Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  “They were already looking for me,” I say.

  “Nice try.”

  “It’s true. I’m wanted for murder.”

  He glances over at me. I hold his gaze.

  “I cut off your boss’s head with a bread knife,” I say. “The FBI just found it in my freezer. Half the police force is looking for you, the other half is looking for me.”

  The perplexed look on his face suddenly seems hilarious. I can’t stop a mad grin from twisting my bleeding lips.

  “You’re way out of your depth, Shannon,” I say. “You have no clue what’s going on.”

  He laughs uneasily and turns his eyes back to the road. “You’re a funny one,” he says. “Maybe Fred will like you, after all.”

  We’re approaching a bend. I reach for the handbrake.

  But Shannon slows down. I retract my hand without him noticing.

  “First stop,” Shannon says.

  A young woman is waiting out front of an apartment block, walking back and forth, stomping her feet in the cold. She’s small, white, with dark hair and a fur-lined hoodie. As the car gets closer, I think I recognize her from one of the naked photos in Luxford’s desk.

  He rolls down his window. “Hi, Macy.”

  Macy digs something out of her pocket and thrusts it through the window. A driver’s license.

  “I did it,” she says. “But I need it back by tomorrow morning, okay? Before he notices that it’s missing.”

  Shannon studies the license. “Yeah, sure. No problem.”

  Macy can tell he’s lying. “I’m serious,” she insists. “I’ve done everything you ever asked, okay? If you don’t get it back on time, he’ll know I took it.”

  She’s scared, but not enough to have seen the news. She doesn’t know that Shannon kidnapped a woman and kept her imprisoned for years. She certainly doesn’t know he’s a suspect in the Crawdad Man killings.

  “Relax,” Shannon says. “You’ll get it back.”

  Macy’s eyes settle on me. “Who’s this?”

  “He’s no one.”

  I could try to tell her what’s going on. There’s a chance that she could help me. But Luxford might kill her.

  “I’m no one,” I repeat.

  Shannon smirks. “Good boy. See you around, Macy.”

  He rolls up the window and drives off. In the side mirror I can see Macy pacing again. Worried that he won’t come back.

  If he doesn’t, she might tell the cops everything. She might mention me. Maybe they’ll find us before Fred kills me.

  “Who was she?” I ask, although I already know.

  “Just a girl who owes me a favor,” Shannon says.

  “Because you have naked pictures of her?”

  “Right. I forgot that you’d seen those. She’s nice, right?”

  He doesn’t mean her personality. “How many girls owe you a favor?” I ask.

  “Enough to get me this car, a fake ID and a few thousand dollars,” Shannon says. “And a gift for Fred.”

  “You mean me.”

  “Not just you.” He slaps my knee. “This is cool, right? Getting to talk man-to-man. No more pretending.”

  The truck slows as it turns off the South Loop toward Kirby Drive, then into a grid of huge parking lots. The stadium on the horizon holds seventy thousand people, and contained even more during Hurricane Katrina. But there’s nothing on right now, so the lot is deserted. Twenty-six thousand parking spaces—hundreds of acres of empty concrete. We drive through the darkness, past the stadium, toward the Astrodome, which is surrounded by abandoned construction equipment. They’re renovating it—turning it into even more parking spaces.

  A single car is parked alone in the moonlight. Hope Biggs steps out from behind the wheel.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  I have two bodies, joined in one. The more I stand still, the faster I run. What am I?

  Shannon parks twenty or thirty yards away, making Hope walk stiffly through the cold.

  “Just to be clear,” Shannon tells me. “If you try to tell her where we’re going, I’ll kill her, then I’ll kill you. Got that?”

  There’s no point appealing to his conscience. If he has one, he ignores it. Like me.

  “If you do that,” I say, “you have no present for Fred.”

  “There are plenty more girls where this one came from,” he says. “And I don’t really need you at all. Don’t try it.”

  Hope opens the back door and climbs in behind Shannon.

  “Hope!” he says. “Glad you found a parking space.”

  “Shannon,” she says. Neither begging for mercy nor telling him to go fuck himself. She looks at me, and raises an eyebrow.

  I try for a reassuring smile, but it comes out as a grimace.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  “My friend was in a car accident,” Shannon says. “Sit behind him, please.”

  Hope slides across, out of my field of view. We have no way to communicate without Shannon knowing. I hear her put on a seat belt. Shannon starts driving. We cruise across the acres of empty parking lot.

  “Where are you taking us?” she asks.

  “A hospital.”

  “Why is Mr. Blake taped to the seat?”

  Shannon shoots me a sidelong glance as he turns back onto Kirby Drive. “You two have met?”

  The car is accelerating. It’s almost fast enough for me to grab the handbrake and crash it. But now that Hope’s in the backseat, I can’t.

  “My dad’s missing,” Hope said. “You might have heard. Mr. Blake and his partner interviewed me.”

  “I see,” Shannon says. “Well, after his accident, I was worried about his spine. That’s why I taped him to the seat.”

  He says this with presidential confidence. Like he doesn’t care whether she believes him or not.

  “That’s real nice of you,” Hope says flatly.

  We take the on-ramp toward the South Loop. The pickup zooms through the night toward Houston’s outskirts.

  “How much did you tell him?” Shannon asks Hope.

  “Everything,” Hope says.

  “Oh.” Shannon glances at her in the rearview mirror. “Nice to have it all out in the open.”

  “Did you kill my father?” Hope asks.

  Shannon grins at me. I wonder if he’s about to repeat what I told him. About cutting off Biggs’s head with a bread knife.

  “Why would you even ask me a question like that?” he asks.

  Then his chest explodes.

  It’s like the birth scene in Alien. The bullets must have flattened as they passed through Shannon’s body. Bloody chunks of his bladder, lungs and heart splatter the windshield and the side window. Hope works her way up his torso methodically, putting bullets through his abdomen, his chest, his neck. I can hardly hear his screams over the deafening blasts of the gun right behind me. Finally she gets to his head. He stops gurgling as the window is flecked with gray and pink.

  Shannon’s dead foot presses down on the accelerator. I grab the emergency brake just in time. The engine complains and rubber squeals. Instead of zooming away, the pickup goes into a skid. Hope unbuckles Shannon’s seat belt and tries to drag his twitching corpse into the backseat. She can only get him halfway, but it’s enough to lift his foot off the gas. The vehicle slows, stops, stalls. Warning lights flash all over the dash.

  I look around. Shannon’s blood makes it hard to see through the windows, but it looks like no one’s around. Outside the loop, predawn. Ghost town. But someone will turn up sooner or later. We have to get this cleaned up, fast.

  It’s not until Hope grabs my shoulder that I realize she’s been talking to me. My ears are still ringing.

  “Hey,” she says. “You okay?”

  I nod. “You?”

  “Never
better,” she says.

  “Get his keys. Maybe you can use them to cut me loose.”

  Hope gets out of the car and circles around to the driver’s side door. When she opens it, the movement sends the red drips worming toward the road.

  She grabs the keys from the ignition and slams the door, spraying me with blood again. I lick my lips without thinking.

  Hope opens my door and starts hacking at the duct tape with the keys. Punching holes, sawing, punching again.

  “Are you gonna arrest me?” she asks as she works.

  “I’m a civilian consultant,” I say. “I don’t arrest people.”

  “But you’re going to tell the police about this. Right?”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I say. “Were you?”

  “Honestly, I hadn’t thought any further ahead than this,” she says. “What was he going to do to us?”

  “Nothing. But a friend of his was going to torture and kill us.”

  Hope nods, satisfied. “So, what are we going to do?”

  “We could tell the cops everything. You shot an unarmed man after voluntarily getting into his car, but given who he was and what he did to you in the past, you have good odds of a temporary insanity defense. You’d have to explain why you brought the gun with you in the first place, though. Do you have a concealed carry license?”

  “No. You sound like you have another option.”

  “You can go home. Take a shower. Scrub your hands. Throw those clothes in someone else’s trash. Go out for brunch with some friends tomorrow, somewhere public. Act normal. Pay with plastic. In a few days, buy some bullets to replace the ones you used.”

  “What about you?”

  “I can make Shannon disappear.”

  “And his friend?”

  “Him, too.”

  Hope nods again. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s do this.”

  She cuts the last piece of tape, and I can breathe again. I peel the severed strands off my clothes.

  Hope holds out the gun for me to take.

  “I don’t want that,” I say. “Wipe it clean, unload it, put it back in your dad’s safe.”

  Together, we lift Shannon’s body and dump it in the bed of the pickup. There’s an old newspaper in there. I use bunched-up pages to scrub the windshield and the side window. The driver’s seat is still soaked in blood. I’ll have to live with that until I’m somewhere safe.

  “You really think we’ll get away with this?” Hope asks as I throw the bloody newspaper into the bed and close the lid.

  “You will,” I say. “If I get caught, I won’t turn you in.” Not that anyone would believe me, a wanted criminal blaming this young woman for murder.

  “Have you done anything like this before?” Hope asks.

  “No.” The truth. The things I’ve done were much worse than this. “But it’ll work.”

  I drive her back to the stadium parking lot. The sun is rising as I let her out near her car. As I’m pulling over, my phone beeps. I check the message.

  Text me your address, sweetie. I’ll pick you up at dusk. Bring $500 cash, and be ready for an unforgettable night. X

  —Sleeping Beauty

  “Problem?” Hope asks.

  “No problem.”

  She opens the car door. Hesitates. The cold air flows in.

  “Did he really kill my dad?” she asks.

  It would give her closure, believing that she’d avenged her father’s death. If I tell the truth, the guilt might overwhelm her.

  But Shannon was a bad guy, who intended to kill us both. And if tonight goes the way I think it will, everything will be out in the open soon.

  “No,” I say.

  Hope looks up at the lightening sky, blinking away tears. Blood dribbles from the corner of the open car door like sand through an hourglass.

  Typical, Thistle says in my head. You’ll lie to save your own skin, but not to give anyone else any peace.

  “Don’t worry,” I say. “I think I know what happened to your dad. By tonight, I’ll be sure.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I have a ring but no hands. I have many voices but no mouth. What am I?

  After Hope is gone, I search the pickup.

  I find several thousand dollars in cash. A gun, which I don’t touch. A small padded envelope with an address written on it. Shannon’s handwriting. No name. The envelope is empty, but about the size you’d choose for a USB stick. I’m thinking that’s Fred’s address.

  Too far away to check out right now. I have a lot to do before my rendezvous with the wigmaker—AKA Sleeping Beauty, AKA the Crawdad Man.

  I drive to a strip mall, find a public bathroom and wash the blood off my face. Shannon’s blood and mine, swirling together down the stainless-steel drain. The mirror is scratched to shit, but I can more or less make out the damage from the crash. A black eye, a broken nose, a split lip. Not a bad disguise, all up. But if I don’t straighten my nose, I won’t be able to breathe through it when it heals.

  I pinch the bridge and wrench it sideways. The sparks shoot up my nostrils like coke, making my eyes water. Then I stagger out of the bathroom.

  The wigmaker knows what I look like. She followed me home after I visited the college, and dumped a body in my backyard. The busted-up face will help, but I’ll need a haircut, too.

  The strip mall has a twenty-four-hour drugstore. I spend some of Luxford’s cash on a pair of scissors, a pack of disposable razors, some shaving cream and condoms. The young woman behind the counter serves me without looking up from her phone, the blue glow of the screen highlighting the powder on her cheeks.

  I raid a charity donation bin for some clean clothes. They’re better quality than you’d think. In Texas, people throw things away not because they’re ruined, but because they shouldn’t have bought them in the first place. The problem tends to be a lack of closet space.

  I find a white shirt, some worn formal shoes and a Blues Brothers–style dark suit. No belt, no tie, but the clothes look like they’ll fit well enough that it doesn’t matter. I take them back to the bathroom and start cutting my hair.

  Going on the run is easy for me. This is how I used to live—off the grid. I can’t imagine a spoiled rich kid like Shannon Luxford stealing secondhand clothes and shaving his head with a disposable razor in a public bathroom. I wonder what his long-term plan was. How long would Fred have protected him?

  The sun is up when I leave the bathroom. I look good enough to go to the supermarket without arousing suspicion. I walk in and grab a basket, taking the aisles one at a time. I pick up paper towels. Two bottles of refrigerated water. Some meat-tenderizing powder. A hammer, just in case. I don’t know how to use Luxford’s gun, but I know how to use a hammer. I pay cash.

  It takes me a few hours to clean the pick-up. I pour the meat tenderizer into one of the water bottles and shake it until the mixture thickens. Then I pour the fluid onto the bloodstained parts of the seat, rubbing it into the cloth with my fingertips.

  When I’m done I sit on the backseat, waiting for the tenderizer to break down the proteins in the blood. I don’t know what I’m going to do about the body under the lid of the tray.

  I assumed you’d eat it, Thistle says in my head. I hear that’s your thing.

  “I don’t do that anymore,” I say.

  Because you’re too busy having sex with me, right? Thistle says dryly. That was the plan? Tell me, at what point in the future do you picture me forgiving you?

  “When you realize I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She just laughs. It’s a sound with no joy.

  * * *

  I didn’t text Sleeping Beauty my real address. I told her to collect me from a random apartment building in East Houston. The pickup is parked in one of the visitor spaces out front. Now I’m watching the sun go down.<
br />
  I didn’t eat Luxford. I used his cash to buy a mattock and a shovel from a hardware store, then I drove all the way up to Huntsville State Park. I spent hours digging a deep hole way off a trail. Then I got him out of the trunk, dragged him to the grave and lowered him in.

  I even said a few words before I refilled the pit. Trying to prove something, I guess, though I’m not sure what, or to whom.

  Not long to wait now. It’s safe to make a call. If the FBI traces it, they won’t get here before the wigmaker does.

  I reassemble my phone and dial Norman. She picks up straightaway. “Hello?”

  “Dr. Norman, it’s Timothy Blake.”

  “Mr. Blake. What can I do for you?”

  Her tone throws me. If she’s heard that I’m wanted for murder, she does an excellent job of hiding it. Maybe no one thought to tell her.

  “Hello?” she says.

  I wanted to tell her that I’m not guilty. Get her thinking about the things that don’t add up. Things that Thistle might be too enraged to see. But if she really hasn’t heard, I can ask her something else that’s been on my mind. “I had a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “That flap of skin from Gomez’s house. You said it had been preserved somehow.”

  “That’s right. But not with formaldehyde—something odorless.”

  “It got me wondering if the killer might have preserved the rest of the victim, too. Do you know if it’s possible to stuff a human being?”

  “With what?” I can hear noises in the background. A male voice, maybe her husband. Clattering dishes. She’s having an early dinner. Strange to think of her having a normal life outside that icy room I always see her in.

  “Whatever taxidermists use,” I say.

  “No,” she says. “Separated from the body, skin eventually shrivels and goes scaly, no matter what you pickle it in. A stuffed person wouldn’t last more than a few weeks.”

  “Why doesn’t that happen with animal skin?”

  “It does, but the fur covers it.”

  “Huh. Thanks, Doc. It was just a thought.”

  She chuckles. “Your thoughts are always amusing, Mr. Blake. Is there anything else?”