The
one good thing about Samuel Leadhead’s
murder is that by the time he died, he had no
nerves left. That’s what the police told
Cheryl Kiss and her mother the night they were
brought in for questioning. They said it was
the one good thing.
The point is your little friend wouldn’t
of suffered as much as you would of thought
from lookin’ at him,” the policeman
with the missing finger finally blurted at Cheryl
in the dark police corridor. “Second degree
he would of really known about. Second degree
would of really got him hoppin’. But third
degree burns’ll strip a man’s nerves
right back to their stumps.”
The policeman said you had to look
on the bright side.
The policeman said you sure you’re
all right?
The policeman said look sharp Cheryl
Kiss, if the wind changes your face’ll stay
like that forever.
Cheryl thought about the bright
side as she sat with her knees to her chest in
the dark in her bedroom. Over the racket outside
the door, she could hear her mother still screaming
from the laundry and Zeus yapping his head off,
uselessly strapped to the iron spine of the clothes
hoist.
It was only a matter of time until
the whole story ran full circle.
Cheryl pulled her Personal Pocket
Journal out of her school bag.
“I, Cheryl Kiss,” she
wrote. “I, Cheryl Kiss write this only half
a mile from the river where Samuel Leadhead was
burned alive. I, Cheryl Kiss write these words,
tell this story before it’s too late and
I am also snatched.”
Cheryl paused. She peered through
the gloom at the page and used the biro’s
savage tip to stab it to shreds.
It was typical really.
Minutes, maybe only seconds left
to live, and she had writer’s block.
Cheryl had no idea whether the distance
between her bedroom and Samuel’s pyre down
by Advantage Creek was really half a mile She’d
been raised on the metric system. And snatched?
What sort of bull crap word was snatched?
Minutes, maybe only seconds to live,
and Cheryl Kiss was still as pointless as ever.
Whatever happened next she deserved.
Whatever happened next she was asking
for.
What was going to happen next?
“Not the Pulitzer Prize,”
she said aloud “I can tell you that for
free.”
“Pull it’s a what?”
Zeus barked back from the clothes line. He still
couldn’t believe the sheer cheek of the
invader. The sheer inevitability of the danger
that had crunch crunched its way straight past
him.
Burning skin.
Burning hair.
If Samuel Leadhead had no nerves
left to feel the pain why had he screamed so long
and high? Just for the fun of it?
Cheryl didn’t have all the
answers. Cheryl knew only as much as she knew.
Evidence was thin on the ground for the lonely
detective, but the things Cheryl’s mother
had suggested were unthinkable.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,”
she finally called. “There’s no need
to have a coronary, I’m coming out, all
right.”
Samuel Leadhead’s killer stopped
pounding on her bedroom door and waited |
