“It’s me,” Gordon said. “We need to talk.”
“Gord?”
“Yeah.” Gordon spoke in as low a tone as possible. “I’m sorry for waking you up. Your folks didn’t hear, did they?”
“Fuck no, they’re on the other end of the house. What’s up?”
“We might have trouble,” Gordon began. “It’s about Count.” Gordon told an abbreviated version of what happened that evening, leaving out any notion that he’d gone to Count for help in the first place, as well as leaving out the part where he’d showed the zombies to him. He might have been dumb enough to get mixed up with Steve, Dave, and Scott, but he wasn’t dumb enough to admit that he was planning on ending everything.
“So you were driving around with Count Gaines because the little shit tried to blackmail you?” Steve asked.
“Yeah,” Gordon said, repeating the story to Steve again. “Like I said, he called me earlier in the day. Said if I didn’t go to the police and confess I robbed that grave that he would furnish them with proof. He said he’d snuck over to my place and planted evidence, but wouldn’t tell me where. He said he wanted to make a deal with me. For us to leave him alone, so I told him I’d talk to him.”
“That little fucker.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. That’s when we got picked up by the cops for violating curfew.”
“Violating curfew? There’s a curfew?”
“Yeah. If you’re under eighteen you’re not supposed to be out after eleven P.M., or some shit.”
“You aren’t? When’d that law go into effect?”
“I don’t know,” Gordon said, changing the subject quickly. “The point is, we lucked out. Count Gaines got taken to Brendan Hall and — “
“Brendan Hall? Oh man, is he in deep shit!”
“Yeah. I don’t know what for, but maybe they got a hard-on to really bust him now.”
Steve laughed. “That’s great! Bet he’s finally going to take the fall for all that shit we blamed him for!”
“Maybe,” Gordon said. “But it’s not gonna be so great if Tim and his parents fight the allegations, get a lawyer and raise a big enough stink that the cops are forced to do a thorough investigation. They might not only come poking around my place, but Scott’s. What do you think they’re gonna find there?”
“That’s not gonna happen,” Steve said adamantly. He sounded more awake now.
“The cops asked me if I’d heard about John going missing,” Gordon said. “I’m positive Count was asked the same thing.”
Steve went silent.
“I played dumb,” Gordon continued. “Count didn’t know shit, of course, but I played dumb. Suppose somebody at the party saw John leave with us?”
“Nobody saw us.”
“Suppose they did?”
“Even if somebody saw John leave with us, it means nothing.”
“It will if Count Gaines raises a stink and the cops decide to search Scott’s place and find those zombies in the guesthouse.”
“Shit!” Steve sounded frustrated now. Gordon held his breath, hoping he’d conveyed his point. Of the four of them, Gordon had been the most reluctant to go along with the crimes they’d been committing. Scott had obviously noticed this, and Gordon wondered if Steve and Dave were aware of it and what Scott might have confided in them when Gordon wasn’t around. He had to tread carefully.
“When the cops pulled us over,” Gordon continued, “I told Count that if he started shit with me, his girlfriend Chelsea was toast.”
“Count Gaines has a girlfriend?”
“He’s been going out with Chelsea Brewer. You know, that little art chick from Mrs. Farner’s class.”
“That little thing?”
“I told Count Gaines that if the cops came around and questioned any of us, that we’d hurt her. I didn’t tell him how. I didn’t really have to. He’s afraid of us already.”
“You think that’ll work?”
Gordon thought about that for a moment. A month ago if he was asked that question, he would have said yes. Now he wasn’t so sure. “I don’t know,” he said. “He seemed pretty freaked out at the thought of any of us hurting Chelsea in any way. I’d like to think that put the scare into him.”
“How’d you like to see that bitch’s skinny little ass getting’ chomped by the zombies,” Steve said, the hint of a smile in his voice. “It would be even better if we made Count Gaines watch!”
“Yeah, it would,” Gordon said. No need to tell Steve that Tim had already seen the zombies. He’d explode if he knew. Gordon was counting on Gaines to keep that to himself, to not stir any trouble, which was why he’d threatened to have Chelsea hurt if he squealed.
“So what should we do?” Steve asked.
“You know where Chelsea lives?”
“Yeah. She lives near Danielle Sawyer, over on Fourth Street, just west of Cedar Street. In fact, she lives two doors down from Danielle. Right in the corner house.”
“You have any way to keep tabs on her?”
“Not really. I can drive by her house.”
“What about Scott or Dave? Do they know Chelsea’s friends? Even casually?”
“I don’t think so. I can check.”
“Do that. Tell them what I just told you. We need to watch what happens with her and keep our ears open to the rumor mill.”
“Well shit, that means we just gotta hang out with my neighbor, Joyce. You know, the crazy cat lady that lives next door to me?”
Gordon grinned. Joyce was a middle-aged woman that lived by herself in a large ranch house next to Steve’s. She’d been single as long as Gordon knew her, and had adult children who often dumped their spawn at her place on the weekends. Joyce was a nice enough lady, but could talk the ears off a donkey and sometimes talked to herself when she was tending to the garden in the back yard. She also had a lot of cats, somewhere in the neighborhood of seven. Or maybe it was ten. It was hard to keep count. Despite those annoying qualities, Joyce had the uncanny ability to know what was going on in town before it made the local weekly newspaper. She was like the little old lady in movies who spied on her neighbors with a telescope and then got on the phone to gossip with her friends about who was sleeping with whom, who’d lost their job at the paper mill, who’d been arrested for DUI the previous evening, what family tragedy had befallen the Green family who lived on the other side of town. Only instead of gossiping about it on the phone with her friends, Joyce kept the information bottled inside her because she had no friends.
She was always eager to share the information if you so much as paid the slightest bit of attention to her, though.
“That’s actually not a bad idea,” Gordon said. “Joyce seems to know everybody in town.”
“That’s the plan, then.” Steve seemed agreeable. He also sounded more awake now.
“I still think we should do something to get rid of the zombies permanently,” Gordon said. “At least bring the idea up to Scott. If he feels the threat of discovery, he’ll agree.”
“You would think,” Steve said. He sounded more sympathetic to Gordon’s point of view now. “I can bring it up to him. Besides, we can always make more zombies, right?”
“Of course,” Gordon answered. Not if I can help it, he thought.
A police siren sounded in the distance, fading away in the early morning. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay. Talk to you later.”
“Later.” Gordon hung up the phone. Another siren rose in the distance, joining the first one as it headed to some unknown disaster. For a minute Gordon wondered what would happen if the zombies locked in Scott’s guesthouse broke out. What kind of havoc would they cause? How would the police respond? He felt a brief flare of panic at the thought those police sirens were heading to Scott’s place, but then he realized they were heading elsewhere, out toward the northeast part of town. Zuck’s Woods lay toward the northeast side of town.