Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book (4 page)

“Well, ladies,” he
said, wedging himself into a place at the bar with Morgan and me on one side,
and Tuck
Schroep
, my second-grade teacher’s husband,
on the other. “What’ll it be?”

I was already barely
able to keep my balance, but I let him order me a shot of whiskey.

It was while I was
doing the shot that I saw Shawn at the back of the bar. He was nodding
drunkenly at one of his friends from the mill.

For a moment I worried
he’d see me shoulder-to-shoulder with this extremely attractive stranger—the
only guy in the bar in skinny jeans—and get upset.

But in exactly the
next moment, I 
hoped
 he’d
see me. I thought again about his complete inability to help Ian with the body
in the locker room, and the way he’d laughed at me with Jason. Fuck him.

“Nate!” I yelled at
the bartender, pounding my hand and drawing as much attention to myself as
possible. “Three more Maker’s!”

I had no idea if this
worked because I lost sight of Shawn when a surge of about a dozen people
spilled in from the cancelled concert. I’m sure the bar was well past its legal
capacity. I could hardly breathe.

By the time our next
round arrived, Tuck
Schroep
was talking at Bryce and
Morgan from beneath his hairy white mustache.

“…
clean
off!” he was saying, making a chopping motion with his hand. “That’s right. I’m
telling you.
Somebody’d
cut his thingy clean off!”

He was talking about
the body.

I knew the news of a
mutilated corpse in the girls’ locker room was going to spread like prairie
fire, but not
this
fast. Mrs. Whipple
must have told anyone within earshot after the football game.

And now everyone was
on edge. All of a sudden, I could tell. The people in the bar weren’t just
drinking because it was fair time—they were nervous, afraid. Things like
this didn’t happen in Muldoon. I’d never even seen Tuck
Schroep
drunk before, not ever, come to think of it.

“What’s he talking
about?” Bryce laughed. He couldn’t seem to figure out if Tuck was crazy or not.

“I don’t know,” I
lied. I was desperate to come up with a way to change the subject. Before I
could think of how, though, Tuck broke in again.

“Fella was trying to
rape one of the girls, I guess!” he declared. “One of the cheerleaders. I don’t
know which one of them cut it off, but one of ‘
em
did. Good for them, I say.”

I felt a hand on my
shoulder. At first I thought it was someone trying to pay Nate, but
whoever
it was kept his hand there and pulled a little,
gently turning me around.

It was Ian.

“How’re you holding
up?”

I practically knocked
Morgan over hugging him. “You’re already here! I didn’t think I’d see you.”

He looked at me a
little warily. He’d changed clothes and was wearing a black hoodie with “ARMY”
written across the chest. He glanced at Bryce, then back at me.

“How’re you holding
up?” he asked again.

“Fine!” I yelled over
the bar’s noise. “Fine!
Totally fine.
Drunk off my
ass, but fine!”

Bryce Tripp spied Ian
out of the corner of his eye, turned, and held out his hand. “Hey, I’m Bryce,”
he said, charmingly.

Ian shook his hand. He
was polite, but wary. “Ian.”

I was pretty drunk at
that point, but I could see right away that Ian was the only person in the bar
who recognized Bryce Tripp from the posters.

“Buy you a shot?”
Bryce asked him.

“Nate!” Morgan yelled to
the bartender before Ian could respond. “Four more!”

Ian grinned at me for
the first time since he’d said hello.

“I did say I might
have one drink.”

Bryce raised his shot
glass. “Well, then, to—where’d you say we are? Muldoon! Prettiest little
place I’ve ever avoided getting my ass kicked. So far.”

Morgan laughed, we all
clinked Bryce’s glass with ours, and I drank down yet
another
whiskey—
who
knows how many I’d
had by that point?

And that’s when my memory
of everything starts to get hazy.

I remember Morgan
talking to Ian about bear hunting with her dad, and Ian nodding and listening
to her drunken blather because he was too nice to tell her to shut the fuck up.
I remember grabbing Bryce Tripp’s arm and peeling him away from Tuck
Schroep
—something I never would have done if I hadn’t
been so totally wasted—and staggering with him in tow onto the insanely
crowded dance floor. I think I remember seeing Shawn watch us dancing, but I couldn’t
say for certain.

Next, I just barely remember
asking Bryce if he smokes, and then buying cigarettes from the vending machine.
I think I remember having one more shot at the bar—and I’m pretty sure Morgan
actually talked Ian into having one with us, too—before going outside.
There was another moment outside—this one very hazy—when Bryce
bummed someone’s last match, and he laughed when I told him he’d have to “
monkeyfuck
" me, which meant lighting my cigarette from
his. But I can barely remember this at all, and I can’t really say if it was
before or after that second round of shots with Morgan and Ian.

And that was it,
really.

The rest was totally
gone. Anything else that happened that night is completely blacked out from my
memory.

The next thing I
remember was waking up alone in the Starlight Motel, without a phone or a car,
and, now, with night coming on.

* * *

I had
no choice but to walk the
half mile
from the motel to
the fairgrounds where I hoped my car would still be parked.

All the way there, I
still felt surprisingly great.

I kept expecting a
massive hangover to hit me, but it never came. I didn’t even have to pee, and I
wasn’t really thirsty at all. I don’t think I’d ever felt more rejuvenated in
my life.

It was only when I
reached the highway that I realized something was wrong.

It was the Saturday
evening of the Muldoon fair weekend, but there wasn’t a single car on the road.

Traffic should have
been
bumper to bumper
and even worse than last night.
At any other time of year, an empty highway would have been perfectly normal, but
not tonight.

I walked faster. My feet
crunching through the gravel at the road’s shoulder was the only sound I could
hear. It occurred to me, hurrying along while the sun sank into the mountains
way off in the west, that I hadn’t seen a single person since I’d woken up. Not
one.

The lights at the
rodeo arena were on. And most of the street lights, too.

But as I approached
the fairgrounds, I saw that all of the carnival rides were totally dark. The
Ferris wheel’s motionless silhouette rose up over the feedlot’s corrugated tin
roof. There was no blaring carnival music, no roar of
souped
-up
engines at the Saturday-night destruction derby, and no cheers from the
grandstands.

I hopped the fence
into the parking lot.

There were only a few
cars left. I was so relieved when I spotted my little gray sedan parked all
alone in the dimming evening light, I practically ran to it.

I’d lost my set of
keys along with my phone, but thank God Shawn always insisted I keep a spare
hidden under the battery. I popped the hood and found the extra key right where
I expected.

But the car door
wasn’t locked. That was odd, because if there was ever a time I’d be sure to
lock my car door, it was during the fair, especially since I’d parked in such a
public spot.

I wanted to get out of
there as soon as I could and go home—or maybe to my parents’ or to Ian
and Danielle’s—and figure out what the fuck was going on.

I tried not to think
about the unlocked door for now and jammed the key into the ignition. Just as I
put the car in drive, I noticed something on the passenger seat.

It was a man’s
sweatshirt. I kept my foot on the brake and held up the fabric.

It was Ian’s black army
hoodie. The one I’d seen him wearing at the bar.

So Ian had been in my
car last night.

I tried again to think
as hard as I could about what happened after we were all at the bar, but it was
no use. I had no memory whatsoever of anything after that.

In the dimming light,
I almost didn’t even see that there was something
else
on the seat. But when I moved the hoodie aside, there it was.

A gun.
Ian’s gun.
I recognized it right away.

Ian wasn’t one of
those guys who packed heat everywhere he went, but he must have been carrying
it last night in the bar. He must have had a reason.

But why would he have
left his gun in my car? With the door unlocked?

It didn’t make sense.

Something was wrong.
Something was
really
wrong. I had to
get to Ian right away. I had to talk to him and find out what the hell was
going on.

I hit the gas and
drove my little car as fast as I could toward the fairground’s nearest exit.

The exit was in the
back, near the stockyard. On the way there I saw that everything at the
carnival was totally shut down. All the food stalls were closed, and as far as
I could tell, even the animals had been taken out of their pens. My headlights
flooded the road and all of the motionless rides, but I didn’t see a single
soul.

When I reached the
gate, I found it was blocked.

A pair of wooden
police barriers spanned the entire road. What the fuck was going on?

Someone knocked hard
on my window. I almost screamed.

“Ma’am?” It was a male
voice, but it was too dark now to see who it was.
Another
couple of pounding knocks.
“Can’t leave here, ma’am.”

It was a cop. He was
knocking on my window with his flashlight. I don’t know if I was more relieved
that it was a cop and not someone trying to kill me, or that it was simply another
human being, the first I’d seen that day.

I rolled down the
window.

My eyes adjusted to
the glare of the flashlight, and I could see that the cop was Jason. Fucking
great.

“I’m not authorized to
let you through here, ma’am.”

“
Ma’am
?
Who’s
 
ma’am
? What the fuck, Jason?”

“Ashley. Whatever. You
can’t pass through here.” He was obviously still hungover, but this wasn’t
stopping him from acting like an asshole cop now that he was on duty. “Vehicles
can’t come or go until the search is over. Why are you even here? Why aren’t you
at home?”

“I’m trying to 
go
 home,” I said. “Just let me
out.”

“Can’t. Can’t let
anyone in or out. We still haven’t caught those guys yet.”

“What guys?”

“Are you kidding me?”
Jason leaned casually against my car and folded his arms. This enraged me even
further. “The guys who attacked that girl. Where have you been?”

Immediately my
thoughts leapt to Haley. “What girl?”

“I don’t know.” Jason
shrugged. “Some girl. Some kid. It was two guys who did it. We’re still looking
for them. We’re combing the fairgrounds. It’ll take some time. The whole place
is locked down—here and the high school both. How do you not know about
all this? Everyone was supposed to be out by two-thirty last night. They were
announcing it for hours over the PA.” Now he grinned that stupid smug grin of
his. “Where were 
you
?” He
laughed. “You were fucking hammered last night! Having a little too much fun?” He
gave a few rabbit-like thrusts of his pelvis.

I was too worried
about Haley to care.

“Who was the girl,
Jason? Just tell me who the girl was.”

“I told you I don’t
know, Ashley. Maybe if you weren’t so shitfaced drunk last night you could have
found out for yourself.”

In the briefest of
moments I thought about the gun under Ian’s hoodie. But I wasn’t stupid.

I had to focus on
getting home as soon as possible,
then
calling
Danielle on the landline. All I cared about right now was making sure that
Haley was okay. I tried to remind myself that there were probably hundreds of
little girls at the fair last night. But if something had happened to Haley
after she’d begged me to take her to the carnival, and I wasn’t there… I’d never
forgive myself.

I had to stay calm. I
had to.

“Look,” I said to
Jason, trying to control my voice. “You know me. I’m obviously not a suspect.
All you have to do is move that roadblock and let me through.”

Jason didn’t stop
leaning against my car.

Instead, he grinned.
Again.

“What’s the rush?” he
said. “I mean
,
I can’t let you out. I already told you
that. And, hell, I sure could use some company.” Now he leaned in closer and
lowered his voice. “Here I am, stuck out here all alone on a chilly evening.
What’s the hurry?” He winked. “It’d be just like old times.”

“Let me the fuck out.”
It was everything I could do not to scream. “Right now, Jason. Let me the fuck
out. There’s no way this is even legal. Let me the fuck out right now.”

Jason put his head
through the open window and brought it close to mine. He sniffed.

“
You
been
drinking? Ashley? Are you still drunk, maybe?” He put his finger
under my chin and turned my face around toward his. He sniffed again. “I wonder
if maybe you’re getting just a little belligerent. I wouldn’t want to have to
detain you. But if I have to, I have to. For your own good.”

I couldn’t even think.
I had never been so enraged in my life. I just acted without planning and suddenly
found that I’d slammed my foot into the gas pedal.