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The carhop skated away. We dug into our cheeseburgers, which hadn’t even had a chance to get cold. Shari said, “I didn’t think I’d ever want to eat again.”
“You were really nervous, huh?”
“Are you kidding?” She swallowed another bite. “And it isn’t like we’re out of the woods yet.”
“Sure it is.”
She sighed. “C’mon, Johnny. We still have to go back to school. We still have to face everyone else.”
“So what?”
“I mean, all the stories and everything….”
I shook my head. “It’s like I said: This one little step, and it’s all over. Nick and Marty were the biggest, toughest monkeys in that damn zoo. With them gone, it’ll be easy.”
“But what about you? Nick and Marty talked, y’know. I mean, I never would have found your grave if I hadn’t listened to all the stories that were going around. And there’ll be lots of questions when you show up again. Think about it, Johnny. You’re going to have to explain things. Your parents are going to want to know what happened—”
“Those rummies?” My lips twisted into a smirk. “They’ll be sorry to see me walk through the door. My old man will worry that I’ll cut into the beer budget or something. Maybe I’ll just stay in the boneyard. It’s gotten so I kind of like it there.”
“But everyone else—”
“Screw everyone else. Screw their questions. Who’s gonna have the guts to ask ’em, anyhow? Who’s gonna come up to a guy who’s supposed to be dead and buried in an unmarked grave in the old cemetery…especially when the studs who supposedly gutted him and put him six feet under turn up dead? Who’s gonna say a thing to that guy when he comes waltzing into school with a girl on his arm?”
Shari nodded. “Not just any girl. A freak who believed in ghosts and witches and things that go bump in the night. A freak who everyone laughed at.” She took my hand. “Until she found someone who taught her to believe in herself.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but you had to dig me up to do it.”
“Sometimes you have to be real desperate before you can really believe.” She kissed me, a sweet schoolgirl peck on the cheek. “And, anyway,” she added slyly, “some things are worth a little digging, y’know?”
We finished the cheeseburgers and drove back to the old cemetery, parking the stolen Ford between the same two broken-down mausoleums. Like I said, there was barely enough room to get one door open, so we both slipped out the driver’s side. I left the radio on, because Dinah Washington was singing “My Man’s an Undertaker.” Somehow, it seemed appropriate.
There was a marble slab a few feet off. Spider-webbed with cracks, but pretty much level. I set the Chevy model on top of it. “I wonder where they are,” Shari said.
“Let’s find out.” I knelt down, put my ear to the plastic hardtop and listened for a couple minutes while Shari paced back and forth between two granite tombstones.
“No clue where they are,” I said finally, “but you should hear the idiots yelling at each other.” I stood up, shaking my head, and winked at Shari. “I can’t figure out what surprised them more—that I’d come back from the dead, or that you’d turned into such a dead solid knock-out.”
“Real funny, Joh
nny.”
“Yeah.” I sat on the slab. “Sorry. But I gotta tell you, Shari—your legs really made an impression on them.”
“Why, Johnny Benteen, you’re such a card.” She laughed. “I never would have guessed that a dead guy could possess such a lively sense of humor.”
“Ouch. Score one for the sexpot sorceress.”
“This is so weird.”
“The weirdest.”
“Let’s get it over with.”
“You want to do it?”
She turned away. “I don’t even want to watch.”
I slipped Nick’s switchblade from my pocket. Flicked it open. Pressed the sharp metal point against the miniature tornado that swirled on the model’s flimsy plastic hood.
