Page 90 of Forever Dark
The sound blared once into the open night.
A fist drove into her side.Not a punch exactly.More like brutal force meant to fold her up and stop the noise.Breath vanished from her lungs.Her bag slipped from her grasp and spilled, pens and receipts and lip balm and her hospital badge scattering onto the ground.
She kicked.
One shoe connected with something hard and drew a grunt.Hope flared and died almost at once.The man dragged her half out of the seat.A stone bit through the thin sole of her other shoe when her foot found the ground wrong and slid.
“No,” she gasped.“No, no, no.”
The porch light shone over the driveway.Beyond it the road lay empty and dark.No passing car.No neighbor at a window.No one.
Tara clawed for the open door, caught the inside handle, and held on with both hands.The man tore her free finger by finger.Her badge lay face up in the dirt, white and blue under the car’s interior light, her own photograph staring back at her from the ground.
Another scream left her, smaller now.
The open night swallowed it.
Then he hauled her away from the car, into the dark beyond the reach of the porch light, while the engine kept idling and the driver’s door hung wide, spilling pale light over the scattered contents of her life.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The ringing dragged Selena up from a sleep so deep, waking felt like breaking through ice to breathe.
Gray skies pressed at the edges of the windshield.Her neck hurt.One leg had gone numb where it was bent against the passenger door.For a second she did not know where she was.Then came the smell of stale coffee, Connor’s aftershave, and the fairground mud caked along the bottom of the car.
Connor sat behind the wheel with the phone to his ear.He was awake as they were taking turns on the stakeout.
“Yes,” he said.“We’re on our way.”
He listened a moment longer.
“No, don’t let anyone inside until we get there.Keep the perimeter wide.”
The call ended.
Selena straightened in the seat and rubbed at her face.“What’s happened?”
Connor turned toward her.Dawn showed the fatigue in him now.The stubble, the flatness around the eyes, the hard set of his mouth.
“There’s been another murder.”
The words cleared the sleep from her faster than cold water could have.
“Where?”
“An old grain silo on the northern edge of the county.Patrol got called by the landowner.”
Selena looked past him through the windshield toward the revival grounds in the distance.The bus sat where it had sat all night, still and sealed.
A bitter taste rose in her mouth.
“How long ago?”
“The body was just found.No time of death yet, but it looks like it was during the night.”
Which meant while they had been here.
Watching the wrong place.
