Kill Her Again

Начало книги

The little girl was about to die.

She knew this instinctively, even though the man in the red baseball cap had never uttered so much as a word to her. It was as if she had crawled up inside his brain and could read his innermost thoughts.

Thoughts of darkness. And dead things.

Lots of dead things.

The little girl wasn’t a stranger to death herself. She’d seen it firsthand, at six years old, when Mr. Stinky got hit by a bus. A lot of the details were hazy now, but she remembered she was playing hopscotch with Suzie at the time, Mr. Stinky running circles around them on the driveway, barking like crazy.

Then, for some reason, he had decided to dart out into the street. Saw a cat or something. And the city bus that usually came down their block at nine o’clock every morning came late that day, showing up out of nowhere as if it had been waiting for Mr. Stinky to make his move.

The little girl had been waiting, too, waiting for Suzie to finish her turn, watching her friend skip from square to square, when she heard the roar of the bus and looked up to see its front bumper smack Mr. Stinky right in the head. It knocked him into the air like one of her old stuffed animals, his legs flopping as he did a kind of slow-motion somersault, then landed on the blacktop.

Читать дальше →