Escape from Happydale, page 8
part #1 of The Last Final Girl Series
Parker pulled out the yellowed manila folder tucked under a box of ammunition and flipped it open. Inside was a list of names and addresses—a simple list written in black Magic Marker.
ANNIE AMES—DECEASED
RAYMOND AMES—DECEASED
SANDRA KAZAN—DECEASED
MARCIA KURTZ—DECEASED
JUDITH MALINA—DECEASED
SUSAN PERETZ—DECEASED
JENNIFER LANZISERO—DECEASED
LYNETTE SHELDON—DECEASED
ANNA HILL JOHNSTONE—DECEASED
WAYNE SINCLAIR
LIZ SINCLAIR
PARKER AMES
NANCY SINCLAIR
Parker’s eyes drilled down on that last name: Nancy Sinclair. Besides Parker’s name, she was last one left alive. If Hurricane got to her first, Parker just hoped that Nancy Sinclair knew how to run fast and not trip over.
Nineteen
Parker loaded the weapons from McCormick’s coffin into the Charger and hit the road. According to the file, Nancy Sinclair lived at home with her parents in Cedar Springs. It was a two-hour drive from Anarchy, but Parker hammered there in just under an hour. The very instant she hit Nancy’s street, she cut her speed to next to nothing and crept the Charger down the road. She kept her eyes peeled as she passed the houses, scanning the yards and windows for Hurricane. All she saw was a teenager doing aerobics in her lounge room, a couple of boys playing baseball in the street, and an old man tending to his roses in his front yard. By all accounts, there was nothing out of the ordinary.
She brought the Charger to a stop outside of 25 Chatsworth Road, shut the engine down, and climbed out of the muscle car. She made her was across the yard and up the couple of steps to the veranda. The Sinclair household was a hundred-year-old two-story home that the Sinclair family obviously loved. In the past couple of years, it had been painted, the veranda that wrapped around the home was tidy and swept, and there was even an American flag doormat that told guests they were welcome.
Parker raised her hand to knock on the door but paused when she saw it was already open a crack. She wasn’t the taking-chances kind and unholstered the .45 from her hip. She raised it high and, with her non-shooting hand, slowly pushed open the door and followed the weapon inside. It was a nice suburban home with family photos on the walls, homemade pillows on the sofa, and the smell of cinnamon in the air. The Sinclairs were good people, and it wasn’t a stretch for Parker to make that assumption. Sometimes a person could just tell.
Except for the open door, nothing struck her as being out of the ordinary, and Parker was about to holster her weapon and leave when she saw the closed kitchen door and the blood seeping out from underneath it.
It was then that she stopped dead in her tracks.
With her free hand, she gently and very slowly pushed it open. At first, Parker saw the room in small increments. A splash of blood on the toaster. A spray of blood on the wall.
As she opened the door farther, Parker saw the massacre in all its glory. An inch of blood coated the floor, the benches looked as if they had been painted red, and the smell of rust soured the air. The whole joint looked like something out of a Jackson Pollock painting.
But the worst of it were the corpses… or what was left of them. Their limbs had been torn from their bodies and tossed around carelessly. To the regular everyday person, it would have been close to impossible for them to know how many victims there were, but Parker Ames had experience in such things. At half a glance, she knew that there had been two victims: one male and one female, both in their early fifties. Hurricane didn’t just want these poor bastards dead—he wanted them ripped apart. Nancy Sinclair wasn’t one of the bodies. That meant the girl was still out there somewhere, and he wasn’t far behind.
Parker heard a thump outside the kitchen window. She gripped the .45, closed her eyes, and listened. There were more thumps.
Something was out there, all right.
Parker ran through the house, toward the front door, and exploded out onto the veranda, down the couple of stairs, and into the front yard. She was in full battle mode, ready to unleash hell on Hurricane Williams. But rounding the side of the house, she saw a kid running between the fence and the house, and she stopped in her tracks. He was around ten years old, with a baseball cap on backward and a Scorpions tee.
Parker caught up to him, and with a fistful of the back of his T-shirt, she cut his getaway short.
“Hey!” the kid yelled. “Let go of me, lady.”
She did, and they both caught their breath.
“Who the fuck are you?” Parker asked.
“Who the fuck are you!” he snapped back.
Parker was a little taken back by the mouth on the kid. “A family friend,” she said, chilling out.
“Visit all your friends with a gun, do you?”
“Depends on the friend.” Parker holstered the weapon. “What were you doing back there?”
“Taking a shortcut. I was visiting my girlfriend in the next house over. She’s got big tits.”
“What about the girl that lives here?”
“She’s got big tits, too.”
Parker clipped him across the head. “Have you seen her?”
“Yeah, I saw her. So what?”
“Where did you see her go?”
He pointed down the street. “Headed that way in her shit-box Nova.”
“What’s down there?”
“Nothing but Resurrection Road.”
Before Parker could ask him anything more, he took off running again. When he hit the sidewalk, he turned back and called out, “Hey, lady!”
Parker looked over just as the kid flipped her the bird. She didn’t care, though. Her mind was on Nancy Sinclair, Hurricane Williams, and Resurrection Road.
Twenty
Beau Jenko was the first on the scene at Patrick’s Garage & Gas. He had been the sheriff of Happydale for fifteen years, and before that, he had done his time in Vietnam. Like everybody else who had gone over there, he had seen some shit. Those images of pain and horror had the tendency to sneak up on him late at night when he wasn’t expecting them and rob him of a night’s sleep. But he had never, not in fifteen years on the job on top of the five years before that he’d spent in a war zone, had he seen the brutality that little blonde had laid out on that poor hunk of meat that was butchered out front of Patrick’s Garage & Gas.
The blonde refused to say a word. She just dropped her weapons, of which she had many, put her hands behind her back to be handcuffed, and then calmly sat in the back of his prowler. She was covered in blood, and he was unprepared. He should have laid some plastic down in the back of the car, but he left the house in a hurry and didn’t have any in the trunk, so he was going to have to hose it out later. The hospital tag around her wrist said her name was Parker Ames, but apart from that, she wasn’t giving over any information.
Jenko was beat, and he was only at the beginning of the whole mess. He rubbed his face and glanced at his watch. It was a little after midnight, and there was a hell of a lot to do. He got on the radio, woke Deputy Morrison, and told him to pick up some coffee and get down to the station.
“Don’t forget the coffee,” he said again just before he ended the call.
The coffee was important. He had a one-week-old little boy at home. Cindy had just left the hospital, but she was struggling with the postnatal, so it was up to Jenko to look after the little guy while she rested up. He didn’t mind. But after a week of no sleep, he was living on not much more than coffee and Mary James’s strawberry pie from the diner across the road from the station.
When Jenko had arrived at Patrick’s Garage & Gas, he’d looked around at the scene and tried to work out what the hell had happened. The other girl told him her name was Nancy Sinclair and that she had come from Cedar Springs, but she had the shakes and the tears, and after telling him her name, she really didn’t say much more of anything. He’d sent her to the hospital with Deputy Grady and would have to collect a statement from her later on after she had seen the nurses.
So he had one hysterical teenage girl covered in blood, one blond killer also covered in blood, one dead gas station attendant, dead in his own service station, and an unknown victim hacked to pieces on the ground by the blond killer covered in blood. None of them had been particularly chatty, and that wasn’t exactly a hell of a lot of leads to go on at that point.
Jenko, Grady, and Morrison represented the entire Happydale Sheriff’s Department, and given the size of Happydale, they were more than enough… most of the time, that was. They also had one hospital, one ambulance, and one ambulance driver, Gordon. After Jenko made the call, Gordon came with the meat wagon, collected the corpses, and made his way back to Happydale Medical.
Not too much time later, Jenko climbed behind the wheel of his prowler, and with the bloody Parker Ames in the back seat, they hit the road. Patrick’s Garage & Gas was a full fifteen minutes away from the center of Happydale, but in the middle of the night and as long as they didn’t have to wait for a passing train from San Antoine, they should make it back without any trouble.
He glanced up into the rearview mirror at Parker. She was cool and calm, just staring out the window and watching Happydale roll past as if there were nothing in the world that bothered her.
That’s some cold shit, Jenko thought to himself. She didn’t look as though she had just hacked a man to death; she looked like she was just riding in the back of a car on her way to school, the mall, or some other place that a young woman might go. He’d only seen the aftermath of the massacre, and it took his hands a full forty-five minutes to stop shaking. He peeled his eyes off Parker and made a mental note to keep them on the road and not look back at her again.
The people of Happydale were good, hardworking Americans. They loved their football and their town fairs, and they were ready to help when anybody needed anything—like when old Marty Robbins needed a hip replacement and his insurance wouldn’t pay up, the town chipped in and got old Marty Robbins his hip replacement. The town was good like that. If anybody needed anything, it stood up, and there it was. But that good side came with a healthy dose of a bad one to go along with it. Like a lot of other towns, Happydale had secrets, and it kept them well.
For instance, nobody knew that Dave Peters had gotten Jennifer Cameron pregnant in the back seat of his Cadillac shortly before they broke up in 1982. Over the next eight and a half months, she wore baggy clothes and left the house only to go to school. Everybody just thought she’d just stacked on weight, and the kids at school even started calling her Fattifer Cameron. She had plans of being the first person in her farming family to go to college and had even been accepted to Notre Dame. So a baby certainly wasn’t in her plans for the immediate future.
The baby arrived at 8:34 a.m. on a Tuesday, while her parents were out working on the farm, and as far as she knew, the baby boy was 100% completely healthy. She’d already worked out a plan to leave the baby in a picnic basket on the steps of Father Harris’s church and ring the bell. Father Harris was a good man, and he would know what to do. However, on that particular Tuesday, Father Harris was in Antelope Falls, visiting his sister. and didn’t return to Happydale until Thursday. By that time, the baby was no more. Father Harris recognized the picnic basket from a cookout the church had three weeks before. He recognized it because it had accidently been left by Jennifer’s mother, Ilse, and she’d come to retrieve it a couple of days later. It wasn’t a big stretch for Father Harris to put together the basket, the baby, and the young Cameron girl’s weight gain. So Father Harris gathered up the poor child and buried him in the small graveyard behind the church. He never said a word of it to anyone.
The people of Happydale never knew, but Happydale knew.
It was the same thing with Darrell Lee’s wife. Sometime toward the end of 1968, or early 1969—nobody could really remember for certain—Darrell Lee and his wife, Fritzy, opened up a soda stand just a couple of doors down from the corner of Mable Avenue and Main Street. Most of their trade was done between the hours of three o’clock and seven o’clock in the evening, and they mostly served ice cream to the kids from Happydale High. They weren’t living high on the hog, but they were making a living, and for Darrell, that was good enough. Although for Fritzy, good enough wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted all the glamor, the money, and the life he had promised her before they were married. It wasn’t that Darrell didn’t try to give her those things, but he was what Fritzy’s mother would call “low class,” and he thought that a chicken dinner at the local diner was a class act.
A few months after opening Darrell Lee’s Ice Cream and Soda, Fritzy began referring to her husband as “the little ice cream man.” It started off just between the pair of them, and even though Darrell told her he didn’t like it, she continued to call him the little ice cream man. Before long, she was using the nickname in front of their friends. Well, to be frank, they were her friends because he wasn’t allowed to have his friends over.
It was “little ice cream man this” and “little ice cream man that,” and day after day, Darrell just took it… until one day when he didn’t.
Everybody in town knew that Fritzy Lee was having an affair with a salesman from New York. He came to town every couple of weeks, and the two of them would hit up Sussman’s Grill for a steak dinner followed by cocktails in the lobby of the Astoria Hotel, Happydale’s best hotel, before retiring to a room upstairs. Darrell knew what was going on. Fritzy knew that Darrell knew, and the entire town knew everything. But being the polite folk that the residents of Happydale were, nobody ever said anything in mixed company. But everybody knew.
Come the first week of 1971, and Fritzy was nowhere to be seen. Not at the ice cream shop, not at the hair salon, and not at the Astoria Hotel. Eventually, Dottie who ran the post office asked Darrell about his wife. Darrell looked down at the ground and said she was in New York. Everybody knew what that meant, and nobody asked any questions after that.
They should have, though, because Fritzy wasn’t in New York at all. She hadn’t even left Happydale. The truth was Fritzy Lee was hanging frozen in the walk-in freezer of Darrell Lee’s Ice Cream and Soda, and that was where she had been for the past few weeks.
“Little ice cream man…”
“Little ice cream man…”
“Little ice cream man…”
For hours, that was all he’d heard as she got drunker and drunker. Darrell hadn’t even realized what he’d done until it was done. Next thing he knew, Fritzy was bleeding out on the kitchen floor, and the knife was in his hand. She didn’t die straight away. It took a good five minutes for her heart to pump all the blood out of her body, and as he watched her breathe her last breath, the only emotion he felt was relief. He wrapped up her body in an old blanket, drove her to the store at three in the morning, and put her in the walk-in freezer. Over the course of the next few months, Darrell fed steak-sized pieces of Fritzy to Barry Henderson’s three Dobermans on his afternoon walk. One thing was for sure: nobody called him the little ice cream man again.
Bad things just happened in Happydale sometimes, and nobody really knew why.
In the beginning, Jenko figured whatever had happened at Patrick’s Garage & Gas was just another one of those things.
Twenty-One
Jenko pulled up to the station and shut the engine down. The lights were on, and he could see Morrison making coffee through the window. The station had been state-of-the-art one hundred years ago, but since then, the paint had faded and the floorboards had warped. The roof leaked, the heat didn’t work in the winter, and during the summer, it was like an oven. It was a twenty-by-twenty-feet room with a few desks, a gun cabinet, and a small cell in the corner, which was only bars drilled into the roof and the floor.
He pulled Parker out of the patrol, took her into the station and put her straight into the cell. He even shook the door just to double check that there was no way the psycho could get the hell out and cause any more havoc. He took off her cuffs and turned to Morrison by the coffee machine. He was a good kid. Dumb as shit, but his heart was in the right place. Jenko put him on partly as a favor to Albert Morrison, the mayor of Happydale, and partly because nobody else applied for the job.
“If she moves,” Jenko said, “shoot her.”
Morrison looked up from the sugar he was stirring into his coffee. “I left my gun at home, boss.”
Jenko cursed under his breath and shook his head. “Did you at least run her name?”
“I did.” Instead of continuing, Morrison glanced over and got his first good look at Parker. The mere bloody sight of her caused him to freeze. In his twenty-six years, he had most likely never seen anything like it, and now that he had, it took him by surprise.
“Well, what’s it say?” Jenko asked, breaking Morrison’s concentration.
He snapped out of it. “Um…” Morrison swapped the coffee in his hands with the papers on the table. “We got three counts of assault. We got two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. We got one count of assault with a vehicle, various charges of theft, bribery, an escape from police custody, breaking and entering, and… one count of murder.”
They both looked over at Parker.
She shrugged. “It wasn’t me?”
“And twelve hours ago, she escaped from a mental institution,” Morrison added.
