Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  Warner swipes to unlock the phone, leaving a smudge of blood on the screen.

  “Take me to the hospital,” she says.

  “I’m doing it! Make the fucking call.” I floor the accelerator. The wheels spin in the dirt for a second before the tread catches and the car lurches back up the driveway.

  When I glance over, Warner appears to be swiping through her contacts. Looking for Tyrrell, I hope.

  “Put it on speaker,” I say. “I want to hear every word you say.”

  She mumbles something. My ears are still ringing.

  “What?” I say.

  “I’m calling him,” she says. “I’m doing it. Just get...”

  She’s blacked out again. Her skin is deathly white. It’s surreal to see someone so terrifying look so helpless. Charlie Warner has killed so many people, and ruined the lives of so many others.

  The phone is ringing. I shove her shoulder. Her head thunks against the window, and she gasps.

  “Stay awake,” I say. “If Thistle dies, I’ll eat you alive. You understand? I’m not being figurative.”

  The phone keeps ringing for a while, and then cuts out.

  “He’s not picking up,” she says unnecessarily.

  “Try again.”

  She fiddles with the phone as the car hurtles down the highway. After what seems like way too long, the phone starts ringing again. I’m clenching my remaining teeth so hard it feels like they might fracture.

  The phone keeps ringing.

  Warner’s eyes are closed again.

  “Hey!” I backhand Warner across the face.

  She looks at me through bleary eyes. “Dad?”

  I never wondered about Warner’s early life, and I’m not going to start now. “I’m not your dad,” I say. “Focus. You have to call Tyrrell. Tell him to stop what he’s doing immediately.”

  The phone keeps ringing for a while, and then cuts out again.

  “Try again,” I say.

  Warner looks out the window. “This isn’t the way to the hospital,” she says.

  She’s right. But she’s too weak to do anything about it.

  Soon we reach Thistle’s house. It’s a one-story, two-bedroom place with stucco walls and a small lawn out front, ripped to shreds by her dog.

  Tyrrell’s car is parked a few houses up. I’m too late.

  “No!” I unbuckle my seat belt and leap out of the car, leaving it in the middle of the street with the engine running.

  I run up the path to the front door. Try the handle. It’s unlocked.

  I sneak in. Tyrrell is here. I don’t want to spook him, especially if he has Thistle. The floorboards creak under the synthetic rug, and I wince. I listen for breaths or footsteps, but I can’t hear anything over my racing heart.

  She might still be alive. Maybe. Tyrrell might be the kind of killer who takes his time.

  I grit my teeth and shake my head, trying to dislodge the image of Thistle bound to a chair or stuck in a bear trap. Then I creep farther into the house.

  Photos of people I don’t recognize line the walls. Thistle’s not the type to fill the house with photos of herself. An umbrella stand with a lone umbrella is up the other end of the hallway, too far from the door to be useful. I move down the hall toward it. The bedrooms are to my right, the living area to my left. Both bedroom doors are open. Through the gaps I can see bookshelves, nightstands, a sliver of a bed. I’ve never been in Thistle’s bedroom, so I don’t know which one is hers. But one of the rooms has no books on the shelves, which doesn’t seem like her. I slip into the other one.

  The heavy curtains are drawn. The bed is a single, with lavender sheets. A dream catcher hangs from the lamp on the nightstand. The books on the shelves are New Agey—angels, tarot, the healing power of crystals. This isn’t her room.

  I go back out. As I’m about to turn toward what must be Thistle’s bedroom, I notice something in the living area. From this angle, I can see Tyrrell on the sofa, watching TV with the sound off. I wonder if he knows that Warner was on her way to kill me.

  He sees me at the same moment as I see him. He jolts in his seat.

  “Christ, Blake,” he says. “What happened to you?”

  “It’s a long story,” I say. “The FBI agent—have you dealt with her yet?”

  “No,” he says, getting up. “Still waiting for her to get home.”

  I can’t tell if he’s being truthful. Would he watch TV if he was lying in wait? Would he stick around if he’d already killed her?

  I didn’t think to take the Springfield from Warner before I came in. Stupid. Now I’m defenseless.

  Tyrrell gestures at the TV. “Care to join me?”

  He knows that I’m on Warner’s kill list. He’s trying to get me into a vulnerable position.

  “No thanks,” I say. “Boss lady sent me here to tell you to call it off.”

  “Oh, she did?” Without Warner’s password, he doesn’t believe me.

  “You weren’t answering your phone. Come on, we gotta get out of here. Warner’s been shot. We need to get her to a hospital.”

  “Okay. Let me grab my things.” His hand goes out of sight behind the sofa cushions.

  I grab the nearest object—the umbrella in the stand—and hurl it at him. It misses, but it throws off his aim. When he pulls the trigger of the Walther in his hand, a puff of plaster dust bursts out of the wall behind me as I run at him, reaching for the gun.

  He backs away, but trips over the coffee table. Another bullet hits the ceiling. I jump on him and grab his wrist, crushing it until the gun slips from his fingers.

  He pounds me with his other fist. My brain quivers like Jell-O. I lose my grip on him, and he pushes me off.

  He scrambles toward the fallen gun. I’m still on the ground. It takes me a split second to realize that he’ll almost certainly get to the gun first, and that even if by some miracle I end up with it, I don’t know how to use it. So I grab the umbrella instead.

  He snatches up the gun and whirls around. Takes aim at my head.

  I take aim at his, and push the button on the umbrella.

  The spring-loaded mechanism clicks, and the spiked tip goes straight into Tyrrell’s eyeball. He shrieks, flailing as blood and vitreous humor pours down his cheek, and then he disappears from view as the canvas of the umbrella unfurls. I give the handle a shove, and the screaming stops.

  “Reese!” I call out as Tyrrell hits the ground with a thud.

  Silence descends upon the house.

  “Are you here? It’s okay. It’s Blake.”

  Nothing.

  She’s not dead, I tell myself. She’s hiding. She thinks I’m the Crawdad Man.

  “Don’t shoot me, okay?” I say. I check the kitchen, because it’s closest. Then the laundry. The bathroom. No sign of her.

  Finally I check the last bedroom.

  It’s empty, and not just of people. Thistle’s clothes are gone. Her books. Her viola.

  There’s a handwritten note on her bedside table. I guess Tyrrell didn’t notice it. He probably thought the other bedroom was hers. Without Thistle’s stuff, it looks like a guest room.

  Phoebe,

  I’m sorry to leave like this. You’ve been a good friend to me. I hope I’ll see you again—but not anytime soon.

  It’s nothing you did. I made a mistake. Actually, mistake doesn’t cover it. I screwed up so badly that I can’t be a cop anymore. That guy I told you about, he turned out to be a criminal. You have no idea how bad. And if I’m not a cop, I don’t know what I am. I need to go somewhere while I figure that out.

  I wanted to stay until you got back from Memphis, to say goodbye. But the thought of another night in this city makes me feel sick. I can’t be here right now. Please understand.

  There’s a month’s rent in the Apache tears. You kno
w what that means, right? I hope that gives you enough time to replace me. Helen is looking after Junie until you get back.

  I’m really sorry. I’ll miss you.

  Reese

  P.S. I’ll ask my old colleagues to watch the house. If that guy comes to the door, don’t answer.

  A teardrop lands on the note. I brush it away with my thumb, and walk out of the room. I find myself looking at the dead man with an umbrella stuck in his head, without really seeing him. Part of me is aware that I’m in a house where shots were recently fired, and the police are probably on their way. I can’t stay. But I don’t know where else to go.

  I’m a missing-persons investigator, but for the first time, I’m clueless. Thistle could be anywhere. Even if I somehow found her, there’s no way I could convince her to trust me again. It’s over.

  Eventually I wipe down the door handles, the umbrella and the other things I might have touched. I mop up the mud on the floor. I leave Tyrrell where he is. I don’t open the crystal healing book, which almost certainly contains a month of rent. Apache tears are a kind of volcanic glass.

  By the time I get back to the car, sirens are in the air, and Charlie Warner is dead.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  I can turn back time, resurrect the dead, make you smile, make you cry. I form in an instant, but last a lifetime. What am I?

  The highway cuts a ghostly ribbon through the forest. My headlights turn the trees gray, like headstones. The heater roars, drying out my eyeballs. I’ve showered, but I can still feel the dead all over me. The radio is cranked up as loud as it goes, so I can’t hear myself think. It doesn’t work.

  Without Thistle, I can’t change. But without Warner, I have no one to eat. The hunger will slowly drive me crazy.

  I could turn myself in. Confess to everything I’ve done. Die by lethal injection. Or maybe hobble out of prison an old man, penniless in a futuristic city I don’t understand, Reese Thistle a distant memory.

  That’s the less appealing of my two options.

  I still can’t hear Thistle in my head. Instead, I have the memory of Hope’s voice: Let me give you some advice, Mr. Blake. If you ever want to kill yourself, put the gun to the side of your head, not the front or the back.

  That’s the more appealing option. I have Warner’s Springfield. My aim isn’t good, but it’s good enough. There’s just one more thing I have to do first.

  The turnoff is so well hidden I nearly miss it. I brake hard and narrowly avoid flipping the car. I spin the wheel and send the car bouncing down a dirt road. It seems impossible that anyone could live so far from civilization. But according to the navigation software on my phone, this is the right way. I resist the urge to double-check the address on the envelope, handwritten by Shannon Luxford.

  I’ve chosen my last meal. Fred.

  And then I’ll stop, I tell myself. This is the last one.

  “...found dead at a remote homestead near Beaumont, Texas,” the radio says. “Police have confirmed that they believe there is a connection to the double homicide in West Houston.”

  Quick work. I guess they found Warner’s body—I just left it in the street—and followed the phone trail back to Sindy’s cabin, where they found a dead FBI agent and around twenty other bodies, some of which had been stitched together. Glad I’m not the one who has to deal with the fallout.

  The field office director comes on the radio. “We’re pursuing several leads,” she says. “We urge anyone with information to come forward.”

  That’s code for: We’re shitting ourselves.

  The news anchor is back. “The victims’ names have yet to be released,” she says, barely managing to keep the glee from her voice, “but the details of the case have been described as ‘disturbing.’”

  Even when my own body is eventually found, it’s unlikely that the police will connect any of this to me. Warner’s gun is probably untraceable. I killed only one of the many, many victims, and any trace of me will be buried by the sheer volume of DNA from other people. Once all the bullets have been counted and the guns examined, the cops will probably announce that all those people killed each other.

  Some will suspect it isn’t true. But an open case of this magnitude would look bad for everyone. Better to blame the victims and declare the case closed.

  Maybe Thistle is listening to the radio right now. Maybe she’ll follow the case from afar, and eventually realize that I wasn’t the Crawdad Man.

  But that won’t help. It wasn’t the body in the backyard that destroyed our relationship. It wasn’t even the head in my freezer. It was the look on my face. She knows me now. Nothing can undo that.

  Another turnoff. This narrow trail isn’t on Google Maps, and would be easy to miss. But there’s a rotting wooden sign, for the mailman.

  “My next guest is Professor Raquel Solar from Louisiana State University,” the anchor continues. “Professor, these latest shootings bring this year’s gun death toll to seven hundred and twelve in Texas alone. Is it time to talk about gun control?”

  Another voice comes on. “We’ve done nothing but talk, Susan. Compared to other countries—”

  I turn off the radio. A house is visible through the trees.

  It’s nothing like Sindy’s cabin in the woods. It’s a sprawling two-story building, with probably five or six bedrooms. A big white pickup is parked right in front of a two-car garage. Electric lights are switched on—it’s off the grid only in the criminal sense. I bet there’s hot water, too. Someone is living a good life out here.

  More lights come on as I stop the car and kill the engine. Automated security lights, I think.

  As I get out of the car, the front door opens. A man in jeans and a knitted sweater steps out—he’s friendly-faced but muscular, like a young Matt Damon.

  He approaches me, sneakers crunching on the gravel. “Shannon?” he says, extending his hand.

  I shake it. “Fred. Nice to finally meet you in person.”

  “Likewise.”

  He has a firm handshake. I won’t be able to overpower him—I’ll have to take him by surprise.

  He looks me up and down, assessing. He clearly doesn’t know what Shannon looked like, but I’m older than he would have expected. The shaved head and the broken nose helps, though. I could be anybody.

  “Thanks for letting me crash here,” I say.

  “No problem, man. Stay as long as you need. We gotta look out for each other, right? Come on in.”

  Finally he turns his back, walking back toward the house. I reach behind my back and grip the hammer. I’ve never killed someone in cold blood before. But I need this. One last monster to eat.

  “The other guys love your videos, man,” Fred says without looking over his shoulder. “They’re really looking forward to meeting you.”

  I let go of the hammer and let my shirt fall back down to cover it.

  “The other guys?” I say.

  * * *

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to my endlessly accommodating family, especially Venetia, Mum and Dad. This book couldn’t have happened without your support.

  Thanks to the amazing teams at Allen & Unwin, Bolinda Audiobooks, Booked Out Speaking Agency, Curtis Brown Literary Agency, Hanover Square Press and ICM Partners, who made Hangman such a success and took a leap of faith on an even more disturbing sequel.

  Thanks also to the talented translators who helped Timothy Blake go global. I’m so sorry about all the wordplay in the riddles.

  Particular thanks to Luke Causby, Patrizia di Biase-Dyson, Christine Farmer, Clare Forster, Angela Handley, Natalie Hallak, Peter Joseph, Dan Kirschen, Ali Lavau, Kathleen Oudit, Jane Palfreyman, Christopher Ragland (the wonderfully sinister voice of Blake), Ben Stevenson and Evan Yeong.

  Thanks to Sarah Bailey, Paul Cleave, Jeffery Deaver, Gregg Hurwitz, Gordon Reece, Ben
Sanders and Emma Viskic for writing such terrific noir and for recommending Hangman to your greedy fans.

  Thanks to all the readers who took a chance on Hangman and then, instead of demanding that the author be institutionalized, submitted riddles and volunteered to have characters named after them in the sequel. Sorry I couldn’t use everybody! Apologies to Shannon Luxford, who’s a very nice person in real life.

  ISBN-13: 9781488098697

  Just One Bite

  Copyright © 2019 by Jack Heath

  First published in 2019 by Allen & Unwin as Hunter

  This edition published by Hanover Square Press, 2019

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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