Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  I wake up alone.

  This is not abnormal, and it takes me a minute to remember someone is supposed to be here.

  Thistle. When I fell asleep, her arm was across my chest and her legs were tangled up with mine. Now she’s gone. I reach over to the other side of the single mattress. No one.

  For a horrible moment I think I dreamed the whole thing. Last night, and tonight. Maybe Thistle still hates me. Or maybe she never existed. After our last case together she became my imaginary friend—perhaps she always was. I’m sane enough to know I’m crazy, but I’m never sure just how much.

  No. The sheets are warm. She was here.

  I roll onto the floor. Pull on a shirt and some pants—it’s too cold to walk around in the nude—then I go looking for Thistle.

  I open the bathroom door, only remembering half a second later that it would probably have been polite to knock first. But she’s not there.

  I check the bathtub, suddenly worried that I forgot to drain it. Empty. She hasn’t fled after seeing eighty gallons of melted human. Or, if she did, she drained the tub first.

  The clock in the living room says it’s three a.m., so it’s really four. I peer out the front window. Thistle’s car is still here.

  “Reese?” I whisper.

  No answer.

  The fear wells up from beneath me like groundwater. What if I hurt her? I’m a sleepwalker, partial to midnight snacks. What if I killed her?

  I check the freezer. Lots of frozen meals past their sell-by. Bacon, hot dogs, ground meat. I rummage around, revealing a plastic sheet, Biggs’s head beneath it. No sign of anybody else.

  I hear something from outside. I cover Biggs and slam the freezer shut.

  The sound came from the backyard. I tiptoe over to the back door. It’s not locked—not even closed all the way. I open it a crack.

  Thistle is sitting on the back step, huddled in her jacket, legs bare. It’s stopped raining, but it’s colder than ever. She looks up from her phone and smiles, teeth shining in the dark.

  “Hey,” she says. “Sorry—didn’t mean to wake you.”

  I sag with relief, and sit next to her. “No problem. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I wanted to see if my neighbor had gotten my text about feeding my dog. I asked my roommate to do it, but she messaged late last night, saying she had to suddenly go to Memphis. A work thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Phoebe says she’ll be gone for a couple days. Want to stay over tomorrow night? My bed’s bigger than yours.”

  “Sure.” I wrap my arms around her. It already feels like a natural thing to do. She hugs me back. Our breaths shroud our heads in fog. I wonder if I should tell her how scary it was to wake up without her. Probably not. She might think that was alarming.

  “You remember Ophelia Tynan?” she asks. “From the group home?”

  “Curly hair,” I say. “Sucked her thumb until she was six.”

  “Right. She had the bunk under mine, and she snored. Drove me crazy. I got so mad at her during the day, and she never knew why. I haven’t thought about that girl in years. But you snore, too.”

  “I do?”

  “Like an old dog. But it’s cute, not annoying.”

  “That’s me,” I say. “Cute.”

  Thistle laughs. “Well, give it time.” She stands up. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  Then she stiffens.

  “What?” I ask.

  She releases me. “What’s that?” she asks, staring into the dead weeds of my backyard.

  “What’s what?” I ask, suddenly on guard. Could someone be watching us? My house is well secured, but my yard isn’t.

  “There.” She walks off the cold concrete and across to the dirt to a rough patch. It has fewer dead weeds than anywhere else, as though the earth has recently been turned. But I haven’t done any gardening, ever.

  I follow her. The bad smell gets worse as we approach. It was never coming from inside the house. No wonder leaving the back door open didn’t help.

  Thistle bends down.

  I see it at the same moment as she does.

  Fingertips, sticking out of the dirt.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  You can break me without moving or even making a sound. What am I?

  Later, I realized that I could have saved the situation. If I had crouched down alongside Thistle and helped her unearth the corpse, as though we were both discovering it, then that might have been okay. A normal person would have done that. But I just watched as she peeled back the tarpaulin, which had been hidden under a thin layer of dirt. As though I had already known the body was there.

  “What the fuck?” Thistle says.

  “It’s Daniel Ruthven,” I say.

  It has to be. His head is gone, but he’s the right height and weight, and it looks like he was skinned within the last few days, not long after his death. His raw, sticky muscles are still dark red rather than brown, and his fingernails have not yet become clawlike as the flesh receded. None of the Crawdad Man’s other victims went missing recently enough to qualify.

  Thistle slowly rises to her feet, looking at me. She doesn’t ask me how I know whose body it is.

  “What’s he doing in your yard, Blake?” she asks.

  “I don’t know.” It’s the truth, but it comes out sounding like a lie. I stare at the body. So much meat. If I washed the dirt off, it would still be edible.

  “You don’t know,” Thistle says softly.

  I say nothing. Shannon Luxford must have dumped it here. He followed me home.

  No, not Luxford. The wigmaker. Shawn’s voice echoes through my mind: That woman I saw hanging around your house? She looked like a keeper.

  At the same time I was planting Biggs’s hand at the college, she was dumping Ruthven at my house. To implicate me, to intimidate me, to confuse the investigation.

  “Okay,” Thistle says. “Stay here. I’m going to call the FBI.”

  She pushes past me and walks back into the house.

  It takes me a moment to realize that she already had her phone in her hand. Why did she go inside?

  I hear the freezer open.

  I run back into the kitchen. Thistle is staring down into the freezer, eyes wide, knuckles white around the edge of the lid. She can only be looking at Biggs’s severed head.

  “Reese,” I say. “This isn’t what it looks like.”

  “Jesus,” she whispers. “You’re the fucking Crawdad Man.”

  “I’m not,” I say, my heart going into higher gear. “I swear. Someone’s trying to make it look like I am.”

  “I wondered why this place was locked up like Fort Knox. I could tell the freezer was making you nervous...you said you were sick in the head. You even said you were afraid of hurting me. Oh God!”

  She bends over, gagging. After three violent retches, she pukes onto the kitchen floor.

  I rest my hand on her back. She shakes it off and backs away, flecks of vomit stuck to her chin. “Don’t touch me!”

  I raise my hands. “Thistle. I didn’t do this. How could I? I’ve been with you the whole time.”

  “Convincing me that Luxford was guilty,” she says. “You knew so much about the case.”

  “Luxford is guilty,” I say. “He must have followed me home, gotten in here somehow.”

  “Oh.” Thistle wipes her face with her sleeve. “Okay. You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  She’s only pretending to believe me.

  “Please,” I say. “Trust me.”

  “I do,” she lies. “Of course I do. I just lost it there for a minute. Don’t worry, we can figure this out.”

  She turns toward the coffee table, where her handbag still sits. I realize what she’s doing a fraction of a second before she does it. She reaches for the handbag. I kick it off
the table. A bunch of things skitter out across the floor—a wallet, some painkillers, a set of keys...and a Glock 17 mm.

  We both dive for the gun. I push her fumbling hands out of the way and grab it.

  “No!” she screams.

  I scramble away from her so she can’t snatch it out of my grip. She puts her hands up. She’s shaking.

  I don’t point it at her, still telling myself I can fix this. I keep it by my side.

  “Please believe me,” I say. “Please.”

  “I do believe you,” she lies. “Of course I do. Just put the gun down and we’ll talk.”

  The vision of us as old people in rocking chairs fades away like smoke. Tears spring into my eyes. “I can’t.”

  She changes tactics. “You’re sick, Blake. You need help. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “I am sick.” My throat is closing up. It’s hard to get the words out. “But not in the way you think. I promise. I didn’t kill that guy. Either of them.”

  Another mistake. If I were innocent, I would have assumed the head belonged to the body in the yard.

  “Put the gun down,” Thistle says. She’s crying, too. “I don’t have to call the police, okay? We can figure this out.”

  She’s trying to trick me. I force a smile. “I can find the real killer. If I catch him, you’ll believe me then, right?”

  “I believe you now. We’ll figure out what happened together. Okay? Just give me the gun.”

  I realize her phone isn’t in her hands anymore. My guess is that it’s in her pocket, listening to this conversation. Either she decided to call 911 and wait for a few decades, or she’s hit Redial and called Vasquez. He’ll be sending people here right now.

  I pick up Thistle’s keys off the floor. “Where are you going?” she asks.

  I should give her a fake destination, to buy myself some time. That would be the smart thing to do.

  But I can’t lie to her. Not now. Not when I’m so desperate to win back her trust.

  “I don’t know,” I say truthfully. Then I back away, out the door.

  * * *

  I’m driving aimlessly through the light and shadow of Houston by night. The AC blows warm air on my bare feet. I can hardly see the road through the tears.

  I have to ditch Thistle’s car. All police vehicles are low-jacked. Right now, I’m a blinking light on a digital map in someone’s office.

  But I won’t get far on foot. Which means I need to ditch it somewhere where there are other transport options. Bus station. Airport. I can’t fly anywhere, but it’ll take them a while to work out that I didn’t.

  Or I could leave it unlocked in a bad neighborhood with the keys on the seat. Get the cops chasing some joyrider for a few hours.

  I could make someone pull over, use the gun to jack them. But assuming I don’t get shot in the process—it happens—I’d be committing a pretty serious crime, which it would be tough to explain to Thistle. Later, once she realizes that I’m innocent.

  But you’re not innocent, she says in my head.

  “I am.”

  You cut off Biggs’s head and put it in the freezer.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t kill him. Or Ruthven.”

  You cut off his hand and left it at the college. You ate parts of him. You—

  “Once I find Luxford or his accomplice, I can prove they buried Ruthven’s body in my yard. Then they’ll get blamed for everything.”

  My conscience falls silent, but I can tell she’s not convinced. Thistle has seen the real me now. No matter who takes the rap, I can’t undo that.

  I pull over on the side of the I-60 and dig out the burner phone Warner gave me. It takes me a minute to switch on the data, and then another minute to register a burner email address. After that I Google my way to the giantess forums Biggs was frequenting and create an account.

  After scrolling through a ton of weird porn, I eventually find the comment I’m looking for. It’s posted under a story about a shy man, seduced by a giant woman. New username, same message: Anyone want to try this in real life? DM me.

  I check the profile. No photo, no bio, but a location: Houston, Texas. My hunch was right.

  Without the resources of the FBI, the only way I’m going to catch the wigmaker is by using myself as bait. I send a short message: I want to do this for real. I can pay.

  I wonder how similar that is to what Biggs wrote, before he died. Alone and scared, miles from the woman he loved.

  Headlights in the corner of my eye. I turn my head and get a quick glimpse of the truck before it smashes into the side of Thistle’s Crown Vic.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  A plane crashes on the border between Texas and Mexico. Where are the survivors buried?

  The world turns upside down, ground to sky and back again. My spine quivers like a freshly released bowstring. All the windows frost over immediately, except for the one directly behind my left ear, which disintegrates. My organs swim around my torso, too loose in their moorings. The fluid in my brain whirls like my skull is a blender.

  I black out, and dream of Thistle. She’s sitting next to me in the shattered car, looking at the crumpled door. Man, she says. The director’s gonna have my ass for this. Then she looks behind me and says, Blake! Wake up!

  I open my eyes. Strong hands are grabbing me by the armpits, dragging me from the wreckage. I’m too dizzy to help. It’s all I can do to keep the bile down.

  I find myself on my back on the freezing asphalt. The world keeps spinning, as though I were still trapped in a rolling car.

  When it steadies, I find myself staring up at Shannon Luxford.

  “Motherfucker,” he says. I’m not who he was expecting.

  I try to say something clever, but my jaw hurts. One of my teeth is loose in my mouth. I resist the urge to spit it out. A dentist can replant it if the root doesn’t dry out.

  Shannon raises a phone to his ear. “Fred,” he says. “I got the wrong one.”

  There’s a pause.

  “Yeah, okay,” Shannon says. “Thanks, man. I appreciate it. See you soon.”

  He ends the call and lifts me up over his shoulder. I feel like Lois Lane. My ears are ringing and I think I might throw up. I’m helpless as he throws me into the passenger seat of his pickup truck. Thanks to the bull bar, the truck is almost undamaged.

  Maybe he’ll dismember me and throw me into a ravine. Maybe Thistle will eventually find my body. That will prove I’m innocent.

  Luxford puts on my seat belt and gets a roll of duct tape out of the glove compartment. He starts winding it around my torso, tying me to the passenger seat. I will my hands to move. My fingers wiggle, but my arms are too heavy to lift.

  I let out an involuntary groan as the tape squeezes my chest.

  “Oh, does this hurt?” Luxford says. “My bad.”

  Then he punches me in the head. As my skull snaps sideways, I accidentally swallow the tooth.

  “You don’t even know what pain is, asshole,” Luxford says. “Not yet.”

  When I’m fixed firmly to the seat, Luxford starts binding my ankles. I try to kick him, but my feet move sluggishly. He pins them easily and keeps working, like he’s putting a diaper on a squirming toddler.

  This thought makes me realize that I’ve pissed myself at some point.

  Luxford notices, too. “Goddamn,” he says. “That reeks. Glad this isn’t my car.”

  “You got my message quick,” I slur.

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” he says, and slams the door.

  My upper arms are pinned to my sides, but my forearms can move. I think I could probably reach the parking brake with my left hand. Useless while the car is already parked. But if we’re taking a bend at speed, I might be able to crash the car.

  I barely survived the first crash, th
ough. A second might be a bad idea.

  Luxford gets in on the driver’s side. He drapes a coat over me, hiding the duct tape.

  “My friend was expecting a hot, black, lady FBI agent,” he says. “He’ll be pretty disappointed when he sees you. I hope he kills you, anyway. You really fucked up my life.”

  It’s hard to talk around my missing tooth. “What does your friend do?” I mumble.

  “He hurts people.” Luxford zooms back onto the highway, apparently keen to put as much distance between himself and the wreck as possible. My problem about being tracked by the cops seems to have solved itself.

  “You pay him?” I ask.

  “It’s more of a sharing economy–type deal.”

  I nod. The movement sends a wrecking ball through my skull. “You traded videos of Abbey—and the other women—for videos of pain,” I say. “Right?”

  Luxford keeps his eyes on the road. He’s trying to look calm, but a vein is bulging on his temple.

  “Anything involving giants?” I ask.

  He looks confused. “You mean the NFL team?”

  “I mean actual giants.”

  “Christ,” he says. “You must have hit your head hard.”

  “You met this friend on the dark web, right?” I say. “You ever met him in person?”

  He still says nothing, but I can tell the answer is no.

  “Did your friend dump Ruthven in my yard?” I ask. “Or was it you?”

  His eyes narrow. “Who’s Ruthven?”

  “The fat guy,” I say. “The most recent fat guy.”

  He shrugs, apparently bored. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

  He sounds truthful, and I can’t think of a reason for him to lie. Not now.

  Which means that I’ve been investigating two separate cases all this time.

  One involves Shannon and Fred, sharing videos of rape and torture.

  The other involves a wigmaker and sixteen dead men. No connection, other than the fact that Shannon knew one of the wigmaker’s victims.

  “How long before they start looking for you?” he asks casually.