Riley Thorn and the Corpse in the Closet by Lucy Score

37

11:27 a.m., Tuesday, August 18

Riley stared in shock at Hudson Neudorfer, the affable Channel 50 employee who brought her coffee when she’d gone to the studio with Detective Weber to interview the on-air talent. He was holding a gun.

“Hudson?”

He stepped over Gabe’s legs and into the house.

“Of course it’s me. You’re the psychic. It’s why you keep messing up my plans, isn’t it? You knew all along!”

She really didn’t have it in her to handle two unhinged individuals at the same time.

“I really didn’t. I’m not a very good psychic.”

“Oh, please. I’m supposed to believe that you just happened to show up at Channel 50. You just happen to be here when I’m delivering the package. You just happen to live next door to one of the murder scenes.”

“That’s what that smell is?” Riley yelped. She felt suddenly nauseated.

“Take your shoes off!” Chelsea yelled.

“She just steam-cleaned the carpet,” Riley explained.

Hudson glanced down at his sneakers, then back up at Chelsea. “No,” he said firmly. “And I hope that I’m tracking mud inside.”

She gasped and took an unsteady step back as if he’d struck her. “How dare you,” she hissed.

“How dare me?” Hudson repeated. “How dare you! You are a horrible human being. Do you know how terrible you have to be in order to make my murder list? Pretty freaking terrible, lady.”

“I think you’re in the wrong house. The terrible people live next door. That’s their cow destroying my yard.”

“Good! I’m glad your yard is being destroyed just like you’ve destroyed the lives of other people.”

“Uh, Hudson. What did you do to Gabe?” Riley asked, inching closer to her friend. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.

“I injected him with a tranquilizer. He’ll be fine. But I am not happy that I had to go off plan. You are ruining everything!” He glared at Riley.

“Is this a friend of yours?” Chelsea asked Riley.

“No. I think he’s here for you,” Riley answered, noticing a small package sitting on Chelsea’s welcome mat.

“Is that the glitter bomb?” she asked him.

Hudson pointed the gun at her. “It most certainly is. And now it’s going to go to waste since I have to kill both of you today,” he complained.

“You are not setting off a glitter bomb in this house,” Chelsea said, putting her hands on her hips.

“Maybe don’t antagonize the guy with the gun?” Riley suggested.

“Shoot her.” Chelsea shoved Riley in front of her. “But take her outside first.”

“I don’t want to shoot her,” Hudson said with a stomp of his foot.

Riley thought she saw a flicker of movement in Gabe’s trapezius muscles.

“Then why are you waving a gun around in my house?” Chelsea demanded.

“I don’t really want to shoot you either. I’m on my lunch break, damn it! I had much more dramatic plans. But a good vigilante adapts. I’ll do what I have to do,” he insisted.

This was not good. This was very not good. Nick was going to kill her…if, by some chance, she survived being murdered by Hudson.

Gabe was definitely at least breathing. That was a good thing. But she didn’t need him coming out of his tranquilizer and scaring Hudson into shooting them all.

“I’m sorry for ruining your plans,” Riley began. “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“Make it up to me?” Hudson repeated, looking at her like she was the village idiot. “Do you know how long I’ve been planning this? How meticulous I was with my research and organization? And then you come along and, instead of incapacitating her and throwing her into the mountain lion enclosure at the Hershey Zoo, I have to skip straight to the grand finale weeks ahead of schedule.”

Oh, boy.

“You were going to throw me into the mountain lion enclosure? Why?” Chelsea demanded with not nearly enough fear in her tone.

“I’m glad you asked,” Hudson said, throwing the syringe over his shoulder and pulling a folded sheet of paper out of the back pocket of his neatly pressed khakis. He cleared his throat. “‘You’re a horrible mother. You deserve to be left for dead and eaten by mountain lions for putting your child in danger.’”

“I stand by my statement,” Chelsea sniffed. “A good mother would have driven home and made her husband put gas in the car. She certainly shouldn’t have left her baby strapped in while she was pumping gas. Of course someone stole her minivan with the baby in it.”

“Seriously?” Riley asked Chelsea.

“You see what I’m dealing with?” Hudson said, gesturing toward Chelsea with the gun.

“So you were monitoring the comments?” Riley asked him.

“Armand didn’t know a Facebook page from an Instagram account until I offered to help. I was just being nice. Something all those commenters know nothing about,” Hudson explained.

“That’s why you want to kill me? Because I posted a completely valid truth online?” Chelsea scoffed. “That’s stupid. You’re stupid.”

“And you’re trying to stop me?” Hudson said to Riley.

She shrugged.

“Because I made a comment online,” Chelsea repeated, clearly missing the point.

“Because you have no empathy, no regard for your fellow human beings. What about when you told a mother to put her family out of their suffering and kill herself?”

Chelsea rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on. She shouldn’t have let her daughter out of her sight. She’s a horrible parent. My boys never wandered into a bison enclosure at Zoo America,” Chelsea pointed out.

“She was giving CPR to someone’s grandfather,” Hudson shouted. “He survived, and her daughter was fine!”

Chelsea shrugged. “She’s a mother first. It’s her duty to never take her eyes off her children. I was just pointing out what we all know. She’s a bad mother and deserves public humiliation.”

“So you combined the mountain lion mauling and the Zoo America situation into a death sentence,” Riley said, spotting Chelsea’s cell phone half-buried in the thick carpet.

“Who died and made you judge and jury over mothers?” Hudson said with a humorless little laugh.

“Obviously, I’m a better mother. Look at my boys,” Chelsea said, pointing at her photo shrine. “They’re perfect. They never needed braces. They were both varsity starters in their sports. They both took attractive young ladies to prom. They had the perfect upbringing, and they’re perfect young men.”

Hudson used his gun hand to flip the page. He cleared his throat again. “I’m so glad you brought that up. As the perfect mother, you must be aware that your son Henry was arrested twice this year for underage drinking, public intoxication, and urinating on a police officer.”

“That’s absurd,” Chelsea scoffed.

“Your son Elvin has been seeing a therapist with virtually no online security. Twice a week, he goes to an office off-campus and tells Dr. Najimura just how horrible you are.”

“You take that back! Neither of my perfect little boys needs therapy! I gave them everything. I am the perfect mother.”

“You gave them a suitcase full of neuroses and a complete and total inability to problem-solve,” Hudson said triumphantly. “Ergo, you are a horrible mother, and you deserve the public humiliation of everyone knowing it.”

Riley started to inch her way toward Chelsea’s cell phone. If she could call 911, they might be able to survive this.

“I am not a horrible mother! I am the best mother in the history of motherhood! I invented Elf on the Shelf and gluten-free bake sales! I color-coordinated the entire family’s Easter outfits every year for the past two decades. I made sure the boys never had a teacher who didn’t like them or a grade below a B. When Elvin’s soccer team lost the tournament in fifth grade, I sued the soccer organization for poor refereeing and bankrupted the organization!”

“It’s like she doesn’t even hear what she’s saying,” Hudson said to Riley.

“I know,” Riley sighed, stretching her foot toward the phone’s screen.

“And that’s why she has to die.”

“Hang on,” Riley said. Her shoulder blades were starting to scream from holding her hands up for so long. “Just because she’s a horrible person doesn’t give anyone the right to kill her.”

“If I don’t kill her, she’s just going to keep doing harm. Sooner or later, she’s going to hurt someone badly enough that they’ll hurt themselves.”

She felt a nudge from her spirit guides. There was something important there, but it was hard to focus with a gun in her face.

“I’m stopping this horrible woman from ruining more lives,” Hudson said. “I’m the hero.”

Riley chanced a peek down at the floor and pressed her big toe to the Emergency Call button on the screen.

“The hero? Please! You’re the bad guy, dummy,” Chelsea scoffed. “If anyone’s the hero in this scenario, it’s me. I’m the one who’s been wronged and bravely continues to hold my head high.”

“You can’t tell me you think she’s a good person,” Hudson said to Riley.

“Oh, I’m definitely not saying that.”

“Then why are you trying to ruin everything?” he demanded. This time Gabe’s shoulder blades flexed.

“I’m not trying to ruin anything. I’m just trying to do the right thing,” Riley insisted. “So why take the victim’s electronics?” She needed to buy some time. Enough time for a 911 call to go through, the call to be traced, and Nick to get his sexy ass over here.

“Don’t call them victims!”

“Sorry. How about terrible people?” she offered.

“I didn’t want any obvious ties between the terrible people. One look at any of their browser histories, and any idiot could see they spent the majority of their time insulting people online. So I covered my tracks by covering theirs.”

“Smart,” Riley said.

“It was until you Scooby-Doo-ed your way into my plan. Now I have to accelerate my timeline and, thanks to you, the next seventeen terrible people on my list get to keep on being assholes,” Hudson complained. “That’s on you.”

“Let’s get back to this accelerated timeline thing. What does that mean, exactly?” Riley asked.

“I didn’t even get to glitter bomb her,” Hudson complained.

“What is it with you people and glitter bombs?” Chelsea demanded.

He rolled his eyes. “The glitter bombs are a two-week warning. The recipient of the bomb has two weeks to clean up their act and start behaving nicely.”

“Nicely according to you, Hudson?” Riley asked loud enough that anyone listening on the phone could hear, hopefully.

Hudson nodded. “I am the official judge, and I monitor each recipient’s behavior after the glitter bomb. All any of them would have had to do is stop being horrible. No more mean comments online. No more cutting people off in traffic. No more stealing coworkers’ lunches out of the fridge. It’s not that hard.”

“Wait a second. How many people have you killed?” The seriousness of the situation finally seemed to be sinking in with Chelsea.

“Three so far. You’d be amazed at how many assholes there are out there,” he said conversationally. “Not one of them changed their behavior in the slightest. In fact, some of them got even worse. But I guess now we’ll never know what you would have done with a warning, Chelsea.”

“It sounds like a lot of planning went into this,” Riley noted.

“I’ve been researching and following these jerks for months,” Hudson explained. “I have a dossier on each one.”

“Maybe you don’t have to accelerate anything,” Riley said hopefully. “Maybe you can consider this visit to Chelsea Strump’s house her two-week notice. And you can sit back and watch to make sure she turns into a nice person.”

“I demand my two week’s notice,” Chelsea insisted.

“That’s not the way it works. And nice try, Ms. Thorn. But I’m not a crazy person. She’s the crazy person,” Hudson said, pointing the gun menacingly at Chelsea.

“Hudson, maybe you could put the gun down,” Riley suggested.

“Moo?” Daisy the cow poked her head in the front door.

“Get out of here, you flea-ridden roadkill,” Chelsea screeched.

“She can’t even be nice to a cow,” Hudson pointed out.

He had a point. Chelsea really was awful.

“Daisy, don’t step on—” Riley’s warning came too late as the fleshy cow hoof crushed the package on the welcome mat. There was a muffled pop and a poof and glitter exploded everywhere. The cow, not used to stepping on exploding boxes, high-tailed it off the porch.

Riley spit out a mouthful of glitter.

Chelsea was frozen next to her.

“You okay?” Riley asked.

The woman sucked in a breath and started coughing up glitter.

“You…you…motherfucking assholes!”

Riley had never heard Chelsea swear. The woman considered four-letter words to be the language of disgusting poor people with no education.

“You think you can come into my house and—”

Hudson was remarkably glitter-free from the front, but when he bonked Chelsea on the head with the butt of his gun, Riley saw his back was sparklier than a disco ball.

“Ow!” Chelsea howled.

Hudson frowned at the gun. “Huh. They make it look a lot easier on TV.”

“You stupid son of a bitch. I hope you get testicular cancer, go through treatment, lose your hair, and the day you find out you’re in remission you get run over by a bus!”

Bonk.

This time the blow penetrated Chelsea’s seventeen layers of hairspray, and she slumped to the floor next to Gabe.

Hudson sighed then looked at Riley. “Pick her up and get moving.”

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“It’s time for the grand finale.”