My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(80)

No thank you.

It’s so hard to stay awake without a phone, though. Without a spear to stab trash with. Without Holmes sad-ranting about Terra Nova. Without a videotape playing. Without Fugazi leaking into her ears. Without Letha screaming to fill the night.

It had been glorious, though, hadn’t it? And—the way she stabbed her hand up, plucked that machete down from the heavens by the handle. If she’s not a final girl, then there never was a final girl, and Jade’s wrong about everything.

But no way is she wrong.

Jade stands, paces the meager length her cell affords, tries to grim her eyes down like a real convict but it’s hard to maintain while doing the pee-pee dance. There are no facilities in the two cells, just a chamberpot from, she’s guessing, 1899.

Henderson and Golding themselves probably took turns pissing into it.

So far, Jade’s been granted access to the ladies’ room up front. But that was only one trip, and that was a lunch tray ago, which included two boxes of apple juice.

More pressing, if it’s halfway through Thursday afternoon —and she’s pretty sure it is—then that means the massacre is seriously looming.

“Sheriff! ” Jade yells, and it’s like she’s yelling into a megaphone while also being in that same megaphone. Before the first call’s even echoed away, she’s saying it again, and again, louder and louder, until a key announces itself in the lock, giving her a chance to stop before the door opens.

Hardy saunters in, one side of his face printed with the ghost of a backwards “4”: he was asleep on his desk calendar.

“I’m thinking you need to charge me or let me go,” Jade informs him, digging hard in her Law & Order dictionary.

Hardy breathes in deep, lets it out slow.

“How was the bologna?” he asks, then before Jade can get a comeback together, he’s already following up: “There’s an old song by Tom T. Hall about getting hot bologna every day of his stay here in the greybar hotel.” Hardy pats the cinderblock up high as if confirming its solidity. “He comes to like it.”

“What am I being charged with?” Jade asks, trying to lock him in her glare.

Hardy chuckles, strings his keys out from his belt, hauls Jade’s door open, grandly presenting the outer world to her.

Jade steps through, not trusting this even a little.

Hardy rubs his mouth so he can smile behind his hand.

“This is for your own good,” he finally says.

“Being locked up?”

“Your dad let me see your bedroom.”

“What? He let you in the house?”

“Why wouldn’t he? But it’s official now, Jade, sorry. You’re a runaway.”

“I’m almost eighteen.”

“Which means… let me do the math here, let me do the…

does that mean you’re still seventeen, and subject to a whole different set of laws?”

“I’m not running away,” Jade tells him.

“To say nothing of your attempt on Letha Mondragon’s life,” Hardy goes on, moseying ahead of her to the front office.

“I was giving her something, not trying to hurt her,” Jade grumbles.

“And if she hadn’t caught that something?”

“I knew she would.”

“More like you’re lucky she did,” Hardy says, presenting the hall to her.

“Bathroom?” Jade has to ask as it’s sliding by.

“In a moment,” Hardy tells her.

“Cruel and unusual,” Jade says.

“Shit, don’t get me started,” Hardy says back with a chuckle, offering her the perp chair on the other side of his desk and not taking a seat himself until Jade settles in. Her phone is plugged in on the edge of his desk, is pretty much the only thing she can see anymore.

“I really do need to pee,” she says.

“If you’d just used the thunder pot in there, we could avoid these little discussions,” Hardy says, taking a fancy silver pen up from its holder, rolling it across the back of his knuckles.

“But—kids these days, right? I mean that too, kids. You are still seventeen, little miss. And you were running away. I found your bags back in the trees. Much as this might seem personal, I do have a duty here.”

“Then this isn’t about… about anything I might have seen the other night?” Jade asks, careful with her phrasing.

Hardy creaks back in his chair, studying the much-studied ceiling, it looks like.

“And what do you think you might have seen?” he says.

“You want, I can get my recorder from Meg, you can give a statement. Or, no—you can get it. Know right where it is, don’t you?”

He angles his face down to hers, rubs his lips hard against each other like he just glossed them, is trying to spread it around, get it worked in proper.

“Nothing,” Jade finally says. “Didn’t see a thing, Sheriff.”

She’s not sure whether she hopes that’s the exact wording thirteen-year-old Clate Rodgers used once upon a time, or if lucking into that would be the worst possible mistake.

“Seen more deaths here in the last couple weeks than in the forty years previous,” Hardy says, leaning forward now, his elbows finding the desk. “Then I find the local horror fan running around at night with a machete that’s got a name scratched into the blade?”