Some people are so easy it almost isn’t satisfying.
Almost.
I strip the bed, roll the sheets into a tight bundle, and stuff them into a black trash bag with the towel and my old clothes. There’s nothing incriminating on them—nothing obvious—but I don’t like leaving skin cells behind unless I have to.
Jason never understood that.
He thought he was immune to mess because he liked talking about it. As if narrating a crime turned it into fiction. As if saying “we” all the time meant he couldn’t ever be alone in it.
“Outsourcing,” he called it. “Division of labor. You’re my finisher, Henry. You make it pretty.”
He was good at the talking parts, I’ll give him that. Good at the social grease, the smiling, the introductions. Good at making girls feel like they were in on the joke instead of the punchline.
But he never liked the final moments. The cleanup.
That was always my job.
He liked to make it a game. Set them free—or at least, make them believe he was setting them free. Give them a sixty second head start, and then I’d begin the hunt. If they’d been good—not inclined to give him any trouble while he kept them—their death would be easy. He had a syringe prepared that would offer them a quick, painless slide into oblivion when I caught them.
If they’d been a pain in the ass, though…I got to play. Do whatever I wanted to with them. Sometimes it was a bullet, if I was in a hurry. Sometimes a knife to the throat, and other parts of the body.
Of late, without Jason’s presence, I’ve been in an inventive mood.
I take one last look around the room. It’s almost empty now—generic again. The way it was supposed to be. A place anyone could have stayed.
I leave the keycards on the nightstand, slip out the back stairwell instead of walking past the office, and find the dumpster in the alley. The trash bag goes in, buried under fast-food sacks and beer bottles with a few efficient pushes.
By the time the police think to check a place like this, if they think to check it at all, those bags will be long gone. Compacted. Buried. Ash.
I’m halfway to the car when the anger really hits.
Not hot. Not wild. I don’t do wild.
It’s a cold, clean thing that slides under my ribs and settles there, a weight with edges.
I don’t like being pushed out of my spaces. I don’t like having to run.
Tallulah did that.
Her and her screens and her stupid, clever little brain. She turned on a porch light where there should have been shadow. She dragged my brother’s name onto everyone’s lips and then had the audacity to stop there, like she’d done enough.
Like she hadn’t left anything unfinished.
Jason in his orange jumpsuit. Shiloh in her vineyard. The town sighing in relief and going back to its wine and weddings and fall festivals, as if one brother in a cell meant the story was over.
They forgot about me.
She didn’t, though. She knew exactly who was back when Mia Hart was found on that shelf.
Idrive.
Back roads, then a state route, then the interstate for a few anonymous miles before I get off again. I swap plates at a truck stop, taking the ones off a minivan whose owner is too busy wrestling three screaming kids into a bathroom to notice.
A few towns over, I park in the lot of a diner that smells like burned coffee and old grease and listen to the chatter.
Locals.
Truckers.
