Phantom Prey Read Free

walked back to the dressing closet and took out the short black leather jacket, pulled it on: the jacket gave her shoulders, and a stance. Two-inch black heels gave her height. Ready now.
    “The knife?” Loren asked.
    “Here.” She touched the breast pocket on the jacket; could feel it in there, new from Target, hard black plastic and soft gray steel, sharpened to a razor’s edge.
    “Then—let’s go.” Loren smiled, teeth flashing, his face a white oval above his dark clothing, and Fairy reached out, took his hand, and they went.
    Loren was the one who’d found Frances’s killers; together they’d scoured her laptop, her photographs—thousands of them, taken with a cell phone and a point-and-shoot Nikon, some of them stored electronically, but hundreds of them printed out, stacked in baskets, stuck to the front of her refrigerator, piled in drawers: a record of her life, from which the killers emerged.
    There were three: “I can actually feel her hand on their shoulders,” he told her. “These are the people who did it.”
    The three were scattered through the stacks of photos, but they were all together in one of them. The photo had been taken at a party of some kind, the three people peering at the camera, laughing.
    “You’re sure?” Fairy asked.
    “Never more. Blood on their hands, missus,” he said.
    “I want them,” she said
    “Revenge,” he said. He smacked his lips. “It’s so sweet; revenge tastes like orange juice and champagne.”
    Fairy laughed at the metaphor and said, “Everything with you goes back to the senses, doesn’t it? Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell . . .”
    “That’s all there is, missus. . . .”
    They bought a car to hunt from—bought it at a roadside person-to -person sales spot, along Highway 36. Gave the seller an envelope full of cash, drove away in the car, an aging Honda Prelude. Never registered the change, never bought insurance; kept it out of sight.
    They began to scout, to make schedules, to watch. Early on, it became apparent that the bartender was at the center of the plot—the fulcrum of Frances’s Goth world. He took in people, places, events, and plans, and passed them on. He knew what was happening, knew the history.
    Fairy talked to him three times: once on the sidewalk, when he passed her, looking her over, and she passed by and then turned and called, “Excuse me, are you Mr. Ford?”
    He walked back to her and grinned, shoulders up, hands tucked in his jeans pockets. A charmer. “Yeah. Have I seen you around?”
    “I was over at the A1 a few weeks ago with Frances Austin,” Fairy said. “Did you hear about her?”
    “I did. There’s been a lot of talk.”
    “I can’t imagine what happened,” Fairy said, shaking her head. “Some people say drugs, some people say she must have had a secret lover.”
    “She used to smoke a little, I know that,” Ford said. “But . . . I’m not sure she even had her own dealer. She didn’t smoke that much. I can’t believe it was drugs. Must’ve been something else.”
    “The police think . . . I don’t know. Because she was one of us”— Fairy patted her black blouse—“that maybe somebody sent her to the other side, to see . . . what would happen.”
    “Well, that’s scary,” Ford said. “What’s your name?”
    She made up the name on the spot: “Mary. Janson. Mary Janson.” They shook hands. “Some of the people have tried to get in touch with her. On the other side.”
    Ford’s eyebrows went up, and he smiled. “No luck, huh?”
    “You don’t believe?”
    “Oh, you know. I used to, I guess. Used to talk about it, anyway. With me, it’s more of a hang-out thing,” he said. He looked away. “I used to listen to the people talk about . . . you know. Life, death, crossing over. It’s interesting, but, I don’t know. Too depressing, if you do it for a long time.”
    Fairy shook her head again, the black hair swirling around her shoulders: “It bothers me so much. If I could