Read Hurt for Free Online Page B

my mom would point out back in Chicagoland.
    I coast down the driveway and then get off the bike, wondering if anybody lives here. There are abandoned houses all around these parts. Like Jocelyn’s old house. Empty and silent.
    Perhaps this is one of those.
    When the door opens without my knocking on it, I jolt and almost tear back to my bike. Yet the man at the door doesn’t appear threatening.
    Then again, appearances don’t mean a thing. Not around Solitary.
    “Hello, Chris,” he says without any hint of surprise at seeing me.
    “You know me?”
    “Of course. Would you like to come in?”
    The windows in his modern-styled house looked dark and hidden.
    “How do you know me?”
    He smiles, and several lines of wrinkles form on his forehead. He looks sixty- or seventysomething, with white hair that’s slicked back, at least what hair he has on his half-bald head. He wears wide glasses that hide more wrinkles underneath them.
    “I can explain. I won’t hurt you. Promise.”
    “Do you know my mom?”
    The man is quite tall, a couple of inches taller than I am, and he just stands there next to the opened door, waiting for me to come in. I nod and walk inside.
    I almost bump into a woman with long blonde hair standing in the hallway. I step back and blurt out an “excuse me” before noticing that her eyes look a little dead.
    “That’s Fiona,” the man says as he closes the door behind me. “Lovely, isn’t she?”
    She’s wearing a short black dress with a low-cut top that reveals a golden necklace. In her heels Fiona is taller than I am. She’s not quite smiling. It’s more like she’s … posing. Posing and waiting.
    And, oh yeah, she’s a mannequin.
    “Fiona is five years old and still as beautiful as the day she was born,” the man says as he puts a hand on my shoulder and guides me down the hall.
    Suddenly Marsh doesn’t seem that creepy to me anymore. I really am regretting that I came here.
    “You drove all this way out here to find me, yet you’ve hardly said a word since you arrived.”
    Maybe that’s because I haven’t been this freaked out since, well, since the last time I was in a family room looking at a mannequin. In this case, there are probably about half a dozen of them surrounding me. All ladies … the guy’s own wonderful set of wives.
    “My name is Alfred Graff. And, as you can see, I make these beautiful creatures.”
    That’s what he said. Not mannequins or dummies or figures. He said creatures.
    “What brings you to my home, Chris?”
    My heart is slowing down a bit, and I notice the old man isn’t holding a gun or a knife or anything like that. He just holds a small container the size of his thumb that he keeps dipping his finger into and then spreads the contents over his lips. Which, once again, is sorta creepy.
    “Did one of your, uh, ‘creatures’ recently escape?”
    He laughs and glances at a figure right behind him. “A man seventy-seven years old no longer takes offense at comments like that. I’ve heard them all. I’ve been making these for a long time, Chris.”
    “How do you know my name?” I ask again.
    “There are quite a few people around here who know your name, Chris Buckley. Who know of your importance.”
    “So you, uh—are you with Marsh? And Staunch?”
    “With?” He says the word as if it’s a bad curse word. “This isn’t grade school, my boy. This isn’t the Cub Scouts. I am paid very well to do what I do and have been for quite a while.”
    “Make mannequins?”
    “Yes.”
    The room is barely lit, so the figures that are all standing around us seem threatening, waiting to suddenly pop to life and attack me.
    That’s just my luck. I’m finally in a room surrounded by beautiful and exotic women staring my way. Unfortunately, they’re fiberglass models that don’t breathe or speak or blink.
    At least I hope they don’t.
    “Who do you—”
    “Why are you here?” Alfred interrupts in a deliberate and loud tone.
    “A