Free The Bird Eater by Ania Ahlborn

the top of the stairs trying to fight those birds off still fresh in his mind. But before he could decide on whether he wanted to dig around the shed in the dead of night, he saw something shift just beyond Edie’s flowering rosemary.
    It was the weird kid who had slammed his hands against the diner window—the same one who had flapped his hands like an avian shadow puppet and flashed an impish grin.
    “Hey,” Aaron blinked at the boy through the window. “Hey!” He rapped on the glass despite the kid staring right at him.
    The boy wasn’t fazed. He simply gave Aaron a sour smile and turned away, ducking into the trees.

Five
    The camcorder’s picture jostled as Aaron crouched on the gravel driveway, pointing the lens at his front driver’s-side tire. There was a slash in the rubber the size of a knife blade.
    “See that?” he asked the camera, turning the lens on himself. “Cooper warned me about psycho killers, but not about bastard kids with butterfly knives.”
    He swept the camera along the tree line, searching for the culprit among the leaves. A few seconds later, he was sliding the recorder onto the roof of his Tercel and looking back at the tire. The last time he’d caught a flat, he’d bolted on the donut tire and driven it to a local shop—one that had failed to stick the spare back in his trunk. He had meant to call them about it for weeks, but after a month had passed in an alcohol-induced haze, he had lost his opportunity to complain. Of course, he hadn’t bothered to replace the stupid thing with another, thinking, What are the odds? Now, the odds were staring him right in the face. Murphy’s law. As far as Aaron was concerned, Murphy was a grade-A dick.
    He fished his cell phone out of his pocket and stared at it as his brain tripped over itself, struggling to remember the name of the mechanic’s shop he’d seen in town, the one Eric had mentioned was owned by Cheri’s husband. Free tire rotation with every oil change. “Not like it matters,” he muttered, dialing 411, glaring at the flat while waiting for the call to connect. He could call the mechanic’s shop all he wanted, but unless he had some magical way of teleporting the Tercel from here to there, he was going to need a tow.
    As odds would have it, the tow truck that arrived was marked VAUGHN MECHANICAL across the front doors. The truck crunched up the driveway; its massive tow hitch rising from where the truck bed should have been, swinging and clanging behind the vehicle like a broken arm. Aaron knew it was irrational, but the sight of that massive grille momentarily gutted him. For a split second, all he could see was that grille screaming toward him; he could hear the screech of rubber, the explosion of safety glass, could smell the sharp odor of gasoline mingling with the scent of rain. He pulled himself out of that flash of nightmare when he noticed the driver sitting in the truck for what seemed like longer than necessary, but the man eventually ambled out of the dually, pulling the hem of a too-short T-shirt down over his potbelly—a shirt that sported a cartoon drawing of a giant fish, the tagline beneath it reading: Quit staring at my bass.
    Aaron met the guy in the driveway while shielding his eyes from the glare of the sun. “Hi,” he greeted, the driver already inspecting the slashed tire on the Tercel. “Thanks for coming out,” Aaron continued. “I know it’s out of the way.”
    The guy looked up from the tire, allowed his gaze to linger on Aaron for an awkwardly long moment, then glanced to the house in the background with a dubious expression. “That’s okay,” he said after a beat. “Just doin’ my job.” He gave Aaron another look, bushy eyebrows furrowed across the ridge of his eyes like a fuzzy shelf. “You the Holbrook kid?” he asked.
    Aaron couldn’t help but blink in surprise.
    “Yes?” The reply came out as a question, Aaron not sure whether or not being “the Holbrook kid” was a good