Free The Depth of Darkness (Mitch Tanner #1) by L.T. Ryan

sounded like they came from a hundred miles away. Or a few
feet through the water. It was all the same to her.
    The guy turned and stuck the keys into the
side of the building. He leaned forward into what she supposed was
a closet of some kind.
    Along the outside of the building?
    It made no sense to her, but she had to trust
what her eyes were seeing. Besides, she’d never walked along the
outside of the entire school. He returned a moment later, holding a
brown bag. Not like a trash bag, but something else. He began
walking in their direction, his gaze fixed solely on her.
    Debby said, “Come on, Beans.” She didn’t wait
to see if he followed along. The tone of her voice should have told
him that she meant business.
    One of the boys from her class ran up to her
and blocked her path. His name was Peter. His red hair and freckles
always made her think of a pepperoni pizza. Strange? Yes, she
admitted that. What was stranger was she couldn’t look at him for
long, otherwise she’d get hungry. When she tried to go around him,
he held out his arms and stopped her.
    “Let me alone, Peter,” she yelled.
    He stepped to the side so that he was in
front of her again. “Go back to your little black boyfriend,
dweeb.”
    She threw her arms forward and pushed him
back. Peter’s cheeks turned as red as the hair on his head.
    “I ought to kick your little freak butt.”
Peter also rode the same bus as her. Everybody copied the
red-haired boy.
    She shrieked and bulldozed her way past him.
By this point, Ms. Suarez had started toward her to see what in
God’s name was going on.
    “What in God’s name is going on?” Ms. Suarez
said.
    “She hit me,” Peter said. A few other kids
added their two cents to confirm this.
    “Go away,” Debby said to him. Then she
grabbed Ms. Suarez’s hand and started to pull. “There’s a—”
    “What are you doing, Debby?” Ms. Suarez freed
herself from the child’s grasp and placed her hands on her hips.
Her thin eyebrows angled downward in the middle. She tilted her
head to the side and leaned over a bit. “Are you okay?”
    “There’s a strange man on the side of the
building, and he—”
    Ms. Suarez straightened up. Her tone went
from caring to fast and serious. “What does he look like?”
    “Old.”
    “What’s he wearing?”
    “A blue suit.”
    “Like Principal Bennett wears?”
    “No, like a trash man.”
    “What color is his hair?”
    “He has none.”
    Her expression eased up and her voice
relaxed. “That sounds like our new janitor.”
    “What happened to the old janitor?”
    Ms. Suarez shrugged. “He stopped showing
up.”
    Debby pulled away from Ms. Suarez and looked
toward Beans, the bench and the gate. The gate swung open. She
screamed. The man was coming for her.
    Ms. Suarez said, “Wait here,” and she started
walking toward the open gate.
    At that moment the bald headed man who had
seemingly been stalking Lil’ Debby Walker throughout the day burst
into the recess yard with a brown burlap sack. He pulled a rifle
from the bag and aimed it in the direction of Ms. Suarez.
    “Don’t move, bitch,” he said.
    It caught the teacher off guard. She had
picked her pace up to a run when the guy appeared, and now in the
presence of the rifle she tried to turn around. Her feet didn’t
cooperate with the rest of her body. At one point Ms. Suarez’s body
was parallel to the ground and three feet in the air. She hit the
ground with a thud and made a painful gasping sound.
    Debby looked from Ms. Suarez on the ground to
where the man had been standing. He wasn’t there. She shifted her
gaze to the left. The man reached for Beans and yanked him off of
the bench. Debby tried to scream. She couldn’t. Neither could
Beans. So she did the next best thing. She started running after
the man who had Beans hanging over his shoulder.

Chapter
13
    Sam and I sat in Huff’s office, in the little
seats, while he lorded over us from his deluxe office chair. We
looked at copies