All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(17)
“Hey, Vie,” he said, leaning forward to rest his upper body on the lip of the Dumpster. “What are you doing?”
Every inch of me was saying, move back, get away. Instead, I bent towards Lawayne, propping myself on the Dumpster’s frame and hoping to hell I looked casual.
“Lost something.”
Lawayne chuckled. “Want some help?”
Ignoring him, I peered over his shoulder. Lawayne wasn’t alone. A woman with a helmet of stiff, glossy blond hair stood between Becca and Lawayne, and her posture was warning Becca not to make any sudden moves. I’d seen that woman before; she was Lawayne’s driver. The last time I’d seen her, she’d had her nose so high that she risked cracking it on Cloud Peak. Today, though, she didn’t look so hot. She favored her left side, as though she’d had a nasty fall, and she wore a pair of sunglasses with lenses the size of softballs. Whatever she’d spent last night doing, I hope she’d enjoyed it.
A few feet from the Dumpster, a bulky guy in a black blazer stood with his arms crossed. He had a deep tan, a lot of gold chains, and every inch of him glistened like he’d been swimming in baby oil. The hair on his head had moved down to the back of his neck, and I didn’t recognize him.
When the man with the tan and the chains and the baby oil realized I was looking at him, his eyes flicked up to mine. The world paused, and I was dragged into a memory, but not one of mine. This was how my ability worked: uncontrolled, responding to the first time I met someone, triggered by touch or by eye contact. An instant later, I found myself standing on a slope of neatly trimmed grass. I was in a a park, with old trees dotting the hill and a swoop of cattails along a brown pond. A girl was stumbling away from me, naked from the waist up and clutching a flimsy red scrap to her chest, and I felt this huge, pebbly heat in my chest, like I’d been swallowing sun-warm gravel. I—not me, but the man whose memory I was trapped in—lunged. The movement was quick, quicker than I would have expected from the bulky man, and his fist hammered down at the base of the girl’s skull. She stumbled and pitched into the dirt, striking chin-first. As she rolled over, I—the man—bent, hefting a stone from the ground. It fit well into the hollow of my hand, warm, warm like that pebbly heat inside me. Dropping to one knee, I brought my hand back, and there was blood on the girl’s chin, and her eyes were so bright and glassy that I could see every movement I made, and in that reflection the stone came down once, and then again, and again.
The memory popped like a soap bubble, and as I found myself back in the Dumpster, the world rushed in: the garbage-rot filling my lungs, sunlight glaring off the Ford’s windshield, the whine of a small motor—a lawnmower, maybe, or a leafblower, a block or two away. The man with the tan and the chains was still staring at me, oblivious to the fact that I had just witnessed him committing a murder in a pretty park. It might have been yesterday. It might have been twenty years ago. The shock of the murder, of its brutality, left me shaken. Worse, though, was how this man had enjoyed it.
That wasn’t the part that scared me, though. At least, not by itself. It wasn’t the fact that this man was obviously sick. There were plenty of people who enjoyed hurting others; I knew some of them very well. What made me grip the Dumpster’s frame more tightly, what made blood rush to my head until it felt huge and throbbing like a drumskin ready to split, was the simple fact that until this point in my life, every memory I had accidentally experienced had been the single worst moment of that person’s life. Their darkest secrets, the things they hated about themselves, words and actions they’d never shared with another living soul. But this man—this man had enjoyed killing that girl. What did that mean?
“Kid, you listening?” Lawayne’s smile had faded. “I really hope you’re listening.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m waiting. And don’t ask what I’m talking about. Don’t play dumb, don’t make us both look dumb. I’m waiting, and I’ll wait a little longer, because, even though I know you don’t believe me, I like you. You’re a shit, but you’re a pretty tough shit, and if you were ten years older I’d probably lose a little sleep.” His grin sparked again. “’Course, if you were ten years older, well . . .” He grabbed my hair and shook my head from side to side. “If you were ten years older, I’d have settled this already. So—”
I knocked his hand away. “Don’t touch me.”
The man with the tan and the chains laughed, a honking noise, and said, “Big man, Lawayne. You got a big man there.”
To Lawayne, I said, “He looks like somebody off a bad TV show. God, he even sounds like it.”
Lawayne, smiling his big buddy smile, reached to grab my hair again, but I pulled back. His hand hovered in the air for a moment, and something moved in his eyes, something small and dark and darting across the bottom.
“I’m waiting. I’m not going to wait forever.” He pulled back, waving for the girl and the man with the tan and the chains to follow. Almost at the same moment, a patrol car rolled into the parking lot. “You’ve heard of trespassing, haven’t you, Vie?” Then Lawayne smiled and, escorted by the other two, climbed into a dark town car and drove off.
The patrol car came to a stop in front of the Dumpster, and a fat deputy heaved his bulk from the front seat. It was Fred Fort, and he looked pissed. Becca ignored the deputy and rushed towards me.