Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  “Hey, man, watch it,” someone says.

  I keep running.

  I turn one more corner, and now the way out is visible up ahead. I see my reflection in the glass. Already red-faced, my hair glued to my forehead by sweat. Behind me, I can see the two men. They’ve spotted me. They’re walking quickly, but not running. Not calling attention to themselves.

  The tracksuit man is walking stiffly, spine rigid. He has something in the back of his pants, probably a knife. Carbon fiber, since he got it through the metal detector.

  A bottleneck ahead. I won’t have to go through the metal detector to get out, but I will have to walk through a one-way security exit. There’s an automatic door, followed by a short airlock-like corridor, followed by a second automatic door. The crowd is slowing down as it approaches the exit. I push through, angering more people. “Sorry, sorry.” My phone is still vibrating like a hornet trapped in my pocket.

  A security guard is looking at me. Rotund, black, with a thick mustache and a wedding ring. Maybe I should tell him the guys behind me have a bomb. He wouldn’t believe me, because of the metal detector. But enough people in the crowd would fall for it to create mass panic. Dozens of people running. The confusion might help me slip away.

  Or it might give the two men the freedom to stab me with a carbon-fiber blade and disappear into the crowd, leaving me gasping on the floor like a fish as I bleed out through a punctured liver. I meet the guard’s gaze and look away.

  The first automatic door opens for me, making a squeaking sound like on Star Trek, and I’m running through the airlock. Quieter in here. I can hear my breaths reverberating off the walls, the clopping heels of the woman ahead of me. She looks like a lawyer. Gray skirt, jacket over one arm, gold earrings. She senses me behind her and turns, alarmed. I overtake her and hurry through the second door.

  Out through the foyer and onto the courthouse steps. I trot down them like a dancer, my legs a blur. Across the road is the diner where I ate with Thistle. There was a multistory parking lot on the other side of it. If I—

  Someone grabs my collar and I miss a step. My legs fly out from under me, but the hand keeps me from falling down the stairs. It’s like I’m being dangled over a cliff in the cold evening air, although the next step is only six inches below me.

  “Phoenix, Ferguson,” the tracksuit man says. A deep voice, with at least two generations of Texas in it. “Now answer your goddamn phone.”

  * * *

  “When we met yesterday,” Warner says, “I don’t remember you mentioning that you were working for the FBI again.”

  She doesn’t sound pissed off. Instead, there’s an ominous flatness to her voice. It takes me back to Mrs. Radfield at the group home. I’m not angry, Timothy, I’m just disappointed.

  “Where did you hear that?” I ask, still acting like I don’t know about the tracking app.

  “Please,” Warner says. “Are you going to pretend that you’re not with Special Agent Reese Thistle right now?”

  Actually, Thistle is still inside. I’m with the tracksuit man on the courthouse steps, the streetlights stretching our shadows to a surreal length. But I take her point.

  “You never said you wanted me to work exclusively for you,” I say. The plastic phone creaks in my hand as I squeeze it tighter and tighter.

  “I figured that was strongly implied,” Warner says. “And given the nature of the work you do for me, I thought you’d be smart enough to stay a mile away from the feds.”

  She’s not wrong. “I’m not investigating you,” I say. “It’s an unconnected case. Unless you murdered someone named Kenneth Biggs?”

  I said “murder” deliberately. Maybe she’ll ask me how I know he’s dead. If she does, I know she’s involved.

  But there’s just silence at the other end of the line. Impossible to read.

  The Asian guy is at the curb at the bottom of the steps, smoking a cigarette and spinning a car key in one hand. I’m guessing it’s for the black SUV parked nearby. The lumberjack is still inside the building.

  Tracksuit man is adjusting the back of his pants, where the knife is. I don’t know if he’s willing to use it. He and the Asian guy would have been recorded entering and leaving the courthouse. If he stabs me and runs, the police could probably ID them both with facial recognition. He might be too dumb to realize that, though. And perhaps Warner considers them expendable.

  “You don’t know as much as you think you do about my business,” Warner says finally. “But you know enough that I don’t want you hanging around cops.”

  “It’s a one-off,” I say. “Just this case, then I’m done.”

  “It won’t surprise you to hear that I’m a big fan of Bill Clinton.”

  Actually, that surprises me quite a lot, not least because it seems to have nothing to do with what we were talking about.

  “I liked his three-strikes law,” she continues. “It was nice and easy to understand. Get caught three times, that’s it. Life sentence.”

  The law was more complicated than that, but now I see what she’s getting at. “You must have lost a few customers.”

  “I’m a minority shareholder in a few private prisons. I make money off these guys whether they’re on the streets or not. The point is, you didn’t call me when Francis missed the drop-off yesterday. That’s one. You took a case for the FBI. That’s two.”

  I say nothing.

  “You’re not gonna solve this murder,” Warner says. “You’re gonna drop it. Or else that’s three. And then I find a new waste-disposal guy and give him his first assignment.”

  The Asian guy is watching me from the bottom of the steps.

  “You understand?” Warner asks.

  I cough. “Yeah.”

  “You’re gonna drop the case?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I have another delivery for you. Be waiting at one a.m. Now put Tane on so I can tell him not to kill you.”

  I hand the phone to tracksuit man. He puts the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”

  There’s a pause.

  “He tried to run,” he says.

  I can hear Warner laughing. Then she says something else.

  “Understood,” Tane says. He ends the call and hands the phone back to me. “Lucky break, asshole.”

  But I can see signs of relief. An unclenched jaw, slackened shoulders. Some people go through life hunting opportunities for violence. You find them in dive bars, police forces, armies. Looks like Tane isn’t one of them.

  Nor am I. But I’ve done terrible things anyway, things I can’t take back. I’ll never be able to look at a stranger without knowing, in a flash, what their insides look like. I’ll never hear a knock at the door without wondering if it’s the police. I can never have an unguarded conversation with anyone.

  Tane doesn’t have to live with any of that, at least not yet.

  “Lucky break,” I echo, wondering how long it will take Warner to realize that I lied to her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  What food has no beginning, end, or middle?

  Dinner is reheated Biggs. It’s a dangerous meal, since I still don’t know how he died. He may have been poisoned. But Aaron Elliott smelled off. Must have been left unrefrigerated too long, which means he’ll have to be cooked, and I’m too hungry to wait. Eating people is dangerous, anyway, because of blood-borne viruses. Doesn’t mean I can make myself stop.

  Don’t judge me. Heart disease is the number-one killer in the USA, but you still eat donuts. Your diet is killing you, too.

  While I’m chewing, I find myself looking at Biggs’s left hand. The right is in my freezer. I’m saving it so I can plant it in the home of his killer, once I’ve worked out who it is.

  The cut on his index finger is bugging me. When I was homeless I donated plasma every two weeks, because they’d give you free foo
d after. Cheese, crackers, juice, a milkshake. But I couldn’t help watching the people in the other chairs, leaning back like fat kings on thrones as the blood trickled out of their arms—so I always left hungrier than I arrived. I tried the sperm bank, but they don’t feed you.

  Before each donation the nurses would stab my fingertip with something a bit like a stapler, taking a single drop of blood to check my hemoglobin levels. I’m type O negative, universal donor, so my blood was in demand. If the levels were too low the first time, they’d keep stabbing fingers until they got an acceptable reading. The wound on Biggs’s fingertip looks a bit like the ones I used to have.

  Or... I look closer. That could be a bite mark. Not one of mine. I don’t take little nibbles like that. I take huge chunks, like a great white shark.

  On a hunch, I lift Biggs’s floppy arm, bending his elbow so his hand is near what’s left of his face. I’m no forensic expert, but his teeth seem like they might match the divot in his finger.

  I think back to the bloody prints on the wall planner in the shipping container. A tingle ascends my spine as half a theory emerges from the shadows in my mind.

  I swallow and clean my face, as though Thistle will be able to see me. Then I make the call.

  She picks up the phone quickly. “Yeah?”

  “Imagine you’re a math professor,” I say.

  “You wanna explain what the hell you were doing in that courtroom?”

  I hesitate. Right. The courthouse.

  “Were you trying to put me off? Get me sued?”

  “No,” I say. “I sat up the back so you wouldn’t even notice me.”

  “That’s worse, you creep. You think you have the right to keep tabs on me? Were you and my asshole husband comparing strategies?”

  “Your husband?” Oh. The lumberjack. Man, you got no idea. Your friend? She has a cold streak. You’ll see.

  “Don’t come in tomorrow,” Thistle says. “I can solve this case without your help.”

  It’s the perfect way out, but I don’t take it. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I was worried about you. When you said you had a lawyer, I thought you were in trouble. I just wanted to know what was going on.”

  “If I wanted you to know, I would have fucking told you.”

  “And I didn’t know that guy was your husband,” I say. “He didn’t tell me. And he’s not what I pictured.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  I keep talking. “I get that you don’t—” Like me anymore. The words are too hard to say, so I finish with “—want to see me. But you’re my oldest friend.” Only friend. “I care about you.”

  Thistle hesitates, making it clear that she doesn’t think of me as a friend.

  “You can show it by respecting my privacy,” she says.

  “I will,” I say. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have followed you.”

  “You had the chance to be a part of my life,” she says. “You turned it down, remember?”

  “I know. I’m sorry about that, too.”

  Another pause. I can feel her wondering what I mean. Do I regret my choice, or am I just sorry for hurting her?

  The answer is both. Something else has been bubbling away in the dark recesses of my brain. I rejected Thistle because I was hungry, and afraid of hurting her. But now Warner is providing me with a steady supply of bodies. My ugly desires are sated. Does that mean a relationship between Thistle and me could be...safe?

  But there are two problems. One, Thistle isn’t attracted to me anymore. It’s a miracle that she ever was. Two, Warner will stop supplying bodies—and maybe kill me—if I keep seeing Thistle.

  “So,” Thistle says. “I’m imagining I’m a math professor.”

  I exhale, relieved to be back on safe ground. “Right. Say you were locked in a shipping container at a dump site. You’re expecting your captor to move you soon. You want to get a message to the cops—a warning, about something happening on December 9—but you don’t have a phone. What do you do?”

  “You think that was Biggs’s blood at the dump? Not Ruthven’s?”

  “Biggs went missing more recently than Ruthven, and the blood wasn’t old. Not fresh, but not old.”

  “And why December 9?”

  “Those splotches of blood weren’t random spatter. He was marking specific dates. The last one was the ninth of December. Tomorrow.”

  A beat.

  “Okay,” Thistle says. “So Biggs pricked his own finger and decided to write with his own blood, rather than doing something more obvious and less dramatic.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like using the whiteboard marker right under the calendar.”

  “We wouldn’t have paid attention to that,” I say. “Random dots of marker on a wall planner.”

  “We would have, if he added a message explaining what they meant.”

  “His captors would have seen a message when they moved him. They would have cleaned it up. Blood was the only way to get our attention without getting theirs.”

  “So what happens tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But whatever it is, it happened at least eleven times before. There was a date marked on each month. January 9, February 13, March 19, April 15—”

  “I have the dates. I took a picture. So if we work out what happened on all of those days...”

  “Then we can guess what’s supposed to happen tomorrow.”

  “I don’t even know what to look for,” Thistle says.

  “Get Vasquez on it. Maybe he can use software to look for similarities.”

  “We don’t have much time. I’ll call him now.” A pause. “Good work, Blake.” The line goes dead.

  A flutter of pride, but also guilt, as I look down at Biggs. Thistle wouldn’t be congratulating me if she knew whose finger had “tipped” me off.

  She’s more right than she knows—we don’t have much time. I need to solve this case quickly so I can stop working it before Warner kills me. Which means I can’t just wait around for Vasquez to find an answer. I need to go back to the woods where I first found Biggs. If the killer dumped his body there, then maybe I’ll find Ruthven there, too.

  Texas has a drive-through culture, and I’m not immune to it. I can’t resist carving some more off Biggs to eat on the way. As I slide the knife under his pectoral muscle, I see something strange beneath his ribs.

  I have to crack them with a hammer to get to it. When I finally pull it out and wash the gore off, I don’t recognize it. A little silver bulb, topped by wires contained in transparent plastic.

  A pacemaker—it must be. Which changes everything.

  Heart failure. The number-one cause of death in the USA. I still don’t know how Biggs ended up naked in the woods, or why his car and phone ended up at the dump. But it’s possible that he died of a heart attack while fleeing from his abductor. If that’s the case, the person who took him—the one who sealed him in that shipping container, who presumably also abducted Ruthven—didn’t poison him, and didn’t deliberately freeze him to death. They might not even realize he’s dead.

  * * *

  I’m getting into my car when Shawn opens his front door. Probably not coincidence. More likely he’s been waiting for me to leave.

  Sure enough, he waves to get my attention as he jogs over. He’s holding an empty plastic tray. The dog is watching from the window, paws against the glass.

  I wind down the window, teeth chattering in the cold.

  Shawn twists his face into a grimace and puts on a funny voice as he approaches. “Hey, buddy. You got a dead cat in there, or what?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He drops the voice, looks disappointed. “It’s from Terminator. You haven’t seen it?”

  “No.”

  He shrugs. “So anyway, I smelled something funny near your place. Caitlin sme
lled it first, led me right to your doorstep. Thought I’d let you know. You used rat poison lately?”

  “Nah,” I say. “Gives me hives.”

  He hesitates for a moment before laughing. “Okay. Well, maybe you got a dead rat under your fridge, or a raccoon died in your trash can or something. Or there’s a dead body under your floorboards.”

  He chuckles again. I force a laugh, too, thinking about the off smell from Elliott’s body.

  “Thought I should tell you,” he says. “You know how you can’t smell your own house? You wouldn’t want your new lady friend smelling it like that.”

  Thistle would certainly recognize the smell of death. “No, sir, I would not,” I say. “Thanks.”

  “No problemo.” He sees me looking at the plastic tray. “Oh, I gotta take this with me whenever I leave the house. So Caitlin thinks I’m taking the recycling out, and not going for a walk without her.”

  The dog starts barking at the window. Maybe she heard her name through the glass.

  “Gotta go,” Shawn says. “Hasta la vista, baby.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I am fatally wounded with a blade before I am given away as a gift. The receiver keeps me alive as long as possible, but I always die. What am I?

  Francis isn’t due to deliver the next body until one a.m. It’s ten p.m. now—I have some time to kill.

  I park farther off the road than usual, bumping down the grassy slope and waiting until the hood is nudging the shrubbery before I kill the engine. I don’t want anyone who drives past getting a good look at my car.

  My trail through the woods is only two days old, but hard to find in the dark. Up close, the trees are seething with life, insects devouring everything that isn’t made of stone, and plants slowly smothering everything that is. My footprints are half-buried in a layer of patchy undergrowth. Ten steps in, I can’t see my car through the wall of dark green, speckled with white flowers. I flick on my flashlight app, but keep the beam at a low angle.