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Nick didn’t believe in Bigfoot, the Sasquatch, or the Yeti. He indulged Rufus Ferguson’s natter about the mythical beasts but did not believe they existed. Whatdidexist were bad humans. And bad humans who hid out in the timberland surrounding Cooper Springs were the worst kind of bad.
Forrest Cooper might understand Nick’s point of view. Nick suspected he might. But he hadn’t yet screwed up the courage to follow up with Forrest about the cars he’d seen or the supposed Bigfoot sightings this past summer. And he certainly wasn’t going to the police about it.
Nick considered Forrest a friend of sorts—or, somewhat of an outcast like himself. They had beers at the Donkey and swapped tall tales, but one thing Forrest never talked about was his life—and his younger sister’s life—before their grandfather rescued the siblings and brought them back to live with him. Forrest had his own reasons to believe what people thought were Bigfoot and his brethren were actuallyhumans,and up to no good. Nick’s relationship with his parents was nonexistent nowadays, but they’d at least done the basics and hadn’t made him live in the woods and scrounge for food to survive.
Humanity was the most frightening monster of all.
The night of Lizzy Harlow’s murder, Nick hadn’t seen—or heard—anything out of the ordinary or even ordinary. He hadn’t liked her, hadn’t even known her that well. He didn’t think many in town had. But she certainly didn’t deserve her fate, and Nick had this nagging feeling he’d let her down somehow. He should have been watching. He knew—because information was currency in a small town—that she hadn’t been killed at the bridge. Some murdering creepmurderedher and then brought her body to the marsh, where it had been discovered by Xavier Stone and Vincent Barone.
In Nick’s opinion, that could mean one of several things. One, the killerwantedthe body to be found and knew the footpath to the beach was popular—thus, they were local. Two, they’d thought the bridge was as good a place as any to dump her—could be local, could be from out of town. Although an out-of-towner was less likely to know about the footpath. And last, the killer didn’t know that the bridge and path were used regularly, even in the foulest weather, and had thought they stumbled upon a good place to hide the body—therefore, from out of town.
All Nick knew for certain was that he felt he’d failed Lizzy Harlow. He should’ve have witnessed something. A noise. A car. A suspicious person. And yet he hadn’t seen or heardanything. His cabin was only four hundred feet, give or take, from the bridge. But he’d managed to sleep that night. Had the murderer known Nick was there? Was it a challenge of some kind? Nick doubted it, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that it was on him to hunt down the fucker who’d decided acting like a god was his kind of fun.
In his mind, he separated the men-in-black SUV from Lizzy’s killer. He’d seen the SUV—although there could have been more than one driving around—before and after Lizzy. Either the occupants were stupid and trying to be seen, or they had nothing to hide and Nick was a paranoid freak. Therefore, they had nothing to do with Lizzy Harlow.
The SUV situation bothered Nick a lot, but he didn’t know what to do about it. If he reported it to the cops, they would laugh him out of the building. The Strip was a public roadway, and people could drive on it as often as they liked, day or night. And the only thing he could do for Lizzy Harlow now was to be vigilant.
“If no one else is going to pay attention,” he whispered into the shadows, “it’s going to have to be me.”
Next time the SUV came flying through town, he’d try to find out where they went.
He finally drifted off, Kitten still on his chest. Tomorrow, he’d make her sleep in the carrier.
As luck would have it, or something less like luck and a tad closer to malevolence, Nick saw the black SUV again the next day. He was on his way to Liam’s, needing time to calm down after the stupid run-in with Martin Purdy. He’d left a pissed-off Kitten safely contained in the bathroom.
The Penis Incident was brought on by his own actions, but Nick flat-out refused to explain to Purdy that his chainsaw art was so terrible it only looked phallic and wasn’t actually a representation of a penis. Penis carvings could be a big seller in the right market, after all.
After slamming the door in Purdy’s stupidly sexy face, he’d needed to get out of the cabin, off the property and away from the almost irresistible temptation to carve everything in sight into huge, unmistakable penises.
The storm Nick had seen lingering off the coast had finally rolled in. The wind and driving rain grew stronger and harder as he trudged along toward Liam’s. Nick’s gloveless hands were shoved into his coat pockets, and he hunched his shoulders, trying to make himself a smaller target for the sheeting rain. He’d just crossed The Strip when the fucking black SUV sped past, drenching him completely from head to toe.
“Motherfuckers,” Nick growled, spinning and glaring after the car. Now he was going to have to ask Liam if he could use his dryer as well as hang out on his couch. Nickhatedasking for favors, even from Liam. Asking Xavier for a ride to the veterinarian had been some kind of weird anomaly.
Squinting after it, he tried to catch the plate number, but they were already too far away for him to read it. Then brake lights flashed, and the SUV slowed and took a right turn into the neighborhood behind Pizza Mart. Cursing vehemently, Nick jogged after it, ignoring the twinge of pain in his thigh, and headed the opposite direction from Liam’s house—and the clothes dryer—hoping he’d see where the SUV was headed.
By the time he got to the corner, the car wasn’t in sight. Pausing and staring down the street, Nick decided to head that direction anyway. See if he could find out what was down there that creepy out-of-towners might be interested in.
Did he feel like some idiot Hardy Boys impersonator? Yes, he did.
Did he do it anyway? Yes, he did.
Cooper Springs was a long, narrow town, forced to be so by the immoveable ocean on the one side and the forest on the other. This meant Nick didn’t have many blocks to go before he came to the end of the road. There was no outlet, so the SUV must have turned again down one of the earlier blocks. It was nowhere in sight.
“Fucking damn.”
The only thing of interest on this street was the old Cooper Mansion, given to the city by Forrest’s grandparents in the 1980s. These days, the mansion sat empty as it waited for town leaders to come up with the funds to do something with it.
There was no sign of the SUV.
This four-block neighborhood was made up of mostly older homes. Some of them had been built at the same time as the mansion, while an unfortunate cluster had been built in the nineties and were ugly as sin. A crime that had never been punished. From the outside, most of the houses in the small neighborhood seemed to be in good shape, and none had a For Sale sign in front of them. A well-worn trail off the dead-end street looked like it probably led to the high school. When Nick had gone there, he’d used a similar path on a daily basis. It was faster to cut through the edge of the woods than go all the way around.
“Huh.” There was absolutely nothing suspicious that he could see.
Not wanting residents to reporthimto CSPD as a creeper, Nick turned around and headed back toward Liam’s. The rain continued to fall and by the time he arrived, there wasn’t a part of him that wasn’t cold and wet.
NICK
Fact: Diamonds come in almost every color, but red is the rarest. There are about 30 known red diamonds in the world.
