Alex Kava Bundle - Alex Kava [646]
Before he could catch himself he was falling, knocking into Kevin and bringing him down, too. He slammed his shoulder into a tree trunk and felt his elbow scrape against the bark. Kevin went facedown. Corey could hear the marshy slosh underneath the pine needles. Immediately his jeans were soaked. And geez! It smelled bad, like rotting garbage.
Suddenly Corey jumped up, quickly forgetting any pain. He saw worms crawling up his pant legs, fat little worms. He brushed and hit at them. Kevin watched until he saw them on his arm, then Kevin was back up on his feet, too, doing a dance to get them off.
They were so frantic getting the worms off that it took them a few minutes before they looked to see what had tripped them. Corey glanced back first. It looked like a pile of debris, dirty black rags covered with mud and leaves. There was a lot of household crap left over from Hurricane Ivan that had gotten caught up in the trees and brush.
“What the hell is that?” Kevin said, grabbing Corey’s arm.
“What’s going on?” Ethan shoved his way through some branches. “I told you boys—” He stopped when he saw the pile that had tripped them. “Jesus Christ! Is that a dead body?”
“Is it?” Corey asked. And now he could see what was left of a face under a moving swarm of white and brown worms.
“Wow! That is so gross,” Corey heard Kevin say, and they both moved in for a closer look. He had never seen a dead body before except on TV or in Newsweek. He wondered if they’d be able to see any of the guts.
“Get away from there, boys,” Ethan told them, but then he started gagging and wretching.
Kevin looked over at Corey. This time he rolled his eyes. “You’re right. He is a dweeb.”
CHAPTER 48
Our Lady of Sorrow High School
Omaha, Nebraska
Nick Morrelli slammed the door of the rented Oldsmobile, taking out his anger on the car when he really wanted to smack some sense into Tony. It was bad enough that he and Jill had to stay at separate places while they were in town. She had to stay at her mother’s while he stayed at Christine’s. It was ridiculous. They were adults, not a couple of teenagers. What made it worse was that’s how Jill liked it. She seemed to prefer spending time with her mother and her girlfriends, which Nick couldn’t really complain about. He was secretly grateful that they hadn’t included him in dress shopping and cake tasting. But their first full week of vacation together that was supposed to include some wedding planning had turned into mega-planning with little vacation.
Then the one night they managed to have together—this after cooking up the lame excuse that they needed to check out the downtown Embassy Suites for their out-of-town wedding guests—even that ended up being interrupted. It was getting a little frustrating, to say the least.
This morning when he rolled over to answer his cell phone while in that nice warm, king-size bed with Jill curved up next to him only to hear Tony’s frantic voice, he wanted to tell his old buddy to screw off. He wanted to remind him that he had warned him this would happen. What did he expect? He couldn’t just fuck around with police detectives even if he did supposedly have God on his side.
But instead, he had agreed to meet Tony at the school in an hour, instructing him to tell the detectives to do the same while he half crawled, half fell out of the comfy hotel bed.
“Tell them that unless they have a warrant for your arrest, you shouldn’t need to go down to the police station,” Nick had told Tony. “They want to talk to you, then they can come to you.”
He hadn’t realized he was yelling until Jill had rolled over and thrown a pillow at him. At the time it didn’t stop him. He had simply readjusted his cell phone between his chin and shoulder while he put on his other shoe.
Damn it!
He wished he had time to stop at Christine’s and change into something other than blue jeans and Nikes. But it was more important that he get there early, beat the cops in case he still had to drill it into Tony’s thick skull that he was skating on thin ice. Whatever it was Tony thought he