Against what? The deer?
The last face Jade sees is Lee Scanlon’s. He’s looking back, his free hand clamped tight on the tailgate, his lips pressed together, his eyes for all the world pleading with her, as if he’s being abducted, just needs someone to say something about it.
Jade tracks the taillights until they make a turn just short of the highway, to the right. Where there’s only logging roads that all bottleneck at the Old Bridge, two miles down the creek. The bridge that only leads to…
Caribou-Targhee National Forest, on the other side of the lake.
“Jaws,” Jade says at last, like making a late identification of those two trucks. This is that comic relief scene in Jaws, where all the boats are vying for space in the water so can they be the ones to haul the killer shark back to Amity Island.
It’s not so funny in real life, though. That look in Lee Scanlon’s eyes for the half-second Jade saw him, it was fear, one hundred percent. Not that there’s any sharks up here in the mountains. And not like any motley crew of villagers ever actually kills the slasher—looking at you, Halloween 4.
Jade remembers that massacred herd of elk over in Sheep’s Head Meadow on the other side of the lake, though. And elk are way tougher than people are.
For a moment she considers ducking back into the sheriff’s office to have Meg pass word on to Hardy that strange things are afoot at this particular Circle K. Things that could get people hurt.
But, too, a slasher’s gonna do what it’s gonna do, right? You can’t stop wheels this big and timeless from turning, from grinding over who they need to grind over. All you can do is keep your eye on the sky, for if one of those wheels is rolling at you.
Jade thumbs her earbuds in right then left, wobbles her head to make sure the cable’s free enough, and Hardy’s already droning through them at a steady mumble.
“—the one who looked like a young George Peppard, that one? Or’s he too old for you, Megan?”
Jade sneaks a look behind her to be sure she’s alone. With Hardy whispering right in her ear, she doesn’t feel very alone.
She does most definitely clock Hardy’s use of past tense, though. Whoever he talked about looked, not “looks.” Ding ding ding, give the man a headstone, he’s dead.
No clue on “George Peppard,” though she likes the way Hardy rides that last syllable. It makes her want to say it herself, except of course he’s not waiting for her, is just droning on. Fast-fast, she pauses his dictation, image-searches “George Peppard,” and, holy shit, Hardy was right: that is one of the Founders, right down to the rakish smile, the hair, the softness at the edges that means money.
Deacon Samuels.
To be sure-sure, Jade searches him up as well, tabs back and forth from Peppard, and, yep, it’s like she did the same search twice.
Point for Hardy.
“Thank you, sir,” she says to him, and unpauses his voice.
“He didn’t exactly have permission, no, strike that, strike that, delete. I mean, I’d given him a warning already, that better? Yeah, looked like someone was shooting a Roman candle over there, just poof, poof, poof, these orange fizzing balls arcing up from the old camp, sizzling down into the lake.”
“That was you, then,” Jade says to Deacon Samuels, looking up as if she can see all the way to Camp Blood from here. But, if the Terra Novans are the ones using the old campground as a place to shoot fireworks off now, then where are the kids from Proofrock supposed to hook up, drink? More important for Jade: where’s she supposed to hide out for a night or two when she needs a place?
“But it wasn’t fireworks,” Hardy’s going on, talking quieter now, as if he’s hiding under the monkey bars at recess. “He was—get this—he had a bucket of gas right there by him, in this little tee box where he’d cut the grass down so it wouldn’t wrap the head of his driver up on the way down. A tee box is like, shit—sorry, sorry. It’s like a batter’s box had a baby with a putting green? That help? Anyway, what he was doing… I got to get the order down here, else his ass’ll blow up instead of—but I’m getting to that.
“So he had good expensive balls down in that gas, Dixon Fires, no joke, and then he had a lit candle maybe four feet away—about as far as he could reach while keeping his feet planted, same position every time, so he could know what to adjust. You know what I’m talking about, Don plays, you’ve seen him swing into that net he sets up in his front yard.