John Lutz - Serial

On the road she felt better. It wasn’t going to rain. The morning was going to remain glorious. And she and Vincent Salas would have a civilized conversation and come to an understanding.

Once she turned onto the Interstate, she reached Lorenton in less than an hour. It was already almost ten o’clock, so Salas should be awake. Westerley had mentioned where Salas lived in the trailer court-third trailer on the left after you go though the entrance, gray with blue trim. Pile of crap, Westerley had called the trailer. Which was about what you could afford, Beth thought, if you recently got out of prison. She wondered if Salas had a job. If not, maybe she could help. She could offer her help, anyway.

There was a lot of making up to do. A lot to talk about.

As the Honda sailed smoothly over the blacktop highway, Beth’s thoughts wandered. She created a conversation in her mind, thinking on ways to steer their talk in the right directions.

In a sad kind of way, she and Salas needed each other. He could use her help to find a way up in the world, and she could use his forgiveness.

He shouldn’t mind that kind of trade.

After she made the turnoff to Lorenton, Beth had no trouble finding the trailer court. Oak Tree Estates, it was called. Which sounded pretty ritzy.

But it wasn’t ritzy. And Beth saw only a few big pin oaks. Most of the other trees were scraggly-looking maples. The gate Beth drove through wasn’t an actual gate but a rusty iron archway with broken curlicues and some weedy-looking vines growing halfway up each leg.

There was the trailer, dirty gray with faded blue trim. It had wooden latticework concealing the wheels and tires. The same kind of vine that was growing up the entrance arch was laced into the lattice. Two wooden steps led up to a screen door. The trailer’s windows were all tinted, or blocked with shades or drapes. It looked deserted.

Beth got out of the car and walked over hard dusty earth to the steps. There was a clutter of cigarette butts on the ground near the bottom step, as if someone habitually sat there and smoked. She felt the lump of guilt in her gut suddenly turn to fear. Was she out of her mind coming here? This man had every reason to hate her, to harm her.

She might have turned around and gotten back in the car, but a woman’s voice said, “He’s in there.”

Beth turned and saw a heavyset woman with scraggly gray hair walking toward her. She was moving slowly, as if her feet hurt, carrying an ovular blue metal roaster without a lid out in front of her with both hands.

The woman stopped about twenty feet away and stood as if balancing the roaster so liquid inside wouldn’t spill out. Behind her was the trailer she must have emerged from. Its screen door was hanging open. It had a tattered green awning over the door, and smaller, newer-looking awnings over two of its windows. A rusty tricycle lay on its side near the steps.

“Go ahead an’ knock,” the woman urged Beth. “He’s in there. I heard him come home last night. Couldn’t help but hear.” She shuffled carefully to the side about ten feet and tossed a grayish liquid from the roaster into the weeds. “He’s in there,” she said again, over her shoulder, giving Beth a show of yellowed, jagged teeth. She looked Beth up and down. “He could prob’ly use some company.” The woman headed back toward her trailer, holding the metal roaster in one hand now, letting it dangle at her side.

Determined not to let herself be scared away, Beth climbed up on the first step leading to Salas’s trailer door and pushed a buzzer that almost certainly didn’t work. She knocked three times on the metal frame of the screen door.

There was a faint noise from inside the trailer. Then the door on the other side of the screen door opened inward, and there Salas stood, staring down at her.

He was only a vague shape behind the dark screen, not as big a man as she remembered, but still large. He seemed to have put on weight in the right places while in prison. If he hadn’t been wearing a sleeveless white undershirt, he would have been almost invisible in the dimness behind the screen.

“So what do you want?” he asked, in a hoarse voice that suggested Beth had awakened him.

She fought to find words for the ominous dark form towering over her, gazing down at her with a stillness that suggested great calm and a kind of superiority. She was the one who had lied. She was the one who had caused all the damage. Even her husband Roy had told her that before leaving her.

Salas made no move to open the door and invite her inside, or to step outside and talk with her. This wasn’t going at all as Beth had planned.

“I’m…” she managed to say.

“I know who you are.”

“I thought we should talk.”

He was silent for several seconds, then: “So talk.”

“I came here to assure you-” Beth said. God! Did that even make sense?

The shadowy form behind the screen said nothing.

Beth forged ahead. It was why she’d come all this way. “When I identified you in that police lineup, and in court, I would have sworn I was pointing at the right man.”

“You did swear.”

“I don’t know how I could have made such a mistake. And…” She gulped air. “… I sincerely apologize.”

He said nothing. Didn’t move.

“I-I’m genuinely sorry,” Beth said. “I know it can’t mean much to you now, considering what happened, but I just wanted you to know-”

He closed the trailer door and she was standing alone on his bottom step, staring up at the screen with a blank surface behind it.

She stood that way for more than a minute, arms at her sides, head inclined, as if gazing up in search of a god that had forsaken her.

When she backed down off the step, she stumbled and almost fell on the hard baked earth.

Beth barely remembered the drive back to Hogart and home. It seemed that suddenly there she was, in front of her garage with the car’s engine idling.

She realized she was crying.

She knew that nothing had changed, but that everything must.

After parking in the garage and slamming the car’s door behind her, she had to run from the hornets.

New York, the present

The Skinner sat hunched over his chocolate latte at an outside table at Starbucks and stared at the City Beat he’d plucked from a neutered vending machine a block away. The giveaway paper was lying on top of several newspapers the Skinner had bought that morning. The headline infuriated him.

SKINNER, CARVER, CANNIBAL

What on earth…?

He read on, oblivious to the people streaming past nearby on the sidewalk, the rumble and exhaust fumes of traffic, and the morning sun beginning to shine brighter and hotter on the round metal table. His attention was rapt.

Anonymous sources… Unnamed authorities… removed his victim’s tongues for the purpose of cooking and consuming…

He felt sick. He pushed his latte across the table and rested his elbows on the warm iron. How could they possibly believe that? What right did they have to jump to such a conclusion? To lie about him?

Cannibalism! The sick bastards!

Quinn! This has to be Quinn’s doing. He knows it isn’t true. There’s no reason even to imagine such a thing.

It’s so goddamned unfair!

Quinn. He’d somehow gotten the story planted. And this was exactly the kind of reaction he wanted. The idea was to get under his skin. Under the Skinner’s skin.

Well, it wasn’t going to happen. Not in the way Quinn expected. Not with the desired result.

He was calmer now that he had an understanding, or at least a hypothesis, as to what such a breathtakingly absurd accusation was about. And it was in some ways an effective stratagem. What could he do about it? Sue for defamation of character. No, Your Honor, I did not consume the tongues of those women! Would the court break out in laughter or in violence?