The Devil Next Door Read Online Free Page A

Kojozian said. “He got sick in the grass over it all.”
    Warren grinned. “No shit? Well, take it easy, Mr. Shears. Dead is dead. You can tap dance on this kid or drop your knickers and take a dump in his mouth. It’s all the same to him.”
    Louis stared up at him, pale and wide-eyed. “You’re all crazy,” he said.
    “Boy, he does have a weak stomach, all right,” Warren said, exhaling smoke through his nostrils. “No offense, Mr. Shears, but you wouldn’t make much of a cop. Lots of bodies, always lots of bodies.”
    “We had a guy last week,” Shaw said, “over on West Rider Street. Mail piling up and all that. Neighbors call us and we go over there. We had to go in through a side window and that stink when we opened it up…holy Jesus! We found the stiff on the shitter. Old guy had a heart attack while he was delivering the mail. Must have been about a thousand flies on him. Another thousand on the windows and flying around. They were buzzing so loud, you couldn’t hear yourself think.”
    “That’s nothing,” Warren said. “When I was first on the Department, we got a call to go out to the airport. Middle of summer, some guy’s sleeping in his car with the windows all rolled up. A real hot bastard it was, too. Some kids were riding their bikes around, saw the guy laying in there, said he had rice all over him. Rice. Ha, what a mess! The smell would have put you right down to your knees, swear to God. He’d been in there almost a week, came apart like boiled chicken when we tried to pull him out. Most of him stuck to the seat…”
    Louis got to his feet and then he was running, running dead out for the Dodge. His brain was filled with a screaming black noise and he was certain that he had lost his mind. Nothing else could possibly explain it.
    “Hey, where you going?” Kojozian called out.
    “Let him go,” Shaw said. “We don’t need him. What we need here are a couple shovels to scrape this kid off the sidewalk with…”
    And then Louis was in his Dodge. He could feel the seat beneath him and his hands gripping the steering wheel. He held on tight before the entire world went flying away beneath him. Because it was coming, he knew it was coming.
    He squealed around in a U-turn and saw Warren wave to him in the rearview. As he screeched away down Tessler Avenue, barely missing a parked car, his face was slicked with sweat and his entire body was shaking. He needed badly to pull over and be sick, but he didn’t dare. He just did not dare. He had to make Rush Street and home. And the most insane, impossible thing of all was that the cops did not come after him.
    They did not come after him…
     
    6
    At Greenlawn High, things began to happen.
    Macy Merchant, a junior and honor roll student, sat down in her fifth hour Mass Media class and tried to shut out the teenage soap opera that played around her as it did on a daily basis. Macy was not a popular girl. She was smart and ambitious and serious, qualities which certainly did not endear her to the more socially elite of Greenlawn High.
    Not that any of this really bothered Macy.
    At least, not that she was willing to admit openly. Some kids were funny and some kids were jocks, some were drop-dead gorgeous and some were burgeoning criminals, and some, like her, were just smart. A thin, flaxen-haired, girl, she knew her one true attribute was her brain. And she was adult enough to know that in the real world, this is ultimately what counted. Sometimes she wished she had looks like Shannon Kittery or Chelsea Paris or some of the other senior vixens, had guys worshipping at her feet. But not too often. For she knew that looks faded, as they said, and that both Shannon and Chelsea would probably end up living in trailers with three screaming brats each and the obligatory alcoholic, abusive husband who once upon a time had rushed for a hundred yards in the big game, but now only rushed to the refrigerator or to the TV set to watch the WCW or Girls