Devil’s Wake Read Online Free Page B

clicked on the faded linoleum as he trailed Terry into the kitchen. Terry realized he was hungry, but when he lifted the pot’s lid, he clamped it down again fast. Ugh.
    Piranha sank into his usual silence, grabbing a soda out of the fridge, so Terry was alone with the story and didn’t feel like making jokes. “We need help putting the fish away,” Terry said instead.
    The freezer was an industrial-size Master-Bilt, deep enough to hide Darius’s Ninja. That had been fun. After ten minutes of stacking and packing in the freezer while Hipshot shadowed them, Terry finally said, “Hope Vern’s gonna be okay.”
    “What happened to Vern?” Sonia said, only halfway interested. That was her shtick, really. Chronic disinterest. She actually had a black sweatshirt with BLASÉ emblazoned in white letters.
    So he told them. All work ceased. Even Sonia seemed impressed.
    “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” they kept saying. “You have got to be kidding me!”
    “You saw a cop get nailed by a driver on Pike Street?” Darius said. He sounded far more impressed than horrified. “A real cop?”
    “Yeah, after the dude chomped Vern’s arm,” Terry said, because Darius seemed to have missed the point. “It’s all over the news. Not just in Seattle. Portland too. Something’s up.”
    After the fish were stacked and their gloves were put away, they all trudged to the counselors’ bunkhouse. Technically, Sonia had a nearby cabin to herself, but she hung out with them as late as she could get away with it. Somehow Terry didn’t think Vern would be swinging by with his flashlight tonight to make sure, as he put it, nobody got any “foolish ideas.”
    Darius was Evel Knievel on the asphalt, but a bust in the kitchen.He seemed to think that monosodium glutamate could magically transform him into Wolfgang Puck. Piranha took a tentative sip from the wooden spoon and then scowled. “Aw, hell, no.”
    “Like you could do better,” Darius said.
    “I do better on a regular basis,” Piranha said. “I do better asleep.”
    “You know it,” Sonia said, and gave Piranha that sly, heavy-lidded look that made it obvious that they’d engineered a few hours of privacy. Terry wondered what Sonia would think of the calls to girls back home in SeaTac that Piranha had made on the ferry.
    Terry didn’t bother tasting the stew. Instead, he warmed up enough leftover pasta for everyone and broke out the playing cards. They listened to music while Piranha dealt, and they bet pennies on cards that seemed cold for everyone. Nobody got a hand worth a damn, just hammers and deuces until just about yawning time, when Darius dealt Sonia a royal flush, and she won the entire pot, about enough to buy a gallon of gas.
    Sonia brayed laughter and slapped her palm on the table. Sometimes Sonia seemed kind of flat-faced and skinny, but in victory she was oddly attractive. “Thanks for the change, boys. It’s been a slice,” she said, and sashayed across the room while all of them watched. Except Piranha.
    Terry saw her glance back at Piranha. That look always came sooner or later, but Piranha’s eyes remained on the table, ignoring her message. That boy was beyond cool—he was cold. Too skinny or not, if Sonia had given Terry the are-you-coming-or-not look, Terry would have beaten her to the door.
    Terry flicked on the ancient TV, bracing himself. Vern was too cheap to spring for satellite, so the best he could get was the local news on a fuzzy UHF station. Footage from the Pike Place Market, of course. The newscaster said two residents had died that afternoon, which was a surprise to Terry. He’d missed the details about who had died besides the rabid cop he’d seen hit by a car, hearing only “officialsblaming the melee on an unknown form of methamphetamine Officer Norgren and others might have ingested.”
    Officer Norgren. So, the dead cop had a name. A chart came up on the screen: Two dead, forty-six wounded in Seattle. Three dead,