and they always pay cash. It’s pretty hard to trace.
When they lift her into the Camaro, I stand back. It only takes Cal and Hael—the clear ‘muscle’ of the group—to do it. There’s no time to steal a car now, not with the shit that’s following us around.
“You think this was Mitch?” Aaron asks Vic as Hael slams the trunk closed.
“Doubt it,” Vic replies, lighting a cigarette. He moves over to the side of the garage where Aaron’s left his lawncare shit. There’s a backpack attached to a bottle of Roundup—I’d tell him that shit is cancer-causing, bee-killing garbage, but that would imply I had enough room in my brain to care about issues outside my own life—that he picks up. “He’d be too freaked out by his dead bestie to pull a stunt this elaborate. There’s no way he left the house to work on this without at least noticing the god-awful stench of his car. Go check the boys.” Vic is spraying the grass with the Roundup, holding his phone with the other hand, and smoking, all at the same time.
It’s impressive.
“They’re not answering,” Oscar confirms, looking down at his iPad. The light catches on the edges of his face and makes him look ghoulish. He glances up at me. “That’s not a good sign.”
“Definitely not. Especially after how bad they messed up on Halloween,” Victor murmurs, seemingly annoyed but not worried. Then again, his shoulders and arms are tight. He’s full of shit, isn’t he? Just too damn good at playing pretend.
It only takes Cal, Hael, and Aaron a few minutes to report back.
“They’re gone,” Hael says, nostrils flared. “Every guy in the immediate vicinity, and we had, what, six?”
“Eight,” Vic corrects, gritting his teeth. A bead of sweat rolls down the side of his face as Hael pulls his keys from his pocket. Guess I know where he’s going after this. “This isn’t good. This is bigger than Charter Crew shit. They didn’t kill anyone on Halloween. I mean, they might now, since we left that special delivery of ours. But not yet, not this quickly. Even if they did, they’d leave the bodies for us to find.”
My blood chills as something occurs to me, and the fine hairs on the back of my neck rankle.
“The Thing,” I say, licking my suddenly dry lips. My gaze meets Oscar’s, of all people’s, but there’s no emotion inside his gray irises, like he’s either really good at pretending he doesn’t have emotions … or else he truly is a sociopath.
“You think he’d go this far, this quick?” Vic asks, looking askance at me. “Because he knows we have one video?”
“Because one monster always recognizes another,” I whisper, my eyes on Victor but my focus elsewhere. Hael pauses, one leg inside the car, to watch me. I blink and the fog in my vision clears. “You might be a different breed than he is, but he knows. And now that he’s seen me with you, he knows about me, too.”
“How so?” Hael asks, and I let out a deep exhale.
“That I’m a monster, too,” I tell them, without a shred of shame in my words. “And he knows exactly what we’re going to do to him because, if given the chance, he’d do the same to us.”
“Why Ivy?” Aaron asks, but we don’t have time to talk about it. We need her body gone like, fucking yesterday.
“Because she was with Vaughn the night we found him,” I say, because I know how my stepdad works, the things he does, the way he retaliates.
“What about our boys?” Vic asks, nodding at Hael. The latter climbs in the Camaro with Aaron and Cal, killing my opportunity at having any alone time with Aaron tonight
“I don’t know,” I say, feeling a cold chill fall over me. And it’s not the dew, or the fact that it’s nearly four in the morning. It’s because I know that once Neil Pence latches on to something, he never lets it go.
It makes me wonder … if my sister’s suicide was really a suicide at all.
The next morning starts out with me waking up in a puddle of blood.
The timing’s unfortunate because as I’m sitting up and throwing Aaron’s sheets aside, he walks in and sees me staring down at the violent mess of crimson I’ve made of his bed.
“What the fuck?” he blurts out, tattooed fingers curled around the doorjamb as he leans into the bedroom, like he needs the door to keep himself upright.