Free Hide and Seek by Jack Ketchum

you hit it with a hammer. There would be no stopping her. Calling out would only make it worse. The sound of breaking glass had been so loud I half expected to see porch lights go on all along the street. But everything was still quiet. As she marched across the lawn and over a macadam driveway to the house next door.
     
    I looked back to her place. My hands were sweating on the steering wheel. I saw her father framed in the window. He had just come through the doorway and was standing there in perfect profile, staring down at the damage, at all the broken glass I imagined winking up at him from the floor.
     
    He turned slowly toward the window and looked out. He looked to the right and then to the left, and then he looked at me.
     
    I had to turn away.
     

     
    There was too much sadness there, too much guilt in me.
     
    I heard another crash. Louder than before. She had put the second rock through the right front window of the house next door.
     
    I didn't ask myself why. I knew why. There would be questions now, plenty of them. Her father would be answering some of them.
     
    There was shouting inside. A woman. A man. Casey was straightening up, recovering the follow-through. A slab of glass came drifting down off the top sill like the blade of a guillotine, hit the

bottom sill and shattered. The shouting sounded almost hysterical tome.
     
    I watched her walk back to the car. She took her time.
     
    There was a moment when I almost left her there I glanced back to her place and saw that her father was gone from the window. The porch lights went on. Soon he would be standing there. I leaned out to her.
     
    "Get in, goddamn you!"
     
    Sympathy can turn so quickly. Just add fear. Stir.
     
    By the time she was back in the car I was burning. Burning and scared.
    I had just enough control left not to gun the thing to get away from there. We slid away from the curb nice and slowly.
     
    See no evil, hear no evil.
     
    I wondered if anybody was buying it but me.
     
    I wanted to hit her.
     
    I wanted to slap her so bad my shoulders twitched. I wouldn't even look at her. I kept thinking how she'd involved me, how she'd done this to me. Not just to the people next door or to her parents for whatever idiot reason, but to me. I hadn't done anything. I hadn't
    asked for it. ,_, ..p
     
    All kinds of things went through my head. I felt like opening the door on her side and giving her a push. Never mind that the car was moving.
    Fuck her. If she could do that to me. Just fuck her.
     
    I drove two blocks under the most careful, most frantic control of my life, absolutely boiling inside, and then hit it hard and went looking for the highway.
     
    I hit sixty on the quiet streets of Dead River and pushed it up to seventy-five on the coast road. The road was not nearly good enough for seventy-five. Neither was the pickup. I realized what I was doing and pulled over.
     
    I cut back the engine, cut the lights. We sat there in the deep black of emptynighton the shoulder of a bad road with noonearound but the crickets and the frogs, and I had not lost an ounce of my delicious anger. I held out as long as I could, hoping she'd say something to make it all right again, knowing in my heart that there

was nothing she could say, not now. And then I groped for where I knew her shirt would be and pulled her over with both my hands and shook her like a rag doll, bounced her against the car seat while she whimpered to me to please stop and I told her to go to hell and felt the shirt tear along the sides of my big, happy fists.
     
    "You don't understand!"
     
    She was crying again but this time I didn't care. It didn't mean a thing. She couldn't touch me. I shook her until I felt the shirt go at the shoulder too and then that was no good to me so I slid my hand into her hair and shook her that way.
     
    "You sonovabitch! You don't understand!"
     
    Then suddenly I had a tearstained screeching little bomb on my hands.
     

I've told you she