He tapped his foot against the floor. His shaking made the whole car sway. Shepherd forced himself to stop. She said she’d be right back. She was just going to knock on the back door, like some kind of … encyclopedia saleswoman. And then no one would answer, and they could leave.
They would leave.
They would leave any second now.
But the seconds ticked by and turned into minutes. Cicadas angry at the world screamed all around him. A lizard jumped on the hood of his car and ran up to the roof.
There was no sign of Ginny.
“Damn it.” He took the keys out of the ignition. “She probably got eaten by a panther or something. Just pull it together.” He got out of the car and retrieved a baseball bat from the backseat.
There wasn’t much a baseball bat could do against a panther, but a man’s gotta use the tools he’s been given.
“Don’t freak out, Shepherd,” he muttered under his breath, gravel crunching beneath his shoes. “This house is too expensive to be haunted.” He scoffed. “Now I gotta go and fight a wild animal or a ghost with a baseball bat. And for what? Stupid fake girlfriend, that’s what. So what if she’s pretty and she smells good?”
There was no sign of Ginny around the back of the house. No sign of panther paws, no ectoplasm. He circled the entire house before realization swept over him, bringing ice-cold dread with it.
She’d snuck in the damn house.
ELEVEN
The back door was unlocked. Shepherd opened it a crack and held his ear up to the empty space. His palms were sweaty. He readjusted the grip on his bat. No one was screaming, so that was good. But there was no noise at all, which was less good.
With a mumbled curse and a whispered prayer, Shepherd shouldered the door open and stepped inside. What struck him immediately was the smell. He had a cat growing up, and as she got older, she had a harder time using the litter box, and sometimes he’d come home from school and that stringent cat-pee odor would hit him straight in the face, making his eyes water. It was the same smell that greeted him now.
It didn’t take much investigating to find out why. The back door opened into the kitchen, only it wasn’t really a kitchen, per se. It was a lab, and it didn’t look like they were doing science experiments. School experiments, at least, would’ve been done with proper equipment, and not plastic gallon jugs and duct tape. There were liquids slowly dripping into jugs from wires that were hung up seemingly at random around the kitchen. Buckets collected who knows what on the floor. A propane tank and lighter fluid sat in front of the sink. A half-full blender burbled on the counter.
Perhaps the meth maker was about to make a smoothie when Ginny had barged in.
What was she thinking, sneaking into a place like this?
Shepherd had only seen meth on TV, and even then, it was a bright blue color. But the crystals in a strainer on the stove top were white. The windows were closed, trapping in the cat-pee smell, but now that he’d grown accustomed to it, there was a thick stench of cigarettes in the house, too. That was a shame. You never could get cigarette smoke fully out of the walls or the carpet with just a regular clean.
He gripped his bat tighter, held it up by his ear. Amidst the dripping sound of the various illegal liquids, there was also a quiet hiss. This was not good. This was, in fact, very bad. And Ginny just waltzed into it without a care in the world! At least he had a bat! She went in empty-handed!
But where had she gone? Was she still there, searching from room to room? Had she snuck out the front door while he’d been breaking and entering through the back door? A thick, heavy lump settled in the middle of his throat. Shepherd swallowed. The lump remained. His breathing was shallow and uneven, matching the buzz of his pulse.
There were voices coming from the other side of the house. Quiet, muffled voices. One male. One female. The female had the familiar lilt that Ginny had, and his heart ratcheted up to another until-now-impossible speed. He gulped, and it was audible in the silence of the meth lab. With careful steps, occasionally looking down for blood trails lest he walk into blood twice in one day, he approached the back rooms. The main area of the house was sparsely furnished: a pull-out couch, with blankets in a bundled heap at the end. A card table with four chairs, a snuffed-out but still slightly burning cigar in one of the two ash trays filled with cigarette butts. No artwork on the walls, no carpet on the floor. He tiptoed down a narrow hallway. Three doors were dark, but the last one on the right had light peeking out of the bottom.
His mouth was dry. His throat was dry. His eyes were dry. It seemed all liquid in his body had moved to his hands, which struggled to keep hold of the bat.
He heard Ginny say, “I’m not the police, OK? I’m looking for my mom, like I already told you.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see if that story holds up once the boss gets here.”
Shepherd was not going to wait to appeal to any boss. Waiting for a boss was a Bad Idea. Unfortunately, so were all his other ideas. Every one he’d ever had. Including this one:
Shepherd threw open the door and ran in swinging. It took a second to line up the hit, but the man talking to Ginny hadn’t been expecting him. The man turned towards the intrusion.Not fast enough. Shepherd swung like he was hitting a home run in the World Series. He struck the side of the man’s head with a sickening thunk. Blood spatter covered the wall, his shirt, his right sock.
The man stood there, suspended almost as if by strings, before the invisible lines were cut, and he collapsed.
The metal bat trembled out of Shepherd’s hands, clanging to the tile floor.
Ginny sat on a twin bed, apparently unscathed. She stared up at him with big, blue eyes.
“How bad is it?” he whispered.
She swallowed, the column of her throat constricting, before braving a glance down at his feet. “Um,” she squeaked.
