Charnel House Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’d be able to stop.
    Garraty straightened up and dug in his pocket for his phone. If he ditched the rest of the beer up in the woods—someplace he could find again tomorrow, because dead kid or no dead kid that was money he could ill afford to throw away—and did a few calisthenics or ran in place to clear his head, he might get out of this. There was a pack of Certs or TicTacs or some such thing somewhere in the car, he’d bet his life on it. Tina loved that breath shit almost as much as she loved the twins (and probably more than she loved him, at least now, he thought) and left half-consumed packages in a trail behind her the way a bunny will leave piles of little black pellets. It would take the cops and paramedics a good twenty minutes to get up here. Plenty of time for him to get his shit together.
    He could handle this.

4
    The phone’s screen came to life when Garraty pressed the button on the side to wake it up, and he swiped his finger across to unlock it. In the notification bar he saw Searching for service in small black letters.
    “Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked the night, or God, or maybe even the dead kid. He didn’t know or care. None of them were going to answer.
    Fucking Walmart phones. That’s what he got for carrying the cheapest service there was. No wonder it only cost him a few bucks a month. How could the damn thing not find a tower up here over the town? There had to be at least three or four within sight of this spot on a clear day. He hit the phone button on the screen and brought up the dial pad, dialed 9-1-1, and pressed send anyway. It couldn’t hurt to try. The phone was silent for a couple of seconds, then beeped reproachfully at him as if offended he didn’t believe it when it said there was no service. He almost hurled the thing into the void over the town out of spite.
    There was nothing else to do. He was going to have to leave the kid here and go for help. This just kept getting better and better. Couldn’t he even catch one little fucking break? The cops were going to smell the booze on his breath even if he did find some of Tina’s forgotten mints and that would be all she wrote, because God or karma or the universe hated him and wanted to crush him. That was the only rational explanation. Lock me up and throw away the key, ossifer, because I’m one drunk son of a bitch, he could say when he burst into the police station. And that’s exactly what they’d do. He’d be frog-marched down the courthouse steps in front of reporters from as far away as Montgomery during the trial, and afterward his picture would end up on the front page of every newspaper in the state with the words CHILD KILLER under it in letters two inches tall. All because this little fucker couldn’t be bothered to look both ways before bolting into the road.
    Calm down. You’ll be fucked for sure if you don’t keep your shit together.
    Once again he considered running. The shit on TV was probably exaggerated, right? Hell, the real life CSI folks couldn’t even figure out if that Anthony woman in Orlando killed her little girl or not and that was just a couple of years ago. He could just go , simply get in his car and motorvate right on home cool as a cat. As far as anyone knew right now, the boy was still alive and Joe Garraty had gone straight to his trailer with his beer from the Piggly Wiggly.
    But what if someone spotted the boy before he got far enough away? Hell, someone could be coming right now. Garraty clicked off the Maglite, suddenly certain he would see twin spears of light piercing the gloom just over the hill, but the darkness was complete. The only sounds were the dripping trees and the occasional whirring chirp of a lone cricket. Maybe he could move the kid off the side of the road, just drag him a little ways back into the trees so he wasn’t so visible, so obvious , and—
    The house .
    Of course.
    No one ever went up there anymore. Hell, almost no one had gone up there