Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

“That’s where we’re going,” Thistle confirms. “What else does the file say?”

  “Uh, born and raised in Houston, father died of prostate cancer, mother still lives here. Went to Waltrip High School—”

  “He didn’t go to the college Biggs taught at?”

  “No college at all.”

  “And yet he still managed to get a low-level job building a fast-food place,” Thistle says. “Your kind of guy.”

  I ignore the gibe. “He was reported missing by his roommate, Ian McLean. McLean works for a software company.”

  “We’ll have to talk to him, too.”

  “Hey, do you know how much Biggs took out in his second-last ATM withdrawal?”

  “A hundred,” Thistle says. “Same as the one before that. Farther back, I don’t know. But two-sixty is a lot, for him.”

  “Hmm.”

  Ninety minutes later, we drive past a blue sign with a fleur-de-lis: Welcome to Louisiana—Bienvenue en Louisiane. Thirty-six hours now since I found Biggs in the forest. The trail is cold and getting colder.

  It’s just gone two o’clock when we slow down and turn a corner. Thistle says, “This is it.”

  Squinting against the sun, I see skyscrapers made of trash. It looks postapocalyptic, the landscape jagged and bleak, all the colors faded and stained and scraped to sewage-brown.

  We drive up a dirt road to a big steel gate and a sign—Sulphur Resource Management Center. Sulphur is just the name of the nearest town, but it could also describe the stench. I’m gagging even before Thistle rolls down the window to show the security guard her badge.

  Once, at the group home Thistle and I grew up in, someone knocked over a plate of food and it landed upside down. I would have picked it up and eaten it, but it was asparagus with ranch dressing. Not my thing. For whatever reason, no one else picked the plate up, either—it was in a corner, out of the way and half-hidden. Weeks later, when it was my turn to vacuum, I noticed that the plate was still there. I unstuck it from the floor and flipped it over. Beneath it was a seething mess of maggots and congealed dressing.

  This whole place smells like that plate did.

  The security guard—a broad-shouldered man with aviator sunglasses—sees us grimacing. He grins, showing a mouth of crooked teeth. “You get used to it,” he says, and waves us through.

  “He’s right,” Thistle says as she drives through into a small parking lot. “After half a day searching for Biggs’s phone, I barely noticed the stink.”

  I grunt, and get out of the car.

  Up close, I can see the content of some of the garbage piles. Dressers, TVs, blenders, toy trucks, a walking stick. A lot of it still looks workable. Unwanted, not broken.

  There are huge hills of magazines and DVDs. As Thistle and I walk closer, I realize that almost all of them are porn. An endless mosaic of cupped breasts and spread ass cheeks. After they’ve been used, most DVDs and magazines end up collecting dust on shelves, but I guess porn isn’t like that. Once people use it, they’re ashamed of it, and they just want it gone. Straight in the trash.

  A row of shipping containers have been concreted into place, with windows cut in the sides. They’re being used as site offices, I guess. As I watch, a mustachioed man with no neck emerges from one of the containers. He’s wearing a checked shirt under a hi-vis vest. Thin, graying hair peeks out from his hard hat. He’s fortyish, with skin turned to leather by the sun.

  “Agent Thistle,” he says as he approaches. “Back so soon?”

  “Different case this time,” Thistle says. “Bevan Edwards, this is my associate, Timothy Blake.”

  Edwards shakes my hand, and does a double take at my missing thumb.

  “We’re here looking for a man named Daniel Ruthven,” Thistle says.

  Edwards makes a big show of trying to remember, raising his eyes to look at the sky. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” he says finally.

  “We have a picture of him,” Thistle says. She clicks her fingers. I hand her the file, and she shows the guy the photo.

  He peers at it, but also keeps glancing at us. Like he wants to gauge our reaction to his words.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I haven’t seen anyone like that around here.”

  This is clearly untrue. Several employees are visible from here, and half of them are pudgy white guys. The other half are lean Latino men.

  “Well, we’re tracing a phone signal,” Thistle says. “Same as last time. Maybe we could talk in your office?”

  “Uh, sure,” Edwards says.

  As he leads us over to his shipping container, he keeps glancing at the one next to it. One with no windows.

  The back of my neck is prickling. Something’s going on here.

  Edwards’s office has a single chair, a small desk, two filing cabinets and a plastic potted plant. Through the small window, I can see the mountains of garbage, but not the road, the vehicles or the people. From in here it looks like the whole world has ended.

  “Like I told you yesterday,” Edwards is saying, “we don’t inventory everything that comes here. If one of my boys sees a gun, or drugs, we call it in. Anything else just goes on the pile.”

  “So no one’s handed in a suspicious phone lately?” Thistle asks.

  “No. But to be honest, if it was a new model in working order, someone might have just kept it. Especially the new guys. The first couple of weeks, they’re amazed what people throw away, and they take a lot of stuff home. Then they get over it. Or their garage fills up, and they realize why the stuff got thrown away in the first place.”

  The phone trail ends here. If someone took it, they haven’t switched it on. Unless they swapped out the SIM card first. I’ll have to remember to ask Vasquez if there’s another way to trace it.

  “What about things that could be recycled?” I ask. “You have to separate that out, right?”

  “The recycling center is a half mile that way,” he says, pointing east. “Things are here because people can’t recycle them, or don’t want to for whatever reason. Not much sorting happens.”

  “When the pile gets too big,” I say, “then what?”

  “Then it gets buried, so it doesn’t get scattered by animals. Or the weather,” he adds. “During Hurricane Harvey it rained trash over half the town. Now city hall says we gotta bury twice a month, not just once.”

  “Does the name Shannon Luxford mean anything to you?” I ask.

  He puts on the same show as before—raised gaze, pursed lips. “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “No reason,” I ask. “What’s in the other shipping container?”

  His expression shifts. I can almost sense his blood pressure rising. “Just files and stuff.”

  “You don’t keep your files here?” I gesture to the filing cabinets.

  “Only the new ones,” he says. “Old stuff gets archived.”

  Thistle leans forward. “We’d like to take a look, if that’s okay,” she says.

  “The phone trail dead-ends there,” I add. This isn’t true, as far as I know. But it gives us a plausible reason to want in.

  A bead of sweat trickles out from under Edwards’s hard hat. “I’m not really sure where the key is.”

  Thistle looks at me. “I guess we could come back with a full forensic team,” she says. “They always bring cutting equipment.”

  “Just...hang on,” Edwards says. He starts opening and closing drawers in his desk. Eventually he produces a key. “Here we go. You can have a quick look.”

  He’s hoping we’ll be less thorough than a forensic team. He’s wrong.

  Thistle and I follow him out the door and over to the windowless container. Thistle stays a couple of yards behind him. Not so close that he could suddenly turn and attack her, but close enough that he couldn’t destroy or hide any evidence without her seeing.

  He unlocks
the container. The keys jingle louder than you’d expect. I think his hands are trembling.

  The door creaks open. It’s dark inside. As my eyes adjust, I see more filing cabinets and some archive boxes.

  “See?” Edwards says, half blocking the doorway.

  “Are there lights?” Thistle asks.

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Edwards reaches in and clicks a switch. Fluorescents flicker on above, casting a thin glow across the cabinets and boxes. There’s also a folding chair, a little desk lamp and a wall planner.

  A well-adjusted person might not have noticed the splotches, but my gaze is drawn to them straightaway.

  I walk over to the wall planner like a moth approaching a bug zapper. Twelve red spots are scattered across it. Each one has a faint whorl pattern. Fingerprints.

  With my back blocking Edwards’s and Thistle’s sightlines, I scratch off a tiny fragment of red with a fingernail and touch it to my tongue. A familiar copper tang.

  When I’m certain, I turn around. “Agent Thistle,” I say, gesturing to the wall planner, “does this look like blood to you?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  J. A. S. O. N. D. J. F. M. A. M. What is the next letter?

  “Mr. Edwards,” Thistle says, “do you want to tell us why there’s blood on your wall calendar?”

  “Blood?” He looks perplexed.

  “Red stuff. Usually kept inside the body, rather than on the walls.”

  Edwards swallows. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know,” Thistle repeats.

  “Maybe...maybe someone got a paper cut before they wrote on it.”

  “Does that seem likely to you, Mr. Blake?” Thistle asks.

  “It does not, Agent Thistle,” I say.

  “How many people have access to this container?” Thistle asks Edwards. “Just you?”

  “My office isn’t locked during the day. The key was in the drawer. Anyone could have—”

  “Could have what? Broken in here, given themselves a paper cut, dabbed some blood on the wall calendar and then left again?”

  Edwards’s eyes are wide. I get the feeling that he honestly didn’t know about the blood. This isn’t what he was worried we would find.

  Thistle’s playing bad cop, so I play good. “You seem like a nice guy,” I say. “I’m sure you didn’t expect anyone to get hurt. If you just tell us what happened, we’ll be able to—”

  “Nothing happened. I don’t know how that got there.”

  I open the least dusty archive box and start digging through the contents. Just employment records, like Edwards said, plus some receipts and bills for utilities. None of them less than three months old. No references to Biggs, Ruthven or Luxford. All the surnames in here sound like occupations—Tailor, Smith, Cook, Mason, Post. I’m checking phone numbers and addresses as I go, and so far nothing matches either victim. Got to work quickly. Soon Edwards will wake up and realize we need a warrant for this.

  “I want to call my lawyer,” Edwards says, like he’s reading my mind.

  “Go ahead,” Thistle says. “But you know you’re not under arrest?”

  Edwards clenches his jaw and says nothing. He pulls a phone from his pocket, checks the screen and walks out of the container.

  Thistle checks her phone, too. “No service in here,” she says. “What are you thinking, Blake?”

  “Not sure yet.” I close the archive box and go back to the wall planner, chewing my lip.

  “I’ve never seen a spatter pattern like that,” Thistle says, looking at the blood.

  “It’s not exactly spatter. There are prints in it.”

  “How fresh do you think it is?”

  “Two or three days, I figure,” I say. “No older.”

  “Okay. You be the victim, I’ll be the killer.”

  I turn to face Thistle. She takes a pen out of her pocket.

  “I come at you with a knife,” she says, and slashes at me with the pen. I raise my hands instinctively, and the nib swipes across my palm.

  “So you’re hurt,” she says. “Your hand is bleeding. Do you trail it across the wall planner as I push you backward?”

  She steps forward, and I step back, like we’re dance partners. I leave my arm outstretched, keeping my fingers an inch away from the planner. “Doesn’t feel right,” I say. “And it’s not a trail of blood. It’s just spots.”

  “So maybe you lean against it.”

  “Twelve times? With only one finger each time?”

  “Is it the same finger?” Thistle asks.

  “The print looks the same, yeah.”

  “Okay, forget that for now. But let’s pretend that you’re already bleeding.”

  “All right,” I say.

  “I come at you again, and you push back.” She makes a slow-motion stab at my sternum. I put my hands on her shoulders and give her a halfhearted push back.

  “You fall,” she says, and pushes me over. I slowly tumble to the floor.

  “I keep coming,” she says, and mounts me. I try to think about absolutely anything other than how close to me she is. My saliva glands are in overdrive. Other parts, too. I hope she doesn’t notice.

  Thistle raises the pen, and goes to stab me in the heart. The nib stops an inch from my shirt. Her hair hangs almost low enough to touch my face. I can smell mint on her breath. I wonder if she’s deliberately teasing me.

  “So where’s the blood?” she asks.

  I look around. “They cleaned up.”

  “But they missed the wall calendar? And it’s not like you can wash those archive boxes.” She touches the floor. Her finger comes back dusty. “This place hasn’t been cleaned. At least not within the last two days.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So no one was murdered here.”

  “Then why the blood?”

  The door rattles. We scramble to our feet and dust ourselves off as Edwards comes back in. He wordlessly hands his phone to Thistle.

  Thistle puts it to her ear. “This is Agent Reese Thistle,” she says.

  After a pause, she says, “Can’t hear anything. No service.”

  “Oh. Well, it was my attorney,” Edwards says. “He was gonna tell you to get out and come back with a warrant.”

  * * *

  Thistle and I walk out of the container, blinking like newborns in the harsh sun. As the security guard promised, I’m already used to the smell. I nibble a fingernail, still tasting the sliver of dried blood from the calendar. According to the file, Ruthven was a blood donor. Maybe I could track down one of his donations. Confirm by taste that the blood in the container is his.

  This is ridiculous on several levels, but fun to think about as Thistle argues with Edwards about probable cause. Tells him he’s not a suspect at this time. Gives him one last chance to cooperate. I already know he won’t take it. His jaw is clenched, his tasty veins bulging. He’s angry, maybe at us.

  I turn back toward Thistle’s Crown Vic—and then realize I’m not the only one staring at it.

  A group of workers are wading through debris between two hills of trash. One of them, a Latino man in his late thirties, slows down when he sees the car. He’s wearing a dust mask and carrying a milk crate filled with broken PVC piping. He finally stops, like a clockwork toy that needs winding. The other workers trudge on, oblivious.

  I watch him from the corner of my eye, not wanting to spook him. He looks from the Crown Vic—clearly a police vehicle—to Thistle, in her pantsuit and dark sunglasses. His eyes skip over me completely. I probably blend in with the garbage.

  He starts to back away. I walk toward him slowly, like a cat sneaking up on a bird. He doesn’t notice. He’s still watching Thistle.

  Then, suddenly, Thistle is watching him, too.

  The guy drops the milk crate and bolts.

  “Bla
ke!” Thistle yells, but I’m already running, sloshing into the river of trash as the man with the dust mask disappears between the two rotting mountains. The other workers watch me wide-eyed as I approach. One of them, an apple-cheeked white guy I’ve seen somewhere before, steps into my path.

  “Hold on there, fella,” he says. “Where you headed?”

  I remember him now. He pulled over to give me unwanted roadside assistance once. Nearly caught me eating a Tanzanian triple-murderer. Hopefully he doesn’t remember me.

  “Move,” I say. “Police.”

  “You don’t look like police,” he says, which is true. But Thistle is behind me now, waving her ID. He reluctantly steps aside.

  “Sorry for the delay,” he says, but we’re already past him. We race through the trash, looking for signs of the man with the dust mask.

  We’re looking down a long vista between two walls of trash. Plastic slurry, bullet casings, moldy cow bones, coffee pods, more porn. Can’t see the guy, which means he turned off somewhere. We keep running, looking for clues.

  I spot a narrow side alley between hills of shredded polyester clothes and shattered iPhones. Too much of this trash is probably mine. I reuse a lot, but I don’t recycle. One of my many bad habits. After you’ve eaten a few people, none of your other flaws seem important enough to fix.

  “I’ll check that way,” I say, puffing. “You keep going.”

  “No,” Thistle says. “This whole place is fenced off. We should go back. Guard the exit.”

  “The guy looked like he could climb a fence. Especially if someone threw away a ladder.”

  Thistle hesitates. She doesn’t trust me. Usually a good choice.

  I don’t give her time to decide. I run down the side alley. She doesn’t follow.

  The path is narrow and dark. Probably only gets sunlight at noon. Mushrooms grow from deep gashes in the trash. A crust of moss is swallowing an old fridge. There are footprints in the damp cardboard, but it’s impossible to tell how recent they are.

  A diesel engine rumbles somewhere up ahead. Seconds later there’s a screech and a metallic crash. Maybe a mountain of broken toasters collapsed. I hope our suspect wasn’t under it. This deep in the maze of garbage, like the ruins of a freshly dead civilization, it’s impossible not to think about being buried alive.