Black Daylight

by Scott Blade

  The chaperones knew that. They could see it. It was obvious even to a couple of rural meth-heads like them.

  After the coast was clear, the buyers were long gone, and before they killed her, they had to decide on how to do it. But first they did what any junkie would do, they reveled in the money.

  It came in a medium-sized, black duffle bag. They opened it, stared at it, stayed quiet, and stared some more. They couldn’t bring themselves to count it, but they did touch it. They moved it around and studied the stacks of cash. It was all big bills, easy enough to transport and easy enough to spend.

  After the reality of being a step away kicked in, they turned back to what they had to do. The money wasn’t quite theirs yet. They had to kill the girl.

  They were still on the fence about how to go about it.

  There were many ways to do it.

  The best way would’ve been to just open her up from her stitches right there, and let her bleed out. No one would’ve pinned it on them.

  But they couldn’t do it that way. The trail might lead the cops to the buyers, and the buyers had already told them what that would mean for them.

  Before they decided to strangle her, they got nervous again. They got cold feet. They got the jitters—brought on by the act of killing someone and by the fact that they had both been sober for twenty-four hours and that was twice longer than they were used to.

  Like any junkie, they didn’t make it to their goal of sobriety until after the deed was done. So, they blazed up right there.

  The meth they had wasn’t particularly good. It was low-quality, bottom-of-the-barrel type stuff, but it did the trick. They could buy better-quality meth later. With the money, they just got paid, they could keep themselves in the good stuff for years.

  The decision to strangle her came because they convinced themselves it was the hardest to track back to them.

  First instinct was to shoot her. They had come armed. One of them had a gun. He always had a gun, but the deliberations changed their minds. They decided. No guns. No bullets. No knives. They talked themselves out of using weapons completely.

  Weapons have handles and retain fingerprints and hair follicles and dirt and grime—too much forensic evidence.

  They didn’t want to get caught. Obviously.

  What good was a bunch of money if you get caught?

  Can’t spend it in prison. Although, one of them commented that they could get meth in prison, probably. They started a short argument over the idea, which caused them to blaze up one more time. More of the bad meth. This led to more of the deliberations until they came back full circle to the original method of murder that they had already vaguely planned on.

  They had to strangle her. That was the right way to do it.

  And it would be easy enough. She couldn’t fight back. She was too doped up.

  Truth be told, they all were at this point. But she was seriously doped up even though they had done meth twice.

  The stuff she was on took the cake. It was all medical-grade, high-quality stuff.

  The buyer’s medical crew sedated her with serious medications.

  They remembered hearing words like Prednisone and Fentanyl and Alfentanil and Meperidine. None of which they understood, but then they heard words like Oxycodone and Diamorphine, and they did know those.

  They didn’t know which was used.

  They had no idea what any of them were. They weren’t doctors. They weren’t college educated. They weren’t even high school educated. Not really. Both of them had dropped out.

  All they knew was that the meds she had in her bloodstream knocked her out cold, and she wasn’t getting back up any time soon.

  She wasn’t going to fight back.

  After they decided the method of death, they discussed disposal.

  They could kill her, and dump her on the side of the road.

  One of them suggested that right off, but the other one rejected the idea. It was too easy for her to be found that way. There had to be more to it.

  Some effort was needed.

  The other one suggested that they should do more to conceal the body, like bury it or stuff her with rocks and send her over the edge of a boat into a lake. Maybe, they could incinerate her in a giant oven, or a kiln like the ones used in morgues.

  “Whatever that oven’s called,” one of them had said.

  After a while, after all the deliberating, after it became apparent to both of them that they were stalling, they came to an agreement.

  It was time.

  First thing was first. They had to kill her.

  As their highs started to wear off, which was due more to the severity of the situation than the quality or quantity of the meth in their systems, they almost couldn’t do it.

  The physically stronger of the two of them hesitated. Then he chickened out. The smaller one couldn’t do it either.

  In the end, they decided to open the duffle bag and stare at the money again, like a motivator. They could still turn back. The girl would never know.

  The smaller one opened the duffle bag. Inside, they both stared again at the stacks of hundred-dollar bills, bound tight with currency bands. It was all unmarked, and all theirs if they wanted it if they did what had to be done.

  Finally, the smaller one pushed harder at the stronger one.

  “Okay. Now. It’s time,” the smaller one said.

  The stronger one nodded, and he did the killing.

  First, he opened the painkillers intended for the girl and popped a couple. He stuffed the rest in his coat pocket, safe for later.

  He walked over to the girl, pulled her off a cheap hospital bed the crew provided for her. She hit her head on the way down, on the corner of the table. That had been an accident. Blood seeped out of a large cut. At first, they thought she might die from that. They hoped, but she didn’t.

  It wasn’t deep enough. It was superficial at worst.

  The stronger one ignored the cut, no reason to patch her up, and he climbed on top of her, straddled her for a long moment. He held his hands up, above her face. They shook and trembled violently for a long moment. His nerves rattled like jittering stones. He felt a pounding in his head that came on slow, but far away at first like a distant runner on pavement.

  He closed his eyes tight and reached his hands out, gripped them around her throat, and strangled her.

  She did not resist. She never woke up. He strangled her until he thought she was dead.

  Once her body seemed to go lifeless, deliberations were pointless. Deciding to dump the body was easy at this point, whether they could agree on the right procedure or not. It didn’t matter.

  They had a good idea of where to take her, and it wasn’t a lake or a grave.

  The I-Ninety has a three hundred and forty-mile stretch of road that passes through the state. This particular stretch of road was notorious for harboring dead bodies.

  They had watched a special on it one night, back when they were only joking about the idea of murder.

  The special aired on KOTA, the ABC affiliate out of Rapid City, but that’s not where they saw it. They had originally watched it on the internet. It popped up when they were searching Google, trying to get ideas about where to dump the body. It appeared right there in front of them like an answer to a prayer.

  Four months ago, the KOTA news team did a piece on I-Ninety called “Death Road.”

  They watched the whole thing, one of the only times that either of them had ever watched a complete news story while sober.

  The special shocked them. It was an amazing piece. Incredibly, over the last thirty years, more than two hundred dead bodies had been discovered there.

  Although it turned out for some of them there had been logical explanations: hikers frozen to death, or hikers eaten by bears, or hikers eaten by wolves, and so on.

  Not all of them were so easily explained. Many of them had been murdered and dumped and stripped of clothes, which the loved ones figured was to get
rid of trace evidence.

  Some of the murders seemed to be connected, some by the nudity of the bodies. Some were found rolled up in rugs, some stuffed in trunks, and others wrapped up in plastic.

  The news team tried to play it up like they had uncovered the dumping ground of an unknown serial killer, a mysterious killer out there somewhere. He was prowling hitchhikers, runaways, and nobodies. He raped the women, killed them, and dumped the bodies.

  That was how the media had reported it, sensationalized it.

  None of it was true though. Many of the dead had been drug-related murders or thefts gone wrong or many other scenarios, and they weren’t all women, either. They had found plenty of dead men. None of it was the work of a mysterious serial killer.

  The truth didn’t stop their imaginations from running wild over the story.

  It led them to wild ideas. It led them to many possibilities about how to go about the girl’s disposal.

  That same night they watched the online news video, they smoked some heavy crystal, better than what they had now, and they sat back and talked about it.

  One of them said, “You know if you wanted to hide a body, just do it off the Ninety.”

  The next one said, “You can even go farther and drive off one of the country roads. There are hundreds of dead ends out there. Lots of unknown dirt roads.”

  “Empty roads with nothing on them.”

  The smaller one took a deep puff from the meth, inhaled, and smiled.

  “Nobody would ever find the body.”

  “Who would you kill?”

  When the answer came, it shocked the stronger one. He played it off as a joke. And it was a joke, at first, but then they started talking about money.

  How could they make a bunch of money? If there was money to be made, then it might not be a joke.

  This conversation went on like this for weeks and weeks until the answer fell in their lap like it had been dropped there by the gods themselves.

  The idea came from the most unlikely place.

  The soon-to-be victim gave them the idea.

  It turned out that she had also been thinking of ways to make fast money. The route that she had contemplated was drastic.

  She had been thinking of a way to make a lot of money—fast and tax-free.

  One of the loved ones asked her if she was going to sell her body.

  She replied, “In a manner of speaking—yes. Yes, I am.”

  That was the end of it. The motive was there. Part of the plan was there.

  All they had to do was wait until the transaction was complete, like spiders in a web.

  That’s what they did.

  The wait had ended moments ago after the strong one strangled the girl to death. Now, they were on to the next step—hiding the body.

  Chapter 2

  T HE CORRIDOR OF I-NINETY, running through western South Dakota and straight on through the state, had millions of nooks and crannies and overgrown brush and thickets and woods and ditches to spare.

  That was why it had been called Death Road in the news report. That’s what made it so attractive to killers in the first place.

  All of which had to be taken into account with the forecasted long winter ahead and the dregs of massive snow banks already out there canvassing the ground.

  There was another factor to consider. There was what the locals called “white quicksand,” which referred to snow that got packed down tight and settled down into a pit like a sand trap or a naturally formed deadfall.

  The packed snow appeared to be stable ground. Passersby walked along and saw just another patch of snow—no big deal. But once stepped on, a person would sink into the quicksand like a block of concrete tossed into an ocean.

  Some of them got lucky. If it wasn’t that deep, the bottom was only a few feet or inches below. Easy enough to climb out.

  Others weren’t so lucky. Others got sucked down into the ungodly cadaverous place that lay beneath.

  Some of these pits went deep, like subterranean holes burrowed underground by some undiscovered lifeform.

  Some pits sank down so deep they caused the victims to get stuck and slowly freeze to death or starve to death or die from hypothermia or suffer all three until death finally arrived.

  It was a horrible way to die.

  The victim can’t call for help because their lungs nearly freeze over. The voice box freezes up. The blood runs cold and slows down through the veins nearly to a trickle.

  The heart decelerates to a single drumbeat.

  The white quicksand pits that were especially dangerous were the ones filled with ice-cold water at the bottom. In which case, the victim had all the same dangers to face, only with the added bonus of drowning or freezing faster or dying from hyperthermia faster, whichever came first.

  White quicksand wasn’t a common occurrence, but it was common enough to become a local urban legend.

  Everybody knew about it. But, neither of the loved ones ever saw it happen. They didn’t know anyone it had happened to.

  They did believe it to be true. Like most urban legends, true or not, most people bought into it.

  The loved ones hoped that they could find such a patch of white quicksand to hide her dead body in. Maybe confuse any police later about how she died.

  That would make it so much easier. If they could find something like that and dump the body in it, then maybe she would sink to the bottom. They wouldn’t have to worry about her being found for months, not until the snow thawed out in the spring. Or maybe, they would get lucky, and she would never be found.

  Either way, it didn’t matter because by spring they could be long gone with the money.

  How far could you go on a hundred and fifty thousand dollars?

  Their answer to that question was pretty far. At least it’d be the hell away from where they had lived their whole lives.

  Realistically, one of the loved ones knew that finding white quicksand probably wasn’t likely because it hadn’t started snowing as heavily as it would in the coming weeks.

  This year had a slow-starting winter.

  The loved ones did what they did to her.

  They stripped away her clothes as they had seen done on TV, and rolled her up in something that would help in transporting the dead body. It was nothing special, just a rug they found lying around, already rolled up in the corner of the garage.

  They had seen it done this way in the movies and on the news special. It worked there so why not for them?

  When she was finally dead and rolled up, they took one last hit of some crushed pills, a backup to the meth.

  After, they worked together to haul her body into the back of the car. Luckily, she didn’t weigh much, and she was short. Even rolled up, she fit snugly into the trunk.

  The rug did make it a little harder, but they managed.

  They had to let some of the rug stick up and out, but they had tied her down with rope they already had. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  Even near the town of Deadwood, no one would stop them. It was a quiet, snowy night and they were going to get away with murder.

  After about ten minutes of loading up the dead body and tying her down, they cranked up the old car, let the engine run.

  The other thing to deal with was her little dog. They didn’t want it. So, they decided to stop and pick it up. It should be with her anyway.

  They waited another ten minutes till the fan was on full blast and blowing hot air instead of cold.

  They waited till the inside of the car was warm and toasty. Then they set off to the destination that the man had picked.

  They drove to the dumping ground.

  Chapter 3

  E VERYONE GETS SCARED. Everyone feels fear. Panic. Distress. Terror. Everyone on planet Earth. With the exception of newborn babies.

  Maybe.

  Who knows?

  When a newborn comes out, terror may be the first thing it feels. It could be the original sensation of all sensations. It
could be the first reaction ever made by every person, like God saying, “Remember your place, little one.”

  Either way, everyone gets scared at some point in his or her life—no escaping it.

  It’s possible for a man to go his whole life without feeling shame. Maybe.

  It’s possible to go a lifetime and never feel remorse or grief or guilt. Certainly.

  But fear?

  No way.

  Some people grow up to be fearless. That’s true, but they’re only like that until they’re not or they’re dead, whichever comes first.

  Jack Widow was no exception to the rule.

  There are no exceptions to the rule.

  Walking down a snowy, empty country road in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, courtesy of South Dakota, an eerie atmosphere surrounded him.

  Thick fog rolled across the ground and wisped up beyond eye level. It thinned out as it rose toward the sky, but it was still just as unnerving. It felt a bit unnatural like he was on the set of a horror movie. And the scene being filmed called for limitless fog from immense, heavy fog machines, hidden behind the trees so they would stay out of the camera’s lens.

  Widow plodded in the snow. Some serious stubble grew on his face. No beard, not yet. But that was the path he was headed down.

  He smelled of gas and cigarettes. One because he rode into the great state of South Dakota in a car whose occupants were chain-smokers. And two because the chain-smokers had abandoned him at a roadside gas station that reeked of gasoline as if the pumping trucks were right there still pumping the underground tanks full.

  He had been standing around waiting for ten long minutes. He knew that the chain-smokers weren’t coming back for him. They had sent him inside to get supplies of bottled waters and coffee for the road, on him since they were kind enough to give him the ride in the first place.

  But standing there at the empty coffee line, deciding if this particular gas station coffee was worth it or not, he happened to look up and catch the chain-smokers backing up out of the parking spot, turning, and bolting out of the lot. He watched them turn onto the interstate and drive off east.