This time the first floor and the basement are empty, and the side door into the garage is yawning wide, the garage past it open. No nails in any doorframes, no blood misted on any walls.
Same for the second floor.
Jade steps into what she thinks will probably be a study in a month or two and positions herself just inside the broad window, enough so she can see out, not quite enough where she’s a distinct form in the glass. Just an irregular continuation of the wall, she hopes. A half-assed drape—tarp or something.
From here she can see the yacht so much closer.
Tiara’s swishing her hips along the railing, disappearing through a door. Nobody’s reading a newspaper anymore, nobody’s dropping flower petals into the lake.
Does this mean they’ve all been nailgunned in the forehead?
And then, finally, a flurry of fast motion.
It’s Shooting Glasses. He’s scrambling down a roof two houses down, is Jesse Pinkman’ing into what’s going to be the front yard, and already rolling that impact away because it’s the least thing he has to worry about. Jade watches the window he must have dove through but it’s the front door of the house that swings open instead.
The Prowler, the killer, the slasher.
His chest is heaving, his face unchanging, still gas-masked, the nailgun heavy and deadly by his thigh.
Shooting Glasses looks back, shakes his head no, holding his hands up like to ward off flying nails, and he’s saying something over and over but it doesn’t matter.
His killer steps down off the porch, is already leveling the nailgun.
“No, no!” Jade hears herself screaming, the flat of her hand slapping the glass of the window she’s up against.
The slasher stops, turns around, settles his tinted eyes in her general direction but hopefully she’s behind a glare, hopefully those tinted lenses aren’t binoculars.
Jade backs a step up and the slasher has to give his attention back to Shooting Glasses when Shooting Glasses is up and running again. He falls twice on his way to the pier but makes it there fast enough. The slasher just steadily approaches behind the whole time, until there’s nowhere for Shooting Glasses to go but into the lake, not so much a dive as a desperate jump, or a failure by the water to hold him up when he tries to run across it.
Right as he goes under, nails stitch the water all around him.
The Prowler wades in up to his knees, quilting the whole area with nails until his cartridge runs dry.
He looks at the gun and tosses it aside, lets it kerplunk down.
Now he’s looking up, to the yacht.
Letha is up against the rail, calling down. Not shrieking, not screaming, not crying, not asking what or why.
“T’s napping! ” she whisper-yells, just loud enough Jade can make it out.
Below her, knee-deep in Indian Lake, Theo Mondragon peels out of the gas mask and hoodie.
“Did you get them all?” Letha calls down, apparently forgetting her injunction against waking Tiara.
Theo Mondragon shakes his head no as if disappointed with himself, then holds his forearm up as if for inspection.
“Do wasps bite or sting?” Letha calls down, leaning far out over the rail, completely unconcerned about gravity.
Theo Mondragon looks at his forearm, probably at a welt Jade can’t see from this distance, and exaggerates his shrug.
“You should be careful!” Letha says, but is kind of thrilled too, Jade can tell.
Her dad was rooting out a wasp nest or two. Thus the mask, the hoodie. Just, he redefined “wasp” to include Cowboy Boots, and Shooting Glasses.
Mismatched Gloves?
Jade looks behind her, half-expecting him to be sitting in the corner with a bellyful of nails, his fingers moving over them like accordion buttons.
Why? Why would Theo Mondragon be going after his own workers?
It doesn’t make sense. They can’t be in the justice cycle, shouldn’t be slasher vics at all.
But Clate Rodgers wasn’t exactly supposed to have been, either. And Mr. Holmes was supposed to have been around to write the sad history of this all down.
And, really, if she’s counting people who don’t deserve it, the Dutch kids were sort of extra too, Jade figures.
Deacon Samuels may be the only actual targeted victim.
Unless Theo Mondragon saw Jade through the glass, that is.
Unless she’s about to be the next cleanup on aisle 9 of this wilderness re-enactment of Intruder.
Her insides clench, her airways constrict.
At least it won’t be nails, when it comes. The nailgun’s wet and buried.
And, like Nancy Thompson in A Nightmare on Elm Street, her chances go way the hell up if she can just keep from falling asleep. Just, there’s still the night to get through. And then tomorrow. If there is one of those.