He laughed. “Did you say
“I’m not kidding, Tim.” He might be “Deputy” to everybody else, but he’d been “Tim” to eight-year-old Jack back when he’d gone out with Kate and so
he’d always be “Tim” in Jack’s mind.
“It’s true!” Weezy puffed as she pul ed up beside him. “I saw it too!”
Tim’s smile vanished as he stared at Jack. “This had better not be one of your practical jokes.”
Jack gave him a wounded look. “Who, me?”
He’d pul ed a couple of pranks on Tim and Kate when they were dating—innocent little tricks like resetting Tim’s watch and his car clock ahead so
they’d get home an hour early. Truth was, even though he’d liked Tim, he hadn’t wanted Kate dating anyone.
“Look at us.” Jack pointed to his face, then Weezy’s. “Do we look like we’re joking?”
People were discovering bodies al the time in the mystery-thril er-adventure stories Jack devoured. He’d always thought he’d be pretty cool if ever in
that situation.
Uh-uh.
He could stil feel the dry, rotted flesh against his fingers, see those empty eye sockets, the grinning teeth, the matted hair. Ugh. It made him queasy to
think about it. He tried to push it from his mind but it kept slithering back.
He wasn’t sure but he thought he might have screamed right along with Weezy. If so, he hoped she hadn’t heard him. That would be majorly
embarrassing.
Tim got on his radio. “This is A-seventeen requesting backup. I have a report of a corpse in the Pines near Johnson.”
A burst of static fol owed, choking a voice saying
Tim opened his door, unfolding a map as he stepped out. He spread it on the hood of his car.
“Where exactly did you find this body?”
Jack looked at the angled lines of the fire lanes and the winding old Piney roads and didn’t know where to begin. He’d been fol owing Weezy’s lead and
hadn’t been paying attention.
Weezy stepped forward and jabbed her finger onto the map. “Right about here.”
Tim looked at her. “That’s Zeb Foster’s land.”
Weezy went al wide-eyed and innocent. “Is it? Oh, my goodness. We had no idea. We were just fol owing this fire trail, then we took the right fork here,
and the left fork here …”
Jack spotted Eddie standing by the rear bumper, leaning on his bike and looking annoyed. Jack wheeled over to him.
“You guys weren’t kidding, were you,” he said. “Al the way home I half thought you were putting me on. Wouldn’t be the first time you sucked me in.”
“But we wouldn’t be putting on the sheriff’s department, right?”
He shook his head. “I guess not. So if it was real, why didn’t you let me see?”
“Nobody stopped you. You could’ve gone over.”
“Yeah, but I thought you were kidding and you’d laugh at me.”
“We’re a little old for ‘made-you-look’ stuff, don’t you think?”
Jack hadn’t pul ed anything on Eddie since this past winter when he’d pul ed the ancient trick of rubbing some black grease around the edges of the
eyepieces of a pair of old binoculars. After Eddie had taken a look, he’d wandered around his house for hours with two black eyes. Hadn’t a clue until
Weezy came home and cracked up at the sight of him.
Eddie pounded a fist on his handlebar. “Man, some people have al the luck.”
“Trust me, if you’d seen it, you’d be thinking ‘yuck’ instead of luck.”
Eddie’s eyes took on a faraway look. “Yeah, but a
Jack turned back to Tim and Weezy.
He heard her saying, “You fol ow those trails and look for a burned-out area on your right. That’l be the place.”
Tim was nodding. “Sounds easy enough. Anything else you can tel me?”
