KILLER WOLF'S ASHCAN EDITION VOL1 AN ABANDONED NANOWRIMO ENTRY

A man is driving a blue sedan down a long expanse of public highway. His name is Todd Garrett, and he spends exactly six thousand, four hundred and ninety three dollars a year on post office boxes. He has at least three in each of the forty eight contiguous states, with extras in a couple of the bigger ones, Texas in particular.

Todd notices that it has been almost an hour since the last time he saw another vehicle, but that is okay because of the rain. As long as it keeps raining, the fewer cars around him, the better. The last twenty mile stretch on the interstate had almost been a nightmare. Todd didn’t consider himself the hysterical type, but the sight of a tractor trailer rig listing, then swerving, at an ever increasing angle behind him made him very conscious of the brake lights on the two rigs ahead of him that had, effectively, boxed him in for the last fifteen minutes.

Compared to that, the relative calm of the back road’s emptiness, despite the storm’s continued attacks, was a welcome change. In some ways it was a mixed blessing, because while it let Todd’s blood pressure settle back down to healthy levels, it gave him time to think.

He thought about blue bottles, but not the blue bottles that he typically found his vodka pouring out of. No, Todd Garrett was thinking of the Calliphora vomitoria, and more specifically, he was thinking of a number of them that were likely responsible for the maggots he’d seen churning away inside of Ernesta Groom’s decaying corpse. That had been the closest he’d come to The Hunter’s handiwork so far. He’d actually been the one to discover the body, although he was only ahead of local and federal law enforcement by about thirteen and a half minutes.

It had been the buzzing sound that first drew him in. His ears had always been sharper then most of his other senses, which came as somewhat of a mixed blessing. His nose was too busy trying to play ketchup to notice the sharp tang of rotting meat before it had fully enveloped him. Todd remembered coughing and putting a hand up to the shed’s door to support himself as his body took its sweet time making its mind up as to whether or not he was going to see his lunch again. When his weight transferred through his palm, the shed door swung away a few fractions of an inch; it wasn’t bolted shut. The buzzing grew louder then, not only was he getting closer to it, he was agitating its source.

That was when he saw the dead woman, lit partially by sunlight that filtered down through holes in the shed’s decrepit roof. Todd remembered feeling his legs start to get a little unsteady underneath him as he pushed the door open wider. With the sun above, and at his back, to a certain degree, him standing in the doorway like that caused his shadow to fall over the body. He was being superimposed on a corpse. It could just as easily been him laying there, butchered like a spring hog. That was a flight of pure fantasy though, Todd knew that The Hunter only killed women, and while Mr. Garrett could be called a great many things, that was most certainly not one of them.

The county sheriff, and of course the pair of FBI agents he and his deputies followed in the wake of, didn’t know much about Todd at all. The only important fact they had, at the moment, was that he was conspicuously planted in the middle of their crime scene. For all Todd knew, the two federal agents might have had just as rough a night as he had, slept in the same kind of flea bag motel, and consumed the same week old coffee and stale donuts. He might have asked them about it, had they not been pointing their side arms at him and ordering him onto the ground.

Todd surfaced from thoughts of his most recent arrest in time to catch sight of a large antique wagon by the side of the road.

…of course, the term ‘antique’ seems miss-applied in this instance, as the ancient horse drawn vehicle seemed like it would fall apart before my eyes. There was a sign tacked to it, facing the road. The top line read ‘The Amazing Susan’, while the next two added ‘Premiere Psychic’ and ‘Expert Chandler’, respectively. Not quite sure what to expect from the next couple of hours, I turned off of the pavement and onto a dirt road of baked clay.

My confusion continued to mount as I pulled into what I took to be the Amazing Susan’s driveway. The clay gave way to gravel which crunched admirably underneath my tires as I came to a stop. The house looked as though it were only a decade or two newer than the wagon by the roadside, but it clearly had at least one modern convenience. A nest of cables and wires carried electrical current to several homemade signs. Some of them no more complicated than a peg board with Christmas lights stuck through in the patterns of various arcane looking shapes. The words Psychic and Chandler appeared again and again as if the owner needed as much of a reminder about their intended trades as the customers did. The signs seemed like some great collective fire hazard, but perhaps the psychic in residence felt safe enough using them because she knew that they wouldn’t catch fire and burn her private empire to the ground.

Then again…

Emily Powell took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes. It was late, as usual, when she received the beginnings of the latest article from Todd Garrett, but that wasn’t what was really bothering her. Going into a job where you’re constantly required to stare at type, usually framed by the glare of a computer monitor, when you have permanent eye damage due to catching a quart of paint thinner in the face at age seven requires a specific type of tenacity and stubbornness. Some might even call it stupidity, but Emily wouldn’t, and since it was her life, her opinion was the only one that mattered.

She could see, for the most part, but close up she was blind as a bat in the middle of nuclear winter unless she had her glasses on. Of course, her glasses tended to give her headaches because in addition to the chemical damage, she had something of an astigmatism that kept changing, ever so slightly, each time she took a knock to the head. To compound the situation, she also happened to be a bit of a klutz, albeit an attractive klutz. She wouldn’t necessarily refer to herself as attractive, but she enjoyed it when others arrived at that conclusion on their own.

Once the sharp pain somewhere behind her eyes receded into a dull throb, Emily slid her glasses back into place and took a second look at the electronic scrawl she’d received. Garrett was good when he wanted to be, or perhaps he was just good by accident every now and then, but lately he’d been the victim of another type of accident altogether and that wasn’t good at all. The piece on the down home psychic was supposed to be a lighter side sort of article. Something with heart and humor, but instead Garrett had turned into a sarcasm laden mess that wouldn’t be running any time in the near future, at least not without some heavy re-writing and adjustments.

Todd Garrett never re-wrote, and by a logical extension of that principle, he never made adjustments. That was his editor’s job, although Emily felt equal parts editor and wrangler, due to the lengths she had to go to sometimes in order to keep Garrett alive, sober, and producing. She’d slept with him a couple of times, not had sex, just slept with him. He’d been broke and homeless, which he always was, but more so at the time than normal, and she’d let him stay with her. He could be charming in his own way, she reasoned, and though she’d honestly considered giving in on a handful of the occasions that Garrett had floated the idea by her, she knew that she wouldn’t have sex with him. She wouldn’t become one of his women, at least not in that sense, because the moment she did, she knew that eventually she would show up in his writing.

It might be some unflattering metaphor that related a traffic accident or some other distasteful occurrence to some personal flaw he would discover in her, or she might simply pop up as a character in one of the serials Garrett has been known to write for men’s magazines. So no, she would be his editor, his wrangler, his den mother, his confessor and confidant, and now apparently his co-author as well, but she would not be his lover.

With that decision made, or rather re-made, as she had gone back and forth on it a couple of times in the past, Emily checked her computer’s clock. There wasn’t much to work with yet, as far as the article was going, but she needed to have something submitted before morning to keep the machine rolling. If she was able to whip the teaser into shape quickly, she could be done early enough that she wouldn’t have to cancel her late night coffee date.

--

“It was a freak accident,” Barbara Canary said on the topic of her mother’s death, once she had regained enough composure to do so, “you see, about five years ago momma was doing a psychic archery display for some kids from Carter County elementary.”

“Psychic archery?” Todd found himself asking.

“Anyone can hit a target if they work at it long enough, but momma could do something even better. She told the kids to think about where they wanted to put the targets, you get it? She told them ‘think of the perfect spot to put a target’, and once they did, she’d take a shot at it.”

“This actually worked?”

“You’d be surprised, Mr. Garrett. Momma was truly gifted. She went eighteen for twenty kids, that’s pretty good I’d say. Of course, she really got nineteen out of twenty. See, one of the kids ran back to momma before the bus left to tell her the truth. He wanted to put his target up in the tree instead of on the ground like she’d asked them too.”

“So…your mother shot an arrow into a tree?”

“Well, up into the boughs. She got it to stay up there, not stuck in the bark, but just kind of caught in the branches and leaves,” Barbara took a breath before continuing, “and well, last week momma was doing her gardening, and a wind kicked up. It was the start of this big storm we’ve been having, I guess. That’s how it happened, the wind must have shook the arrow loose, and it fell. Sharp side down, right over the garden. Doc said she was gone before she hit the ground, didn’t even feel it, probably.”

“She was killed by an arrow she’d shot into a tree from five years ago?” Todd asked with unabashed incredulity.

“Yes,” Barbara said, seeming to be on the verge of another crying spell.

“You would think she might have seen that coming,” Todd wanted to say that, but he didn’t. It had been over a couple of weeks since the last time he’d had sex with anything warm that wasn’t attached to his own body, and Barbara was both of legal age and extremely vulnerable.

The reporter tried not to leer at the grieving young woman. She had an overall country look about her, couldn’t really be avoided, all things considered, but she didn’t suffer for it too much. She had a nicely shaped mouth, with the minor exception of a slight overbite that could have been corrected easily by a year or two of braces, and freckles on her cheeks. They would probably disappear under any normal application of makeup. Her eyes were large, but tinged with red. The hair was blonde, but nowhere near the bottle variety, and she had a rich, even, tan.
If he turned it on, Todd thought, if he really turned it on, he could have her eating out of his hand inside of fifteen minutes. So why wasn’t he turning it on?

He felt a little ill when he connected the dots. She reminded him of himself, all alone after a random twist of fate, though she’d gotten the benefit of at least one of her parents, as eccentric as Susan the Psychic may have been, for at least a decade longer than he had been able to spend with his own family. Correction, his first family. The foster homes he hop scotched through didn’t really count. He found himself feeling guilty for wanting her. Todd needed to leave.

“Well, I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Canary,” he began, “I should be going. I was sent down here to do a piece on the psychic of Carter County, and unfortunately, she’s no longer with us, so…”

“That’s not true,” Barbara said, sniffling her way back into control of her tear ducts, “I’ve got momma’s gift too.”

“So you couldn’t see it coming either? Remind me to keep your contact information on file incase I need some lottery numbers,” Todd wanted to say, but again, he did not.

“I’ve been sexing goose eggs like momma showed me for a few months now,” Barbara said, matter of factly.

There was so much wrong with that sentence that Todd didn’t even know where to start. He found himself just sort of sitting there with his mouth hanging slightly open, almost as though he soon expected the young woman to transmute into another creature.

“See, all it takes is a doll’s leg and some string.”

That didn’t help much.

“You tie the string around the doll’s leg, and then you hold it over the egg. You have to be real still, and you have to have the gift, otherwise nothing happens. Now, if you’re really still, and you have the gift, the doll’s leg will start to move. It turns clockwise for baby boys and counter clockwise for baby girls.
“And it’s not just geese either, Mr. Garrett. You dangle the doll leg over a pregnant woman’s big belly, and you can tell what she’ll have just as easy.”

Or you could have an ultra-sound taken, Todd heard himself thinking.

“You must think I’m just some silly little girl, but I’m not.”

Don’t think about her naked, don’t think about her naked on your bed.

“Momma gave me her gift when I was born, and it’s my job to share it with the world, so I’d like it if you stayed and saw for yourself what I can do,”

I’d really like to, you have no idea, kid, Todd thought to himself, realizing that he wanted to be anywhere else. He could almost see himself in the corner, or hiding behind the sofa. Hell, he might have even been under the kitchen table hatching plans with one of his not quite brothers. Maybe Barbara was one of his almost siblings, maybe he was still seven years old.

“Alright,” he said, “tell you what, I’ve been driving all day and I need some rack time under my belt before I do anything else. I’m going to get a room at the motel, and I’ll come back tomorrow. We can get an early start on your article.”

“Okay, Mr. Garrett,” Barbara said, a little too cheerily, “I’ll see you tomorrow. And you know how I know I will?”

She smiled and tapped the side of her head.

--

“Sometimes, Emily, I wish I could just take a big black marker and write all over my life, wiping it out. Redacting it. I don’t really care if anyone else knows, I just want to forget it,” Todd’s voice was weak and shaky over a bad phone connection.

Emily knew better than to try and talk Todd down, they both knew that wasn’t what he wanted any way. He was holed up in a filthy motel room someplace, alone, by the sound of it, and drunk. He’d struck out, maybe more than once, in the mood he was in it was most likely on purpose. All he wanted was for someone to sit and listen to him, he just wanted to be heard. He knew he could trust Emily because they’d worked together for a long time, and she also had an interest in him staying functional. She set her glasses down on the desk and looked out her window at the afternoon sky.

“Did I ever tell you about the first girl I saw naked, now I don’t mean like in a magazine or on tv, but up close, in the flesh. The first foster family they placed me with was pretty nice, but they couldn’t handle me, or at least they were decent enough to tell the state that they didn’t think they could handle me. Now, the second home, it was a fucking pit. Once you grow up, you figure a lot of stuff out. I know they were getting checks for all of us, it was supposed to be for food, for medicine, for clothes. We saw maybe ten cents on the dollar, or less, if we were lucky.

“They fed us, enough to keep us alive and looking sort of healthy for when the inspectors showed up, but that was just about it. We used hand me down clothes from kids we never even met. They were too old or too difficult to make money off of anymore, so they were gone and we got the leftovers, meanwhile, Ted and Jeanie got a big screen and a giant leather sofa that they kept in their air-conditioned garage. See, the house was shit poor, but the garage was like their little palace.

“They paid for it off our backs, but if we tried to get in, they’d punish us. They couldn’t hit us, because that would show up, but they ran us into the ground just the same. I remember being locked up in the crawlspace under the house for almost two days once. Greg snuck food to me through this break in the boards. As hungry as I was, I didn’t eat it, because I knew I’d get out. They had to let me out, because if I disappeared, so did my check. Food, and on those rare occasions we got it, candy, were like gold to us. We traded with each other for whatever we wanted.

“Well, there was this one girl, I guess she might have been border line special needs, but she wasn’t all that dumb. She had, I guess you’d call it a milk tooth or something. It looked like she’d nursed way too long, and her front teeth came in funny, almost pointing straight out in front of her. She sucked on her teeth a lot, so her face looked almost sunken or just fucked up from the mouth down, but she was holding it that way on purpose. Her name was Luanne. So, this one night, Greg decides he wants to see what Luanne has, or doesn’t have, under her dress. He promises that we’ll give her four pieces of candy if she shows us.

“So, she lifts her little dress up. At the time it was probably spectacular, you know, seeing the unknown, the great mystery of the universe there between her little legs. But really, it was pretty fucking boring, and thinking back, it makes me want to take a shower. She was supposed to be like a sister to us, you know? Greg was just amazed, he couldn’t stop talking about it. I guess that happens when your foster parents won’t buy you video games or comic books. So, Luanne puts her dress back down and we hand over the candy. She starts sucking on one piece of it and says to us, ‘if you give me eight candies you can touch, too’

“Naturally, Greg wants to touch it. He tried a swap on Luanne, she could touch our stuff if we could touch hers, but she said no, she wanted eight candies. Like I said, she may have been borderline special needs, but she wasn’t dumb. Greg raided his stash and only had six pieces left, so he wanted me to come up with the rest. I said no. You know what he did, the fucking little rat, he stole my candy while I was in the bathroom. I was really pissed, probably as pissed off as a little kid can get, and I went looking for him. Not a big deal, because it was a small house, and I knew he wouldn’t be in the garage. I found them in a hall closet, and I just sort of jumped at Greg like an animal. Really, we fought like animals. I guess that is what Ted and Jeanie were raising us to be. We hit, we kicked, we bit. But I know I won, I probably broke his nose, the way it started bleeding.

“That was when Ted found the three of us. Luanne was in the back, her panties around one ankle and her little dress pushed up, her mouth full of candy. I was still on top of Greg, still hitting. Somehow, the whole thing was my fault. I was the only one who got locked under the house for it, but that time, and every time after, no one snuck any food to me.”

Emily wanted to tell Todd to come home, to come to her home. She had a thing for broken people, she liked to fall for them and try to fix them. She knew that she couldn’t fix Todd though, hell, even if she could it might be the wrong thing to do. There was an old saying about how pain made art. When Todd was on, which was rare anymore, he could come just about as close to art as you could get with the written word. The logical side of Emily’s brain, the business side, that is, clicked back into control.

“Todd, I don’t want to push you,” yes she did, she had to, “but I need the article in two days, and you haven’t sent me anything yet. I’m,” she stopped for a moment, she hated doing this to him, but she knew it was the only thing he would respond too. It was one of the bonuses of their honest relationship, they could both be incredibly cruel to each other and get away with it, “I’m meeting someone later tonight, so if you have anything to send, it needs to be here before I leave for the night.”

“Alright,” Todd seemed to dry up by leaps and bounds on the other end of the phone, “I’ll send you the prelim as soon as I’m off the phone. It’s just the trip out there though, I won’t have the rest of the meat until tomorrow.”

“That’s fine, as long as I have something to show the home office in the morning, it should be no problem to get your usual fee,”

“Thanks for listening, Em,” Todd said.

--

“Do you really think he looks good for this?”

Todd heard that from the direction of the federal agents. It didn’t really matter which one of them said it, it was the answer that concerned him. The cheap government suits and ties were almost comical to him. Being ordered onto his stomach, less than three feet from a maggot ridden corpse had not been comical to him in the least, but thankfully the sheriff’s station had smelled better by at least a couple orders of magnitude.

“He was at the scene, he’s not a local, he fits the profile. If I’m missing something here, Marlene, would you tell me what it is?”

Marlene was the female one, obviously. From the dark hair and her features, Todd figured her for being Hispanic. For some reason, he wanted to hang the ‘female law enforcement agent as lesbian’ cliché on her. If he’d been the one writing her that is how she would have been written. She didn’t seem like the type to let a man get the better of her, and Todd thought to himself that even if she did lower herself to sleeping with men, that she would still be in charge.

Maybe she’s a dominatrix, Todd thought to himself, trying to control the urge to twist his hands against the cuffs. He’d been handcuffed before, and every time it had reminded him of his childhood, once he’d gotten too big for the crawlspace, that is. Marlene the butch dominatrix, she had to be in charge. Maybe she was wearing black leather under her government issue.

“First, it is agent Carerra. Second, You’re too eager. You’re seeing what you want to see, and not what the evidence is trying to show you.”

They shouldn’t be having this conversation in front of him. He knows it, he is pretty sure that they do too, or at least that they should. Then it hits him, it is an act. They’re feeding him this bullshit to make it look like he’s getting away clean so that he’ll lead them to something really incriminating. They’re going to be watching him now, everywhere he goes?

“Are blinders standard issue for senior field agents?”

“That’s enough, Agent Montgomery,” Marlene’s voice cuts like a scythe, “go wait in the car.”

You can almost see it, Todd thinks to himself, Agent Montgomery’s severed manhood falling free down his pants leg and rolling out from his cuff onto the tile floor. If it did happen like that, he had no doubt that Marlene would have stepped on it and ground it underneath her shoe. They’re putting on a nice little play.

The agent’s expression seems to soften as she turns to her remaining prisoner, “I’m sorry about that. We’re working on processing your release right now, we have no reason to hold you, but I would like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind?”

“Now you want to listen to me?” Todd’s mouth reacts faster than his brain, he figures he might as well let it keep going like that for a while, “For the last three years I’ve been trying to tell the FBI that the cases have all been connected. Thirty four dead women in eleven states, thirty four, all from the same killer,”

“Mr. Garrett, why are you so certain that it is the work of one individual. Do you have any new information that could help us?”

He likes her subtle accent. She must be very good at what she does, because she has been allowed to keep a part of her racial identity. She isn’t like the newscasters with Latin last names who have perfect diction, the only concession to their natural accent appearing when they say their own surname at the beginning or end of their reports. No, Agent Marlene Carerra is good enough to be herself. She must be very dangerous. Todd imagines he can see a blow fly buzzing around Marlene. It plays around her throat, dipping down to crawl over skin that probably shouldn’t have been exposed. Todd admitted he didn’t know if FBI regulations allowed their agents to pop the first couple of buttons when they were caught short in a rural hell that suffered from a malfunctioning air conditioning system. The blow fly is buzzing again, gone from the agent’s throat. It flutters around the side of Marlene’s head before it disappears into her right ear.

“You want to know how I beat you to the body, how I cracked The Hunter’s code and figured out where he would drop the next one, right?” Todd took a deep breath, “I was there for his first kill, covering it, I mean, back when I was still on a regular newsbeat in New York. He’s the reason I turned into this: a gypsy newshound who runs down stories about miracle bathtubs, spontaneous combustion, and the appearance of religious figures on moldy bread. I’ve been following him for three years, and now I’m really starting to get close.”

“Think about that, Mr. Garrett,” Marlene almost purred, “If you are getting as close to him as you say, close enough to predict his movements, don’t you think he knows? He’s been one step ahead the whole time. Are you sure you want to leave this office today? We might be able to arrange protection for you, in exchange for your information.”

“Lady, I’ve been giving your office my information for the last three years, for free. You couldn’t protect the last thirty three victims, what makes you think you could protect me?”

--

Emily Powell couldn’t believe her luck. Not only did her date admit to having a ‘thing’ for girls who wear glasses, he was built like an athlete and he also happened to be a successful lawyer. He’d arrived early for their date, and she’d actually caught him reading, wait for it, the new issue of the Economist. It was the closest to smitten that she had gotten in quite a long time.

“I’m really glad that Rebecca set us up,” the date said. His name was Hoight Braskell, and Emily didn’t know that people could really have eyes that were that blue, “I don’t get to meet a lot of women in court.”

“I can’t believe that,” Emily replied, playing with the handle of her nearly empty coffee cup, “I’m sure there must be one or two around.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong,” Hoight’s smile seemed impossibly wide and bright, “there are a lot of women there, but they usually come in only three categories. Lawyers, Judges, and Criminals. Lawyers are okay, but it is hard enough to get out when it is just my case schedule I have to work around. Judges are a lot like lawyers, only they’re usually older, not to mention married, and things would get really complicated if I got involved with one.”

“That leaves criminals then,” Emily pointed out, “all the desperate women at your complete mercy, you could live like a king.” What the hell was she saying, she wondered. She sounded like an idiot. Had she managed to miss someone adding a fifth of Irish whiskey to her coffee?

“Even more complicated to deal with than judges,” Hoight chuckled, “It took me a long time to get where I am, I’d rather not risk it. Besides, if I thought it would work with any of them, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I don’t really regret the choice I made. Okay, enough of that. I think it’s my turn now. Becca said you were in publishing?”

“I’m into a few things. I work as a literary agent for a couple of local clients, I’m on the review board for Cooper-Smith Publishing, and I do a little head hunting on the side.”

Hoight set his coffee cup back down, “Head hunting, now that sounds exciting.”

“It can be, but not for the reasons it might sound like. Basically, I just put people together with other people who need them. An example, I have a running contract with a couple of news magazines. I get a commission for bringing stories in to them. Now, just about anyone could submit stuff to them, if they know the right numbers to call, but with me, they get almost like a guarantee. Because of my background, they know I’m not going to feed them something they can’t use. It works both ways, they know my people can produce, so they’re willing to pay a little more, sometimes they’re even willing to dish it out on speculation.”

“I bet you must have some interesting clients, then? Renegade journalists, living on the edge and filing a report about it?” Hoight asked. He was infinitely less interested in what Emily did then in the fact that not only did she look good doing it, she was able to talk about it intelligently.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m a teacher, running a class room full of very gifted five year olds. Once I get them to slow down and go in the right direction, they never cease to amaze me.”

From there, they moved on to more random fact finding about each other. They’d attended the same university, albeit several years apart. Emily had always preferred her men slightly older though, so it was more of a bonus than a sticking point to her. Eventually they meandered into discussing a few of the recent articles that they had both read.

Whether they were arguing or agreeing about whatever topic at hand, it was becoming starkly obvious to both of them that they had already made up their minds about another issue.

So, even though it went contrary to her usual character, Emily knew that she would be inviting Hoight up when he dropped her off back at her place. She also knew that he would demure at first, the mark of a gentleman, but eventually he would accede.

It was no surprise when Emily found herself nude and straddling the man on her bed, bucking up and down and feeling his tongue as well as his large, but strangely soft, hands on her skin. For whatever reason, she hadn’t allowed herself to feel like that, to feel that good, in a long time.

Later, when he lay spent beneath her, she folded herself down onto his chest, listening as his pounding heart began returning to its normal rhythm. Hoight ran a hand through Emily’s hair as she looked up at his face, a stray shaft of moonlight coming through the drapes to give the entire affair a poignant glow.

“You’re incredible,” he still sounded out of breath.

“I know,” she smiled back it him before playfully biting him on the chest.

--

In Todd Garrett’s dreams, his house was always made of fire. Not Ted and Jeanie’s house, not any of the houses he did time in after theirs, his house, his real house. It was alive, twisting, turning. Something made of fire could not be burned down. That was the type of infallible logic that could only appear in a dream. His real family lived there, his mother and his father, but they were not made of fire. Their faces were burned away leaving a mask of black ash, and as they talked to him, the ash shimmered and shook like curtains before an open window on a windy night.

“Go back to bed,” ash mother said to him. Her voice should have been warm and soothing, the one thing in the world that he would truly be able to take comfort from, but it was not. Instead, it was harsh and sibilant. The voice sounded like it had to be drug up from a deep pit, parts of it getting scraped off along the way.

“it will be okay,” ash father said. Todd usually pictured him being a towering giant, having to hunch his shoulders to stay below the roiling flame of the ceiling, this time he was small, smaller than Todd was.

Luanne rode by on a bicycle made of human bones, her mouth stuffed so full of candy that she would certainly choke if she attempted to swallow.

From the far end of the great hallway, Todd could hear the sound again. It always came back, every time. It started like a scream but quickly plummeted in pitch so that it made the walls and floor shake.

“Is this hell?”, young Todd asked the ash father.

“Yes.”

Emily, I could kiss you for prodding me into going out on the psychic story. For starters, you can unclench, I wrote the article that the magazine wanted, and I’m sure you’ll be able to put it all back together. You’ll find it attached.

Now, moving on to what is really going on. Remember a couple months ago when I found the Hunter’s most recent victim, how the FBI detained me for questioning? Well, it seems that they’ve been watching me, at least intermittently, since then. As far as I can tell, they are almost completely convinced that I’m involved in the Groom killing. It still looks like they’re not convinced that all of the victims are connected, but then again that might work to my favor. They’re only accusing me of one murder, not thirty four. I guess I should be thankful for small favors.

I should also be thankful to Barbara Canary. Without her intervention, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. One version of my return trip to the new and improved Carter County Psychic is in the attached article, here’s the real deal:

When I woke up this morning, it was to a ringing phone. I hadn’t asked the desk for a wake up call. It was the girl! Initially, I thought that she’d been able to pick my location and the phone number straight out of the ether, of course in my defense I had just woken up from what could be referred to as a vodka induced temporary coma, so I wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

I was almost disappointed when she explained that it was a small town, and it had taken her about four minutes on the telephone to get my location and room number. I was about to hang up at that point when she hit me with the reason for her call. She told me she had a vision about me, that I was in a house of fire chasing a man with many weapons. She told me that in her vision I kept getting close to him, almost close enough to touch, but he would burst into flames and re-appear somewhere else. At the end of the vision, I got close enough to touch the fire as he burned up, but then I lost the trail because now I was the one being chased. Sound familiar?

Barbara says she can help me. We’re off to buy a bunch of maps. She brought along an overnight bag and her doll leg for divining. It sounds insane, but at this point I’m up for almost anything.

As soon as I have a bearing, I’ll let you know so you can start looking for anything in the area I might be able to sell a story about. Money is really tight, and it is only going to get tighter with two of us eating on the same dime now. I feel like this could be it though, if I can get him before the next cycle starts this whole thing can be over.

"I’m agent Carerra, this is Agent Montgomery. We need to ask you some questions about the man who assaulted you, Miss Teale,” Marlene was trying her best not to be imposing. She had an entire catalog of expressions and looks that said ‘Have you seen my marksmanship scores, I could drop you from across a football field with a pistol. Iron sights only.’ That look helped with suspects sometimes, but it usually made the witnesses squirm and dry up.

“He didn’t assault me, I mean, he didn’t do anything against my will,” The young woman was fresh off her shift, still wearing her waitress’ uniform. Her feet were killing her.

“So you wanted him to rape you at gunpoint?” That was Montgomery’s approach at tactfulness.

“What? There was no rape,” the waitress rested her head in her hands, “Look, that isn’t what happened at all.”

“Then tell us what happened,” Carerra prompted.

Waitress Teale looked back and forth between the two agents. She would lock eyes with Marlene, flick over to Montgomery, and then back before cutting her eyes over to the door.

“Agent Montgomery, would you get us some sodas or something?” Carerra asked.

“Sure thing,” the junior agent said. A few seconds later and he was out the door.

“Alright honey, he’s gone,” Carerra sat down opposite the waitress and leaned toward her like they were college girlfriends getting together over a cup of coffee for the first time in years, “why don’t you tell me what really happened?”

“He came in really late, my replacement was already in, but she was… well, she was stuck in the bathroom so I figured, why not? One last table for the night, maybe he leaves a big tip, you know?”

Marlene nodded.

“He ordered a sandwich, fries, and some tea. The place was pretty dead, so I kept going over and checking on him, making sure everything was okay. I figured it couldn’t hurt my chances. Anyway, he was really nice, and funny too. We ended up flirting, a lot.

“He paid for his food when he was done and gave me a nice tip, but we didn’t stop talking. Since I was out of there anyway, we were leaving at the same time. He held the door for me, all of that. I’d asked him where he was headed, basic small talk back in the restaurant, he said he wasn’t really sure yet. It usually wasn’t up to him, those were his exact words.

“I’m not even sure how it happened. I mean, I know how it happened, but… okay, I’d been dating this guy for a while, and it was boring but safe. Not even that fun anymore, but it worked, you know? So, there is this other guy, probably never see him again my whole life, and he wants me. He was being cool about it, or trying, but I could tell. I figure why not, he’s not bad looking, he’s funny, and no matter how good or bad it is, I won’t have to see him again. He was like a holiday, and I really needed one.”

“Did you take him back to your place, or go to a motel?”

“My place. My boyfriend and I weren’t living together, we’d stay over a couple nights at a time, but that was it. I kind of hate his apartment anyway,” Miss Teale was on the verge of rambling, but Agent Carerra was able to steer her back on course using only her facial expressions, “so, I bring him home and we start. He’s not bad at all, knows what he’s doing. Very nice,” The waitress smiles at the thought, blushing slightly, “but after we’re finished, he started getting weird.”

“How so?”

“He told me that he had a fantasy, and asked if I wanted to help. We’d started drinking when we got to my place, and then after the other stuff, I mean, it just seemed okay. I wasn’t ready for him to leave yet I guess. I said sure, lets do it. That was when he comes up with the gun out of nowhere. Now, right off, he tells me it isn’t loaded, but he wants me to act like it is.”

“What did he do?”

“Not that much really, he pushed the barrel up against me a couple of times. It was very cold. He drew on me with it for a while, like he put it up against me and traced over my body with it. He asked me if I could put the barrel in my mouth, and I started to get a little scared… but he said it was okay and we could stop. He put it someplace out of sight and we went back to doing regular stuff, because maybe the stuff with the gun helped him and he was definitely ready to go again. In the morning, he was gone, and so was the gun. I got what I wanted, a one off casual affair, and he got to do his gun thing.”

“I don’t understand. It sounds like everything was consensual, that doesn’t fit with the report that…”

“The report is bullshit,” Miss Teale affirmed, “I was telling one of the girls on my next shift about it, sort of like ‘you wouldn’t believe what I did last night’. Bitch couldn’t keep her mouth shut, told my boyfriend. He came up with the whole ‘raped at gunpoint’ thing.”

“I see,” Agent Carerra said, trying, and failing, to suppress a frown. Garrett was fucked up, there was no real question of that, but he hadn’t actually done anything illegal.

“There was one other thing though,” Miss Teale added, “he mumbled something when he was holding the gun on me. I think it was ‘help me understand’.”

“Thank you Miss Teale,” Agent Carerra responded, “You’ve been a big help.”

“Sure thing, now where did your partner go to get my drink, Canada?”

--

Todd Garrett was trying not to ask too many questions, but when Barbara attached a small votive candle to his dash with double sided tape and then proceeded to light it, he had to make the obvious inquiry.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m protecting us and getting ready to do a reading for you,” Barbara explained.

Okay, so an open flame in a moving vehicle had protective properties. There was a first time for everything. It took a couple of minutes for Garrett to notice that the candle was steadily filling his car with the aroma of vanilla. That was a problem.

“Do you have one that doesn’t smell?” He asked.

“Is it bothering you?”

“Well, I kind of have to drive by smell, which is ironic because I’m not too good at it. Smelling, I mean, not driving.”

Clearly, the young rustic seer wasn’t getting the picture. She looked cute with her face slightly pinched up in a confused expression.

“My valve cover leaks, so sometimes oil sprays out under the hood. The car runs very hot, small engine, so the oil gets burned, and after a while, I can smell it. When it gets really bad, I know that I’m down to just the older, heavier, oil that is left from a while ago. That means I need to put more oil in, and I have to be able to smell it.”

“Couldn’t you just check the dipstick every so often?”

“I do that too, but the leak isn’t constant. It has to do with pressure and a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t understand. So yeah, I check it every time I start off on a long trip,”

“You didn’t check it when we left the hotel this morning,” Barbara interrupted.

“No, you’re right, I didn’t. That’s why it is important for me to be able to smell when the oil starts burning.”

Garrett hadn’t been paying much attention to the flat road spooling out ahead of his oil burning car during his debate with his passenger, so he was naturally surprised when he flicked his gaze back out the front of the windshield and saw oncoming cars planted in the middle of both lanes.

Todd jerked the wheel, sending his blue sedan off the road and up onto the shoulder as the pair of apparent drag racers screamed by without really seeming to notice anyone else had even been on the road with them.

The grass underneath the tires was wet, and the vehicle’s forward momentum was starting to translate into a spin. When the vehicle finally came to a stop, thankfully without the intervention of any of the nearby trees or fence posts, Todd had to make a definite effort to uncoil his fingers from around the steering wheel. He found himself breathing heavily. He wished that one, or both, of the redneck racers had stopped to check on him so that he could yell at them about driving like idiots.

That was a lie. What he really wanted to do was to chase them down and blow their brains out with the magnum he kept wrapped up in an old pair of panties in the glove compartment. He noticed he was smiling at the thought of murder again, but at the same time he realized he hadn’t even thought to check on his passenger. Luckily, she was smiling too, but the writer wasn’t quite sure why.

“We’re here,” Barbara said, before she leaned forward, cupped her hand behind the candle’s flame and blew it out.

--

Todd Garrett had been twenty one, once. He had also been drunk frequently. One night in particular stood out to his memory, which was something of a miracle considering how much alcohol he’d actually consumed on that very occasion. It was his first time with an older woman, well, almost. He’d been with older girls for most of his life, but only by a margin of three or four years or so. He’d always looked older than he really was, and didn’t see the need to point out that he had been below the age of consent for most of his initial liaisons.

Jenny was different though. She wasn’t a couple of years older, more like thirteen.

Todd worked with Jenny’s husband, a rough looking guy named Perry. He was a head shorter than his wife, and always seemed to be dirty. The business practically demanded it. Perry bought up old railroad ties, the big pieces of wood soaked in creosote, and re-sold them as decorative landscaping elements. That meant that most weekdays, starting at around six thirty in the morning, Todd, Perry, and a couple of other employees were filling up trailers with two hundred and fifty pound logs. It was rough work, so the boss compensated by having regular barbecues at his house.

These were mostly an excuse to let the employees and their girlfriends or wives, whichever applied, get lobotomized drunk on the boss’s dime. On the night in question, Perry was the first one to fall to a combination of tequila, vodka, and cheap bourbon. The other employees and their significant others peeled off over the next thirty two minutes, leaving only Jenny, Todd, and a couple inches of booze left to be polished off.

“You drink like a fish, Ted,” Jenny announced.

“Todd,” he felt the need to clarify.

“Right,” Jenny had a pretty smile, despite the smoker’s teeth, “are you going to stay and help me clean up?”

“Sure,” Todd said, wobbling in his seat like a boat at sea.

“Good man,” Jenny said, with an exaggerated nod of her head, “we need some music though. I feel like dancing.”

After noticing that the vodka was already gone, Todd finished what was left of the tequila and then found himself watching Jenny’s ass as she got up from her chair and tried to reach the radio. Todd wondered why they’d put it up so high. If Jenny was having trouble reaching it, not that he didn’t enjoy watching her try, there was no way in hell Perry could make that stretch.

“Here, let me,” Todd said. It took more effort to stand up than he’d expected, and his legs felt a little unsteady as he made his way over.

Jenny moved to the side a little, but didn’t get far enough out of the way. Todd stumbled a little and fell against her, managing to catch his balance on one of the posts that framed in the porch so that his full weight hadn’t driven the woman through the front window of her own house.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Its okay,” came the reply. Jenny was close enough that Todd could actually smell the liquor on her breath, “If you can reach it, just about anything will do.”

It took Todd a moment to remind himself that she was talking about the radio. He made the stretch easily, and turned the knob to the on position, but not too loud. For some reason he couldn’t really hear the music that clearly, he always got a little deaf when he was drunk, but he was able to catch the main beat underneath it. He thought it was very sensual. When he started to lose his balance, Jenny caught his waist with both hands and pulled him back to her.

“Dance with me,”

It was an offer he couldn’t refuse. The alcohol had washed away his normal body consciousness, and he was already weaving this way and that a little, so for once in his life, it actually came easy to him, or at least as easily as it could come to someone who couldn’t really hear the music.

They stayed close together as they moved, and it was starting to drive Todd a little bit crazy. All the grazing touches and rubbing contact. Out of the blue, Jenny pulled him in for a kiss, and Todd felt the woman’s tongue in his mouth, probing his own. As a reflex, he was conscious of one of his arms going around the woman’s waist, pulling her toward him so that their bodies pressed tight together. Even through their jeans and despite the night’s chill, Todd could tell that his boss’s wife was very warm. Instead of pushing him away, Jenny took his other hand and placed it on her right breast.

Todd had never thought about Jenny this way. Sure, she was attractive. She had raven black hair that fell to her waist, large dark eyes, nice breasts that still managed to keep most of their shape without requiring the use of a bra, and she always wore tight clothes to show off an ass that she was very clearly proud of. It all seemed so distant though, like it just didn’t apply to him.

“Fuck me,” Jenny’s voice seemed husky when he heard it from so close up. As a punctuation, she closed her teeth on his earlobe.

Of course he did exactly as told, though it took him a while to get it right. With all the liquor in his system, he couldn’t seem to get more than about half hard, and once he finally did, it didn’t take much longer before he shot his load home inside of Jenny’s clinging warmth. It was cold that night, and he could almost have sworn that they were steaming as they came apart.

They heard a door close, someplace up on the second story. Perry probably, got up to go to the bathroom. That was Todd’s cue to leave. As he was buttoning his pants back up, Jenny kissed him again, and he knew that he was going to have to find another job soon.

The woman looked exquisite as she pulled her own jeans back on, the dark nest of her bush vanishing behind the rising zipper. She hugged Todd one last time, stuffing her discarded panties into one of his pockets. As he made his way down the porch stairs, Todd figured that either the sex itself or the adrenaline of the surrounding situation had sobered him up a great deal.

When he sank into the driver’s seat of his car, it hit him: Jenny had been the best fuck of his entire life. It hadn’t just been the woman though, she wasn’t really any tighter or wetter or warmer than he’d had before, it was the fact that she was supposed to belong to somebody else that really made it perfect. The fact that he got to keep a trophy was just icing on the cake.

--

“The director wants me to pull the plug on your investigation,” the words came into Marlene Carerra’s ear via her cell phone’s speaker, “as far as most of the people in this office are concerned, you’ve been on an extended, paid, vacation for the last month and a half.”

“He’s our guy, Fields,” Marlene replied.

“Despite all the evidence to the contrary?” The voice on the other end of the line prompted.

“He fits the profile.”

“That doesn’t mean a damn thing. All we have is a basic offender profile. White, late twenties to mid thirties, intelligent. That’s almost a third of the bureau right there. Has there been any movement on motive, victim selection, any of those other important parts of the puzzle?”

“We thought we were on to something, sir, but it didn’t pan out.”

“What was it?”

“Aside from all of the victims being female, there haven’t been any other unifying themes. Age, socio economic standing, race, hair color, even the method of their killing, you name it. None of it matches up.”

“Hold on a second,” Fields said, “it sounds to me like you’re buying Garrett’s story about the thirty plus victims now.”

“He’s our prime suspect. We have letters from him over the last couple of years claiming to link all of the victims together. I’m looking at him as our killer, so if he says all the cases are related, then I’m going to treat them like they are.”

“Maybe he’s saying that to throw you off, to make you do exactly what you’re doing now: trying to connect cases that have nothing to do with each other. It is a waste of time.”

“It feels like he wants to get caught, I don’t want to disappoint him,” Marlene wasn’t happy about having to defend her investigation. She was on the trail of, possibly, the most prolific serial killer in her lifetime, and she would be damned if she let the trail go cold because the head office was tired of paying her expense account, “anyway, the thread we thought we had, the one thing that all of the victims had in common, was that all the women were married at the time of their deaths.”

“But that didn’t hold up?”

“The most recent victim, Ernesta Groom, was not, and had never been, married according to county records.”

“Did you do a follow-up?” Fields said.

“The records were there in black and white, besides, Garrett didn’t stay around too long once we cut him loose. We’ve been busy running down some claims that have been made against him, contacting his associates, trying to get the full picture. The way it reads right now, he’s a very disturbed man.”

“This call was supposed to end with me ordering you back to the office and reassigning you, but I’m going to give you another couple of days. Instead of cris-crossing every backwoods motel in the south following Todd Garrett, hoping to catch him doing something, go back and dig a little deeper into Ernesta Groom. If she’s the one sticking point in your hypothesis about the victims, you need to put more time into her.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But, if you run into another dead-end, I want you back here first thing. I’m putting myself on the line here, so do me a favor, and find something that makes it worth while.”

--

“Where were you just now?” Hoight asked, studying Emily’s face.

It seemed like they’d scarcely been apart since their dinner the night before, but somehow it felt natural to be seeing him again so soon. That was one of Emily’s reasons for accepting his lunch invitation. Another had been that she needed something to take her mind off of a growing problem.

“One of my writers,” Emily began.

“One of your gifted five year olds,” Hoight clarified with a smile.

“He’s always been, I guess you could call it, eccentric. Maybe even ego-centric? He does very quirky things, and then justifies it because he thinks it is all significant, almost like the world, and everyone in it, revolve around him.”

“And here you are, talking about him, and proving him right,”

“You asked,” Emily protested, then conceded the point with a sigh, “I’m really worried about him this time. Sometimes, I hope that some of what he tells me is just made up, like it is just another story of his, but then sometimes things happen and I know that he’s been telling me the truth.”

“Such as?”

“This afternoon, I received a call from the federal bureau of investigations. Well, an agent of theirs. She was asking me a whole bunch of questions about my client, she even wanted to come and interview me in person. I sort of know what it is about, but I always thought it was just one of his quirks, and not something that really…” she shook her head, “Sorry, I’m rambling a little.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Hoight’s voice sounded so reassuring that Emily was fairly certain he’d slipped into his practiced lawyer tone for her benefit, “it is not every day that someone gets a call from an fbi agent. I’ll tell you what, Miss Powell. If it comes down to a court case, I’ll represent this client of yours for you, make sure none of his civil liberties get violated, etc.”

Emily almost choked on her tea, “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not, I’m being serious,” Hoight said, and she knew that he was being serious, though she wasn’t sure why.

“You don’t even know him, Hoight. You barely know me,”

“I know enough,” the lawyer said, “I know that you’re much prettier when you smile then you are when you are worrying about him. Let me take care of it.”

Perhaps that was the kind of thing that should have sent some tinge of apprehension up the literary agent’s spine, maybe a little bell should have gone off in her brain, but instead she was sort of surprised to find that she just felt relieved. Instead of getting upset about her concern over another man, as some of her recent relationship partners had been known to do, Hoight accepted it and, without missing a beat, offered to help.

In one way, that made Emily Powell feel a little bit like a lesbian: she was ready to move in with someone on their second date.