Scare Tactics by John Farris Read Free Book Online

guessed) from the sound of it, maybe Nealy’s. She wondered if he’d finished whupping that bitch Gaynell and was out looking for her. Maybe if she just sneaked a peak—but if it really was Nealy, he’d know his own wife’s car; by now he’d have stopped and hollered for her. Also the truck was coming from the wrong direction, not from the vicinity of Nealy’s house.
    Taryn continued to lay low as the pickup idled opposite the Camaro. Now her heart was really thudding. The driver had turned his side-mounted spot on the parked car. If he was sitting up high in the cab of that truck, couldn’t he make her out? Taryn slumped lower, her chin almost touching the bottom of the steering wheel.
    Finally—it seemed like half a lifetime to Taryn, with that big spot lighting up the Camaro—he got tired of looking at whatever he was looking at, and drove on.
    Taryn breathed heavily, more shaken by the experience than she cared to think about. She felt trapped in the Camaro, bathed in sweat, itchy all over. Maybe, she thought, this isn’t the best place for me.
    Because someone else could come along any minute, looking for something to rob, and when he found her in the car—
    Taryn raised up enough to look back over the seat. The pickup truck had disappeared on up the road; at least she couldn’t make out the taillights, and she could see pretty well to the point where the road curved past the cemetery hill.
    She grabbed her purse and got out of the Camaro, then remembered the keys and reached back inside to take them from the ignition. She had an idea, for what it was worth. There just might be a safe place close by, where she could spend what was left of the night.

  •    2    •
    One Dark Hour to Go
    B efore abandoning the Camaro, Taryn opened the trunk. Even without a flashlight she found what she was looking for, a tire iron. She took it with her.
    There was no problem getting to the drive-in. The road was barricaded off the pike to keep kids from driving down there and parking, and to keep out those people looking for a place to dump trash. The main gates, she was sure, would be chained. But the road was unobstructed beyond the barricade, just a little weedy, with slash pine close on both sides. She walked watchfully by the light of the moon down the middle of the asphalt road, not wanting to turn an ankle in a chuckhole.
    The box office was just that, a box not much larger than a telephone booth, and empty—no place to sit or lie down in there, and when she looked through the barred ticket window she heard a scuttling noise. Rat, maybe. Taryn shuddered and went on to the gates. The high wall of the outdoor theatre echoed the slightest sound: pebbles kicked away as she walked, a flattened aluminum can skittering over the blacktop ... her own breathing, but maybe she just imagined she heard that.
    It was spooky here, she had half a mind to go back. But when she turned and looked toward the pike she could barely make out the Camaro parked there. She had come a long way. And she was suddenly afraid, achingly afraid, of being out here by herself in the middle of the night.
    Just as she’d thought, there was a big rusted padlock on the gates. She used the tire iron, making a lot of noise as she pried the hasp of the lock out of the wood. She tried to ignore the noise and concentrated on thinking about the good times she’d had here just a few years ago, when the *Star-Light* was about the only place in the south county where, if you were underage, you could still have some fun. Part of the fun had been to sneak in for free, usually in the trunk of Walter Bevins’s old Caddy. All of them just about suffocating if the line was long ... but she didn’t want to think about suffocating, she was feeling crawly up and down her spine, and beginning to panic.
    The lock-plate screws pulled out of the old wood of the left gate and Taryn staggered back, dropping the tire iron. It missed her foot but grazed an ankle.