Free Let Him In (Let Him Trilogy) by Sharon Davis

killers—STAT.
    An hour later, Lacey pulled into the Walmart Supercenter parking lot with a Phyllis Diller voice and Arnold Schwarzenegger thighs as a result of screaming obscenities at the scooter while Fred Flintstone ing it up the mountainous terrain in between Hermit and Woodstock. The damn thing had stalled twice, both times dead center of roller coaster-like hills. The second time she actually got flipped off by Farmer Ted as he passed by on his sputtering farm tractor. 
    No wonder The Beave had wanted to get rid of it.
    As she entered the store, an arctic blast of conditioned air thick with the scent of rotisserie chicken welcomed Lacey with a one-two punch that left her head aching and her stomach growling. “Welcome to Walmart,” chimed the door greeter, who was almost as round as he was tall. He sported a novelty headband with dark blue stars atop the two long, glittering silver wires that shot out of the base.
    “Thrilled to be here,” she mumbled, storming past him. When the deli came into view she stopped abruptly, shoe sole’s squeaking. She licked her lips as her hungry eyes devoured the hot case filled with potato wedges, General Tso’s, corn dogs, macaroni and cheese and all sorts of other scrumptious looking things that were not Ramen noodles. 
    “Help you?” asked the hair-net clad female leaning against the backside of the hot case. Her slack jaw and glazed eyes made her look like a severely doped up mental patient—either that or a zombie. It was a close call.
    “Not unless you’re giving the crap away,” Lacey replied, eliciting a snicker from the lanky, orange-haired boy stocking the produce section across from the deli/bakery. She scowled at him. “What are you laughing at?”
    “My life,” he exhaled as he tossed another bag of onions on to the teetering pile in front of him. 
    Lacey felt the corner of her mouth lift—misery really did love company. She ducked into the book aisle as a wrinkly, blue-haired demon on a motorized cart zipped by and was almost run over by a Britney Spears look-a-like in Happy Bunny pajamas pushing a cart overflowing with Pop-Tarts, diapers and children. 
    “Just Say No doesn’t only apply to drugs,”  Lacey told the young girl who didn’t seem to notice the wails coming from the baby strapped inside the carrier seat attached to the cart’s front basket.
    “Screw you,” she said, yawning as she picked up a copy of Seventeen magazine while the toddler inside the cart tried to gnaw open a box of cereal.
    “Sorry, I don’t swing that way...but you probably should more often.”
    The girl mumbled something under her breath as she threw the magazine back on the shelf and then sped off like a race car driver at the sight of a green flag.
    Lacey leaped over the flailing arm of the Superman-channeling boy stretched out on the bottom of the cart and then knelt in front of the row of Stephen King novels. After a quick sweep she found what she was looking for: a copy of Pet Sematary , which she’d started reading a month ago at a different Walmart in a different town.
    After grabbing a deck of cards, two coloring books and a  box of crayons from the toy section, Lacey went to the pet aisle, picking out three toys for Casper before becoming lucky number thirteen in the Express Checkout. For some reason, the snow-white hair of the elderly man standing in front of her made Lacey think of Ghost Boy. Scowling, she focused on the heaping pile of extra-saucy BBQ chunks in the deli thirty feet away from her, exorcising GB quicker than Peter, Ray, Winston and Egon ever could. The doped up mental patient zombie was still leaning against the hot case, and this time it looked like she was drooling.
    Lacey felt on the verge of drooling herself as she remembered the Burger King right down the street. The smile that had begun to creep onto her lips at the thought of sinking her teeth into a juicy Whopper with melted cheese vanished as her wandering eyes landed on an