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  After the news, he finished off the drink, washed the mug, and put it away. From under the sink he took a stack of newspapers and lay them down on the floor, overlapping, covering the area under and around the steel table. He lined a large trash can with a plastic bag and put it next to the table. He took cutlery out of a drawer and lined it up, just so.

  He brought in the stiff body from the van and carefully unwrapped it. There wasn’t too much blood, and he kept most of it in the bag, which he emptied into a waiting gallon jar. He labeled it with the date and set it by the freezer door.

  First things first. He put a heavy cutting board under the man’s neck and with one blow from a cleaver separated the head from the body. Holding a newspaper under it, he carried it to the meat locker, where it joined its eleven fellows on a shelf.

  He wasn’t squeamish, but it was easier to work without the head looking at you. Consulting a flowchart that he’d printed out and laminated, he started with the legs and worked his way up, carving the meat into generous but manageable steaks and chops, wrapping each with a Seal-a-Meal vacuum machine and dating it. Every now and then he carried the packages into the freezer and put each into its proper bin.

  It took little more than an hour. He cracked the long bones with the cleaver, exposing the marrow, and put them in a slow oven to cook for brown sauce. Most of the rest went into a simmering stock pot. Then he cleaned all of his implements and the table.

  He stacked up all the newspapers and set them aside to bury tomorrow; burning might attract attention. Besides, he liked to look at the pile every now and then.

  He took a bracing shower and then finished off the pizza, watching MTV.

  Time to make some money. Of course he couldn’t have a regular job, but he could work at home. He opened the rolltop desk and turned on the computer and opened the Word file Shandor Ascendent: Book Four of the Starfound Cycle.

  It wasn’t great literature. But you do have to eat.

  Cat in the Box

  1.

  I spent a couple of hours getting the damned bicycle carrier attached to the back of my old van. My own fault for buying it “as is”; it was missing a couple of bolts the previous owner probably hurled away in frustration.

  Kit didn’t mind the delay. She was going over last year’s notes in Calculus III. I asked her whether that was in preparation for Calculus IV and she said “I wish,” and told me the name of the course it was a prerequisite for. Three words, and the only one I understood was “analysis.” Though I doubted it had anything to do with Freud.

  We probably wouldn’t need the carrier anyhow, this weekend. The plan was to bike up to Cedar Rapids, twenty-four miles on MapQuest, spend the night at a motel, and come back Sunday morning. Then I’d take a longer ride during the week, maybe to Des Moines and back, get a feel for it.

  I’ve been riding a bike since I was a kid, a year-round thing in Daytona, but haven’t done a really long trip since my sophomore year, when a bunch of us spent the summer biking and staying in hostels in Holland and then England.

  Since moving to Iowa I’ve grown a little flabby. Maybe more than a little. Doesn’t take much energy to stare out the window at the snow and wish you were somewhere else. I tried skiing my first winter and fucked up both knees badly enough to need a wheelchair. Not anybody’s vehicle of choice for ice and snow. A diet of beer and potato chips, seasoned with onion dip and self-pity, set me on the road to the 200-pound mark. Hit 203 before I got up on crutches.

  Seem stuck at 190 now. Hoping to lose fifteen or twenty pounds biking, before winter sets in. Help get into the character, too.

  Scrubbed the grease off my hands but decided against a shower. We’d want one when we got to the motel, anyhow.

  Kit was hunched over her computer, which was on the low coffee table in the living room. Half a dozen books were spread around on the couch and table. She picked up a paper notebook and scribbled something down, not looking up when I came into the room.

  “With you in a minute,” she said.

  “Want a beer?”

  “Got tea.”

  I followed my nose into the kitchen. She’d put last night’s soup on a back burner overnight, and the smell made me ravenous. It wasn’t even eleven, though. Popped a beer and sat down at the kitchen table with a magazine and a 100-calorie bag of pretzels.

  The bag had sixteen pretzels in it. A penny’s worth of food and a dime’s worth of plastic for half a dollar. But the principle was valid; if I had a regular box of pretzels I’d keep at them till I could see the bottom. Leave a few so I technically wouldn’t have eaten the whole box.

  Hunter would swallow the box whole. Cardboard, plastic, good roughage.

  How often does he eat, anyhow? Big predators like lions kill a big animal, gorge themselves, and sleep. Maybe he should do something like that. But what do big ocean predators do? I think sharks have to keep moving. Do killer whales and porpoises sleep after they eat, floating in the waves? I’d look it up when Kit got off the machine.

  My own computer was being random, files disappearing and reappearing. So it was resting until the VA check came. The guy at the Apple Store said I’d need a rebuilt hard drive, which would suck up about a third of the check. But the uncertainty was driving me batfuck. So I was a madman writing about a lunatic on a mentally deficient machine. There’s a recipe for a best seller.

  So what’s the appetite of a hugely fat person really like? Myrna the Mountain must’ve been well over three hundred pounds, fattest girl at GHS, but nobody ever saw her eat anything but salad. She said she had “fat genes,” which generated obvious jokes.

  Maybe when she wasn’t eating lettuce she went after hikers on deserted trails.

  Kit came in and opened the refrigerator. “How come you put the bike carrier on?”

  “Had some time to kill.” And it would save me 4.2 miles, biking from my place to here and back. It would make a difference, 48 miles instead of 52. Don’t want to overdo it. “How often do you think a four-hundred-pound person would eat?”

  She brought out a soda water and a pie pan with one wedge left. Key lime with whipped cream topping, graham cracker crust.

  She laughed. “You should see your face—you, too, could be a four-hundred-pound guy! Split it with you?”

  “I’ll pass.” Try not to drool.

  “Maybe he’d eat all the time. If he ate like three huge meals a day, it would put stress on his digestive system. Didn’t we used to be foragers?”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “You know what I mean, humans . . . roots and berries, nibble all the time?

  “Yeah, but we’re set up to be omnivores,” I said. “If you kill a large animal, you can’t just eat a nibble at a time. It would spoil.”

  “Wild animals don’t mind a little rot. Remember that grizzly bear.” We’d taken a helicopter ride over Yellowstone, and saw a bear that the pilot said had been eating on the same moose for weeks. He said that if we were on the ground, the smell would knock us over. She took a bite. “Yum . . . rotten moose pie. Maybe key lime.”

  “I guess this guy doesn’t live on human flesh. He’d have to be killing people left and right.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, stacking lunch meat and cheese. “He weighs four hundred pounds and looks like a creature from outer space. Maybe he doesn’t just walk into a Hy-Vee and buy a side of beef. Maybe he does have to eat people.”

  “Or farm animals,” I said. “That wouldn’t draw as much attention.”

  “You ought to have him break into a zoo and eat a camel. Half a camel.”

  “Speaking of—”

  “No. And I won’t buy any more.” Saturday night she’d come home with half a pack of Camels, and we shared it in an orgy of resolution-breaking. I could still feel the narcotic rush.

  “You can’t be virtuous all the time.”

 
“So look up something really dirty in your Kama Sutra. Something that doesn’t cause cancer.” She held up the mayonnaise jar. “And doesn’t use condiments.” We’d used mayonnaise once, and she complained it made her smell like a sandwich. So people will know where you hid the salami, I said, and she did have to laugh.

  She didn’t like to talk about sex, but was willing to do anything. Better than the opposite, I knew from experience. Lynette of recent memory. A modern kind of celibacy, I guess; talking dirty and being squeaky clean. All talk and no action, my father would have said.

  I wondered where he and his girlfriend were now. It’s not fair for old people to have so much fun. Or, be honest, it’s creepy to think of your own dad fucking a girl not much older than you. Fucking anybody.

  “Earth to Jack.” She set the sandwich in front of me. “You’re daydreaming again. About your novel?”

  “No, nothing.” I drove the image from my mind. “The bike carrier, we might need it. Like if one of the bikes breaks down, one of us could pedal back to pick up the car, then come collect it.”

  “Oh, right. Good.” She took one bite and got up to punch the little boom box by the fridge. “New Flash Point CD.”

  We shared a lot of musical likes and dislikes, but I didn’t get her passion for Flash Point. Retro wannabes, what a combination. I nodded and concentrated on my sandwich.

  “Maybe he’d like them rotten,” she said. “The corpses. Like the French, they hang ducks and geese.”

  “What did they do?”

  “Who do?”

  “What did the ducks do, the French want to hang them?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. Who would hang a fucking duck?”

  She laughed. “They like hang them in a shed. Let them rot to improve their flavor.”

  What an image. “Tell me you just made that up.”

  “I swear to God and Gastronomique. Go Google it.”

  “Oh, I believe you. What do they do with fish? Fuck them blind?”

  “Not raw.”

  “’Course not. The bones.” I put some more mustard on my sandwich. “Maybe he would, you know? He’s got the big freezer, but maybe he’d stack them around for a while at room temperature first. The trailer’d smell like a dead moose, but he’d like it that way.”

  She nodded, munching. “That would make a good penultimate scene. Antepenultimate. The FBI men are closing in on Hunter’s trailer, and they go, ‘What’s that godawful smell?’”

  “He’d remember it from the war,” I said, and had to stop and swallow twice.

  “You all right?”

  I coughed and swallowed again. “Yeah. Nothing.”

  “You remember it. Don’t you?”

  “Sure. But it’s not like a big thing.” The first time, it wasn’t. They’d been dead so long they’d dried out, and we didn’t smell it till we were right on them. But the next was a woman and two babies, bloated up and burst, and as soon as we smelled them we heard the flies, and followed the sound, and if it hadn’t been for the X-rays, the demo squad, we might have snagged a trip wire in the sand and gotten claymored all over the fucking desert.

  “Jack, you’re pale.” She touched the back of my hand and I jerked it away in reflex.

  I rubbed my face with both hands. “Fucking shit.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No, really. I’m all right.” I took a bite and tried to smile and chew at the same time.

  “If you don’t talk to me about it, who are you going to talk to?” I shrugged, or cringed. “You stopped going to the VA shrink.”

  “She just gave me pills.”

  “And you didn’t like the pills, I understand. I didn’t like what they did to you. But you do have to talk to someone.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yeah. I’ll open up. Let it all out.”

  Into the book.

  __________

  Twenty-six miles turned out to be more in practice than it had seemed in theory. The idea of Iowa being flat was also a theoretical premise not borne out by fact. At the nineteen-mile mark there was a forlorn-looking motel, the Tidy Inn, and we turned into it after a two-word discussion.

  The owner was a fat woman with sparse yellow hair, in a faded floral print dress at least a size too small. I had to pay her in cash, and if we’d wanted a phone, that would’ve been another $50 cash deposit. I wondered when she’d last had a customer who didn’t bring his own.

  The room was too large for its small bed and desk and chair. It had a stale smell and was dark as night. Kit kept me from turning on the lights when we unlocked the door. She’d unclamped the strong headlight from her handlebars. She crept over to the bed and pulled the covers over as she snapped it on. No bugs went scurrying for shelter. That should have comforted me, but instead I worried that she might not have been fast enough. Armies of bedbugs waiting to carry us off into the night.

  One welcome surprise was an old-fashioned bathtub sitting on claw feet. It was big enough for two, a little crowded. She filled it up with steaming water, only a little rust-colored, while I did a quick maintenance routine on the bikes and brought them inside.

  She was already undressed, standing in the water, and lowered herself down with an expression of bliss. “Oh, my aching butt.”

  I peeled off my Lycra bicycle togs and slipped in facing her, interlacing legs. The hot water was a relief, technically for the perineum rather than the butt proper, but she knew that. “Oh, my pulsating perineum” might be misconstrued.

  I tickled her with my toe. “What do you want to do tonight?”

  “Something besides that. Maybe trim your toenails.” I jerked back. “Kidding.” She put my foot back in place, gently, and then leaned forward while she reached behind her back to run some more hot water into the tub.

  “Besides the obvious, we might try to find something to eat.” We’d packed an emergency dinner of beans and franks, but there might be a roadside café or, more likely, a fast-food joint.

  “Should’ve asked Dragon Lady,” I said. “Wonder how close we are to the Amanas.” The Amana Colonies were a cluster of pseudo-Amish towns that featured home-cooking restaurants.

  “Ask her when we’re cleaned up.” She took the little bar of soap and started to work on me. After a couple of minutes we dried off hastily and moved to the squeaky bed.

  Afterwards, she fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, her breath tickling my neck. Her body still glowing from the tub and sex.

  As often happens, I was miles from sleep, no matter how tired I was from the neck down. Should think about the book. Hard to put myself into the head of an inhuman flesh-eating monster with this cute flesh doll cuddled up alongside me. My deflated dick shrank even more at the thought.

  I looked down at her body and had a terrible instant of transport. In front of a mosque, a civilian body carelessly ground under tank treads, bare legs unaffected, relaxed. Don’t go there. Don’t go back there.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Stephen Spenser wasn’t impressed by money, having grown up surrounded by rich people he didn’t like. But there was a comfortable talismanic feel to the tight roll of C-notes, held with a fat rubber band, that rode in his left front pocket. Faded torn jeans, to go with his faded flannel shirt and well-worn tennis shoes.

  The bicycle was a marvel of camouflage, or misdirection; a sturdy ancient Schwinn with a flaking paint job and a touch of rust. But the running gear and brakes were brand-new Campy and Shimano, the tires were Gators, and the seat cost more than the frame. It was comfortable and stopped on a dime and got forty miles to the gallon of Heineken.

  It had two big reed baskets, one of which held his travel bag, carefully chosen after a couple of hours’ browsing in pawn shops and thrift stores. It was beat-up khaki nylon, scuffed but strong, with lots of c
ompartments and a lock. The middle part held a week’s worth of clothes and dehydrated meals, and side pockets held wallet and change and a notebook, along with hardware like a bottle opener and flashlight and Swiss Army knife. What had really sold him on this one was a side pocket under a Velcro flap, large enough for a Glock 9-mm and two spare clips.

  Under his shirt he carried a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special .38 Airweight—the kind of gun a private eye always had in the movies. But Steve knew too much about guns to rely on it alone. And Hunter was doubtless a big man. In Alabama he’d left three footprints in mud while he was carrying a two-hundred-pound victim. A police lab report said that it would take at least five hundred pounds to drive his size fourteens that deep. To kill him with a .38, you’d have to hit him in the eye or right down the ear, and Steve didn’t want to get that close while the beast was still alive.

  He recited the LAPD mantra: “Two in the chest, one in the head.” The first would get his attention, the second would kill him, and the third would kill him again. If he were human.

  At Mr. Steinhart’s insistence, he had a radio beacon Superglued to the underside of the seat. It used two hearing-aid batteries and would run for more than a year. If he were killed and the bike tossed somewhere, the cops could track it from fifty miles away. They might even find his body nearby.

  If he were actually following the Southern Tier Trail, he’d start in the middle of St. Augustine. But Hunter wasn’t going to nab anyone off a city street, so he studied the bus route and had the Greyhound drop him and his bike off at Molasses Junction.

  It was like a scene out of The Grapes of Wrath. Bare dirt from horizon to horizon, a steady north wind, cold in the bleak sunshine, blowing needle-sharp sand into his face. He’d be headed west, so only his right ear would fill up with dirt.