Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,27

was another bizarre “incident,” another hallucination or manifestation of my brain tumor.

Obviously I wouldn’t be talking over my situation with Piper after school, because even if she was somehow miraculously not sent home, I wasn’t sure I could have a heartfelt conversation with this Piper. No, I was just going to have to keep all my worries buried deep inside and try to ignore them.

Hopefully all the weird Twilight Zone stuff was over now, and one day I would look back at this time and laugh.

Ha-ha.

* * *

Piper wasn’t the only one in my life acting kind of strange. My dad seemed to be a little bit more tense and distracted every day. He’d always worked long hours, but his super-overtime was usually sporadic. For the past week or so it had been constant, and it seemed like even when he was at home his mind was still at work.

“Crime spree still going on?” I asked him on Tuesday night.

It was almost nine thirty and he’d just gotten home. I’d fixed myself some spaghetti for dinner and was reheating the leftovers while he slumped at the table and looked exhausted.

“What?” he said, rubbing his eyes and blinking, his mind still lost in whatever was troubling him. “Oh, the crime spree. Yeah. It’s…” His voice faded out and he shook his head.

“It’s what?” I asked with a chill of unease. I didn’t like seeing the haunted expression on his face, the uncertainty in his eyes. His duty had been behind a desk for years now, but before that he’d been a homicide detective, constantly faced with the worst humanity had to offer. He’d seemed to me to be psychologically bulletproof. Maybe everything he’d seen had been damaging to his psyche, but if so, he’d hidden it from me and my sister, and maybe even my mom. Certainly he’d never looked then like he looked now.

Another shake of his head. “I don’t know. It’s like there’s a full moon, only times ten. The moment the sun goes down, the weirdos come out of the woodwork.”

I frowned as I retrieved his dinner from the microwave and set it down in front of him. He’d shown himself to be surprisingly self-sufficient since Mom moved out—I’d had no clue he was capable of cooking before then—but tonight he was obviously just too exhausted for the effort and accepted my offer to feed him.

“Isn’t that normal, though?” I asked. “Isn’t crime and stuff usually worse once it gets dark out.”

“Sure. Just … not like this.”

I pulled up a chair as Dad idly stirred his spaghetti around without eating it. He still had that distant look in his eye, like he wasn’t quite in the room with me.

“Not like what?” I prodded.

He sighed and gave me an assessing look that I assumed meant he was trying to decide how much to tell me. Mom had never let him talk about his job in much detail—she said she didn’t want my sister and me to be subjected to the ugly reality of police work, but I think she was protecting her own sensibilities more than ours—so he was really used to censoring himself.

I met his eyes and tried to look as mature and prepared as possible. Whatever was going on out there, whatever he was having to deal with, I wanted to know about it. I figured it couldn’t be as weird or upsetting as the crap I was dealing with, after all.

I must have looked like I could handle it, because he nodded and started to talk, still choosing his words carefully.

“Usually when there’s a crime spree, it’s small stuff and it’s kind of the usual suspects. Like during that heat wave we had a couple years back. People were crankier than usual, so there were a lot of fights and domestic disputes. Most of the people we arrested had records already. But this one…” He shook his head. “It’s not small stuff, not bar fights and domestic violence. It’s murder and assault and perfectly ordinary-seeming people helping themselves to stuff that isn’t theirs. And a constant stream of people calling 9-1-1 with ridiculous shit we’re required to respond to, no matter how obvious it isn’t real.”

I suppressed a shiver, thinking of my own fateful 9-1-1 call a couple of weeks ago. If I’d told the truth about what I’d seen, my call would certainly be counted with the rest of the “ridiculous shit” that had been reported lately. Dad must have thought about that call, too,