Riley Thorn and the Dead Guy Next Door

by Lucy Score

  He heard feet on the stairs, and Riley jogged into his line of sight. “I got them all in the van. I think we need to go now,” she breathed, sagging against the railing.

  “Just one second,” he said, carefully freeing the lens from the hole. It was a snazzy little flexible fiber-optic camera. “Got it.”

  He replaced the tile, shoved the chair back into Riley’s apartment, and jogged across the hall to turn Dickie’s TV off. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  By the time they made it downstairs and out the door, they could hear the faint wail of sirens. Burt loped to the SUV and jumped neatly into the passenger seat.

  “In the back, buddy,” Nick said, giving him a nudge into the back seat.

  “I never thought I’d be the kind of person to hear police sirens and have to run,” Riley admitted as she climbed in and secured her seatbelt.

  He gunned the engine and drove through the yard into the parking lot.

  Mrs. Penny and company were—miraculously—buckled in and ready to go. He flashed his headlights at the minivan, which responded with a rev of the engine. Together, both cars peeled out into the alley and fled north.

  “So, where are we going?” Nick asked.

  Riley grimaced. “The commune.”

  “Say what now?”

  Twenty miles down the road, Nick disconnected a call and tossed his phone into a cupholder. “That was Brian,” he said. “They just got to the—uh—commune with your parents, your sister and her kids, and your dad’s cow.”

  “The cow? How? Never mind. I don’t want to know.” Riley sighed. “Mrs. Penny brought her Xbox, so why wouldn’t my father bring his spite cow? And why should my best friend answer any texts about staying away from Mayor McMurder?”

  A snore sounded from the back seat. Nick adjusted the mirror to look at Burt sleeping soundly with his paws in the air.

  Her phone screen lit up, and she rolled her eyes. “Mrs. Penny and the gang are going through a drive-thru. They want to know if we want anything.”

  He frowned. “I wouldn’t say no to a burger.”

  “Amateurs,” she muttered under her breath.

  Despite everything, he found himself grinning.

  “You know, Thorn. There’s no one else I’d rather be running from the law with.”

  She shot him the side-eye. “You’re just saying that.”

  “I’m really not.”

  She thumped her head against the seat. “Nick, how are we going to get out of this? I stole a car, hit a human being with it, and then smashed into a cop car.”

  “Doesn’t count if they’re crooked,” he said. “Wait. What human being did you hit?”

  “Just Duncan. And I’m serious.”

  He sighed. “I know. Look, I let Flemming know that I knew about his blackmail scheme. So you’re not alone on the BOLO.”

  “BOLO?”

  “Be on the lookout.”

  “Oh God. I’m a BOLO,” she moaned.

  “Where’s your Jeep?”

  “Shot to hell at yet another crime scene.”

  “Classic Riley. Since we’ve got a few more miles to go, let’s talk,” Nick suggested.

  She looked at him suspiciously. “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “There are some things you should know about me,” he began.

  She perked up.

  “Like what?”

  “Like when I was a cop, I head-butted my partner and broke his nose.”

  She frowned. “Why did you head-butt him?”

  “He accused me of not doing my job. A witness I was watching disappeared. He blamed me.”

  “No. I meant why not punch him?” she clarified.

  Man, he was so into her.

  “I was handcuffed at the time,” Nick told her.

  “I’m going to need you to back up and explain.”

  He sighed. “Weber and I were partners. We were tight. Our families were tight. His little sister, Beth, witnessed a crime. It was drug-related. Weber wanted her to ‘do the right thing’ and testify. I thought she’d be safer not saying anything. Figured we could close the case without her testimony. We disagreed. Loudly.”

  He saw Riley’s nose twitch in the dim light of the dashboard.

  “Beth disappeared. Weber accused me of hiding her and fucking up the case. Tried to have me arrested. By the time we both got our heads out of our asses and realized she was missing, the trail was cold.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Riley said, squeezing his hand. “Were you and Beth… involved?”

  He shook his head. “No. We flirted, but that was just to annoy Weber.” Nick lapsed into silence for a long beat. “It’s not that I don’t respect the law,” he said finally. “I just don’t trust it to protect the law-abiding citizens all the time. It can be abused and distorted. Or in this case, completely fubared.”

  “Did you ever find out what happened to her?” she asked.

  His hand tightened on the wheel. “No. She’s a cold case now.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again. He felt the weight of her gaze on him and took her hand.

  It was Riley’s turn to sigh. “I guess this makes it my turn for a confession. I tried not to be psychic because I accidentally broke up my parents’ marriage and sent my mother into the arms of Winston—Wander’s biological dad—when I was four years old.”

  “Uhh, what?”

  “I kept telling Dad that Mommy was kissing a man.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “Yeah. They didn’t realize I was seeing visions of the future. Dad thought I was telling him something that had already happened. Mom didn’t even meet Win until a month after my dad left. They hooked up. She got pregnant. My dad realized he made a mistake, and they got back together. They realized pretty soon after why I’d said what I’d said.”

  “How’d they figure that out?” Nick asked, taking the left onto a bumpy dirt and gravel road.

  “I predicted Great-Uncle Tyrone’s death.”

  Of course she had.

  “You’re a hell of a girl, Riley Thorn.”

  “You just hang onto that thought when you meet my extended family,” she warned, pointing ahead of them where the trees thinned and shadows of buildings appeared.

  “Is that a teepee?” Nick asked.

  51

  11:45 p.m., Saturday, July 4

  The commune was just as weird as Riley remembered it. It consisted of a ramshackle barn, a dozen acres of half-assed fences that chickens and goats were constantly escaping from, and a random collection of buildings, including a few teepees, yurts, and even a wigwam.

  She couldn’t see it in the dark, but she knew that the patchwork garden was loaded with squash somewhere to the south and the creek in which she and Wander had spent hours of their childhood meandered through the woods beyond the house.

  She directed Nick to pull in front of the pink farmhouse that stretched out in all directions thanks to additions built without aesthetics—or permits.

  “Welcome to Happy Acres,” Riley said grimly.

  Despite the late hour, lights were on everywhere. She spotted Brian’s van and her sister’s hybrid SUV.

  The purple and tangerine front door—another new paint job since she had last visited—opened, and a familiar figure stepped out onto the porch.

  “You ready for this?” she asked Nick. Exhaustion was beginning to play at the corners of her mind now that the adrenaline had started to fade.

  “Baby, I practically spit in a murderer’s face tonight. I think I can handle meeting more of your family,” he teased.

  They got out and unloaded Burt and their bags from the back.

  “You brought me a lion!” the woman on the porch said cheerfully. She knelt in her homemade linen caftan to lavish Burt with attention.

  “Karen, this is Burt the dog and Nick the guy. Nick, this is my mom’s second cousin Karen.”

  “Nicky Santiago! Long time, no see. Look at you wearing clothes for once,” Karen said
with a saucy wink.

  Riley choked on her laugh when Nick turned the shade of a radish skin.

  “Oh, hey, Karen. How’s it going?” he said weakly.

  “Tell me you didn’t sleep with my mom’s second cousin,” Riley whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

  “I was eighteen, okay? She taught me a lot.”

  “Oh, I bet she did,” she said, finding the connection perhaps a little funnier than she should.

  Another set of headlights panned over the front porch. Nick tensed next to her, then relaxed, when Mrs. Penny laid on the minivan’s horn.

  “We got snacks and shit,” she hollered through the window.

  “Sounds like we’re having ourselves a party tonight,” Karen said cheerfully as four senior citizens climbed out of the dusty minivan.

  They helped lug bags, seniors, and livestock to their respective temporary homes. Daisy the Spite Cow was happily pastured with the commune’s goat herd. Burt followed his nose—and the sound of fast-food wrappers—to the yurt Liz, Deelia, and Betsy claimed. Nick and Mrs. Penny had their heads together over her Xbox setup in the farmhouse’s turquoise and eggplant living room. Gabe was in the upstairs bunk room reading a bedtime story to Wander’s girls while Wander and Lily made huge thermoses of tea and prepped seven breakfast casseroles.

  Riley took a moment to step out onto the back porch. The sky was so big and bright out here. It made her feel small, insignificant. Just like her life pre-Nick Santiago.

  She let out a long, weary sigh.

  “You look like you could use this.” Her mother appeared with two mugs of tea. She was in her summer loungewear, a long black skirt that swished around her ankles when she walked and a Van Morrison t-shirt that had seen a few decades of washes and Van Morrison himself three times.

  Riley accepted one of the mugs. “Thanks, Mom. I should be bringing you tea. I’m the reason you’re in this mess.”

  “Oh, stop. This is the weekend getaway I’ve always dreamed of,” Blossom said, lying like any good mother.

  A loud fart erupted from the teepee closest to them.

  “Willicott! You just singed my nose hairs,” Fred shouted.

  “Okay, not exactly the getaway I’ve always dreamed of. But my hubby is here, my girls are here. I’ve got my grandkids and my husband’s stupid cow. And we’re all safe. That’s not so bad.”

  “Mom, I admire your ability to put a silver lining on a steaming cloud of old man farts, but seriously. This is a disaster. I never wanted any of this. I just wanted to be normal,” she lamented.

  “Normal?” Blossom scoffed. “What fun is normal?”

  “Normal is great,” Riley insisted. “It’s stable, predictable. Normal people don’t witness the murder of next-door neighbors. Normal people don’t end up in high-speed chases or get shot at by bad cops. Kudos to you and Dad for believing that, by the way. Normal people don’t have to pack up everyone they love and drive them to a commune in the middle of Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh, puh-lease,” Blossom scoffed. “Normal is dry-cleaning and paying your taxes and—”

  Daisy the cow lowed happily from somewhere in the dark. Burt answered her with a cheerful bark.

  “Normal is not having spite cows or stolen dogs,” Blossom finished with a demonstrative wave.

  “I don’t think you’re making the point you think you’re making. Wait, you and Dad don’t pay your taxes?”

  “Let’s focus on you right now.” Blossom didn’t seem nearly concerned enough with IRS authority.

  Riley was definitely revisiting the tax thing when there wasn’t a murderer to catch.

  “My point is. No one is normal. And the people who strive for normal or perfect or respectable miss out on all the good stuff.”

  “I never asked for this.” Riley sighed.

  “The best gifts are the ones you don’t ask for. Maybe you should stop trying to return it. Unwrap it. Open it up. Try it on.”

  “You’re really committing to that metaphor, aren’t you?”

  Blossom nudged Riley with her shoulder. “All I’m saying is maybe it’s time to stop being so afraid all the time. Bad things happen. But so do a lot of good things.”

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing a few good things,” Riley confessed. “All I get are murders and dead people.”

  “Drink your tea.”

  Riley sipped, then gasped. “What the hell is this?”

  Blossom snickered. “Warmed up lemon honey moonshine.”

  Riley took another more tentative sip. “Where did you get it?”

  “You don’t think they survive on organic vegetables and macramé alone here, do you? You should see the pot field in the back pasture.”

  “Mom!”

  Riley finished her hot moonshine and, feeling significantly better about everything, went in search of Nick. She found him high-fiving Mrs. Penny as the woman hurled her headphones to the floor and broke into a victory dance.

  “Are you two playing games?” she asked.

  “Only if doing kick-ass investigative work counts as playing games,” Mrs. Penny hooted.

  “We got the footage,” Nick said with an underwear-melting grin.

  “What footage?”

  He turned and pointed toward the TV. The state-of-the-art flat screen that definitely hadn’t been here last time she visited.

  “Mrs. Penny, did you seriously bring your TV?”

  “Worry about that later,” she said, her fingers working the game controller. “Check this shizz out.”

  The blank screen flashed to the mansion’s third-floor hall and Dickie’s door.

  The timestamp in the corner of the screen read 1:32 a.m., June 20.

  “You didn’t,” she whispered.

  “Oh, we did,” Nick said, gleefully. “Turns out Mrs. Penny’s great-nephew Terrence did a little IT work for Dickie that went beyond just connecting his cable.”

  “How?” Riley asked, impressed.

  “Kid’s an online gamer,” Mrs. Penny explained. “Cost us some Bitcoin and I had to promise to stop calling him Turd Face at family reunions, and he gave us the login to the cloud storage.”

  Nick gave Mrs. Penny’s shoulders a squeeze. “You can work for me anytime, Penny.”

  “I might take you up on that,” the woman mused.

  They watched as a figure came up the darkened stairs and approached Dickie’s door. The bald head glowed on-screen. Riley chewed on her lower lip.

  “You can see the gun, but you can’t see his face,” she worried.

  “Just wait,” Nick said, slipping an arm around her waist.

  True to his word, No Neck Duncan shifted to the left, gazing toward the back staircase before raising his fist to knock.

  Riley pressed her face to Nick’s chest. She didn’t need to watch the rest. She’d lived it enough times already.

  “Oh! This is my favorite part,” Mrs. Penny snickered.

  Riley peeked at the screen in time to see herself running down the stairs with a hockey stick clutched in her hands. Thankfully, the angle mostly blocked the view of her spectacular fall.

  “You know what this is, Thorn?” Nick asked, giving her another comforting squeeze.

  “What?”

  “Irrefutable evidence that Duncan Gulliver killed Dickie Frick. Combine that with the blackmail evidence you stole, which Brian has already scanned into some secret nerd vault, and we’re gonna win this, Thorn.”

  She saw the evidence baggies of photos and papers she’d liberated from the hole in the wall on a doily-laden sideboard.

  Nick’s confidence was comforting, except for that creepy, icy tingle working its way around her chest cavity.

  “By this time tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll be free and clear, and those two sons of bitches will be behind bars.”

  “Then maybe you can help me and the rest of the vigilantes look into police corruption,” Mrs. Penny suggested with a gleam in her magnified eyes.

  “One case at a time,” Riley said fighting
off a yawn.

  “You two want to see your room?” Karen asked from the doorway.

  “Please.” Riley wanted very much to see a bed right now. She wanted to lay down, pull a pillow over her head, and not think about anything.

  They said their good-nights to Mrs. Penny, who looked as though she were settling in for a long night of gaming.

  “We’ve got one room left, so you two will have to bunk up,” Karen explained, leading the way back the hall on the first floor.

  “Not a problem,” Nick answered for both of them.

  Karen delivered them to their door, told them breakfast was at six, and left them.

  Nick gestured for Riley to wait in the hall before opening the door to do a habitual sweep of the room. Not that there was anything remotely threatening at Happy Acres. But still, she found comfort in the protective gesture.

  When her big, bad bodyguard gave her the all-clear, she stepped into the room. And her world came to a screeching halt.

  The walls were paneled in faux wood grain. The pea soup green carpet was worn through in spots and ripped up in others. A lava lamp burped orange bubbles on a rickety nightstand. The only other piece of furniture in the tiny room was a full-sized bed.

  It was covered with a hideous orange and green floral bedspread.

  The hideous orange and green floral bedspread that had haunted her visions for the last two weeks.

  Riley looked from the bedspread to Nick and back again.

  Here. They were always meant to come here.

  He shrugged and dropped his bag on the floor. “I’ve stayed in worse places.” He never saw it coming.

  Riley launched herself at him.

  Recovering quickly, he caught her. Boosting her up, he wrapped her legs around his hips. And then that dimpled sex god drove his tongue into the mouth she planted against his.

  52

  12:42 a.m., Sunday, July 5