Flypaper Cast: Dark Psychological Thriller - Book 3 Read online

  Corpse screamed. “Nick!”

  Every part of him wanted to run, but as he leaned on a single crutch, the cast on his leg transformed into an anchor. He thrust the crutch forward and pulled himself to the door. “Corpse!” He put more weight on the cast than he should have. It killed him. Nerves he had forgotten about pounded in unison with the muscle deep in his chest.

  Every step was a mile. He’d never realized how many steps it was from the kitchen to the balcony before, even in the past few weeks. There were a lot.

  “Nick, help.” Corpse called from outside.

  He couldn’t move fast enough. Damn cast. Damn leg. “I’m coming, kid.”

  The cold air embraced him as he approached the door. The entire balcony had collapsed, creating a wooden slide of cracked and broken planks and beams. At the top, Corpse clutched at a piece of wood still propped against the foundation of the house. And no wonder. The fall alone probably wouldn’t kill her, but the plethora of splintered and split timber would do serious damage.

  Corpse looked up at him with an expression he’d never seen her wear before. Fear. “Help. Do something. This really hurts.”

  Nick dropped to his knees. The crutch clattered to the hardwood floor next to him. He shuffled back and lay on his stomach. “I’ve got you.” He reached down and wrapped his hands around her arms.

  “Don’t hurt yourself, jackass.” She joked to cover how afraid she was, but the tremble below her words gave the game away.

  “I’ve got you. Can you use your feet? Push yourself up.” He assessed the situation. He had no leverage. He couldn’t do much to help pull her up. All he could do was give her something to hang onto that wasn’t shattered wood.

  Corpse adjusted her grip, leaving blood on his scarred left arm.

  “Shit, you’re bleeding.” He looked her over. “You hurt?”

  “Just my hand, I’m okay.” Her feet kicked against the wood beneath her, desperate for solid footing. She found none. The wood shifted and fell away from the house instead. “Fuck. Fuck.”

  “You’re okay.” He wasn’t sure that was accurate. The girl threatened to pull his arms from their sockets. He strained for breath. “Should probably pull yourself up though. Hurry.”

  “I can’t.” She looked down. “Fuck me, I’m going to fall.”

  Nick lowered his head. “Just climb up me. Grab my shoulders.”

  “Dammit Nick, I mean I physically can’t; my ass is too fat for this shit.” She again looked down at the pile of rubble beneath her. “I have to let go.”

  He bared his teeth. “Don’t you let go dammit. Hold on.” He glanced back at his broken leg. This would hurt badly.

  “What are you doing? Don’t hurt yourself.” The fear on Corpse’s face was swallowed by anger. Good. Anger was the soil in which strength blossomed.

  Nick used his good leg as leverage the best he could, pulling himself up off his stomach and away from the door. Despite his best efforts, a lot of weight ended up on his bad leg. He tried to contain the agony that racked him, but it must have broadcast across his face.

  “You dick, I told you not to hurt yourself.” She let go of one of his arms and slapped a hand onto the living room floor.

  “You’re not the boss of me,” he said through gritted teeth. “Come on, pull.”

  Corpse clawed at the floor and dug her fingers into Nick’s shoulder as together they heaved her up and over the edge of the door. With both of her arms on the floor, she managed to pull herself the rest of the way up.

  The two crumpled to the floor and lay on their backs, exhausted and out of breath.

  Nick coughed and sucked air into his lungs. “You okay?”

  “Little scratched up. Dropped my freakin’ cigarette. Okay though.” She patted him with a lazy hand. “How’s your leg?”

  “Hurts. I think I have some drugs left though. Be okay.” He swung an arm in the air at nothing in particular. “Shoddy craftsmanship.”

  Corpse sat up and poked her head out the open door. “You think that’s what that was?”

  Nick grimaced as he sat up. “Hell no. Someone wanted to scare and-or wound me.”

  She let out a little laugh. “Did it work?”

  He looked at her. “Shit yes. I’m just glad you’re okay.”

  The two leaned into each other and hugged with the last ounce of strength they had left.

  Nick patted her on the back. “Okay, this is weird, right?”

  “Absolutely, it is.” She let go of him and stood up. “Let’s not do that again.”

  “Agreed.” He pulled his crutch across the floor and reached for her hand. “Little help?”

  Corpse pulled him to his feet. “Townies, or the Flystrike idiots?”

  Nick groaned and hopped over to the couch on his good leg. He wouldn’t be standing around just yet. “Don’t know, don’t care. Calling Reed either way. Where are you going?”

  Corpse had moved into her room. “Preparing.”

  “Right.” Nick giggled to himself, mostly out of relief. “Hide your weed.”

  “Not that.” Corpse walked back into the living room, a fresh cigarette and lighter in her hands. She stuck out her lips and slurred her words into a spot-on Stallone impersonation. “War.” She put the cigarette in her mouth and lit up. “We’re going to war.”

  Chapter 7

  A light snow fell, the first in several days. If the weather forecast were believed, it would be far from the last. Three of Forest Down’s finest wandered around Nick’s property in search of anything that could be construed as a clue. Their search had been fruitless thus far. The only thing out of the ordinary was a set of footprints tracking to and from his backyard from the main road.

  “So the new gate is worthless, I guess.” Nick rubbed warmth into his arms as he leaned on his crutches. It was colder than a coal miner’s ass out, even without his cast-bound foot buried in a foot of snow. “Do I need a special permit for a moat?”

  “I don’t know about the moat, but you’d definitely need one for the alligators you’d want to put in it.” Reed looked back at him from where she bent over the remains of his patio. Nick gave her a courtesy laugh. It was far too chilly out for genuine amusement. To say nothing of the fact that they stood over the remains of what may have been his favorite spot on the planet. The Sheriff went back to her examination of the rubble. “You don’t have to stand out here in the freezing cold, you know.”

  Nick controlled the chattering of his teeth long enough to spit out a few coherent words. “You have to, so why not? Besides, I wanted to see what was left of my poor balcony myself. Dammit to hell, I loved that thing.”

  “We can rebuild it,” Corpse called out from the balcony door above them. “We have the technology. Better. Stronger. Faster.”

  Reed looked up and lowered her sunglasses. “Why is she wearing an army helmet?”

  “I think she thinks we’re at war.” Nick nodded at one of the beams that once held his balcony aloft. “You see that?”

  Reed ran her hand across a smooth edge of cut wood. “Sure did. It looks like someone cut through it.” She pointed across the pile of splintered wood. “That one over there too. I’d guess they sawed them through and intentionally left them in place. When the girl walked out onto the balcony, it unsettled the cut beams enough to bring it all down. Miracle she wasn’t killed.”

  “Take more than that to kill me.” Corpse took a drag from a cigarette. “Bitches need some silver bullets.”

  Reed stood up and called to Corpse. “You find anything on Myiasis, Qualsnarg?”

  Corpse exhaled a trail of hot breath and smoke. “Negative. All’s quiet on the Western front.”

  The sharp sounds of a branch breaking and slamming into several more branches on its way to the ground echoed across the land. Nick breathed warm air into his hands and looked for the source of the noise. “Geez, does that sound make me nervous.”

  It was a side effect of these sudden freezes. The moisture from the previous
month’s near-constant rain froze hard and fast. Tree branches that couldn’t support the added weight of a sheet of ice snapped like overcooked breadsticks and plummeted to the earth. They had a tendency to severely damage anything in their path; Structures, vehicles… power lines.

  Reed moved toward the side of the house. “You had a thing a couple of years ago as I recall? Downed power line?”

  Nick followed as best he could on his craptastic leg. “Yeah, frigging branch took out a power line a bit up the road. Three days before they got around to fixing it. After the first day, I had no phone or laptop. Thought I’d lose my damn mind.”

  “I remember that.” She climbed the hill along the side of his house. “The whole county was in more or less the same boat. My entire job for a week was supervising the restoration of power lines and clearing dead branches from roadways. Oh, the glamorous life of a small-town Sheriff. Speaking of which, I’ll be honest, we don’t have much to go on here. The footprints aren’t very helpful. They do tell us there were probably two suspects, and they hopped the fence on this side of your property. Other than that… hard to tell what they were wearing, but from the size I’d guess males, maybe in some kind of boots or heavy shoes.”

  The cold air stung Nick’s lungs as he huffed his way up the hill toward his front yard. “So in other words, it could be almost anyone within a fifty mile radius.”

  Reed turned slightly and pointed a finger. “Assuming they’re even local. Let’s not jump to conclusions. Just because the kid didn’t find anything, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t one of your superfans.”

  “Reed, come on.” Nick stopped at the top of the incline and leaned on his crutches to catch his breath. “Yesterday someone in town turned my car into a Street Fighter bonus level.”

  She stopped to wait on him. “I don’t understand that reference.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Nick started moving again. “The kid’s got me playing a lot of video games these days. I’m just saying it’s a big coincidence.”

  “Okay, one… that was more than likely a local, I’ll grant you, but we don’t know for certain.” The pair reached Nick’s driveway. Between Nick’s car, Corpse’s car and the two squad cars, it looked like Nick hosted a bizarre house party. “Two, even if we did know for certain, that doesn’t mean a local vandalized your house. Has anything at all been going on with the site lately?”

  Nick stopped walking again. He lowered his voice. “Yeah, there was a… an altercation, I guess you’d call it. You know what a podcast is?”

  “Sure.” Reed pulled out her pad and pen and started jotting. “Radio on the internet.”

  “More or less, yeah. A couple of people run a podcast… it caters to the Myiasis crowd and the kind of fringe internet weirdos you’d expect to be spending all their time on the site. A while back they talked to a woman who thought she saw my face in her cat’s litterbox. You get the idea.”

  Reed nodded, but wrinkled her nose as if feline urine was a breath away. “Sure.”

  Nick took a breath and moved for his front door. Physically wiped out or not, he wanted some warm air. “The other day they got my Mom on the phone.”

  Reed followed him. “And I’m guessing she didn’t see the harm in talking to the nice people from the internet.”

  Nick kicked the snow off his shoe and wiped it on his doormat. “Of course not. What does she know, right? She’s spent the better part of the last two decades locked away. I don’t think she knows what Twitter is. But she told them everything. The Munchausen’s, my childhood… super personal stuff I’ve never talked about with anyone.”

  Reed kicked the powder off her own boots. “Yikes.”

  Nick awkwardly opened the door. Reed reached out to help him, but he waved her off. “My reaction was a little more R-rated, but sure. So I called these guys up because, you know, I wanted to know how they got her number. If that info’s out there where anyone with internet access can find, I’d like to see if I can do something about it, for both our sakes.”

  The warm air inside the house wrapped itself around them like a heated blanket. “Did you find out?”

  Nick leaned against the wall of his foyer, glad to take some of the pressure off of his leg. The strain he’d put on it while pulling Corpse to safety clung to it like moss made of barbed wire. “No. They were total dicks about it. Claimed some ‘protecting their sources’ bullshit, like they’re effin’ Woodward and Bernstein.”

  Reed stood next to him and scribbled at her pad. “Well, that’s annoying.”

  Nick looked up the hallway for any sign of his exuberant houseguest. He whispered, “You don’t know the half of it. My ‘niece’ got into a screaming match with one of them and there were some vague threats of retaliation. Anyway, the point of all of this is that the balcony could be associated. But with what happened in town the other day, who knows?”

  Reed’s pen danced atop her pad. “They have a lot of listeners, these podcasters?”

  Nick’s voice returned to a conversational volume. ”They say they do. I never listen to the thing. Corpse—sorry, Qualsnarg—monitors it for me.”

  “Do not be blowing my secret identity, bro.” Corpse walked up to Reed and Nick, arms folded, fingers strumming against her sleeves.

  Reed studied the dark green helmet on the girl’s head. “Who you going to war with, Qualsnarg?”

  Corpse’s face soured. “You tell us, Sheriff Brobo.”

  Reed and Corpse stared each other down. There was an elephant in the room. Nick couldn’t see it, but like the invisible specters in a haunted house flick, it was nothing but trouble and he wanted it gone.

  Nick tilted his head in the direction of the living room. “Qualsnarg, could you go check on Myiasis one more time before the Sheriff leaves?”

  She spread her arms, about as aware of social niceties and cues as Nick was himself. “I literally just checked it.”

  He made a face he prayed was an overt enough plea for a moment alone with the Sheriff. “Please?”

  “Fine.” The webmaster stomped away.

  Nick sighed. “Can I ask you for personal advice?”

  Reed glanced down the hallway Corpse had stormed down. “Yeah, sleep with one eye open.”

  Nick shook his head. “No. Believe me, she’s on my side.” He lowered his voice again. “I sort of tore my mom a new one over this thing.”

  “Really?” Reed said. If she’d been chewing gum, it would have been sarcasm flavored. “It’s so unlike you to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation.”

  In terms of sarcasm, Nick gave as good as he got. “Hardy har. Seriously though. You know Mom’s history. Her whole thing was based on soaking up as much attention as possible. Does this sound a little too close to that to you? Or you think I was overreacting?”

  Reed closed her pad. “I’ll be honest, Dawkins, I don’t have a lot of experience with mental illness. Before you came to town, the most up and personal I ever got to the criminally insane was a brother with kleptomania. Now I know what mucophilia is.”

  Nick gagged. “I told you I never wanted to speak of that one again.”

  “Sorry.” Reed lowered her sunglasses. “The point is, I can’t tell you if your mom was falling into old habits or just doing the kind of oversharing every mother does. My mother told my prom date that I was taking extra time to get ready because I was on my ‘mensies’.”

  Nick lifted his eyebrows. “Okay, now I feel bad for even bringing this up.”

  Reed opened the front door. “I’m just saying, if that’s the worst she’s done since she’s come back into your life, you’re probably doing alright. Who knows? Maybe she’s really on the straight and narrow now.”

  He felt a twinge of guilt. The thorn in his paw. “Maybe. That’s fair.”

  She stepped out onto Nick’s porch. “I’ll be on my way now, Dawkins. The boys will follow. If you and your uh… ‘niece’… come across anything unusual at all…” She looked at him and jerked her head in Corpse’
s direction. “…Anything more unusual than your usual, I mean... give me a holler.”

  “Sure thing Sheriff. Thanks for coming out.” He waved, closed the door, and began the long trek to the living room.

  Corpse sat on the couch in front of her laptop.

  Nick shook the melting snow off his head. “Corpse, what the hell, it’d be nice if you got along with her since she’s usually the thin blue line between me and the throngs of disturbed people who line up at my door.”

  Corpse clicked at her laptop’s touchpad. “What am I, chopped liver? Besides, I don’t trust her and you shouldn’t, either.”

  Nick sat down next to Corpse. His leg thanked him in six different languages. “Don’t trust her? She’s been the only person on my side the past three years.”

  Corpse shot him a look that made his balls cling to each other in terror.

  Nick raised his hands. “In Forest Down, I mean. You know I couldn’t function without you, especially this last year. Especially the last few weeks. I just don’t understand the hostility. Is this a jealousy thing?”

  She slapped him on the back of the head. “Wake up. You need to look at the big picture. The Flystrike idiots got your mom’s number from somewhere. How many people would even have access to that?”

  Nick rubbed his head. “I don’t know, I thought maybe it was in some obscure registry. And if it’s not, maybe they have someone, you know, like you. An ‘anti-Corpse,’ if you will. By the way, don’t hit me again, a least not without taking your ring off. That shit smarts.”

  “Sorry, but look, here’s the sitch. You’re probably right. They probably have an anti-Corpse. That’s very cool, by the way, I like what you did there.”

  Nick basked in self-satisfaction. “Thank you.”

  “It could be how they found your mom, but it may not be. Myiasis may have sleepers in Forest Down.” Corpse typed at her computer. “In fact, I’d count on it. Maggots undoubtedly cut down your balcony.”

  He tried to keep up as various windows opened on Corpse’s screen. “What makes you so sure?”

  Corpse expanded a window containing a series of Myiasis threads. “There was a little chatter on the site this morning. Not much, but enough. Something happened last night. I don’t know what, most of it’s been deleted. But there have been a couple of off-hand references to something called ‘Op Flystrike’.”