Painted Walls by Megan Mitcham

Author:Megan Mitcham
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781941899151
Publisher: Megan Mitcham
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

When they crossed the Alabama state line Keen notched fifteen miles per hour out of his speed. From experience, he knew all the state troopers from Alabama to Louisiana didn’t play around. The last thing they needed was to suspend progress for an hour getting a ticket or getting hauled to jail for the creepy contents of his trunk. The hysterical woman next to him wouldn’t help either. Though she’d downgraded to overly dramatic with moments of frenzy, his eardrums still rang from the five and a half hours it had taken to get out of Virginia. Yep, he’d driven that fast.

The roar of the wind whipping past the glass turned to a constant whisper. The scream of the engine turned to a low whine. The tension in the small car crackled.

“What, did the hounds of hell suddenly stop chasing us?”

“Nope. They just fell back in preparation for the kill,” he shot back in a saccharine sweet tone.

“Now who’s being dramatic?”

“You’ve tried yelling, pleading, and bitching. Want to give the silent treatment a whirl?”

Her eyes launched grenades at him. He didn’t look, but he felt their weighty impact.

“Will it make you turn around and take me back?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll try something else. Thank you.”

“Like what, hanging your head out the window, flailing your arms, and screaming, ‘Help me’?”

“I’d have tried it already, if you didn’t have the child safety locks on the windows and doors.”

“I know.”

He merged into the right lane in preparation for twenty miles of road work. “Damn.”

A sinister giggle bubbled up from Ava’s side of the car.

“If you bang on the windows and act like I’ve kidnapped you, I’ll be forced to put you out of my misery and into yours.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Keen slid his gaze to hers. “It means we’ll talk about the scars on your lower abdomen.”

Her mouth opened, gaped for a beat, and then closed without a sound. The silence held through the hills of northern Alabama and into the flat pines of middle Mississippi. Typically, when people rode in a car for a long period of time their shifting and fidgeting took on a beat all its own. Tapping of fingernails. Strumming of restless fingers. Time keeping of a foot. Shifting of legs. Stretching of a muscle here and there. Hums of entertainment. Huffs of boredom. Pulsating music.

Inside the stifled car there was no beat. Neither occupant moved more than what was necessary to breathe.

Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the hub city. Keen had traveled to it and through it a great deal when he was in law school in Oxford. He and his buddies would head down to New Orleans for the weekend to gamble and drink the nights away. But a time or two they got distracted in Hattiesburg on the way to the big easy by the local Southern beauties and a particularly chill bar known as Mahogany.

After Keen whipped the car into a parking space outside The Hog, as it was also known, he let out a sigh. It was still here, still open for business.

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