Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

'Nice morning,' a man said. She turned toward the front counter and saw that it wasn't a man, but a teenager – the redheaded would-be gangsta she had seen in the Mustang outside the school yesterday.

She said, 'Shouldn't you be in school?'

'Work release,' he told her, leaning against the wall behind the counter. His T-shirt was so big the shoulders lapped around his elbows. He had a belly on him, but she could tell from his large hands and feet that he would lose that in the next few years as he grew into his body. He would still have that carrot-colored hair, though, and those freckles would never go away.

'I'm Rod,' he told her. 'You want some Halloween candy?'

'No.' Lena remembered the decorations from the library. Halloween was two nights away. She hadn't even remembered what day it was.

He asked, 'Are you a cop?'

So much for being undercover. 'What makes you say that?'

'You talk like a cop.'

She tasted the coffee and tried not to gag. 'How do you know what a cop talks like?'

'I've seen it on TV.'

Lena fished her change out of the honor box. 'You shouldn't believe everything you see on TV.'

'Junior watches it all night,' he said, probably meaning the clerk who had stared at Lena when she checked in last night as if she was the first woman he'd seen in his life. 'He's got porn tapes he keeps under the couch. Mr. Barnes doesn't know. He's the owner.' The kid gave her a big grin. 'You can watch some of them if you want.'

'Wait for that.' She started to leave, but changed her mind, thinking she might as well try. 'Hey.' The kid was still leaning against the wall, waiting. 'I saw a man the other day,' she began, resting her coffee cup on the door handle, trying to appear disinterested. 'He had a swastika on his arm.'

The kid stood away from the wall. His voice went up three octaves. 'A swastika like Hitler?'

'Yeah.'

'Cool.'

'You think that's cool?'

'Well, yeah. I mean, no, it's obviously, like, wrong.' He leaned back against the wall. 'I just meant it as in good for him for, you know, like not being ashamed.' He lowered his voice. 'There are some people in this town who have some white sheets in their closet.'

'Like who?'

'Well…' The kid realized he had an angle to work. 'Why don't we go back in the office and we can talk?'

'Why don't you call me when you get some fuzz on your peaches?' Lena moved to push the door open just as a woman was walking in.

'Christ,' the woman hissed as Lena 's coffee spilled down the front of her shirt. She was older, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled up into a blue bandanna. She was trim, too – about Lena 's height – and pissed as hell. 'Watch where you're fucking going.'

'Sorry,' Lena apologized, but the woman still scowled as if Lena had done it on purpose.

'Just fuck off,' the woman barked, pushing past Lena and going into the office. She slammed the door so hard that the pictures hanging on the wall rattled.

Lena asked the kid behind the counter, 'What's her problem?'

'She's the maid.'

That explained why the motel was a rat's best friend. 'She always that pleasant?'

The carrot shrugged, still smarting from Lena 's brush-off. 'Better you than me.'

Lena left the building, feeling bad for the woman, thinking she'd probably be pissed if she had to work at this dump, too. It was one thing to work a crap job when you were young, but the lady had to at least be pushing sixty. She should be retiring to Florida, not cleaning motel rooms for pocket change.

Lena walked across the parking lot, wishing she'd put on a jacket before heading out but not wanting to go back into the miserable room to fetch one. The sun was already busy burning off the fog, and she knew that in a couple of hours, she'd be glad she was in short sleeves.

She dumped the rest of her coffee into a storm drain as she crossed the street, glancing down to see if it ate through the concrete. There was a Stop 'n' Save catty-corner to the hotel, just opposite Hank's bar. She tossed her empty cup into the trash as she walked into the general store, which was little more than a front for selling cheap beer. She had sneaked out of Hank's house many a night to hang out behind the store with the other bad kids from high school.

Inside the store, the air-conditioning was already on full blast in anticipation of the coming heat. Lena walked past the coffee machine and grabbed herself a Coke. As she paid, she had the vague feeling that she knew the woman working behind the counter, probably from high school, but neither one of them was particularly interested in starting up a conversation. Lena dropped her extra pennies into the cup and headed back out the way she had come.

She stood on the sidewalk, waiting for the traffic to clear. The motel was directly across the street, and she saw that some creative vandals had broken the lights in the sign so that at night 'Home Sweet Home' would turn into, 'Ho eet me.' What else had the vandals done to the motel? Were they the ones who had scratched the red X in front of Lena 's door? The mark was bothering her. She wondered how long it had been there and if someone was trying to send her a message. Whatever it meant, she wasn't getting it. Still, she looked around as she waited for a truck to pass, her skin tingling, her gut telling her that she was being watched.

As casually as she could, Lena glanced over her shoulder. The woman behind the counter at the convenience store was staring out the window.

Candy, Lena suddenly remembered. That was her name. They had called her 'Corny' because someone had said that she walked like she had a corncob stuck up her butt.

There were times that Lena thought she wouldn't take all the money in the world to be back in high school.

The traffic cleared and she popped open the Coke as she started to cross the street, wondering how in the hell Hank's shitty bar had managed to help put Sibyl through college and bail out Lena more times than she wanted to admit. The Hut was a three o'clock bar, the kind where everyone started to look good around three in the morning. Desperation hovered like a black cloud over the place, and she suppressed a shiver as she got closer to the building.

The bar didn't even have a sign out front; everybody knew what it was. The roof was thatched on

the front, but what looked like a case of mange had set in around fifteen years ago and Hank hadn't bothered to fix it. Tiki torches with orange and red lightbulbs banked the front door, which was painted to look as if it had been fashioned from grass. The exterior walls were decorated in a similar theme, but the paint was so faded you couldn't tell what you were looking at unless someone gave you a clue. There were windows all along the front, but they had been painted black so long ago that they had taken on the appearance of rotten wood.

The yellow ATF tape across the door was the only thing that looked new. Hank hadn't told her the bar had been closed. There were only two reasons to explain the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms paying a visit to the Hut: either Hank had been caught selling liquor to underage patrons or he'd been caught dealing drugs.

Lena tried the door, but it was locked. She put her hand on top of the jamb and felt for the spare, but it wasn't in its usual place.

She gave up and walked around the side of the building. She didn't need to get inside the bar anyway. Hank's office, which bore a closer resemblance to an outhouse, was tucked behind the bar on the edge of a slow-running stream.

Lena tried the shed door just in case, but it was locked, too. Hank must have locked it himself; there was no sign of ATF tape on the shack. The federal boys probably hadn't bothered to get a warrant for the shed. The drug trafficking going on inside the bar would've been enough to make the headlines.