DEAD IN BED By Bailey Simms: The Complete Second Book

PART 8, SECTION 7

A tall chain link fence surrounded the entire football field grounds. When I was just a kid and Ian was still in high school, he'd told me about a loose section in the fence. It was behind the locker rooms and mostly concealed by a stand of trees. You could pull up the fencing, he'd told me, just enough to slip underneath. Ian had mentioned this in strict confidence when he'd confessed to me that he'd snuck into the high school to spray-paint his name on the water tower. But, later, when I was in high school, I'd used the hole in the fence to sneak out during football games to meet Shawn and sleep with him on the wooded hillside below. 

That seemed like a lifetime ago. Or a dream. The person I was then, fumbling around with Shawn in the darkness of the woods, felt like a complete stranger.

Now, though, all the trees on the hillside were bare. They offered almost no cover. I scanned the hillside, and when I was pretty sure no one was around I hurried to the section of the fence I thought was the loose one.

The base of the chain-link was covered in snow and dead weeds. I pulled the weeds aside as fast as I could, but it was hard to expose the bottom of the fence. When I finally cleared the weeds and mud, I grabbed the fencing and pulled. But it didn't budge.

I had the wrong section. 

Crap. If I didn't hurry, someone was going to see me. I glanced up the hillside.

I froze.

A ranger was standing just outside the locker rooms. He was no more than fifty yards away. And he faced me directly.

He reached into his flack jacket and raised his hands, obviously to put a pair of binoculars to his eyes. He must have been some kind of sentry guard. Any moment now he was going call out to the others that he'd spotted someone attempting to sneak in without papers.

I prepared to run. I was surrounded by sparse, leafless trees. The hillside was covered in damp snow, and it was steep. I would be easily visible in my blue parka. I had virtually nowhere to hide...

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