All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(94)

“What?” Becca asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You and Emmett stay in the car and pull up in front of the station. I’ll go in and search the locker. If there’s a trap, I should be the one to spring it.”

“God, here he goes,” Emmett groaned. “John-fucking-Wayne.”

“I mean, I should be the one because I have the best chance of beating it. What if it’s—what if it’s something not everyone can do?”

“Your voodoo, you mean?” Emmett said, wiggling his fingers at me.

“You’re a moron, but, yes. Something like that.”

Emmett stepped towards me, and for a moment the world spun and I thought, he’s going to kiss me, right here, he’s going to do it. But he just leaned real close and straightened my denim jacket, his knuckles brushing my chest. “I’m going. And don’t even bother opening that pretty mouth of yours. It doesn’t matter how much you squawk, because I’m going. And if you’d think about it for five seconds, it would make sense. Mr. Big Empty,” his mouth twisted as he said the name, “knows you and Becca are in this. He planned on you to be in this. But me, I’m your wild card. Your ace in the—”

“Don’t say it.”

“—hole.” His smile floated up like cream.

“Mr. Big Empty knows who you are. He framed you for murder. Well, technically for two murders.”

“Yes, but Mr. Big Empty isn’t here. At least, we’re pretty sure he isn’t. If there’s a trap, it’s going to be someone else. Someone he hired. Or maybe someone his buddy hired. But it won’t be him, and that gives us an advantage. If there is a trap, he’ll only have given them your descriptions.”

“I say no.”

“And I say yes.” Emmett patted my chest with the backs of his hands, still so close we could have—

—kissed—

—brushed noses if he leaned in a quarter inch. “You’re not the fearless leader. We’re a team.”

“Damn it, Emmett—”

“If we’re a team,” Becca said, her voice icier than the garage, “then I get a vote too. And I say Emmett’s right.”

“Perfect.” Emmett reached up to pat my cheek, and I twisted my head away. He laughed and, with a cheery wave, he jogged across the garage and out of sight.

As I watched him go, my stomach dropped like a rock. More and more, something didn’t feel right. Maybe it was just Becca’s suggestion of a trap. Maybe I just had the idea stuck in my head. But I watched Emmett run, watched his lean, loping stride, and I thought of how connected to him I had felt in the car, of that singular, perfect transmission between the two of us, like the rest of the world was static. And if there were a trap, and if something happened to him—God, I couldn’t even finish that thought. It only went so far and then it just dropped away. It was the black hole at the end of an incomplete sentence.

I motioned for Becca, and we walked the way Emmett had gone. I looked at Becca, and the words on my lips were, I should have gone, not Emmett, me. But then I froze, and I forgot what I was about to say. Becca continued for almost a pace before she looked back, and when she called to me, the sound was buried under all the cement around us.

In the tinted rear window of a beat-up Thunderbird, I didn’t have a reflection. Instead, Salerno stared back at me.





The purplish tint to the glass did nothing to obscure Salerno’s image. Every detail was crystal clear: the thinning hair, the oily sheen, the ropes of gold chain, the eyes. Definitely the eyes. Those eyes had met me in a dark alley and had told me I was dead. Those eyes would have watched me bleed out. Yes, I remembered the eyes, I remembered Salerno.

“Vie?” Becca asked again.

“Just a minute.”

I shifted left. Then right. Salerno mimicked my movements.

“Who are you?” I said, and my voice was too loud. It bounced back from the cement in a hundred different directions. It bounced back from the glass too, a perfect echo, except that it came in Salerno’s voice.

“What’s going on?” Becca asked. Her steps rang out as she turned back.

I shook my head and held out a hand. Salerno, in the purplish tint of the Thunderbird, mimicked me. “What are you?”

What are you, what are you, what are you. It ricocheted off the walls of the garage. It reflected off the glass in Salerno’s voice. I had seen a ghost before. I had seen one ghost, Samantha’s ghost, many times. But she had always appeared to me as a ghost: insubstantial, saturated with color, different from the material world. I’d never seen anything like this reflection of Salerno. After an anxious moment, I risked a glance over my shoulder. Empty stalls met my gaze, with only the vivid blue and white of a handicap sign breaking the gray. When I looked back, Salerno’s head was just turning around to meet me.

Then, to my surprise, he burst out laughing. It wasn’t a nice laugh. Nobody ever heard that laugh and wanted to join in. It had a low, rumbling quality, like somebody had loaded a dryer with clothes and set it to high.

“Ah, kid,” he said. “I’m just messing with you.”

“Jesus Christ.” I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You pick the afterlife to get a sense of humor?”