Read Online Wicked Cruel by Rich Wallace - Free Book Online

cold, I mean?” He turns to the thermostat on the wall and amps it up.
    “The TV turned on by itself,” I say, wrapping both hands around the mug and breathing in the chocolaty steam.
    He raises one eyebrow. “It was windy.”
    “The night before that my computer started up by itself, too.”
    He leans back in an armchair and smiles. “Old house. I bet there’s a lot of faulty wiring in the walls. You get a storm or a big gust and it can cause power outages.”
    “The power didn’t go off.”
    “Sometimes it’s a split second that you barely notice. But then there’s a surge when the power comes back, so electronic stuff will reboot by itself. Happens all the time.”
    Maybe so. But it’s different when something reboots and you get Bainer’s voice or a video that scares the piss out of you. That’s no coincidence. That’s a haunting.
    Or insanity.
    I’m not buying this power-surge theory. “I heard Bainer talking when the TV came on,” I say. “Before that, too, but then I shut it off.”
    “Oh.” David’s tone sounds like he doesn’t quite believe me but that he’s pretty sure I believe it myself.
    “I know that sounds ridiculous,” I say. “It sounds ridiculous to me, too. But things keep happening.”
    He takes a deep breath and blows it out, and I can smell cigarettes and beer. “You’re shook up, Jordan, so everything seems magnified. I admit that this is a weird situation, buteverything that’s happened—if you look at them one at a time—has an explanation, right?”
    “One at a time, yeah. But this stuff keeps going down. I’m seeing his face or hearing his voice or having that creepy video show up on my computer. That’s too many coincidences for me.”
    We sit quietly for a few minutes and I sip the hot chocolate.
    “Think you can sleep?” he asks.
    “Not up there.”
    He nods. “Stay here, then. Leave the kitchen light on. I’m really beat. I’ll sleep in your parents’ bed tonight.”
    “Okay.” I set down the mug and shut my eyes. Having him in the house is better. I can probably sleep. A little.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Gary’s phone call wakes me up around ten. “Get bagels?” he asks.
    “Yeah. Gimme ten minutes.”
    David’s rolling out dough for a pie crust when I get to the kitchen. I was so zonked I hadn’t heard a thing.
    “Sleep okay?” he asks.
    “I guess so.”
    He gives me a little smirk. “No more disturbances?”
    “Not lately. Is that apple?”
    “Yep.”
    “I’m meeting Gary. But I’ll be back for some of that.”
    I realize that I’m too hungry for bagels, so I get a small pizza instead. Gary buys two Milky Way bars and we walk toward his house.
    “What’d you do last night?” he asks. He says it sort of accusingly, as if he already knows.
    “Hung around.”
    “At the scene of the crime?”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I saw you walking with Scapes.”
    “So?”
    He shakes his head. “You’re crazy.”
    “And what crime anyway? There were a
thousand
crimes committed on Bainer, if you want to look at it that way. And every one of us is guilty.”
    “I never hit him.”
    We’ve reached his house, so we don’t say anything more until we’re in his room with the door shut. The dog followed us in.
    “What do mean, you never hit him?” I say. “You hit him. I hit him, too.”
    “That was nothing compared to what Scapes does to people. You’re out of your mind hanging around with him, you know.”
    “I wasn’t with him long.”
    “What’d you do?”
    I let out my breath and peel a slice of pizza from the box. I take a bite and chew it slowly. “We snuck into Bainer’s house.”
    “You went in there alone? With Scapes? Are you that stupid? Scapes is a murderer, Jordan. He could have left you there dead. They’d find your corpse in twenty years.”
    I take another bite. “Can I give Barney this crust?” I ask. The dog’s been drooling on Gary’s floor ever since I opened the box.
    Gary looks at it while he chews his