Pieces of Her

by Karin Slaughter

  There was no Ford in sight.

  Shit.

  A pair of headlights approached from Beachview. Andy panicked, running left, then right, then circling back and diving behind a palm tree as a black Suburban drove by. There was a giant, springy antenna on the bumper that told Andy the car belonged to law enforcement.

  Andy looked back up Beachview Drive. There was an unpaved driveway halfway up, weeds and bushes overgrown at the entrance. One of the six remaining bungalows on Belle Isle was owned by the Hazeltons, a Pennsylvania couple who’d stopped coming down years ago.

  Andy could hide there, try to figure out what to do next.

  She checked Seaborne in case any cars were driving up the wrong way. She scanned Beachview for headlights. Then she jogged up the road, her bare feet slapping the asphalt, until she reached the Hazeltons’ long, sandy driveway.

  There was something off.

  The overgrown tangle of bushes had been tamped down.

  Someone had recently driven up to the house.

  Andy skirted the bushes, heading into the yard instead of down the driveway. Her feet were bleeding so badly that the sand created a second layer of sole. She kept moving forward, crouching down to make herself less visible. No lights were on inside the Hazelton house. Andy realized she could sort of see in the darkness. It was later—or earlier—than she’d thought. Not exactly sunrise, but Andy recalled there was a sciencey explanation about how the rays bounced against the ocean surface and brought the light to the beach before you could see the sun.

  Whatever the phenomenon, it allowed her to make out the Ford truck parked in the driveway. The tires were bigger than normal. Black bumpers. Tinted windows. Florida license plate.

  There was another truck parked beside it—smaller; a white Chevy, probably ten years old but otherwise nondescript. The license plate was from South Carolina, which wasn’t unusual this close to Charleston, but as far as Andy knew, the Hazeltons were still based in Pennsylvania.

  Andy carefully approached the Chevy, crouching to look inside. The windows were rolled down. She saw the key was in the ignition. There was a giant lucky rabbit’s foot dangling from the keychain. Fuzzy dice hung from the mirror. Andy had no idea whether or not the truck belonged to the Hazeltons, but leaving the keys inside seemed like something the older couple would do. And the dice and giant rabbit’s foot keychain was right up their grandson’s alley.

  Andy considered her options.

  No GPS in the Chevy. No one to report it stolen. Should she take this instead? Should she leave the dead man’s truck behind?

  Andy let Laura do the thinking for her. Her mother had said to take the dead man’s truck so she was going to take the dead man’s truck.

  Andy approached the Ford cautiously. The dark windows were rolled tight. The doors were locked. She found Hoodie’s keys in the make-up bag. The ring had a can opener and the Ford key. No house keys, but maybe they were inside the truck.

  Instead of pressing the remote, Andy used the actual key to unlock the door. Inside, she smelled a musky cologne mingled with leather. She tossed the make-up bag onto the passenger’s seat. She had to brace her hands on the sides of the cab to pull herself up into the driver’s seat.

  The door gave a solid thunk when she closed it.

  Andy stuck the key into the ignition. She turned it slowly, like the truck would blow up or self-destruct with the wrong move. The engine gave a deep purr. She put her hand on the gear. She stopped, because something was wrong.

  There should have been light coming from the dash, but there was nothing. Andy pressed her fingers to the console. Construction paper, or something that felt like it, was taped over the display. She turned her head. The dome light had not come on, either.

  Andy thought about Hoodie sitting in the truck blacking out all the light then parking it at the Hazeltons.

  And then she thought about the light in her mother’s office. The only light Laura had left on in the house. Andy had assumed her mother had forgotten to turn it off, but maybe Laura had not been sleeping in the recliner. Maybe she had been sitting on the couch in her office waiting for someone like Hoodie to break in.

  He has my gun in the waistband of his jeans.

  Not a gun, but my gun.

  Andy felt her mouth go dry.

  When had her mother bought a gun?

  A siren whooped behind her. Andy cringed, but the cruiser rolled past rather than turning down the driveway. She moved the gear around, slowly letting her foot off the brake, testing each notch until she found reverse.

  There was no seeing out the dark windows as she backed out of the driveway. Tree limbs and thorny bushes scraped at the truck. She hit Beachview Drive sideways, the truck wheels bumping off the hard edge of the curb.

  Andy performed the same trick with the gear until she found drive. The headlights were off. In the pre-dawn darkness, she had no way of finding the dial to turn them on. She kept both hands tight on the wheel. Her shoulders were up around her ears. She felt like she was about to roll off a cliff.

  She drove past the road to Gordon’s house. The flashing lights of a police cruiser were at the end of his street. Andy accelerated before she could be seen. And then she realized that she could not be seen because all of the lights were off, not just the interior lights and the headlights. She glanced into the rearview mirror as she tapped the brakes. The taillights did not come on, either.

  This was not good.

  It was one thing to cover all of your lights when you were on the way to doing something bad, but when you were leaving the bad thing, when the road was crawling with police officers, driving without your lights was tantamount to writing the word GUILTY on your forehead.

  There was one bridge in and out of Belle Isle. The Savannah police would be streaking down one side while Andy, illuminated by the sun reflecting off the water, would be trying to sneak out of town on the other.

  She pulled into the parking lot of what happened to be the Mall of Belle Isle. She jumped out of the truck and walked around to the back. Some kind of thick black tape covered the taillights. She picked at the edge and found that it wasn’t tape, but a large magnetic sheet. The other light had the same.

  The corners were rounded off. The sheets were the exact size needed to cover both the brake lights and the back-up lights.

  Andy’s brain lacked the ability to process why this mattered. She tossed the magnets into the back of the truck and got behind the wheel. She peeled away the construction paper on the console. Like the magnets, the paper was cut to the exact size. More black paper covered the radio and lighted buttons on the console.

  She found the knob for the headlights. She drove away from the mall. Her heart was thumping against the side of her neck as she approached the bridge. She held her breath. She crossed the bridge. No other cars were on the road. No other cars were on the turn-off.

  As she accelerated toward the highway, she caught a glimpse of three Savannah cruisers rushing toward the bridge, lights rolling, sirens off.

  Andy let out the breath she’d been holding.

  There was a sign by the road:

  MACON 170

  ATLANTA 248

  Andy checked the gas gauge. The tank was full. She would try to make the over four-hour trip to Atlanta without stopping, then buy a map at the first gas station she found. Andy had no idea how far Carrollton was from there, or how she’d find the Get-Em-Go storage facility near the Walmart.

  The unit number is your birthday. One-twenty. Say it.

  “One-twenty,” Andy spoke the numbers aloud, suddenly confused.

  Her birthday was yesterday, August twentieth.

  Why had Laura said that she was born in January?

  6

  Andy drove up and down what seemed like the city of Carrollton’s main drag. She had easily found the Walmart, but unlike the Walmart, the Get-Em-Go storage facility did not have a gigantic, glowing sign that you could see from the interstate.

  The bypas
s into Atlanta had been tedious and—worse—unnecessary. Andy had been tempted to use the truck’s navigation system, but in the end decided to follow Laura’s orders. She’d bought a folding map of Georgia once she was inside the Atlanta city limits. The drive from Belle Isle to Carrollton should have been around four and a half hours. Because Andy had driven straight through Atlanta during morning rush hour, six hours had passed before she’d finally reached the Walmart. Her eyelids had been so heavy that she’d been forced to take a two-hour nap in the parking lot.

  How did people locate businesses before they had the internet?

  The white pages seemed like an obvious source, but there were no phone booths in sight. Andy had already asked a Walmart security guard for directions. She sensed it was too dangerous to keep asking around. Someone might get suspicious. Someone might call a cop. She did not have her driver’s license or proof of insurance. Her rain-soaked hair had dried in crazy, unkempt swirls. She was driving a stolen truck with Florida plates and dressed like a teenager who had woken up in the wrong bed during spring break.

  Andy had been in such a panicked hurry to get to Carrollton that she hadn’t bothered to wonder why her mother was sending her here in the first place. What was inside the storage facility? Why did Laura have a hidden key and a flip phone and money and what was Andy going to find if she ever located the Get-Em-Go?

  The questions seemed pointless after over an hour of searching. Carrollton wasn’t a Podunk town, but it wasn’t a buzzing metropolis, either. Andy had figured her best bet was to aimlessly drive around in search of her destination, but now she was worried that she would never find it.

  The library.

  Andy felt the idea hit her like an anvil. She had passed the building at least five times, but she was just now making the connection. Libraries had computers and, more importantly, anonymous access to the internet. At the very least, she would be able to locate the Get-Em-Go.

  Andy swerved a massive U-turn and got into the turning lane for the library. The big tires bumped over the sidewalk. She had her choice of parking spaces, so she drove to the far end. There were only two other cars, both old clunkers. She assumed they belonged to the library staff. The branch was small, probably the size of Laura’s bungalow. The plaque beside the front door said the building opened at 9 a.m.

  Eight minutes.

  She stared at the squat building, the crisp edges of the red brick, the grainy pores in the mortar. Her vision was oddly sharp. Her mouth was still dry, but her hands had stopped shaking and her heart no longer felt like it was going to explode. The stress and exhaustion from the last few days had peaked around Macon. Andy was numb to almost everything now.

  She felt no remorse.

  Even when she thought about the horrible last few seconds of Hoodie’s life, she could not summon an ounce of pity for the man who had tortured her mother.

  What Andy did feel was guilt over her lack of remorse.

  She remembered years ago one of her college friends proclaiming that everyone was capable of murder. At the time, Andy had silently bristled at the generalization, because if everyone were truly capable of murder, there would be no such thing as rape. It was the kind of stupid what if question that came up at college parties—what if you had to defend yourself? Could you kill someone? Would you be able to do it? Guys always said yes because guys were hardwired to say yes to everything. Girls tended to equivocate, maybe because statistically they were a billion times more likely to be attacked. When the question invariably came round to Andy, she had always joked that she would do exactly what she’d ended up doing at the diner: cower and wait to die.

  Andy hadn’t cowered in her mother’s kitchen. Maybe it was different when someone you loved was being threatened. Maybe it was genetic.

  Suicides ran in families. Was it the same with killing?

  What Andy really wanted to know was what had her face looked like. In that moment, as she kicked open the office door and swung the pan, she had been thoughtless, as in, there was not a single thought in her mind. Her brain was filled with the equivalent of white noise. There was a complete disconnect between her head and her body. She was not considering her own safety. She was not thinking about her mother’s life or death. She was just acting.

  A killing machine.

  Hoodie had a name. Andy had looked at his driver’s license before she’d thrown the wallet into the bay.

  Samuel Godfrey Beckett, resident of Neptune Beach, Florida, born October 10, 1981.

  The Samuel Beckett part had thrown her off, because Hoodie’s existence outside Laura’s office had taken shape with the name. He’d had a parent who was a fan of Irish avant-garde poetry. That somehow made his life more vivid than the Maria tattoo. Andy could picture Hoodie’s mother sitting on her back porch watching the sunrise, asking her son, “Do you know who I named you after?” the same way that Laura always told Andy the story about how the H got dropped from her middle name.

  Andy pushed away the image.

  She had to remind herself that Samuel Godfrey Beckett was, in Detective Palazzolo’s parlance, a bad guy. There were likely a lot of bad things Samuel or Sam or Sammy had done in his lifetime. You didn’t darken all the interior lights in your truck and cover your taillights on a whim. You did these things deliberately, with malice aforethought.

  And someone probably paid you for your expertise.

  Nine a.m. A librarian unlocked the door and waved Andy in.

  Andy waved back, then waited until the woman went inside before retrieving the black make-up bag from under the seat. She opened the brass zip. She checked the phone to make sure the battery was full. No calls registered on the screen. She closed the phone and shoved it back into the bag alongside the keycard, the padlock key, the thick bundle of twenties.

  She had counted the stash in Atlanta. There was only $1,061 to get Andy through however many days she needed to get through before the phone rang and her mother said it was safe to come home.

  Andy felt stricken by the thought that she would have to devise some kind of budget. A Gordon budget. Not an Andy budget, which consisted of praying that cash would appear from the ether. She had no way of making more money. She couldn’t get a job without using her social security number and even then, she had no idea how long she’d need the job for. And she especially did not know what kind of job she could possibly be qualified to do in Idaho.

  Keep heading northwest after Carrollton . . . Somewhere far away, like Idaho.

  Where the hell had her mother gotten that idea? Andy had only ever been to Georgia, New York, Florida and the Carolinas. She knew nothing about Idaho except that there was probably a lot of snow and undoubtedly a lot of potatoes.

  $1,061.

  Gas, meals, hotel rooms.

  Andy zipped the bag closed. She got out of the truck. She pulled down the ridiculously small T-shirt, which was as flattering as Saran Wrap on a waffle fry. Her shorts were stiff from the salt air. Her feet hurt so badly that she was limping. There was a cut on her shin that she did not remember getting. She needed a shower. She needed Band-Aids, better shoes, long pants, shirts, underwear . . . that thousand bucks and change would probably not last more than a few days.

  She tried to do the math in her head as she walked toward the library. She knew from one of her former roommates that the driving distance between New York City and Los Angeles was almost three thousand miles. Idaho was somewhere in the upper left part of the United States—Andy sucked at geography—but it was definitely northwest.

  If she had to guess, Andy would assume the driving time was about the same from Georgia to Idaho as from New York to California. The trip from Belle Isle to Macon was right under two hundred miles, which took about two and a half hours to drive, so basically she was looking at around twelve days of driving, eleven nights in cheap motels, three meals a day, gas to get there, whatever supplies she needed in the immediate . . .

  Andy shook her head. Would it take twelve days to get to Idaho?<
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  She really sucked at math, too.

  “Good morning,” the librarian said. “Coffee’s ready in the corner.”

  “Thanks,” Andy mumbled, feeling guilty because she wasn’t a local taxpayer and shouldn’t technically be able to use all of this stuff for free. Still, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at a computer.

  The glowing screen made her feel oddly at ease. She had been without her phone or iPad all night. Andy had not realized how much time she wasted listening to Spotify or checking Instagram and Snapchat and reading blogs and doing Hogwarts house sorting quizzes until she lacked the means to access them.

  She stared at the computer screen. She drank her coffee. She thought about emailing her father. Or calling him. Or sending him a letter.

  If you contact him, they’ll know. They’ll trace it back and find you.

  Andy put down her cup. She typed Get-Em-Go Carrollton GA into the browser, then clicked on the map.

  She almost laughed.

  The storage facility was just over one hundred yards behind the library. She knew this because the high school’s football field separated the two. Andy could’ve walked to it. She checked the hours on the Get-Em-Go website. The banner across the top said that the facilities were open twenty-four hours, but then it also said that the office was open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

  Andy looked at the clock. She had fifty minutes.

  She opened MapQuest on the computer and pulled up driving directions from Georgia to Idaho. Two thousand three hundred miles. Thirty hours of driving, not twelve days, which was why Andy had been forced to take Algebra twice. She had selected PRINT before her brain could tell her not to. Andy clicked CANCEL. The library charged ten cents a page, but money wasn’t the issue. She would have to walk up to the counter and ask for the pages, which meant the librarian would see that she was driving to Idaho.

  Which meant if somebody else, maybe a guy like Hoodie who had magnets on his taillights and construction paper on his dashboard, asked the librarian where Andy was heading, then the librarian would know.