by Jack Heath
Soon I think I’ve reached the spot where Biggs’s body was. My footprints become indistinct here, and then reappear somewhere else, less deep without Biggs’s weight. The blood is gone, consumed by the forest.
I turn slowly, thinking back to the moment when I realized someone was moving through the woods toward me. The tracker came from...this way. I now know it wasn’t the police; they still don’t know Biggs was here. I trudge in that direction, looking for someone else’s footprints.
It doesn’t take much searching before I realize this is hopeless. I could find my own path because I knew where it was. The tracker’s path is impossible to find.
But soon I stumble across a trail. Dirt, just wide enough for a single pair of tire tracks, rutted deep over the years.
Not a trail. A driveway.
I imagine Biggs, naked in the passenger seat. The car stopping, maybe to let a deer pass. Biggs making his move, opening the door and leaping out. He sprints into the forest, and...dies of a heart attack after twenty yards.
Possible. Maybe. Either way, I want to find out who lives out here.
I walk up the drive. A slight upward slope, enough to leave my thighs burning after a while. I occasionally stop and listen. Too far from the main road for traffic noise now. The silence is crushing.
Eventually I spot a cabin. Bigger than a standard hunting lodge—my guess is three bedrooms. The pine logs are recently oiled, and the windows cleaned of cobwebs. No lights on. I hide the flashlight and slow down as I approach. When I reach the edge of the trees I stay still for a moment, listening. Can’t hear any voices or movement from inside, but it’s almost midnight now. The occupants could be sleeping, unaware that a monster is lurking in the dark right outside.
I weave through the trees in a slow circle, wanting to examine the back of the cabin from a safe distance.
The other side has big windows, clean gutters and a rainwater tank. I can’t see anything through the windows other than lacy cream curtains. The cabin seems too backwater to be a holiday rental. No mailbox. Maybe it’s one of those doomsday prepper places, a hideaway for the apocalypse. The inside might be stuffed with canned food and batteries.
When I’m almost back where I started, I take a nearly fatal misstep. I put my foot down on some fallen branches and find there’s no ground beneath them. My arms windmill as I try to shift my weight back onto my other foot. After a moment of wobbling, I crash down loudly onto my ass next to the hole.
I lay still for a full minute, then two. The smell of decay washes over me. No sounds from the cabin, or anywhere else. Seems like I got away with that moment of clumsiness. Guess no one’s home. No sign of a car anywhere around, and this place is too remote to easily reach on foot.
I pick up my dropped phone and shine it into the hole. It’s a little more than two feet wide, dug deliberately by someone. Can’t see the bottom. I think it’s a hunting trap. A deer steps in, breaks its leg and screams until the hunter comes to shoot it. Doesn’t seem very sporting to me, but I used to eat death row inmates, so what would I know?
The cabin isn’t too far from where I found Biggs. Maybe there was no car. He could have been running away from here, not the road, when he died of a heart attack.
Time to have a look inside.
I walk up onto the porch. A little square of glass is set in the front door. It’s too dark inside to see anything beyond.
If I’m going to break in, I want to be damn sure no one’s home. Home invaders get shot in Texas. So I knock. Three loud taps echo out.
No response.
I knock again, and call out. “Hello? I need help! My car broke down, and I have no service out here. Can I use your phone? Please.”
Nothing.
When I was homeless, sometimes I’d be lucky enough to find somewhere to squat. Houston keeps spreading outward, so there are thousands of vacant half-finished houses on the edges of town. Finished ones, too. Investors buy them, wait for the value to go up and then sell, often without bothering to rent them out in between.
Unfortunately, most of the neighborhoods are patrolled by private security teams, because rich assholes don’t like giving free accommodation to homeless people. The few houses that have no security also have no insulation to keep the heat in or out. By law the renter pays the heating bills, so there’s no incentive for investors to build the houses efficiently. I spent a lot of nights shivering on a stolen yoga mat while the cold seeped up from the concrete below.
But I got good at breaking into houses.
Step one: you check if any of the doors or windows are unlocked.
The front door of the cabin isn’t. I do another quick walk-around. No back door. None of the windows will budge.
Step two: look for the spare key. Everyone has one.
The front porch is bare except for a rocking chair and a doormat. Nothing under either one. I run my fingers across the top of the doorframe. Just dust. No potted plants around. Everyone has a spare key, but you can’t always find it.
At this point a burglar would take the hinges off the door, or kick it in. But a squatter will go to step three.
I stand on the rail that surrounds the porch so I can reach the rain gutter, and then I scramble up onto the roof itself. There’s a chimney, too narrow to climb down. But the roof is tiled, not sheet metal. Some luck, at last. It’s pretty easy to lift one tile just enough to unhook the one next to it, making a square hole of blackness. After removing four more tiles, the hole is just wide enough to worm through.
The flashlight in my phone illuminates a crawl space stuffed with fluffy yellow insulation panels. This cabin would be a nice, warm place to squat in. I wriggle through the insulation, the fibers sticking to my clothes. I’m going to be itchy as hell tomorrow.
Eventually I find a trapdoor. I open it and drop down into the cabin.
When I dust myself off and stand up, someone is watching me.
I leap backward, survival instinct taking over. The eyes watching me from the shadows are big and far apart, like something out of a nightmare, gleaming almost too brightly to be real.
I raise the phone, hoping to dazzle the demon with the flashlight. The beam falls on dark fur and long teeth. A wolf!
Or, more precisely, a wolf’s head. It’s a hunting trophy, mounted on the wall.
The wolf is not alone. I look around, taking in all the animal heads as they stare at me through glass eyes. They’re everywhere—above the fireplace, between the cluttered bookshelves, watching over the leather armchair. There’s a rug that used to be a deer, its head still whole, mouth agape.
Even my house isn’t this creepy—and it contains two human corpses.
A hunting rifle hangs by its strap from a hook beside the door, next to a candle lantern and a flashlight. The wood stock shines, recently polished.
A new image forms in my mind. Biggs, stripping naked on the deer rug, while the owner of this place points the rifle at him.
In my head, the owner has no face. But he’s big, and dressed like a hunter, in boots, khakis and with a wool-lined cap.
I’ll give you a twenty-second head start, he says as Biggs trembles. Now run, rabbit!
I don’t have much evidence for this scenario. So it’s time to find some more.
I start walking through the house. The floorboards barely squeak under my weight. Whoever built this place knew what they were doing.
The kitchen has no fridge. No power here, maybe. There’s canned food in the pantry, but not so much that the owner might be expecting the end of the world. A well-stocked liquor cabinet, with several varieties of whiskey and rum.
I was wrong about the three bedrooms. Just two, and only one of them has a bed in it—a queen-size, neatly made. That room has some clothes in the closet, men’s and women’s. The men’s clothes are long of leg and broad of shoulder. A good fit for my imagined hunter
. The closets of the other rooms are empty.
Two bathrooms. One has a single toothbrush and some makeup. The other is bare. Both bathrooms smell bad. Presumably something to do with the plumbing. I don’t know how a toilet that isn’t connected to the grid even works.
I walk back into the main living area, hoping the books on the shelves will give me some clues about the people who live here. But as I’m crossing the deerskin rug, I feel a little bounce in the floorboards.
I lift the rug.
A trapdoor. Padlocked shut. The padlock was hidden under the deer’s head.
I knock on the wood, trying to get a sense of the space below. A cavern, or a cupboard?
I can’t tell. I suddenly wonder what I’ll do if someone knocks back.
No one does.
The poker in the fireplace would make a good lever; I could break the padlock off the trapdoor. But that’s something I can’t fix. When the owner comes home, he or she may decide to report the break-in. That would draw police attention to the woods in which I recently took a bite out of a dead body.
But it’s worth the risk. I put the flashlight down and grab the poker. I try to wedge the tip under the padlock, but it’s hard to see in the dark.
Then the room lights up as car headlights sweep across the windows.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
What breaks but never falls? What falls but never breaks?
Time seems to slow to a crawl, the space between moments expanding like dark energy stretching the universe. I quickly pocket my phone so no one sees the flashlight through the windows. As I scan the room, noting all the signs of my intrusion, the headlights outside go dead.
I roll the rug back over the trapdoor. The poker is my only weapon, but it’s also the thing most likely to give me away. I prop it back up in the fireplace, and immediately feel defenseless.
I look out the window. A man and a woman are walking through the moonlight toward the cabin. The man looks anxious, but excited, too. He’s black, midtwenties, with horn-rimmed glasses and a slim build. Too small to be the owner of the clothes in the house. He’s wearing chinos and a cardigan—not dressed for a hike.
The woman is white, with long black hair and a matching dress. Her hips swing as she walks. She looks much calmer than the man. She has all the power in this situation, or she’s doing a good job of faking it. She’s saying something, but quietly. The distance and the crunching of their footfalls make the words impossible to decode.
I can’t go out the door; they’ll see me. And there’s no time to climb back up into the crawl space. I need somewhere to hide.
I duck into bedroom number two—the one with no bed. Then I stand in the empty closet and hold my breath, hunched over to keep my head clear of the hanging rod.
The lock clicks, and the front door swings open on quiet hinges. The gas lantern hisses. Faint light flickers in the cracks around the edges of the closet door.
The man yelps, and then laughs nervously.
“Sorry,” the woman says. “I should have warned you.”
“What is that, a wolf?”
“Yeah. A Mexican gray. It was a big one, too—ninety pounds.”
Footsteps moving around the living area.
“So,” the man asks. “Where, uh...”
“I’ll show you.” The woman’s voice hovers on the border between friendly and flirtatious. “You want a drink first?”
“Okay, sure.”
More footsteps, heading toward the kitchen.
I slowly open the closet door. I can hear the liquor cabinet opening. Glasses clink.
I creep over to the bedroom door. Look out. No one in the living room. Where’s the man?
“I have to tell you something,” the woman is saying quietly. The man must be in the kitchen with her.
I dart out of the bedroom, cross the corridor and pad through the living area. The front door isn’t locked. I turn the handle, wincing at the faint snick of the mechanism. Then I slip out onto the porch and carefully close the door behind me.
Heart pounding, I crouch down beneath the windows. No sound from inside. Could mean they’re drinking. Could mean they heard me, and they’re staring at each other. A silent look of Did you hear that?
After a moment, the man says, “I’m ready.”
The woman laughs. “Yeah, you are. Bring your drink.”
I tiptoe off the porch and across the undergrowth toward the car. It’s a boxy Buick, a few years old. I can’t tell in the dark if it’s gray or blue or black. I conceal myself in a cave of branches not far from the cabin and finally let the air out of my lungs. That was too close.
I check the time on my phone. I still have a while before Francis is due to drop off my next meal. Whoever owned those oversize hunting clothes isn’t here—I might wait a while, just in case he shows up to join the other two. This looked and sounded like a tryst, but it could be a party. Or something else entirely.
No one turns up. Minutes pass. The adrenaline fades. My legs start to cramp up.
Midnight comes. Silently, the eighth of December becomes the ninth. It’s the day Biggs marked on the wall planner, and I still don’t understand why.
About half an hour later, the front door of the cabin opens. The woman walks out, followed by the man. He looks disheveled. She doesn’t.
I’m getting a weird vibe here. If they were married, they would have stayed the night. If they were having an affair, they would have been holding hands or pinching one another’s asses on the way in. There’s nothing like that, although the man does look guilty. Actually, it’s worse than that. He looks disgusted with himself, as though he knows he’s just done something it will be hard to live with. A feeling I know too well.
The woman wears an expression of intense serenity. Like a Buddhist sniper. For an instant she looks familiar, but then she turns her head as she climbs into the Buick, and her jet-black hair curtains her face. She’s gone before I can place her, like a whisper of perfume on a crowded street.
The man gets into the passenger side of the car. The engine turns over and the brake lights turn the woods bloody red. I keep my head down as the car rumbles away.
Once they’re gone, there’s just enough time to climb back up onto the roof and replace the tiles. I wouldn’t want to be given away by a leaking ceiling. Then I jump down and sprint along the drive toward the highway.
I get to my car just in time. Francis’s van pulls up less than a minute later. I pop the trunk of my car, trying to look casual.
Sariklis gets out of the driver’s seat.
“Where’s Francis?” I ask.
He avoids my gaze. “Shit, Blake. Did you have to park so far off the road?”
“You think it’s unnecessarily cautious? I’ve seen where lazy criminals end up.”
He shoots me a glare.
“What?” I say.
“Come on,” he says, turning back to the van. “Give me a hand with this.”
He checks the horizon for cars. There’s nothing, six hours before daybreak. He opens the back of the van. I can’t see the body through the plastic sheeting, but I can tell it’s another big one. I don’t have room for three corpses in my freezer, let alone in my stomach. Of course, Warner only knows about two of them.
“You reckon there’ll be a gap after this one?” I ask.
“Don’t know. You get his feet.”
I can’t tell which end is the feet until Sariklis lifts the head. He handles the heavy corpse with surprising gentleness, like a pallbearer, as we carry it down the hill. He’s more respectful than Francis ever was.
As we lower the body into the trunk, I realize that my clothes are still covered with insulation fibers. It seems impossible that Sariklis has missed this, but he says nothing.
“Thanks,” I say.
He nods. “Goodbye, pal.”
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I shut the trunk and watch him trudge back up the hill toward the van. He never called me “pal” before. After a minute, I realize that he probably wasn’t talking to me.
I open the trunk again, and peel back some of the plastic. Just enough to reveal the bloodied face of Francis.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
By countless teeth is all my body lined, the forest sons I touch with bite unkind, and yet as I eat, I throw it all behind. What am I?
Two hours before dawn I’m at the college campus, hands in my pockets. Three hands. My left, my right and Biggs’s left.
I’m outside the fence line, well beyond the range of the security cameras. My car is parked a long way from here. My breath comes out of my nose as puffs of steam. My fingers are numb. The hoodie does nothing to protect my ears from the biting wind.
It’s December 9, and I’m out of time. I need to speed the investigation up, and that means changing Biggs from a missing person to a homicide victim.
I walk along the cycle path, hunched up like an armadillo. Another hundred yards and I’ll be able to see the math department on the other side of the chain-link fence. The campus looks different in the early morning. There are a few floodlights, but all the windows are dark. With no young people around, it looks more like a deserted business park than a school. The classrooms could easily be conference rooms; the study nooks in the libraries could be cubicles. I wonder if the students suspect that they’re being trained for life as office drones.
The plan is to toss Biggs’s hand over the fence, somewhere within range of the math department. Even during the break, enough people are around that a severed hand won’t go unnoticed. Soon it will be connected to Biggs’s disappearance, especially since his wedding ring is on it, with the engraving inside the band: Love, Gabbi. After that, it’s a homicide investigation, which gives Thistle and I more resources. We’ll even have Biggs’s prints and DNA, if the lab hasn’t confirmed them yet.
But if anyone sees me do it, I’ll become the number-one suspect in the murder I’m supposed to be investigating. I have to be careful.