Riley Thorn and the Dead Guy Next Door - Lucy Score

1

10:02 p.m., Saturday, July 4

The dead talked to Riley Thorn in her dreams. The living inconveniently telegraphed their secrets to her over grocery conveyor belts and in crowded restaurants.

She did her best to ignore them all.

In fact, right now, the only thing she was talking to was her breasts.

“Heading south on 83 toward the bridge. We’ve got company,” she said through gritted teeth.

“Oh my God. She’s lost it. She’s talking to her tits,” one of her backseat passengers whined.

“I talk to mine all the time. Don’t you?” another announced.

“I do not know if I speak to any body part,” the only man in the vehicle mused. “Perhaps I should try it.”

“You people are not normal,” complained the final backseat tagalong.

Ha. Normal.

Normal had been Riley’s rebellion against a patchouli-scented, home-grown vegetable-selling, seance-attending childhood. Normal was her middle name. Well, not technically. Her legal middle name was the worst possible middle name in the history of middle names. She’d change it if it didn’t involve actually writing it down on paperwork and handing it to another human being.

Normal was what she longed for now as she jammed her foot down on the accelerator. The stolen pickup truck lumbered up to speed while Ram Jam howled “Black Betty” at full volume.

Her front-seat passenger slapped fresh magazines into her guns.

“It looks like the cops,” Riley reported, wondering if she should pull over or if it would be the last mistake she’d ever make. Red and blue lights flashed on in her rearview mirror. “You can’t shoot at cops!”

There was a loud bang, and one of her backseat passengers shrieked. “They’re shooting at us! Bad cops!”

Just then the night sky lit up to the right.

“They’re not shooting at us,” Riley insisted over the music. Fireworks exploded to their right as City Island’s pyrotechnics crew went balls to the Fourth-of-July-wall. There was a baseball stadium full of families enjoying both the nation’s favorite pastime and birthday, completely unaware that the bad guys were closing in on a group of—what had been until last week—relatively normal citizens.

She desperately wished she could have been one of them. Innocent. Happy. Her only concern the inflated prices at the beer stand. But no. She’d made one stupid mistake, one seemingly innocent decision, and now she was going to end up in the Susquehanna River in a stolen truck full of weirdos.

The unmarked sedan behind her veered into the left lane, and she knew exactly what the occupants were going to do. It blared into her mind in high definition.

“Everybody get down!” she shouted and slammed on the brakes.

All five of her passengers hit the deck just before a hail of bullets took out the windows on the driver’s side.

“Pretty sure they’re shooting at us now,” one of the smartasses pointed out.

“You think?” Riley yelled back.

Glass rained down, and the smell of burning rubber assailed her nostrils.

“We’re taking fire,” Riley yelled in the vicinity of her breasts. If anyone was talking back, she couldn’t hear them. Not over the fireworks or the screaming or the rock song wailing at full blast on the radio with the broken volume knob.

She peeked over the wheel. Black tire tracks led up to the car sitting sideways across two of the bridge’s three southbound lanes. Two men stood in front of the car, legs braced, guns drawn. She couldn’t go back. There was only one way to get past gun-toting bad guys barricading the road to freedom. She could only hope the truck’s massive engine block would protect them enough to make it work.

“Everybody hang on,” she said grimly as she revved the engine. A shower of golden sparkles rained down from the sky above, drifting toward the inky black of the river.

“What’s the plan?” her front-seat passenger asked, calmly chambering rounds in both guns.

“I’m gonna ram them.”

Step one. Accelerate to thirty miles per hour.

“I blame you, Nick Santiago,” she yelled to her breasts again and mashed the gas pedal to the floor. She couldn’t tell which pops and booms were fireworks and which were bullets peppering the front of the truck.

“Ohhhhhhmmmmmmm,” hummed the large black man wedged into the back seat in the midst of three shell-shocked waitresses.

“What the hell is Beefcake doing?”

“How should I know? Maybe we should hum with him?”

Riley blocked out the back seat ohms.

Step two. Aim for the center of the front wheel.

Her passengers abandoned their ohm and joined together in a chorus of screams and regrets. Bits and pieces from each of their lives flashed before Riley’s eyes. She had