never just one reason, I mean.”

“Try me.”

He considers this, considers it some more, then nods to himself, spits again, taking his time with it, and starts: “He could have been any one of us, right? Greyson, I mean. It was —we were leveling that lot on the point where the big house is going in. The dragon one.”

“Mon dragon.”

“Mondragon, yeah. One where that—I mean—”

“Where the hot girl’s gonna live and take long naked showers,” Jade says for him.

The dimple in his cheek gives away how right she is.

“You can pour the concrete so the top’s level,” Shooting Glasses continues, doing his hand left to right in case “flat” is a new concept to her. “The base, not so much. It doesn’t have to be so flat, I mean. But you do want to dig down to pour.

Bedrock works best, and like you were saying, it’s shallow as shit over there.”

“The bedrock you mean,” Jade says.

“Yeah, what—?”

“The lake is deepest over there, because that side of the valley’s steeper than over here. Forget about it, sorry.”

She Theo Mondragons her hand for him to go on, and he does: “I wasn’t running the backhoe, Telly was. Just scraping back and forth with the boom. He’d loosen a big rock then push it out of the way. One or two of them caught the slope, went all the way down to the lake. It was like a game.

Anyway, we had this leaf blower, I guess. It was so one of us could blast it around after Telly’d scraped an area pretty clean.

So we could know what there was still left to do.”

“Where’d you plug it in, this leaf blower?”

“It was gas.”

Jade nods, chides herself for stopping him again.

“Anyway,” he says, “Greyson had his safety glasses on, would step in right after Telly lifted out, and he’d—” In the confines of the cab, Shooting Glasses mimes sweeping a great windy nozzle back and forth at foot-level, like herding mice with air. Jade almost has to grin, the picture’s so clear. “I was standing right beside his dumb ass, right? But I had my eyes closed, because Grey was spraying my legs. It was hilarious to him, I guess. He was always screwing around, was an accident waiting to happen. But I had to like close my eyes from it, all that little shit blasting up. Then my pants legs just went still.

That was the first way I knew something had happened. At first I thought he’d maybe run out of gas.”

“And this is in the day time?” Jade asks, hardly believing any slasher could be so brazen as to take someone with the sun shining down on them, people all around.

Shooting Glasses nods like that’s not the interesting part.

“He’d fallen through,” he says. “I guess—I guess we were on top of a cave? I don’t know how Telly’s backhoe hadn’t crumbled it all in already. But Greyson, man, the leaf blower was still there, wedged across the crack like he’d tried to hold on to it. It was still running. But he was gone, man. Fucking fell his ass all the way in, whatever.”

“One of you go down there for him?”

Shooting Glasses winces, having to be there again.