by Blake Crouch
Kork pulled the .45, pointing it at Orson’s face.
Simultaneously, Luther pulled a gun of his own.
“I’ll bet,” Orson said, “that when you were a kid, you were the type of little shit who played in his own corner of the sandbox and didn’t share his toys with anyone. Am I getting warm?”
Kork didn’t like having a gun pointed at him, but it did have the effect of capping his boiling temper. “Who the fuck are you?”
“We’re just a couple of guys heading to a mystery book convention in Indianapolis. Looking for a little fun on the way. To be honest, we were kind of hoping your name was Ben. Because we have Ben’s partner in the trunk.”
Kork couldn’t tell if Orson was kidding or not. The man was seriously hard to read. “You’ve got a man in your trunk?”
“Well, I’m not sitting him in the back seat where he’ll bloody up the leather.”
“You’re bullshitting me.”
Orson raised an index finger and drew an X across his chest. “Cross my heart. Winston and Ben were a couple of predators. Like Luther and I. And like you, judging from the corpse in the field. Only they made the mistake of hurting Luther and his family when he was a kid. So now Luther’s exacting a bit of well-deserved revenge.”
A faint smile curled across Charles’s mouth. “Prove it.”
Orson nodded to Luther, who walked to the rear of the Lexus.
“Keys,” Luther said.
Orson slowly took a key ring out of his pants and tossed it to the pale man. Luther caught the keys and tucked the gun away. Kork walked over, covering Orson, who had his hands at his sides.
Luther popped open the trunk.
“Fuck me,” Kork said.
Inside the compartment lay a man, completely naked, his body wrapped tightly in cellophane, all except for his head. His lips bulged wide around a ball-gag. He was older, in his fifties, white and hairy. His green eyes were wide with fear.
“Think those crows are still hungry?” Luther said, his mouth twitching.
Kork lowered his gun. He wondered what the chances were of running into these two kindred spirits in the middle of Indiana. Then again, he’d heard that the FBI estimated there could be as many as five hundred active serial killers in the U.S., so maybe the odds weren’t as high as he might have guessed.
Luther walked around to the rear passenger door on the shoulder-side of the Lexus and pulled it open. He fumbled around for a moment inside, and then returned to the trunk.
“You want in on this, Kork?” Luther asked.
Kork was staring at the wide-eyed man, thinking that aside from wrapping him in cellophane, it didn’t appear that they’d so much as laid a finger on him yet.
Fresh, untouched meat.
“Kork?”
“Yeah. For sure. You guys planning on doing him right now? Right here?”
“That’s up to Luther. I know he’s been itching to get to it ever since we picked Winston up in Gary.” Orson looked at Luther. “Luther, you sure you’re all right with bringing him in on this?”
Luther stared at Charles. He had eyes like black pits.
“As long as he shuts the fuck up, and doesn’t do anything until he’s offered the chance.”
“Charles?” Orson asked. “You cool with that?”
Kork had killed many people on his own, but the ones that were most memorable, and the most fun, were the ones he did with his sister, Alex. Orson had nailed it when he said Charles didn’t like to share. But with murder, it was different. Sharing made it more exciting.
“So when you pulled over to help me,” Kork said, “were you thinking I’d wind up in your trunk as well?”
“It crossed our minds,” Orson said. “We hate to pass up low-hanging fruit. How about that body in the field?”
“Blow torch versus whore.”
“I thought I caught a whiff of BBQ in the air. So do you want to join in the fun?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
Luther seemed distracted. He was kneeling against the back bumper, leaning over the terrified man wrapped in plastic, staring down into his eyes with a brutal, predatory intensity.
“What you did to my family,” Luther whispered. “To my sister…” He pulled something out of his pocket. “…is something you’re going to pay for with more pain than anyone could endure.”
“What’s he doing?” Kork asked.
“Just give him a moment,” Orson said.
Luther’s face was inches from the man in plastic. “You killed my sister, didn’t you?”
The man wildly shook his head.
“No? So you deny it?”
Wild nodding.
“That just made it worse for you.”
Now Luther held up whatever he’d taken out of his pocket—a small, metal cylinder with six tiny blades on the end.
“This is called an artificial leech. Old-school medical instrument. It’s for poking holes in skin.”
Orson put a hand on Luther’s shoulder. “Not in the trunk.”
“Help me get him…Winston…out.”
The two men wrestled the package from the trunk, one at the head, the other at the feet. Charles joined in, cinching an arm around the wiggling man’s waste. He was screaming around his ball gag, and Kork felt himself becoming aroused.
They set him down on the shoulder-side of the car, and Luther sat on top of him.
“Look at me, Green Eyes,” he said. “I still dream about your eyes, about your friend walking up the beach at night toward our bonfire. You’re going to tell me the truth. Do you understand that?”
Frantic nodding.
“If I take out your gag, you’ll tell me the truth?”
Nodding.
“And do you know what will happen if you tell me the truth?”
Shaking.
“I’ll let you go. I just want to hear you say what happened to my sister. I never saw her again, never heard from her again after that night you and Ben came along and destroyed my family. I just want to know what you did to her. Are you ready?”
The man nodded.
Luther reached around behind his head and unstrapped the ball-gag.
Winston’s chest rising and falling.
The man’s gray hair slicked back with sweat.
“Please,” he said, “please don’t do this—”
Luther silenced him by simply holding up a finger.
“I don’t want to hear a single word come out of your mouth except for your explanation of what happened to my Katie.”
“Katie?”
Kork saw Luther shut his eyes for a moment, then open them again.
“Winston, this is your last chance. Then I’m going to stick you with this artificial leech about five thousand times and feed you to the crows.”
“Just tell me what it is you want me to say. I’ll say it. I’ll say anything.”
The wind was whipping Luther’s long, black hair around his face.
He tucked it back behind his ears.
“What did you do to my sister?”
“I…I…I’m sorry.”
“Where is her body?”
“It’s…I don’t know.”
“You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“Did you kill her?”
Tears streamed out of the man’s eyes.
“Did you kill her, Winston? Tell me you killed her and how you did it, and I won’t kill you.”
“I…I did it.”
“You did. Okay. How?”
“With um…with a knife.”
“You killed my eight-year-old sister with a knife?”
He nodded.
“Did you rape her first, Winston?”
“I…”
“Like you raped my mother. Tell me if you raped her before you killed her.”
“No…I didn’t…”
“You didn’t rape my sister? Or my mother? Because I saw you, Winston. I watched you do it. Don’t you fucking lie to me.”
“If I tell you…admit…that I raped her, you won’t kill me?”
“That’s right. I won’t kill you.”
“Yes,” Winston said. “I did it.”
“Do you know where Ben is?”
“Ben?”
“You’re partner. Tell me where Ben is.”
“I…I don’t know…”
Luther sighed. He pinched the man’s cheeks together and jammed the ball-gag into his mouth and snapped it back into place around his skull.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Luther said, “but I didn’t lie. I have no intention of killing you. I’ll let the crows take care of that. But first, we have to let them know there’s something yummy inside of you.”
The man was still trying to speak through the ball when Luther stabbed him with the artificial leech. Blood appeared beneath the plastic and the man screamed through his gag, the sound racing out across the cornfield.
“All you had to say was the truth,” Luther said, and he stuck him again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
Andagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagainandagain…losing control, wild stabbing thrusts, until sweat poured down his face.
Orson grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him back.
Luther was crying.
He wiped his eyes, breathless, screamed, “That son of a bitch took everything from me.”
“I know,” Orson said. “I know.” The man was screaming and choking under the gag, blood leaking through the puncture holes in the plastic onto the pavement. “But let’s give our new friend a turn.”
By this time, Kork was fully aroused, and he didn’t even bother hiding it.
The tiny sting of embarrassment overwhelmed by his urge, his need.
“Would you like some private time with Winston, Charles? We could cut away the plastic if you want to have a go at it. Turnabout is fair play, they say.”
“Don’t need you to take off the plastic.” Charles removed a folding knife and placed it above Winston’s flabby stomach, looking for a spot where he could cut deep. “I can make my own hole.”
“This must be like the best day ever to be a crow in Indiana,” Orson said.
There were at least four hundred birds perched on top of Winston, who had finally stopped struggling after an hour of being dined upon.
Several cars had driven by in the interim, and a few had even slowed down.
But no one stopped.
The sun was already halfway between its apex and the horizon, and the first hint of the hard freeze that was coming nipped at the tips of Orson’s ears. He and Charles were sitting on the shoulder, leaning against the Lexus, watching the show.
Luther sat out in the cornfield, just a few feet away from the hungry birds, absolutely still save for his black mane of hair that the wind was blowing back behind his shoulders.
He looked like some terrible scarecrow.
“So your buddy finally got his long-awaited revenge,” Kork said. “How did you find old Winston after all this time? You said Luther’s family was attacked, what? Almost twenty years ago?”
Orson grinned mischievously. “Want to hear a secret?”
“Sure.”
“That man out in the field? He’s the fourth Winston we’ve found in the last two months. Whenever Luther sees a man with green eyes, he sees Winston again.”
Kork laughed. “So that poor fucker wasn’t Winston?”
“Nope. Just some poor fucker. Winston’s partner, Ben, was short and stocky. We’ve killed a few short and stocky guys, too. It’s all a healing process, and I’m doing what I can to help.”
“You mind giving me a ride to the nearest gas station? Still gotta get my car fixed.”
“Of course. We wouldn’t leave a fellow traveler stranded. Birds of a feather, and all that.”
“It’s been good meeting you, Orson. Maybe we’ll bump into each other again sometime.”
“It’s a small world, Charles. Anything can happen.”
Bad Girl
Indianapolis, 1995
Lucy sat down at one of the few empty tables on the perimeter of the hotel bar and hoped none of the waitresses would notice her. She was fifteen years old, and even wearing the makeup she’d taken from her mother’s vanity, she knew her chances of getting served a drink were remote. Worse, she was taking up real estate that legal customers willing to pay ten dollars for a mediocre glass of wine could have inhabited. And there were plenty of them about, the bar nearly full and the hotel lobby bustling with well-dressed adults older than her mom.
The convention didn’t technically begin until tomorrow morning, so none of them wore name badges. But she felt sure her eyes were passing over famous mystery writers, perhaps even people she’d read. The man she’d come to see, Andrew Z. Thomas, the convention’s guest of honor, for whom she’d stolen her mother’s car and driven six hundred miles on a learner’s permit, had yet to make his appearance. Just the thought of him being in the same building made her knees feel weak.
“Hi there.”
Lucy turned and met eyes with a waitress now standing at her table, a pretty girl, probably in college, her dirty blond hair drawn back into a ponytail.
Lucy said, “Could I just get a water, please?”
“I’m afraid you can’t sit here, sweetie.”
“Why not?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
The waitress laughed. “I’m twenty-three, sister. You ain’t twenty-two.”
“Please don’t make me leave. I don’t—”
“I’ll get in trouble if the manager sees you sitting in my section. I’m sorry.”
Lucy stared at the waitress, then lifted her handbag off the table and climbed down from the chair. They’d already refused her a room because of her age. Now this. What a mean hotel.
She was two inches shy of five feet, and she felt even smaller threading her way through the groups of conversing adults in the lobby.
“—got a two-book deal for mid-six figures, which just strikes me as a crime considering his last didn’t even hit—”
“—switched agents—”
“—not sure if my editor’s coming or not. She was supposed to have finished my manuscript by now—”
“—and every time I turn around, Darling’s right there, like he’s stalking me or—”
The smell of cologne, perfume, wine breath, and cigarette smoke overpowering.
She broke out of the crowd and found a cluster of unoccupied chairs and plopped down in one. From this distance, the din of conversations mixed together like the static of a waterfall. She leaned back in the leather chair and stared up the full height of the twenty-one story atrium, the uncomfortable pang in her gut not all that dissimilar to what she experienced every day in the high school cafeteria. Invisibility. The people around her untouchable, unreachable, as characters in a movie while she watched them onscreen from the darkness of an empty theater. This sense, that had been with her for as long as she could remember, even before her father had died, that she wasn’t a participant in any of this. In anything really. Only an observer.
When Lucy straightened in her chair, she saw that a man now sat across from her. He looked old to her, though he wasn’t even thirty. Sports jacket. Khaki slacks. Sending out big wafts of cologne which she thought smelled pretty. He seemed either angry or nervous, and he kept looking at his watch like he was waiting for someone, but if he was, they never came.
She watched him, and the third time their eyes met, the man gave a thin smile and nodded.
He didn’t have a name badge either, but Lucy took a stab anyway. “Are you a writer?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you a writer?”