Free Scare Tactics by John Farris

get help!”
    Nealy put the gas can down and took a step to Gaynell’s side. She grabbed him around his waist and hung on for dear life.
    “Oh! My! God!” Gaynell said, her throat locking after each word.
    Nealy squinted at the red-haired boy coming up to the pike, and at the other boy, who was standing just outside the gates of the *Star-Light* Drive-In with his own rifle over one shoulder and a thumb hooked inside his belt.
    “She’s dead! She’s lying there dead! Somebody done stabbed her all over! Get help! Get help!”
    “Oh, shit,” Gaynell moaned. “Nealy, is he putting us on?”
    “I don’t think so. I might better go find out.”
    “Nealy—ohhh, Christ. I am not believing this! It can’t be her—!”
    “Shut up!” Nealy snapped. His color had gone bad. “Sit in the pickup. I’ll follow the boy, and he just better be telling the God’s own truth. If you see me in a little while down there by them gates waving my arms, you know to get on the CB and fetch the Sheriff out here.”
    “Oh, God!” Gaynell wailed, backing away from the Camaro as if it now represented everything that had ever gone wrong in her life. “Why didn’t I have the good sense to stay in Columbus?”

•    5    •
    The Set-Up
    L ieutenant Bob D. Grange of the Carver County Sheriff’s Department knocked on the boss’s door and then after five seconds had passed, he let himself in. The Sheriff was sitting behind his desk with his face in his hands. He was still wearing the fisherman’s vest, decorated with colorful little puffs of hand-tied flies, he’d had on when summoned to the office. Saturdays he always went fishing, so they’d known where to locate him in a hurry. He was listening, on tape, to what Nealy and Gaynell Bazemore had had to say an hour ago in Grange’s own office. The Sheriff neither moved nor spoke to acknowledge the Lieutenant’s presence.
    When the tape was finished, he turned off the machine and looked abstractedly out the windows at the market-day traffic on West Fourth Street in the heart of the Carverstown business district. Sheriff John Stone was a tall man with bright blue eyes and an unusually large, leonine head that made his frame seem insubstantial.
    “Bob,” he said, “all my life I’ve tried to keep that little girl out of trouble. I tried my best, and I just don’t understand how this could have happened.”
    “You know how sorry I am.”
    Still staring out the window, Stone reached into a desk drawer and fumbled for a small photo album. He held it in his lap and thumbed through the mylar photo protectors until he came to a snapshot of a woman with a head not unlike his own, a shoulder-length mane of blond hair and piercing eyes.
    “Caddie and me never got along so good when we were kids. But I swore to her on her deathbed I’d look after Taryn.”
    “I know you done your best.”
    “I don’t think she was ever a bad girl, even though she didn’t show good judgment when it come to picking her friends. Like that woman she was renting from down there at the trailer park.”
    “The one that was busted for hooking two years ago in Chattanooga?”
    “When Taryn turned eighteen, there wasn’t much more I could do. She would have been just nineteen,, come October.” Stone swiveled his chair away from the window, looked up at Grange. Two deep brackets on either side of his mouth lengthened his face, saddened it. “What all have you got?”
    “M.E.’s preliminary report just come over.”
    “Sexual assault?”
    “Don’t appear to have been rape.”
    “What else?”
    “Taryn was—” Grange lowered his voice, as if that would make the brutal facts easier to bear. “Well, there was just a multitude of stab wounds. Any one of at least a dozen could’ve been fatal to her. Also she was beaten. Stomped hard enough to break some bones.”
    Sheriff John Stone’s eyes went out of focus and he lowered his large head in an attitude of pain and sorrow.
    “Have the body taken