Page 78 of Lights Out

She turned to look at me then, and the absence of her usual light drew me up short. No, she wasn’t exaggerating. Right now, I was staring into the eyes of a dangerous woman. And to think I’d been worried about being too fucked up for her. What had she said the first time I watched her through her computer? That Fred only liked me because cats were sociopaths, and he recognized one of his own? I should have picked up on the subtext then: Fred liked two people, Aly and me, making us two peas in a pod.

She blinked, and life returned to her expression, her lips tugging up as she shook her head at me. “I can feel you getting hard right now.”

I met her gaze, uncaring, embracing the fucked up for the first time in my life because at least I wasn’t alone anymore. “And I bet if I reached into your panties, you’d be soaked.”

She rolled her eyes and pulled free from my embrace, standing. “I never should have told you what you do to me.”

“Yeah, sure, let’s chalk it up to that.”

She glared at me.

I booped her nose and was just about to pull her back into my lap when Brad tried to scream through his gag.

Twenty minutes later, we’d changed into real clothes – thank fuck I’d washed and dried my jeans before we fell asleep – I’d dosed Brad with his own chloroform, slapped duct tape over his gag, and shoved him into Aly’s snowboard bag.

While she made us coffee for the road, I left to get my car, keeping the lights off as I backed into her driveway to avoid unwanted attention. It was two a.m. on a Saturday, which meant the risk of someone still being up was greater than on a weekday night. Aly’s front lights were off, and thankfully, her Christmas ones were on a timer, so they’d gone dark hours ago.

This section of her block didn’t have a streetlight, but I still wasn’t taking any chances. I had another mini-blackout waiting to go, and I triggered it right before opening my car door. As the neighborhood plunged into darkness, I popped the trunk and sprinted toward Aly’s front porch. She threw the door open when I reached it, and together, we hauled the Bag o’ Brad up and shuffle-carried him outside, dropping him into the trunk with little ceremony and quietly shutting him in. That done, Aly doubled back for the coffee while I climbed into the driver’s seat.

The neighborhood lights flashed back to life right after I eased out of the driveway, and Aly and I shared a relieved look over the fact that we’d pulled our escape off.

“Here’s your coffee,” she said, passing over a travel mug. “Black with a little sugar, right?”

I raised my brows at her as I took it. “Yeah.”

She flashed me a pleased grin and turned forward in her seat. “I pay attention, too.”

The woman was down for kinky sex, knew how I liked my coffee, and was more than willing to aid in the murder of a rapist. What had I done to get so lucky?

I returned my focus to the road as I pulled out of her sleepy neighborhood onto the busier throughway. There were still cars out and about, but the further we got from the city, the fewer we passed, and in less than an hour, we were the only vehicle on pitch-dark country roads that wound through snow-covered cornfields.

Aly and I barely talked during the drive, both of us stuck in our heads over what we were doing and how much worse this night could have gone if Brad succeeded in breaking in. What little we did speak revolved around me catching her up on everything I’d learned while she was still on shift last night.

The police and hospital had done an excellent job trying to protect the name of Brad’s latest victim, but I’d managed to find Macy Harold, a twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher who’d been in Chicago the night of the attack to celebrate a college friend’s bachelorette party. From what I’d pieced together, they’d run into Brad and his friends during their bar crawl, and at some point during the night, he’d honed in on Macy, buying her and her friends rounds of drinks even after they tried to decline them politely. One of the last things Macy remembered was finally accepting a shot because she didn’t want to seem rude, and less than an hour later, someone heard Brad assaulting her in a bathroom stall and kicked the door open.

Macy and her husband lived in a small cottage adjacent to her parents' house on a hundred-acre farm. The brother who had already gone after Brad lived in a similar place nearby. I hoped that even if Macy’s dad and husband failed to hurt Brad, her brother would step in and get the job done.

I relayed all this still using my regular voice, wondering if she recognized it. My time for hiding from her was drawing to anend, and I had a feeling that if we managed to pull this stunt off, one of the first discussions we’d have when we got back to her house would revolve around confirming my identity and digging into why I’d avoided admitting who I was for so long.

I was dreading that conversation. Aly had already forgiven me for so much, put up with so much. How could I possibly ask her to continue trusting me after she found out who my dad was and started questioning why the son of a notorious serial killer would cover himself in blood and film knife-wielding thirst traps? She’d probably assume I idolized him when nothing could be further from the truth.

I cut the car lights and turned down a dirt road that bisected two corn fields, driving until I reached a narrow band of trees that sprung up around a small brook. The satellite images I’d poured over online showed a narrow footpath leading through them to the main house. I’d hacked into Macy’s parents’ Wi-Fi and couldn’t find any evidence of security cameras, but even so, Aly would stay in the car while I dragged Brad onto their back porch, ready to gun it out of there if shit went sideways and I came sprinting back.

“Are you ready?” I asked, putting the car in park and turning toward Aly.

Her expression was troubled. “Yes?”

“Would it make you feel better if I told you that I’m so scared I feel like I might puke?”

She released a shaky breath. “Oh, good. I’ve been fighting the urge to hurl this entire drive.”

“We’ll have to hold it in,” I told her. “Wouldn’t want to leave behind gross little piles of DNA for someone to find.”

She huffed a laugh. “Let’s do it then.”

I popped the trunk, and we got out of the car.

Aly unzipped her snowboard bag but stopped after exposing Brad’s face, her eyes wide. Had she finally hit her limit? Did itjust now occur to her how fucked up this all was, and she was having second thoughts?

---