DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels by Billie Sue Mosiman Page B

pimples and pockmarks. I was figuring out that bad people looked like the rest of us most of the time. That wasn’t fair. You’d never be able to tell one from the other. You’d never know when to be afraid.
    The boy we left in the motel room had a hole in his belly and his hands over it. He was moaning, but not very loud. Blood came from between his fingers and dripped around them back onto his dark shirt. I couldn’t see his eyes, his face was turned to the wall and his knees were drawn up.
    I thought Heddy and Crow would help him, but they wanted us out of there. Away from there. Someone would have come to investigate the sound of the gunshot. They didn’t have time to check on the man who had probably been about to shoot them anyway. That’s what they said when I asked them. That’s what they told me.
    “ You don’t stop to call an ambulance for a guy who would have shot you dead,” Crow said. “Let’s get our priorities straight, kid.”
    Heddy drove too fast. The car felt like it was a rocket ship roaring down the road. She passed every car in sight while Crow talked and talked and talked. He was a tape machine, turned on to fast forward. Daddy talked some more too, but no one listened to him, like he was a turned off machine or he was speaking behind a screen or something.
    I thought we were going to have a wreck, Heddy drove so fast.
    And then we did.

    #

    ONE moment she had it under control. The next moment she had hit a deep puddle of water standing on the highway from a shower earlier in the evening, and the car was hydroplaning across the center dividing line toward an oncoming car.
    Heddy screamed, over-compensated on the wheel, hit the brakes, and the Riviera fishtailed despite the new, supposedly safer brake system. The oncoming vehicle, an old Volkswagen bus, nicked the rear panel of the Riviera and both of the cars caromed off the pavement and back onto it again. Two other cars, each coming from opposite directions, slammed on brakes, but entered the maelstrom nonetheless.
    For several moments the occupants of the Riviera rode a rollercoaster ride, taking jolts that threw them against the car doors, the dash, the wheel, and even the roof of the car. Heddy had both feet on the brake, had it stomped clear down to the floor, her teeth clamped shut and grinding, her mind going blank, all time telescoping into a few infinitesimal moments.
    Rending metal screamed like train wheels braking on hot rails and cracking safety glass spidered, then popped. The twin air bags in the front seat exploded with a loud whooshing sound of air, covering and pressing both Heddy and Jay back into their bucket seats, burning their faces, scaring the life out of them.
    Seconds later one of the two air bags in the back seat exploded into Crow’s face, knocking him sideways into the door. His head banged against the window so hard he was knocked out instantly. Emily was thrown to the floorboard and Carrie was flung across the seat lengthwise, her head landing against the inflated air bag.
    Finally, after what seemed an interminable length of time, all the motion stopped and the car died.
    It was a five-car pile-up. From Heddy’s vantage point it seemed to her the driver of the Volkswagen was dead. A matron with steel silver hair slumped over the steering wheel with her skull cracked on the windshield. Blood ran from the wound to cover her face.
    People in the remaining three cars were in various conditions from dead (a teen male driver of an older model Mitsubishi Galant), to slightly injured (his passenger, a young girl who looked to have suffered mere bruises where the seatbelt held her in position during the crash.) In the third car, a white Chevrolet Caprice, the driver and passenger, two men, seemed shaken but unharmed. The front of their car had bumper damage and the hood was crimped, but otherwise they had come into the wreck at a slower rate of speed and had been able to avoid the worst of it.
    Cars stopped, halted