Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Colm
Fallow doesn’t say a damn word the entire time.
We get out of the house and trudge around to find one of the SUVs that’s not currently being used, all to the soundtrack of the fucking foxes.
The noise makes him look blissed out all over again, although that may just be the bliss he seems to get from pissing me off at every possible opportunity.
Once I have the right keys in hand and open the door on a white Ford Explorer, I’m expecting him to get in the passenger seat, but when I look around, he’s all the way over by the cages.
He’s leaning down, looking through the wire and making heavy eye contact with a fox that’s clearly evaluating whether she wants to let him pet her, or scream in his face.
I know the feeling.
“Hey, Patrick Bateman, let’s get a move on,” I shout.
He doesn’t move for a minute, and then eventually straightens up. Slowly, though. Making it clear he’s on his own timetable, not mine.
As if I’d ever doubt that. I’ve known him for less than 24 hours, and I can already tell he doesn’t do a damn thing he doesn’t want to.
“Comparing me to such a shitty serial killer is just rude, you know,” he says and he trudges toward me through the mud. “At least call me after one of the greats. “H.H. Holmes, or something.”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t hot.”
The words are out of my mouth quickly—too quickly—and he’s already looking at me with his head cocked to the side before I realize I want to take them back. The amount of personal information I managed to reveal with that single slipped sentence is disconcerting.
I’m waiting for some snide remark to hit me, but he stays silent, just smiling wickedly at me like I’m bare-ass naked in front of him.
Somehow, that’s even worse.
I turn to get in the car, finally, but he starts yapping again.
“Whatever you say, lover.”
Adrenaline and anger hit me like a sharp smack, and it’s an act of great self-control that I don’t grab him and shove him against the car before telling him to get the fuck out of my face.
I tell myself I don’t do it because I’m being respectful of his bodily autonomy—you can be a criminal and a murderer but still have ethics, after all—and not the fear that the action would somehow end with me on the ground, face down while he straddles me and presses his knife in to my throat again.
And if he makes me come in my pants one more time today, he’ll never let me live it down.
“Don’t call me that,” I growl. “Especially not in front of the guys. People might get the wrong idea.”
His eyebrows raise, faux-innocence shining on his face.
“Oh? Well, what would the right idea be?”
Fallow reaches down to adjust himself as he says it. It’s not the first time he’s done this to me, and it’s hit me like a rush of arousal every single goddamn time.
I don’t look. I’m not looking.
This is over, whatever it was.
I should tell him that.
See how he likes boundaries.
“Fuck you,” is what comes out of my mouth instead.
“Now, that sounds like what I was thinking, but you just said that would be the wrong idea.”
Bubbling up with the kind of unhinged, uncontrollable frustration I never normally experience, I stomp over to his side of the car and yank open the door, pointing inside.
“In. Now. And no more fucking talking. No more of whatever this look you’re giving me is either.”
He doesn’t stop eye-fucking me, but I didn’t really think he would.
Instead, he curls his lip slightly, once again looking like the blood-soaked angelic herald of murder that I met this morning.
He moves slowly and carefully, climbing into the car with the same preternatural grace he does everything else with, and I’m left alone with the sound of my heavy breathing and the fucking foxes as soon as I slam the door shut.
The drive to Trigger’s place is silent. No radio, no talking, just the wind rushing past and the unbearably loud sound of my own breathing.
Even that feels like an unhinged loss of control for me. But Fallow’s presence is somehow larger than his body. Like he’s filling up all the space in the car just by existing, and I’m left crushed into a corner, panting like a dog to get enough oxygen to survive.
I hate it. I hate it more because I’m very aware that he knows all about how I react to him and seems to find it wildly entertaining to toy with me.
I should be far away from him right now, trying to slap some sense back into myself. Or maybe I should be locking both of us in my bedroom so I can fuck the sass out of him, consequences be damned. I already risked a lot by letting him dry hump me with the door unlocked, and that turned out fine.
Mostly.
But instead, I’m driving out to referee two idiots who are supposed to work for me, but can’t handle a simple body disposal without my personal involvement.
Maybe Savage was right, and this job really is a waste of everybody’s time. A growl escapes me unintentionally, my fingers tight enough on the steering wheel that something might snap, and I can feel Fallow’s gaze on me from the passenger seat the entire time.
“Something wrong?” he asks, the same teasing lilt to his voice as usual.
I don’t answer. I can’t answer. If I answer, he’ll somehow seize on that and manage to turn the conversation into me pulling over to the side of the road so he can blow me in the car or something, and then we’ll both end up getting arrested for the least illegal thing either of us has ever done.
Thankfully, we’re finally here.
The entrance to Trigger’s place is so overgrown, you can only see it if you know what you’re looking for.
That’s by design, I’m sure. Turning in takes me to an unnecessarily long dirt track that morphs into a driveway at some point, until I’m pulling up in front of a sprawled out, rambling ranch house in desperate need of a coat of paint.
The wrap-around porch is covered in cages and other equipment. It’s all neatly stacked, but overcrowded, nonetheless. There are alligator skulls with beads hanging in the trees, and it makes the whole place creepier than it needs to be.
“I see cages. Is this another fox vendor?” Fallow asks.
“No,” I say as I switch the engine off. “And don’t mention that shit in front of him. He hates it, and I need to keep my hands on him without pissing him off any more than we already do.”
Fallow stares at me, not making a move to get out of the car.
“Keep your hands on him… where, exactly?”
There’s a tone there. More than teasing, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. His eyes are narrowed, and the car feels like it just got ten degrees hotter.
“My metaphorical hands, pervert.” I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes, which he clearly doesn’t appreciate.
I make a mental note to do it more. “He has this big-ass piece of land in the middle of nowhere. All he wants is to do is take care of his ridiculous brood of animals, and he doesn’t give a shit about helping me dispose of bodies sometimes as long as I help him pay the bills. ”
Fallow looks out of the window again, and when he looks back at me, his eyes are wide and bright.
“Dispose of them how?”
“I guess you’ll see.” It feels good to have the upper hand for a minute, even if it’s only in this tiny sense. “If he and Lucky haven’t killed each other yet, that is.”
With a suddenly light expression, Fallow practically flings the door open and bounces out like a kid on a field trip.
We walk toward the house, but I already know they’re not inside.
Trigger doesn’t let anyone in there. At least not any of us, because he barely tolerates us and our criminal acts as it is.
Plus, knowing how many animals he has crammed into the space out here, I shudder to think how many there must be inside.
Instead, we walk past the porch, ignoring the low din of scratching and whining, and the constant horror-movie sound of big, rusty exercise wheels being used by… something.
I don’t want to know what needs an exercise wheel big enough to make that much noise.
On the other side of the building, there are some more outdoor enclosures made out of wire frames.
Fallow keeps stopping to look at them, trying to see whatever godforsaken critters are inside, but they all have little wooden hide boxes, and no one seems to want to come out.
I, personally, am not here on a field trip.
I have shit to do—namely, figuring out how to get Fallow out of my life before he blows it the fuck up.
Not for the first time, I have to resist the urge to grab his arm and bodily drag him with me. But it seems to keep his attention if I just growl at him every few yards to keep moving.
Eventually, we get to the back part. Past the backyard, through some trees, to the place where Trigger stashes shit that he probably can’t legally keep on his property.
Possums and rabbits and shit are one thing, especially because he seems to have some kind of license for whatever he’s doing here, but I can’t imagine there’s any license that lets you keep gators in your backyard. Even in Missouri.
As soon as we make it back there, the sound of yelling is loud enough that it leads us the rest of the way to Trigger and Lucky.
They’re standing at the edge of a pond or lake or some shit. A creek.
I don’t know the fucking difference, but it’s water and it’s brown and it disappears off into the trees.
Trigger and Lucky are at the edge—Lucky waving his hands in the air and ranting at an incoherent speed, Trigger with his arms crossed, leaning back and looking down at Lucky like this whole situation is beneath him, two dead bodies lying on the ground at their feet and a third fucking floating in the water.
All our evidence right there, just bobbing away. Like it’s totally normal.
“Alright, what the fuck is going on?”