Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

She stood outside the closed kitchen door, Glock at the ready. 'Hank?'

No answer.

The hinges creaked as she pushed open the swinging door.

Hank was slumped in a chair at the kitchen table. AA pamphlets were stacked hundreds deep in front of him, right beside a closed metal lockbox that Lena instantly recognized from her childhood.

His kit.

Junkies loved their routines almost as much as they loved their drugs. A certain type of needle, a particular vein… they had a habit for their habits, an M.O. they followed that was almost as hard to break as the addiction. Thump the bag, tap out the powder, flick the lighter, lick your lips, wait for the powder to turn to liquid, the liquid to boil. And then came the needle. Sometimes thinking about the rush was enough to get them halfway there.

Hank's drug kit was a metal lockbox, dark blue with chipped paint that showed the gray primer underneath. He kept the key in his sock drawer, something even a seven-year-old girl could figure out. Though the box was shut now, Lena could see the contents as clearly as if the lid was open: hypodermics, tin foil, torch lighter, filters broken off from cigarettes. She knew the spoon he used to heat the powder as well as she knew the back of her hand. Tarnished silver, the ornate handle bent into a loop that you could wrap around your index finger. Hank had caught her with it once and spanked the skin off her ass. Whether this was because Lena was messing with his stuff or because he wanted her to stay clean, she still did not know.

She was leaning against the kitchen counter, gun still in her hand, when Hank finally stirred. Milky eyes looked up at her, but she could tell he couldn't focus, couldn't see, didn't care. Drool slid out of his open mouth. He hadn't put in his teeth, hadn't bathed or combed his hair in what looked like weeks. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and she saw the tiny scars that needles had left so many years ago mingling with new punctures – ulcerous, gaping holes – where the drain cleaner or talcum powder or whatever the hell had been used to cut the shit he was putting into his veins had set up an infection.

The gun raised up into the air. She felt outside herself, as if the weapon was not connected to her hand, as if it wasn't her finger on the trigger, and her own voice saying, 'Who the fuck was that man?'

Hank's mouth opened, and she saw the dark red gums where his teeth had been, teeth that had rotted in his mouth because the drugs had eaten him from the inside out.

'Tell me!' she demanded, shoving the Glock in his face.

His tongue lolled outside his mouth as he struggled to speak. She had to use both hands to keep the gun steady, keep it from going off in her hands. Minutes passed, maybe hours. Lena didn't know; she was incapable of keeping time, figuring out if she was in the present or somehow trapped in the past, back thirty years ago when she was just a scared kid wondering why her uncle's grin was so wide when blood was streaming from his nose, his ears. She felt her skin prickling from the heat inside the house. The odor coming off Hank was unbearable. She remembered that smell from her childhood, knew he wouldn't take care of himself, didn't want to bathe because the layer of grime on his skin clogged his pores and helped hold in the drug longer.

Lena forced her hands to put the gun down on the counter, keeping her back to him as she tried to stop the memories that came flooding back: Hank passed out in the yard, children's services coming to the front door to take them away. Sibyl crying, Lena screaming. Even now, hot tears slid down her cheeks, and she was suddenly that little girl again, that helpless, powerless little girl whose only hope in life was a useless fucking junkie.

She swung around, slapping him so hard that he fell into a heap on the floor.

'Get up!' she shouted, kicking him. 'Get the fuck up!'

He groaned, curling into a ball, and she was reminded that even in a weakened state, the body did what it could to protect itself. She wanted to pummel him with her fists. She wanted to beat his face until no one would recognize him. How many nights had she lain awake, crying her eyes out as she waited for him to finally come home? How many mornings had she found him facedown in his own vomit? How many strangers had stayed the night – nasty, vile men with their leering smiles and fat, prodding fingers – while Hank remained oblivious to anything but chasing his high?

'Was that your dealer?' Lena demanded, feeling a wave of nausea building in her stomach. 'Was that your connection?'

He whispered something, blood spraying in a fine mist on the filthy linoleum.

'Who?' she screamed, leaning over his curled body, wanting to hear his words, to get the dealer's name. She would track him down, take him into the woods, and put a bullet in his skull. 'Who was that man?'

'He was…' Hank wheezed.

'Give me his name,' Lena ordered, kneeling beside him, her fists clenched so tight that her fingernails were cutting into her palms. 'Tell me who he is, you stupid fucker.'

His head turned up, and she saw him struggling to focus. When his eyelids began to flutter closed, she grabbed his greasy yellow hair in her fist, yanked his head up so he had no choice but to look at her.

'Who is he?' she repeated.

'The man…'

'Who?' Lena said. 'Who is he?'

'He's the one,' Hank mumbled, his eyes closing as if the effort of keeping them open was just too much. Still, he finished, 'He killed your mother.'

From the moment James Oglethorpe first set foot in Georgia, men had been trying to chop up the state into their own perfect little pieces. The first attempt came in 1741, when the Trustees decided to split the land into two colonies: Savannah and Frederica. When Georgia became a royal colony and adopted the Church of England as their official religion, the territory was sectioned into eight parishes. After the Revolutionary War, Creek and Cherokee land in the south was taken for white expansion, then later more Cherokee land was claimed in the north.

By the mid-1800s, no Indian territory remained, so the good ol' boys decided to start subdividing existing counties. Once 1877 rolled around, there were 137 counties in Georgia – so many little pockets of political power that the state constitution was amended to stop the overdevelopment, then amended again in 1945 to close loopholes that had allowed the creation of 16 counties in between. The final number allowed was 159, each with its own representative in the state assembly, its own county seat, its own tax base, schools, judges, political systems, and its own locally elected sheriff.

Jeffrey did not know much about Elawah County, other than that its founders had obviously borrowed the name from the Indians they had kicked out for the land. Night had come by the time he and Sara reached the town limits, and from what they could see, the place was not much to write home about. Lena was hardly the type to sit down and chat about her childhood, and Jeffrey understood why as he drove through Reece, Elawah's county seat. Even the dark of night could not obscure the town's depressing bleakness.

Jeffrey had studied American history at Auburn University, but you wouldn't find it written in any textbook that there were some places in the south that still had not recovered from Reconstruction. Running water, indoor plumbing, basic necessities that other Americans took for granted, were considered luxuries to people living on the wrong side of Reece's tracks. Jeffrey's hometown of Sylacauga, Alabama, had been poor, but not this kind of poor. Reece was the sort of festering wound that was only exposed when some kind of natural disaster yanked off the scab.

'Up here on the left,' Sara said, reading the directions Jeffrey had gotten from the sheriff.