Tattooed Read Online Free PDF Page A

behind it. The bunkers had been built eighty years ago as the outer battery to defend Halifax Harbour. The lower bunker perched on a slope, its flat, sharp roof appearing crooked against the sky. Tall shrubs and a handful of stunted evergreens grew around the squat concrete boxes. Rather than softening the forbidding exterior of the wartime posts, the tangled thicket of shrubs and the dense branches of the evergreens served to emphasize their brutal purpose.
Even in the May sunshine, they were creepy. She veered around them, and headed downhill to the peat bogs. They gleamed in the sun, the area a large, open marsh with a pleasant piney scent. It hadn’t taken much time to find the samples for her biology lab.
Until now.
Last lab of the school year, last lab of high school, Rebecca . That knowledge lent extra urgency to her scrabbling. She wrapped her fingers around the rock anchoring what she now viewed as “her” plant. She yanked the rock-and-plant specimen from under the hummock, falling back on her heels. She staggered to her feet, the prize clutched in her hand.
Her butt was soaked from her efforts. Figures.
She unraveled the roots clinging to the rock.
Her fingers froze.
Beneath the plant debris and muck, the rock appeared calcified. And smooth.
God. It felt suspiciously like a bone.
It’s not a bone, Rebecca.
It was a bone. Her heart pounding, Rebecca tore away the roots of the plant.
The smooth curve and calcified exterior were obvious now.
It’s just an animal’s bone. Probably a deer.
She peered at the hummock, searching for the hole she had tunneled through the underside.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She couldn’t move.
Couldn’t blink.
Couldn’t scream.
All she could do was stare at the two bulging colorless eyes that pinned her in their malevolent gaze. Then she saw the hooked nose, the gaping smile, the hair floating from the head. Everything tinted the same brownish color.
Horror in sepia wash.
Her brain, at first, couldn’t process what she saw. Finally, her lungs forced her breath out in a gasp. And her brain interpreted the image.
The bulging eyes belonged to a mask. A rubber Halloween mask that someone had thrown into the bog. Her insides liquefied with a warm rush of relief. Then she remembered the cold, smooth length of bone in her palm.
It hadn’t been just a mask she had dislodged. The mask had been on a dead body.
She was holding proof of it.
A scream built in her throat.
The dead body was under the hummock. Under her .
Oh, dear Lord. She was holding a dead body!
She threw the bone into the water so forcefully that water splashed onto her torso, her face. And into her mouth. An earthy, decayed taste swelled the taste buds on her tongue. Bog water.
The water had a putrefied body in it.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. With the hand that was filthy with muck.
Muck that contained a dead body.
Her stomach heaved. Vomit flecked her rain boots.
She began to scream.

4
     
T he random movements of people on the sidewalk set McNally’s teeth on edge. The rows and rows of bread in the grocery store…nine grain, whole grain, vitality, soy, cracked wheat, organic this, vegan that. Everything was so…complicated.
And the girls and women… Everywhere.
His first few days on the outside had been a blur. Rick Lovett, who once had hung on his every word, was as of today his new boss. His old friend had greeted him with a warning: “Stay away from me. No drugs. No police.” Lovett had unlocked the now-vacant superintendent’s apartment in one of his lower-rent apartment buildings in the North end. “You are on call 24/7. You have weekends off. Rent is included. Don’t scare the tenants.” He had tossed the keys to McNally, doubt in his eyes, regret already twisting his lips. “And wear a baseball cap on your head until your hair grows in. You look like you belong to a gang with that tatt.”
A flush prickled McNally’s neck, but he slipped the keys in his pocket. He walked