Jack shook his head. “No, they won’t.”
“Yeah, Jack, they wil .”
He leaned inside the cruiser and plucked the keys from the ignition, then held them up and jangled them.
“Not without these, they won’t. Let’s rol .”
Weezy didn’t move, just stood there staring at him with her wide dark eyes.
“What?” he said.
“You’re scary, you know that? Real y scary.” She jerked her thumb toward the spong. “What kind of mind thinks up something like that?”
Jack had no idea where the idea had come from. Suddenly it had just popped into his head.
“Weez, sometimes I scare myself.”
The sound of the lawn mower awoke him.
Jack opened one eye and looked at his clock. The blurred numbers slowly came into focus … 9:02. He groaned and rol ed over.
That same clock had read 3:22 when he’d crawled back in the window last night. No, not last night—earlier this morning. And then he’d lain here, wide
awake, too wired for sleep, too worried there’d come a knock on the door and the trooper and the suit would be standing there with their bloody, bangedup ankles and elbows and messed-up clothes, looking to haul him away.
He didn’t know when he’d final y drifted off. He did know he needed more sleep, but that wasn’t going to happen with the lawn mower roaring back and
forth outside his window.
Official y it was his job to mow their lawn. Dad paid him to do it once a week, and usual y he did it on Wednesdays. But with everything going on, he’d
missed this week. He guessed Dad had decided to cut it. He did that every so often when he felt the need for a little exercise. But why today of al days?
Wait!
He bolted upright in bed. Had last night real y happened? Or had it al been a dream? Could have been. More like a nightmare. Sure was bizarre
enough.
He should have kept the cop’s car keys. Then he’d have proof. Instead he’d left them hanging from a branch over the fire trail. Or at least he thought he
had.
He looked out the window on a sunny summer morning with his father pushing the lawn mower around the backyard. So normal, so everyday. Like
something out of that old Monkees song “Pleasant Val ey Sunday.” And yet just a few hours ago, and just a couple of miles away in the Pine Barrens,
strange men had been digging up the earth in search of … what?
Or had they? He couldn’t be sure. How could something that had felt so real then seem so unreal now?
He noticed a smal , dark-brown lump on his left forearm. A closer look showed it had little legs.
A tick.
It hadn’t buried its head too deeply yet, so he flipped it on its back and pul ed it out. He studied it as it crawled across his palm. A simple brown wood
tick, not the tiny deer tick everybody was being warned about. Get bitten by one of those and you could catch some new infection cal ed Lyme disease,
whatever that was. What’d it do? Turn you green?
Watching the tick he realized that here was proof of sorts that he’d been in the Barrens last night—the place was lousy with ticks. But he could just as
easily have picked it up during the day.
He took it between his thumb and forefinger, ready to crush it.
“You have attacked me,” he intoned, holding it up at eye level. “You have bitten me. For that you must die.”
And then he realized it hadn’t hurt him—hadn’t even had a chance to suck his blood. Just a tick being a tick.
He stepped to the window, opened the screen, and flicked it out onto the lawn. Then he checked the rest of himself for more but couldn’t find any.
Since he didn’t see any more sleep in his immediate future, he decided to get dressed. He’d just put on his jeans when his mother knocked on his door
and stuck her head in. She looked concerned.
