First Girl Gone(92)
Now or never.
When headlights glinted in her rearview mirror, her eyes flicked up to watch them. The car turned onto the street running alongside her end of the lot, slowing as it neared the park. Charlie held her breath.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Charlie ducked down in her seat as the car crept past her parking spot. Heart thudding. Eyes opened so wide they stung, staring into the dark through the windshield. She held her breath and listened.
The tires crunched over the snow in the lot, busting up the crusty stuff as they shambled forward. The engine’s growl grew stronger, deeper. As the car drew alongside hers, the rumble rattled the floor of her car, sending strange vibrations into the meat of her feet and ankles.
Tilting her head up, she watched the shimmer of the headlights spread their glow over her dashboard. The lights moved like liquid, lurching and spilling onto the hood, sliding past along with the passing car.
The pitch of the grinding engine changed as the car cruised by her, and then the growl seemed to move forward no more. It held steady. Whirring along in place. Had he stopped? So close? Was he looking into the park now, studying the gazebo?
She waited as long as she could before she lifted her head to peer over the steering wheel. The bright flare of the brake lights glinted a bloody red over the snow. He’d stopped just a couple car lengths beyond her.
The car was a real piece of shit, she realized now. A small Toyota sedan with rusted-out fenders, old as hell. Probably a hole in the muffler, based on the sheer volume of the exhaust noise.
She squinted. Focused on the silhouette seated behind the wheel. Shadows flitted and fluttered like twisting smoke within the dark on the driver’s side, but she couldn’t make out what she was seeing.
The window slowly rolled down, buzzing a little as the pane of glass disappeared between the rubber lips there. He was putting his window down, trying to get a better look into the park. This was it. It had to be him.
Charlie held her breath again. Watching. Waiting. Knowing in her heart that something was about to happen here.
A half-wadded McDonald’s bag flew out of the car window. It rolled like tumbleweed, skittering into the gutter. Based on the slight bulge to the thing, she could tell it was full of garbage. Probably your standard fry sleeve, burger wrapper, and waxed paper cup. Perhaps a cardboard nugget tray. The tip of a straw poked out of the top.
A couple of empty Sprite bottles followed that, making hollow thunking sounds that reminded her of ping-pong balls as they bounced along the asphalt and settled in the low spot near the bag. Then the window whirred to life again, this time going up.
It took Charlie several seconds to process what she was seeing. Littering. He was littering.
It wasn’t the killer, she realized. This wasn’t significant to their stakeout at all. It was just some dirtbag cleaning out his piece of shit car.
The driver’s door cracked open, an ashtray appearing there in the opening, tipping over. Cigarette butts plummeted to the asphalt like raindrops, clouds of wispy ash mushrooming all around them.
Littering. Unbelievable, and somehow very offensive. So selfish. So vulgar. She could spot two garbage bins on the park premises without even turning her head, and this guy was just dumping his trash on the ground.
Charlie’s mind raced to think of an insult. This guy was a… a… a litterbug. The insult felt anticlimactic. It didn’t seem strong enough to describe how she felt about him just now. Too cutesy. She thought maybe Allie would have thought of something better. Probably something dirty and borderline inappropriate and awesome.
Charlie thought about confronting the guy. The car was still sitting there, brake lights shooting that red glare over everything. She couldn’t risk it, though. She had to stay hidden.
Instead, she lifted her walkie to her mouth, felt the tremor in her hand from the spike of adrenaline she’d gotten when the car had first rolled up.
“Jackal, this is Aardvark. I just had some action over this way,” she said. “A bit of a false alarm, really.”
“I have to say, Aardvark, I appreciate your commitment to the code names. But go ahead. Whaddya got?”
“Oh, just some scumbag in a beat-up Toyota dumping his fast-food wrappers all over the street. The jerkoff is still sitting here now. Bold as brass. Probably trying to think of what other trash he can throw out his window.”
“Nice. Well, give me his plate number, and we’ll be sure he gets a little participation trophy for his efforts. Our lucky winner’s ticket carries up to a $500 fine.”
Charlie chuckled as she read off the plate number. That’d be a nice surprise for her new friend here.
The junky Toyota lurched to life at last, shuffling forward. The engine revved and popped, picking up speed before it veered out of the lot and disappeared.
“He just took off, so I’m back on my lonesome over here,” Charlie said. “I’m so excited for him to get his ticket, though.”
“Oh yeah. Nothing doing over here still,” Zoe said. “I heard a car go by one of the side streets a while back, but it didn’t come within viewing distance. Other than that, I’ve eaten like half a box of Cheese Nips.”
Charlie smiled and leaned back in her seat, letting the headrest cradle her skull.
“Remember that time we snuck into the cemetery at night and tried to do a séance?” she asked. “You found some how-to thing online that suggested bringing along some kind of food or drink as an offering to the spirits, so we spent forever ransacking your parents’ kitchen, trying to find just the right thing.”