by Jack Heath
I feel like I should say goodbye to her. We’ve worked well together. And even if I don’t get shot by police over the next few hours, it’s possible that I’ll be the Crawdad Man’s next victim.
“No,” I say. “Have a nice night.”
“You, too, Mr. Blake.”
The line goes dead.
I dial Thistle. The call goes straight to voice mail.
“You’ve called Agent Reese Thistle. Leave a message.”
Beep.
“It’s me,” I say. “I’m using myself as bait. The Crawdad Man is the wigmaker, and she’s about to pick me up. You can follow the signal from this phone. Do me a favor, and catch her before she kills me?”
I pause.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” I add. “There’s a lot of things I should have done different. But thank you for...for being who you are, I guess. I gotta go.”
I end the call.
I put the phone on silent. Then I wrap it in two condoms.
A few years ago I tried to swallow a big chunk of meat that turned out to have a shard of bone in it. It got stuck halfway down my throat, and I panicked. I thought I was going to die. I wondered how long it would be before my roommate eventually smelled something from my room. He’d bust down my door to find one and a half corpses. The headline would be Cannibal Consultant Chokes to Death on Victim.
I spent three terrifying minutes punching myself in the solar plexus, and eventually managed to hack the chunk back up. I knew it had been a narrow escape, so I taught myself some tricks to suppress my gag reflex.
I take a few deep breaths, and then I put Charlie Warner’s phone in my mouth. It’s a small phone, but it still seems way too big once it’s actually in my mouth. But I just picture the ocean, the gray water lapping at the shore in Galveston, and push. As the phone goes farther and farther down my esophagus, I clench my left hand into a fist. I’m not sure why that helps, but it always does. Before I know it, the phone is gone, and I’m gasping for air. Then I wipe the drool off my chin, grab five hundred dollars from Shannon’s stack and get out of the car.
I don’t want Sleeping Beauty to know which car is mine. She’ll see it parked in a visitor space and get suspicious, realizing that I don’t live here. I walk a few feet away, rubbing my palms together in the cold.
A song is stuck in my head.
Standing on the corner with a dollar in my hand, honey.
Standing on the corner with a dollar in my hand, babe.
Standing on the corner with a dollar in my hand.
Standing here waiting for the Crawdad Man...
Headlights on the horizon. She’s here.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
What eight-letter word contains every letter?
Gomez wasn’t wrong—she is beautiful. Long eyelashes, long neck, full lips with a faint gloss. As she rolls down the car window, she flashes me a perfect smile, like a movie star meeting a fan.
“Hey, handsome,” she says, like she means it. “Come on in out of the cold.”
She’s not wearing her blond wig, and I realize that I’ve seen her before. Not just in the corridor outside Biggs’s office. I saw her at the cabin in the woods, flirting with a nervous black man.
The hair threw me, so I didn’t recognize her at the time. Hopefully my lack of hair throws her, too. I should have figured all this out way earlier.
I hurry over to the car and get in. The seats are supple leather. The radio plays Norah Jones, soft enough that I can only just hear the upright bass under her smoky voice.
“Nice to meet you, Hank,” the woman says. Her eyes are wide, and sky blue.
I shake her hand. “Nice to meet you, Sleeping Beauty.”
She laughs. “Oh, no. I’m Cindy. Sleeping Beauty is waiting for you. You’ll meet her soon enough.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I look out the window. No flashing lights, no sirens. Thistle must not have seen my message yet.
Cindy reaches over, and touches my cheek with her knuckles. She has a French manicure.
“You’re hurt,” she says with what sounds like genuine concern.
“You should see the other guy.”
She beams. “Oh, you’re a fighter.” She puts her hand on my knee. “I like that. Strong, brave. A good man to have around.”
I hope her hand doesn’t move any higher. She’ll realize she doesn’t interest me. She’s not Thistle.
“Are you nervous?” she asks. “It’s okay to be nervous.”
“A little,” I admit.
“It’s funny, isn’t it,” she says, “what scares people and what doesn’t.”
“What scares you?”
She sighs, a long stream of air from pursed lips. Even her breath smells sweet. Peppermint.
“Intimacy,” she says.
“I used to have that problem.”
“Really? Tell me, how did you overcome that?”
“A woman kind of overcame it for me,” I say.
“Aha.” She winks at me. “This woman. Is she still around? It’s all right if she is.”
“No. I screwed that up.” But maybe I can fix it. You’re the key.
“I’m sorry.” She squeezes my knee. “Don’t worry. You’ll find Sleeping Beauty very forgiving.”
We drive farther and farther east. Eventually the car crosses the border into Louisiana. The sign says Bienvenue en Louisiane. Cindy takes a turn toward the dump.
“Is this where she is?” I ask.
“No, sorry. This is just a precaution.”
She does exactly what she must have done with Biggs. We drive through the gate—it opens automatically for her car, like Gomez said—and she leads me over to the shipping container full of archive boxes. The one where I found Biggs’s blood.
He must have been nervous at this point. Maybe even getting scared. Wondering if he’d made a terrible mistake, one he couldn’t come back from.
Cindy unlocks the container with her own key. We walk into the darkness. She turns on the little desk light.
“I need to borrow your phone,” she says. “It’s a privacy thing. Sleeping Beauty is old-fashioned—she doesn’t like cell phones. We’ll come back here to pick it up, after. Okay?”
I wonder if Sleeping Beauty is Cindy’s alter ego. You can’t tell if someone is crazy just by looking at them, but the way the light casts a shadow across half her face, revealing only one unblinking eye, creates an aura of madness.
“I left my phone at home,” I say.
She smiles patiently. “Come on.”
“For real,” I say. “I don’t like being beholden to it.”
She holds my gaze, her pupil huge in the dark.
“I have to check,” she says. “Do you mind?”
I spread my arms and legs wide, like a frequent flyer about to get tested for explosives.
She slowly runs her hands up and down each of my legs, gently squeezing. Then she touches my arms, my chest, my hair, my back. Finally she cups my ass and my crotch.
“I apologize,” she says.
I clear my throat. “No problem.”
“Come with me.”
If I had a phone, I guess she would have left me alone in here while she hid it somewhere else at the dump. That must have been what happened to Biggs. He would have waited, alone in this dark container, more and more convinced with every passing second that this was all wrong.
Until he decided to leave a message behind.
I look at the spot on the wall where the calendar used to be. Suddenly I realize what he was trying to do. The dates were a message. A code so basic that even a nonprofessor could decipher it. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out sooner—it’s just like Tyrrell and his 88 tattoo.
Twelve dates, one per month. Twelve numbers.
9, 13, 19, 15, 1
8, 18, 25, 7, 1, 2, 2, 9.
I, M, S, O, R, R, Y, G, A, B, B, I.
* * *
Cindy drives me back toward Houston. Thistle must have heard my message by now. Where are the sirens? Why isn’t every squad car in Texas converging on us right now?
On cue, my phone starts to buzz inside my stomach.
I cough with surprise. The vibration turns my guts to water. I don’t know whether I’m going to throw up or shit myself.
“Are you okay?” Cindy asks, alarmed.
I clear my throat. “Fine,” I gasp.
The phone keeps buzzing. I clench my pelvic floor. Don’t call me, I think. Track the phone!
“You don’t look fine,” Cindy says.
I thump my chest. “It’s just...anxiety.”
“Okay.” Cindy touches my arm. “Ride it out. Just listen to your breaths, okay? In and out.”
The phone stops. I exhale shakily.
“That’s it,” Cindy says. “Nice and slow. You’re doing great. Relax your shoulders.”
I loosen my muscles. I should have worked out how to turn off the vibration before I swallowed the phone. Another call, and I could be in deep shit. Maybe literally.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Of course.”
“You’ve dealt with something like that before?”
“I used to get panic attacks,” Cindy says. “One time I hurt somebody. I didn’t mean to—I just lashed out. So I taught myself some calming techniques.”
It all clicks together. She’s the one Warner told me about. The sex worker who hit a client, and was allowed to quit. Sindy with an S.
“Did it help?” I ask.
“Not as much as leaving the situation did.” Sindy looks at me. “I do hope you don’t want to leave?”
“No,” I say.
“Great.”
She takes the turnoff toward the cabin in the woods.
When I was homeless, and starving, I’d sometimes have out-of-body experiences. People would walk past me, and for a second I would be them, glancing at my expensive watch as I strolled to my high-paying job as a consultant or hedge fund manager. Sometimes I would see myself out of the corner of my eye, a hairy, sunburned ruin in faded rags. But most of the time I would be invisible. That lawyer or executive would look right at me and see an empty patch of sidewalk.
Now, as Sindy parks the car in front of the log cabin, I have another dissociative moment. For a second, I’m that jittery black man with the horn-rimmed glasses, and Timothy Blake is watching us from the bushes. I look, but don’t see him. Nor do I see any sign of the police coming to arrest Sindy and vindicate me.
“Something wrong?” Sindy asks as we get out of the car.
“No. Nice place,” I say, looking at the cabin as though I haven’t already examined it inside and out.
“Thanks. My father-in-law built it, and when my husband died, it became mine.”
“I’m sorry. About your husband.”
She bows her head. “Thank you.”
As we walk up to the door, she says, “Just letting you know, my hobby is taxidermy. The house is full of animals. I’ve been practicing since I was a little girl, so I’m used to it, but it can be jarring for newcomers. I didn’t want to surprise you.”
“I like surprises.”
She inserts the key into the lock, and touches my arm. “I bet,” she says, smiling.
She opens the door and switches on the light. My gaze immediately flicks to the wolf. Sindy has done a great job. Even knowing that it’s long-dead, I can’t shake the feeling that it might move.
Sindy looks me up and down. “You’re the first guy not to react,” she says.
“I’m just frozen with terror,” I tell her.
She smiles at the false modesty. I listen for sirens. Still nothing. We could be the last two people on Earth.
“Can I get you a drink?” Sindy asks.
Bad idea. “No, thank you.”
“You sure?” she says, still headed for the kitchen.
“I don’t drink,” I say.
“Ah.” She turns back. There are any number of reasons someone might not drink. Religion, health, taste. But in Texas, people always assume you’re an alcoholic.
“I have to tell you something,” Sindy says.
“I’m all ears.”
“She might not wake up.”
“What do you mean?”
“One day, the right man will come.” Her eyes are bright, but sad. “He’ll touch her in just the right way, and she’ll be roused. But that man may not be you.”
“I understand,” I say, though I don’t.
Sindy takes my hand. “Are you ready to meet her?”
Madness in her gaze. She can see reality from where she’s standing. But she doesn’t live there.
I remind myself that she’s not going to kill me. At least not yet. The man with the glasses made it this far. So did Biggs, I’m pretty sure. So I say, “Yeah.”
Sindy peels back the rug, revealing the trapdoor. She unlocks it and lifts it up, revealing a square of blackness.
“Come on down,” she says, like a game show host. Then she walks into the dark.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
If you skin me I won’t weep, but you will. What am I?
The room under the house is lit only by an old-fashioned lamp in the corner. It’s a low-watt bulb, and a sheet of lace has been draped over it to darken the room still further.
My heartbeat accelerates. Nothing good ever happens in a basement. The animal part of my brain is yelling, Get out get out don’t go down there get out!
Sindy switches on one of those fake fireplaces, which is rigged up to a car battery. As the flickering glow falls across the room, I see a padded armchair in the corner next to a hat rack and a gilded mirror. There’s a basin and a garden hose. But most of the room is taken up by a giant bed.
And lying on the bed is a giant.
The rational part of my brain has always been a little slower than the instinctive part. For a moment I’ve stepped off the edge of the real world and into wherever Sindy lives. So my first thought is, She’s real. Holy shit, the giantess is real!
She’s at least eight feet from head to toe, but everything is perfectly in proportion. It’s suddenly hard to tell if she’s huge or I’m tiny. It’s like I’ve gone down the rabbit hole and eaten the caterpillar’s mushrooms. The world has gone inside out. My perspective is so distorted that I miss the last step and stumble into the room.
Sleeping Beauty has a huge mane of slightly curly blond hair fanned across the pillows. Eyes almost as big as baseballs stare up at the dark ceiling through half-closed lids. Her glossy red lips are ever so slightly pursed, as if she’s waiting for a kiss. The satin sheets of her bed are pulled back halfway, exposing huge breasts clad in lacy purple lingerie. Her enormous hands are by her sides, upturned, a foot away from her gargantuan hips. Huge feet are tenting the sheet down the other end of the bed, as far apart as her gigantic shoulders. I’ve heard yoga people call this “corpse pose.”
I walk closer, entranced. So much meat. A feast like this could keep me going for months.
But the scent isn’t quite right. I can smell perfume, shower gel, conditioner. The faint aroma of makeup. But there’s no odor of sweat, or skin. She’s fake.
“You can leave your clothes on the armchair,” Sindy says. I had completely forgotten she was in the room. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
Remembering Thistle’s idea of the sex doll brothel, I touch Sleeping Beauty’s upper arm. Maybe it’s silicone. But it feels completely real. As Sindy walks back up the stairs I peel back the sheets, baring her huge thighs, knees, shins. I can see a thatching of pubic hair through the sheer fabric of the panties. The underwear must be custom—no store would sell anything so big. Sleeping Bea
uty’s calves have been shaved. I can see the hairs, cut back to almost nothing. I can even see a nick behind her knee.
I touch the cut, marveling. Then, running my fingers around the area, I find something else. The same thing that Biggs must have noticed, before he ran into the woods, naked and screaming in terror.
Stitches.
They’re tiny, done with immense care. When I peer under the giant’s calf, I can barely see them. The thread is the same color as her skin. Now that I’m looking for them, I can see more stitches elsewhere—on her hands, her hips, her neck. No wonder this place is poorly lit.
This looks and feels like real human skin because it is real human skin.
This is where the sixteen missing fat men went.
I remember what Dr. Norman said: Separated from the body, skin eventually shrivels and goes scaly. A stuffed person wouldn’t last more than a few weeks. So Sleeping Beauty would need regular grafts. Some patches are a little smoother than others. Newer. A ragged-edged circle under her armpit is especially smooth and soft. I’m guessing that’s Ruthven. The newest victim. I wish he’d had an identifying mark, like a mole or a tattoo. But if he had, she probably wouldn’t have used that part. If he had enough tatts, he wouldn’t have been a target at all. Weird to think that some ink might have saved his life.
I wonder how many of Sindy’s clients have fucked this thing, not noticing that it was a patchwork of human corpses.
I wonder how many did notice, and continued, anyway.
Are you kidding me? Thistle says. Most people would have done what Biggs did. Run screaming into the woods. Had a heart attack. You think some of those guys realized they were fucking a dead body, and kept going?
I think of the guilty, disgusted look on the last client’s face as he left this building. “Yes,” I say.
That’s nuts, Thistle says.
“People are nuts.”
Not everyone is a psychopath like you, Blake. Don’t you think you might be overgeneralizing from your own experience?
“I’m not a psychopath,” I say. “There’s a difference between a person who ignores his conscience and a person who doesn’t have one.”
Is there? Thistle sounds doubtful. I remember again what she said about Luxford, when I said he might not have a fetish for pain. I bet that’d be a real comfort to the victims.