“That’s not even the best part,” Richie added. He nodded at Dwayne and said, “Tell ‘em.”
“It’s a girl and she’s fuckin’ hot. She’s dressed like one of those high-class hookers like that chick in that movie. The one with that guy and she’s got those boots?”
Richie turned back to face me again, aiming his unsettling grin in my direction as he said, “I bet. Hey, guess what? We’re gonna see some titties! UNGH!”
Richie punctuated the end of his comment with a groin-thrust that was particularly un-Batman. Dwayne slowly shook his head and then finally he began to elaborate, telling me how there was this patch of woods by his house that he liked to explore and earlier that day, he was out there with his pellet-gun, hunting squirrels.
That’s when he found the dead body of a woman who looked to be between 25 and 30 years-old (“younger than my mom but definitely older than either of my sisters” was how he had put it) wearing a skimpy red dress and high-heeled boots. Her dress had been torn open in the front and a sheer black bra had been yanked down around her stomach to expose two large perky breasts.
The woman couldn’t have been dead that long when Dwayne found her. If it hadn’t been for her slack jaw and wide lifeless eyes, he would’ve thought she was still alive. Of course “bullshit” was my initial response because I was 12; not an idiot. But I figured…
Fuck it. Why not let these two morons try and scare me? It might actually be halfway amusing and maybe there will even be an opportunity for me to turn it around on them. Besides, it’s not like I have anything better to do.
So Dwayne and Richie led me back down Marconi and over to an ancient set of overgrown train-tracks. We followed the tracks West for about a mile and a half, during which time the last bits of daylight quietly faded from view, turning the sky overhead from a dark purple to the ever ominous black of night.
The tracks wound their way over the Pontchartrain Expressway before eventually bringing us to a densely wooded area that bordered one end of an affluent neighborhood. Dwayne pointed us toward an unmarked dirt path that seemed to cut through the woods, which is when I almost started to panic.
