The Camaro Murders Read Online Free Page A

tail and nudges my chin with his nose. I almost have him loose when I hear the storm door creak.
    Hank stumbles out and sees what I’m trying to do. “You sonuvabitch!” he slurs.
    I don’t have time to stand up before he grabs a nearby shovel and takes a swing. I eat the steel and fall backwards, scrambling to get away. Halfacre isn’t loose yet.
    This isn’t how things were supposed to go. My mind is racing with images of me driving away, and then turning around. Why did I turn around?! What’s going to happen now? I touch my mouth and feel like I’m going to pass out when I notice I’m missing teeth. I’ve got to get to my truck…
    Hank is getting ready to swing again when a car pulls up near the truck—a Camaro. I twist and squirm on my backside, trying to get away from Hank, and hope the driver will lend a hand. Halfacre, straining the whole time, finally breaks loose as the shovel comes down again.

Red Wake
    February 19th, 1999
    Culver Crisp standing in the doorway of his childhood home
    I was seven years old when Ezra Mendelssohn wrapped his bony hands around my neck and squeezed. Our eyes met and shared a silent exchange—a realization I knew what he’d done—before he rose from his chair and lurched towards me.
    The sight of him hunched over in his scruffy cardigan, hands twitching, is still revolting. I’ve never been able to wipe the image from my mind, or forget the pressure of his filthy grip.
    Coming home brings this out of me. Standing inside the door of my old house, childhood comes rushing back, except it isn’t full of Little League and birthday parties like I used to wish. Life is always one-eighty off of what I expect.
    I left the Remington University campus this afternoon and took the three hour bus ride to Graehling Station. Dorm life is claustrophobic and I prefer to be alone most of the time. My roommate doesn’t understand this; he’d rather be shotgunning beers with whoever he can find on our floor.
    The walk from the bus station is about a mile or so, and I sloshed through the snow taking in scenes of rural blight. The run-down mom-and-pop shops with their faded signs and unkempt doorsteps were a downer. I still feel worn-down by them.
    The house—a white ranch with a one car garage—doesn’t exactly lift my spirits either. It sits a hundred feet off the road like the rest of the houses on our side of town. My parents haven’t lived here since work took my dad out west.
    The housing market took a dive around that time and the place never sold, so I still have my key to the front door. The leftover furnishings reflect the basic life we eked out. Our family drove secondhand cars, wore someone else’s hand-me-downs, and got our haircuts in the garage.
    â€œWe can’t afford that, Culver,” was a phrase I heard often. That was my mother’s excuse for why we didn’t have things other people had, and after awhile I regarded the word “afford” with fear. Money must have been tight if we had limitations, I thought.
    The Crisp household is now a collection of dead memories, simple and naive. Whether it’s the nail where a school portrait hung or the marks from the kitchen table where we ate our meals, faint traces of the American Dream linger in every corner.
    In the living room, the last of the daylight is a weak glow in the window sheers. There’s a lonely couch whose rust color reflects the decade to which it belongs. Dents in the carpet mark where a bookshelf and a T.V. stand used to sit.
    It won’t be getting warm any time soon. There’s no heat or electricity so I’ll have to spend the night by the fireplace. I found some dry wood in the garage—enough to last a day or two.
    No one relishes the cold, but I have a special distaste for it. The chill that braces my bones at night is full of the dreams which first haunted me at seven, miserable visions that