The Rebel of Raleigh High (Raleigh Rebels #1) - Callie Hart Page 0,1

fuck.

Speaking to a dead body isn’t nearly as weird as you might think. “Well, Gary. Looks like the piper wanted to be paid, huh?” Sweat stings at my eyes. Crouching down, feet balanced on either side of the coffin, I take my t-shirt from my back pocket where I hung it for safe keeping, and I use it to wipe at my face. Before I arrived here tonight, I’d prepared myself for the sickly-sweet odor of death, was ready to face it, but two feet away from Gary, the only thing I can smell are the winter pine trees on the wind. “Figured we’d end up here eventually,” I tell him. “Didn’t think it would be so soon, but hey…I’m not complaining.”

Unsurprisingly, Gary has very little say in return.

I contemplate his face. His sallow, sunken in cheeks and his pinched, withered features. When did he get so gaunt? Was he always like that, or did the process of dying shave twenty pounds off the guy? I suppose it’s a mystery I’ll never solve now. It’s been six months since I saw him last; there’s every chance the bastard joined Jenny Craig during that time.

I stoop low over him and reach out a finger, prodding at his cheek, expecting to find some give in him, but there’s nothing. He’s solid. Stiff, like a calcified husk. Like I said, I didn’t come here unprepared. Gary’s been dead for four days, so it seemed prudent to read up on what kind of shape the motherfucker was going to be in when I unearthed him. His corpse isn’t bloated, though. His tongue isn’t protruding from between his teeth. He looks…he looks kind of normal. Even the makeup they must have put on him at the funeral home still looks like it’s holding up.

It’s the cold. Has to be. There’s no way he’d be so perfectly preserved otherwise. Honestly, I’m a little disappointed. A part of me was looking forward to seeing the bastard’s skin sloughing from his bones.

With quick hands I get to work, first grabbing the Bible and tossing it out of the grave, hissing between my teeth. Gary’s hands are next. I wrench them apart, then hinge his arms down by his sides, giving me room to unbutton his shirt and fold the material back. He’s wearing a vest, but that’s no big deal. I stand briefly so I can get my hand in my pocket, and then the short blade of my flick knife is gleaming brilliantly in the moonlight. The sharpened steel cuts through the thin polyester in two seconds flat.

Gary’s narrow, twisted pigeon chest hasn’t been rouged up like his face, and here I find the evidence of decay I was looking for. His skin’s pale, tinged an unhealthy blue, mottled like a fine-veined marble. And just off center of his torso, a little up and to the right, a small, neat, black hole with puckered edges punctures his skin.

Do morticians charge for sewing gunshot wounds closed? If they do, then Gary’s penny-pinching brother from Mississauga declined to cover the added expense. I never met him—the brother. In the three years I lived under the roof of Gary Quincy’s doublewide trailer, I only ever heard his brother’s voice on the other end of a telephone, and even then I knew I didn’t like the fucker.

“Had to make sure, Gaz,” I say. “Needed to see with my own two eyes. Now. Where’d you put it, hmm?” I pat down the pockets of his cheap suit pants, feeling around carefully…

I didn’t just come here to make sure Gary Quincy was dead, though that was a big part of this. I’ve spent the last two hours laboring in the dirt, digging his ass up, because he has something that belongs to me, something he took from me, and I want it back.

His pockets are empty. Juuuust fucking perfect. I lift his head, checking his throat, just to make sure, but it’s not there, either.

“You swallow it, Gary?” I ask, glancing at the knife I rested on the edge of the coffin. “Wouldn’t put it past you, you fucking psycho.” I take up the knife, dread lacing my bones as I survey the concave shell of his stomach, wondering if I have the stones to even proceed with such a fucking crazy idea. Cutting Gary open, unraveling his intestines, feeling around inside the cavities, nooks and crannies of his insides will not be something I’ll ever be able to forget. Something like that