A Bite of Murder

by Carolyn Q. Hunter

  Table of Contents

  A Bite of Murder

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  A Bite

  of

  Murder

  The Dead-End Drive-In Series

  Book Five

  By

  Carolyn Q. Hunter

  Copyright 2018 Summer Prescott Books

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication nor any of the information herein may be quoted from, nor reproduced, in any form, including but not limited to: printing, scanning, photocopying or any other printed, digital, or audio formats, without prior express written consent of the copyright holder.

  **This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons, living or dead, places of business, or situations past or present, is completely unintentional.

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  A BITE

  OF

  MURDER

  The Dead-End Drive-In Series

  Book Five

  Prologue

  * * *

  Jason’s lungs burned with the wet night air. Each breath in and out felt like pins and needles in his chest and a fire in his throat. With the beating of his heart, blood ran up into his head sending pounding waves of pain behind his eyes.

  To add insult to injury, his legs felt like two leaden logs. He could barely feel them, and the joints assumed a consistency that felt like gelatin. He was ready to fall over and pass out at any second, his vision blurring as he wheezed.

  How long had he been running? How long since he’d been forced off the road by that renegade truck?

  He’d been on his way home from the real estate office in downtown Sunken Grove. The rural bayou roads were always a little dark at this time of night, but Jason had kept his wits about himself as he navigated his way back to his house.

  He was used to the occasional alligator sitting up on the pavement and having to go around it, but he hadn’t planned for the high beams of a random pickup truck to come barreling toward him at top speed down the wrong side of the road.

  He’d been forced to jerk the wheel at the last second to avoid a collision with the other vehicle. Unfortunately, this action created an issue as his two front tires sunk in the muck of the bayou. There would be no getting it out without calling for a tow truck.

  The person who’d so recklessly come at him had stopped their truck and climbed out. At first, Jason had been positive that whoever it was behind that wheel had been drinking. What other reason could there be for such mindless behavior?

  However, once he realized the person getting out of the truck was wearing a makeshift mask made from burlap and was carrying some sort of knife, he didn’t hesitate to question the situation. Clearly, whoever this was intended to hurt him.

  That was when he’d run out into the dark bayou.

  Stopping for a second, he leaned down with his hands on his knees and drew in a heavy breath. It felt like he’d been running for nearly an hour.

  Looking over his shoulder through the rows of cypress trees on the bayou, he couldn’t spot his pursuer. Had he finally managed to lose the maniac? He hoped that he had, leaning his back against a tree and taking large gulps of air.

  Standing still, the faint sound of music played out along a fresh breeze. It had a cinematic and orchestral style to it, Jason could tell that much. However, where was it coming from?

  Then he remembered. The drive-in theater was out this direction.

  “That’s it,” he whispered, pushing off from the tree and picking up his pace again. Following the noise, he hoped that he could reach the drive-in—and subsequently, the crowds of moviegoers—before the maniac figured out where he was.

  Jason knew he would be safe once he was in sight of other people. He could use the theater’s phone to call the police and have them send out some officers to apprehend the person who had chased him off the road.

  “Come on, come on,” he begged, hearing the music swell louder in a dramatic movement.

  He had to be getting close. Finally, the bluish quality of light he knew had to be coming from the projector passed through the trees. Bursting into a run, he jumped out from between a low brush and nearly ran into a tall wooden wall. He instantly realized he was standing behind the drive-in’s screen.

  A hissing noise and a woman screaming accompanied the music beyond coming from the many cars that had tuned into the radio station that played the audio for the film. Jason had been to the theater only once but knew their set-up.

  He was grateful that some of the patrons had hefty car sound systems to reach him out in the bayou.

  Still, he wasn’t out of the woods yet. To get to the main building and connected restaurant, he’d have to walk all the way around the fence. “Okay, I can do this,” he told himself. Spinning around, he was about to head to the nearest corner of the fence and make an all-out sprint for the entrance.

  However, instead of running, he stopped—impaling himself on the killer’s outstretched blade. He screamed out in desperation as he realized he was dying, but his own voice was drowned by the screams of the woman in the film.

  Jason fell down dead on the wet ground.

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  The piercing sound of screams jolted though Anna-Lee Francis’ ears, causing her to cringe as she took the window service tray off one of the cars who had finished their meal. She lifted her head and looked at the film screen with a somewhat confused expression marring her brow.

  Dracula Has Come from the Crypt was just nearing its climax. The titular character and the young college student hero were wrestling at the edge of a balcony overlooking a cliff. In the background near the old castle door, a platinum blonde and busty woman screamed like a maniac, her fingers clutching the sides of her face in a rather melodramatic performance.

  Within the next second, Dracula fell over the edge and landed directly on top of a pointed gold cross. A spurt of blood that looked an almost neon shade of red, and very fake, erupted from his chest as he was impaled.

  The actor let out a cry, wiggling around like a maniac with his hands in the air before going limp and letting out a long dramatic breath.


  Anna rolled her eyes as she carried the tray back toward the restaurant, thinking the scream she’d heard that had seemed so real was probably just a trick of sound waves bouncing in between cars. The Voodoo Drive-In was Anna’s younger sister’s business, as well as her beloved baby.

  Sarah-Belle had a sick fascination with the macabre and especially enjoyed older horror flicks. The drive-in was known for showing these types of films, movies that Anna probably would never consciously choose to sit down and watch if she didn’t work as an assistant manager at her sister’s business.

  Anna had to admit, however, that these nineteen-sixties British monster movies were the absolute worst. The black and white films at least had some class, but the colorized versions of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and all the rest of the traditional spooks were so goofy she had a hard time stomaching them. They were all made by the same company called Anvil that had long gone out of business.

  While Belle had argued that the films were purposefully made to be over the top, Anna just couldn’t be talked into liking them.

  Unfortunately, at the moment, the theater was doing a two-week Dracula marathon. Each night they showed another one of the Anvil vampire films. It was only the third night of the event and Anna was ready to tear her hair out. She’d seen enough dripping fangs, red eyes, and screaming women to last a million years in her estimation.

  Reaching the service window at the back of the two-story brick building, she handed the tray through to Valerie Bronson, the other manager at the drive-in. “How many more trays are out in the parking lot?” Valerie asked, making sure the hair net was straight over her black dreadlocks.

  Valerie, along with her husband Chief Dan Bronson, was like a parental figure to the “Drive-In Sisters” as they were quickly becoming known as. Anna and Belle had lost their biological parents a while back and the chief of police of the small Louisiana town and his wife had swooped in to act as caretakers and emotional support where they could.

  “Three more, I think. Most everyone else finished their food before the halfway mark.”

  “Okay, let’s just make sure no one steals them this time. We’ve lost two trays this last month to teenagers who just didn’t feel like waiting for us to collect the tray.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. “Why would you want to steal a window tray? What are they going to use it for?”

  Valerie clicked her tongue distastefully. “Nothin. They just like the thrill of taking it. Dan thinks he’ll figure out exactly which kids took em, but I’m not holding my breath.”

  “Well, it has been quiet here lately. No more ghosts or murders,” she said.

  “No ghosts? What about me?” came a complaint from inside the kitchen.

  Anna tried not to pay attention to the Drive-In’s resident ghost—a voodoo practitioner who’d found himself trapped inside the black and white character of Frederick Loren from the movie House on Haunted Hill. Some mumbo jumbo magic had gotten its supernatural wires crossed and now they had a walking talking ghost that only the sisters could see who looked exactly like Vincent Price.

  While both Valerie and Dan believed and practiced voodoo themselves, and therefore weren’t ones to overlook the possibility of supernatural occurrences, the sisters had not told them about their friendly ghost.

  They did, however, know about the potential ghostly involvement in some murder cases that had happened over the past year or so. Dan had grumbled about not being able to put the full story into his police report. What state officials, or other officers for that matter, would believe that spooks were involved in the occasional crime?

  In Sunken Grove, however, the population was no stranger to the paranormal. While there were many who were unbelievers, the fact of the matter was the small town seemed to attract all sorts of strange and unexplainable occurrences.

  Anna, who hated the paranormal on any level, tried to avoid ghosts like the plague.

  Her only exception was Harlem, or Vincent if you wanted to be funny. Harlem was his real name from when he was alive. In the past months, this transparent and otherworldly being had become one of Anna’s best friends and confidants.

  Harlem stuck his nose up in the air and huffed. “I’m offended.”

  Anna rolled her eyes, walking to the edge of the service window and stepping in the back door of the restaurant. “How is Belle?” she asked, knowing her sister was in bed in the upstairs apartment on the second floor.

  “Still as sick as a dog,” Valerie sighed. “I don’t know if it’s a cold, spring allergies, or something else.”

  “Probably both,” Anna admitted, washing her hands in the sink to get a ketchup stain off. Some customers weren’t as clean as others when it came to the food trays. “You know how she is. It’s like a tradition. She always gets a cold in the spring, never in the fall or winter.”

  “I know, but she seems worse this time around,” Valerie admitted, sorting through some of the receipts and getting a start on the nightly book work.

  Anna only shrugged. “Can you hold down the fort for a second? I’m going to check on her.”

  “Will do. Make sure she is getting lots of fluid,” she said in a motherly fashion.

  “I know.” Anna stepped out into the dining room of the restaurant—which was only open each night until the movie started—and headed up the brick staircase behind the bar. Walking through the apartment, she found her sister on the couch then looked out through a window toward the movie screen.

  “Hey, why aren’t you sleeping?” she scolded her younger sister.

  “I couldn’t. Besides, I didn’t want to miss the movie,” Belle complained through a nasal voice.

  Anna sat on the arm of the couch. “You can watch this movie whenever you want. The theater owns a million different films.”

  Belle made a snorting sound, a result of just trying to breathe normally. “I know that, but I wanted to see it.”

  Anna couldn’t help but smile. In the past year, she’d been forced to rely on Belle after making an emergency move back to Sunken Grove. Things hadn’t gone according to plan and Anna had gone broke. She leaned on Belle’s good charity—and the success of the drive-in—to get her through. She was glad for a job, even if it was under Belle.

  At this moment, however, with Belle sick and unable to do her normal work on the place, Anna was having flashbacks to when they were younger. Especially after their parents passed away, Anna had spent many a spring night sitting with Belle through a cold. It felt nice to be needed in that way again.

  “Well, are you at least drinking water?”

  “I’ve had to pee like a thousand times tonight.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said with a smirk. Anna looked out the window and saw that the credits were rolling. Cars were getting ready to pull out. “I better get back down there and collect the last few trays before everyone runs off.”

  “Good idea,” Belle agreed. “Do you mind picking up the trash near the screen tonight? The wind has been blowing and whatever people decide to just toss out gets carried up there in a pile.”

  Anna didn’t like the idea of standing outside in the muggy air to pick up garbage, but if Belle wanted it, she would comply. “Okay. I’ll pick it up, but I can’t guarantee I’ll do a thorough job tonight.”

  “I understand.”

  “I just don’t see why people can’t take care of their own trash.”

  “Eh, they get lazy, is all. It’s never that much trash.”

  “I hope so,” Anna said, patting her sister on the head before heading back downstairs.

  Chapter 2

  * * *

  She hurried out to the lot and collected up the remaining trays, just catching the last one before a car full of teenage girls all drove off back to their homes. She wanted to scold them but refrained.

  Once the trays were all washed and put away and the parking lot was empty, Anna took the trash grabber and a plastic bag. “I sure hope there isn’t a ton of junk out here,” she compl
ained as she made her way across the lot, realizing that Harlem was floating next to her. “Why don’t you pick it up?” she asked him in a joking manner.

  “Believe me, even if I could . . . I wouldn’t,” he said, chuckling to himself.

  “Typical,” she groaned.

  “Naw. In reality, when I was alive I did all my own cleaning and chores. I had to keep a tidy store and a clean house. I could never stand clutter.”

  “But you ran a voodoo shop. Those are always cluttered,” Anna pointed out, thinking of their very own voodoo shop in the downtown area that tourists liked to call The Little French Quarter. Payton Shaw who owned it was as absent-minded and disorganized as they came. His shop always looked a mess.

  “Well, to appease the masses you sort of have to keep a certain atmosphere in a store like that. They want to see skulls, candles, and trinkets all stacked up together in a dusty mess.”

  Anna nodded, reaching the screen and letting out a breath of relief to see only a few napkins and cups had found their way over. “I can see what you mean,” she said, responding to Harlem and pinching the first piece of garbage with the grabbers. She lifted it into the bag. “Did you ever spread dust on things?”

  Harlem floated nearby, letting out a low laugh. “As a matter-of-fact, yes. I did do that once or twice.”

  Anna couldn’t help laughing out loud. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. As she went about picking up more trash, she couldn’t help but wonder if bringing up his past life was hard for him. Did he miss being alive? What was it really like to be dead?

  She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to ask, although knowing that there was something after death, even if it was just a life of a ghost haunting a drive-in, was strangely comforting.

  “So, what did you think of the movie tonight?” he asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It was just way too goofy for my tastes. I can’t believe that I have to sit through another week and a half of this.”