Page 7 of Shadow Secrets
The sedan stopped.
Later, Sutton would try to reconstruct the sequence and find that her memory had broken it into frames—still images with gaps between them, like a graphic novel drawn by someone who’d left out panels.
Frame: the driver’s window sliding down, smooth and mechanical. Frame: the shape of something long and angular extending from the dark interior. Frame: Ginger turning, phone still at her ear, her face caught in the streetlight—young, open, alive.
Frame: a flash.
The sound came after—a flat, suppressed crack that didn’t echo the way gunshots did in movies. Two shots. Three. Ginger dropped straight down, like a marionette whose strings had been cut. The phone skittered across the sidewalk.
Sutton couldn’t move. Her hand was still on the light switch, her body locked in paralysis. Some distant, screaming part of her brain told her to move move move, but her legs had turned to concrete.
Frame: the car door opened. A figure stepped out—dark clothes, economical movement. The figure walked to Ginger’s body. Crouched. Checked. Stood.
Frame: He looked over. Straight at the parlor window.
Straight at Sutton.
The overhead lights were off. She was standing in the dark behind glass. But the neon sign—the IRON ROS sign with the burnt-out “e” that Dom kept meaning to fix—threw enough red-and-blue glow into the front of the parlor to catch her face.
He saw her. The man took one step toward the parlor. Then another.
Sutton ran.
She didn’t grab her phone from the counter. She didn’t grab her jacket or her bag. She hit the back door at a dead sprint, slammed through it into the alley, and ran in the direction her body chose because her brain had stopped being in charge.
The alley was dark and narrow. Her Doc Martens slapped the pavement, too loud, a beacon in the silence. She cut left at the dumpster, squeezed through the gap between the check-cashing place and the fence, and came out on the next block.
She stopped, panting, until she heard a car cruising down the block. Heart racing, she passed the closed auto body shop. Her breath was coming fast as she made it to the vacant lot with the chain-link fence. Next came the intersection where the streetlight was out, and the dark smothered her.
She didn’t look back. Looking back was how people in horror movies died, and this wasn’t a movie; this was real. The woman on the sidewalk was real. She was dead and he saw my face he saw my face he saw my face?—
She ran until her lungs caught fire, sure she kept hearing the sedan on the road.
The Hadley farmhouse sat at the end of Miller Road. It was run-down and lonely-looking, a single dim light on upstairs. Yet never had anything looked so good to her when she’d covered the distance from town to the farm.
Please be here, she whispered.
Since moving to the area, Sutton had never been out this way. Now she was standing on the porch in the dark, chest heaving, legs shaking. All she could see was Ginger Galbraith’s blood, her vacant stare.
She’d run two miles, most of it on back roads, staying off the main drag, cutting through yards and fields. At one point, she’d crossed a horse pasture where something large and dark had snorted at her, and she’d almost screamed.
By the time she found Miller Road, the adrenaline had burned through the panic and left her hollowed out. She was running on fumes and the stubbornness of a body that refused to stop moving.
She should go to the police. But the image of the figure stepping out of that sedan and the calm, efficient way he’d checked the body like it was a line item on a task list—made her shake. He was a professional killer—she was sure of it—and she was only a tattoo artist on the bad side of town. The police might not understand.
This wasn’t a drive-by. This wasn’t random violence. And she was dead sure Ginger’s killer was now after her.
She needed someone who wouldn’t look at her like she was hysterical, and she only knew one person in Blackridge who fit that description—she’d told him to get out of her shop.
You don’t have to like him. You just have to survive the night.
She knocked.
Silence.
No, no, no! He had to be here.
A car drove down the road, and Sutton plastered herself against the left side of the door, panic making her nearly take off running again.
