Killer by Stephen Carpenter Read Free Book Online

over the ridge, is a gash in the ground, partly overgrown now. I know this wound in the earth. I created it. This is the shallow grave where I buried Grace Beverly in Killer .
    My heart swelling into my throat, I approach the ragged rectangular hole in the dirt. What the hell am I looking for?
    I should run.
    But I can’t. I can only move toward the shallow grave on stiff legs, straining my eyes in the colorless moonlight to see inside the grave’s shadow. I come upon it and stop well back, afraid of stumbling in. I lean over the edge of the grave and look inside and see only a black void.
    Suddenly, a flash of stark white and a pair of wild eyes snarl up at me from the darkness of the grave and then a scuffling spray of dirt shoots against my legs as something climbs up and out of the ground and rips a hole in the surrounding brush as it tears off into the night.
    I stagger back, terrified, and stare after the Thing that has leapt from the grave and I realize I have seen coyotes, a large one followed by a smaller one—a mother and pup, disturbed in their sleep, scrambled by an intruder up and out of their safe hole in the warm desert earth.
    I turn and run back down the trail, my heart released from the sudden freeze of fear and now pounding so hard I think that something inside me might break or burst.
    I make it back to the parking lot and stop. I try to breathe. I look around and force myself to calm down and I close my eyes and then open them again. My gaze falls upon the row of picnic tables near the cinderblock meeting-house.
    Something else…something else is here. Near the tables…
    At the end of the row of picnic tables . The olive tree…the dark hollow part inside…
    I can almost hear a voice urging me on to it. A low, sonorous voice with the sound of a smile behind it.
    Like a sleepwalker, I move toward the olive tree. As I come closer I can see that it looks diseased; half of it grows with hale greenery, the other half is clearly dying, no leaf or bud on any branch, and between the two halves of this sad, doomed tree is an oval opening. A dark, hollow place that—once again—I somehow knew would be here.
    Come closer, I hear the deep, sonorous voice say. Look inside .
    I see only darkness and I move my head around to catch the moonlight—and I see a faint sparkle inside the hole in the tree. I clamp my jaw shut tight to fight back the fear and I reach inside and grab a handful of something damp and cold and stringy. Like reaching into a freshly carved jack ‘o lantern.
    I pull my hand out and I am holding a clump of mottled bark and grime. But in the middle of the clump is something—I shake it off and once again the sudden recognition of my own imagined horror washes over me.
    I am holding a hair clip—a large, cheap, plastic thing, bedecked with purple glass beads—and I recognize it as the clip that I described Grace Beverly wearing to hold her hair back in the book. The clip that Killer adjusted to hold her hair out of the way when he applied to the knife across her neck…
    Attached to the hair clip is what I can tell now is a clump of hair, and dangling at the end of the tangle of hair is a dark, papery shred of what I realize is scalp. A small insect crawls around the patch of dried skin.
    I make a shuddering, involuntary sound and stuff the thing back into the tree and run to the car and fumble with the keys like a teenager in a slasher movie and get inside and start the engine and drive like hell out of there.

    CHAPTER SIX

    I drive down the freeway, my mind racing: I have never been there. I have never hurt anyone, ever. I could never do a thing like…no matter how out of my mind with booze and…I could never do it…never do that…never, ever...
    I realize I am saying this aloud. I’ve been saying it, over and over, for most of the drive to the airport. I look down and see that I’m going ninety miles an hour. I slow down suddenly and nearly miss the exit to LAX.
    How did I know?
    I