Chapter Sixteen
A Career in Death
Larry
The inheritance may have felt like a small fortune to Clyde, but it didn’t make all Larry’s dreams come true.
He was caught between anger and disgust for his father.
Larry wouldn’t be living an idle life like he thought he would.
His parents’ home was a complete loss, and because it was paid off, his father had dropped the insurance policy to save money.
A month after the deaths, he received a notice from the city that he had to have the land cleared of burned debris or the city would confiscate the property.
After raging in his hotel room, he decided to let the city take it.
If Clyde had sold the butcher shop instead of simply closing it, there would have been more money. He should have known how foolish his father was and interceded somehow. The hero worship Larry had felt for so long was the delusion of a child. As an adult, he saw how wrong he had been.
There was no way he would return to college.
He didn’t need an education where the teachers were dumber than the students.
This meant he had to find a way to make money that allowed him to live the life he fantasized about.
Exhilaration filled him whenever he thought about it.
His fantasies grew deeper and darker, leaving him restless to take the next step.
He had to generate an income that allowed him to travel.
Killing in his backyard was the quickest way to get caught.
He also needed a home base that wasn’t in a populated area. That meant his current location was out of the question. Larry studied murder from every aspect, including investigations. He found a goldmine in magazines like True Detective, Official Detective Stories, and Murder Casebook.
He carefully purchased the magazines at small stores off the highway because he didn’t want to leave a trail.
You never knew when the feds were watching.
The stories and pictures stimulated his dark curiosity.
The covers screamed with garish headlines in blood-red fonts, promising "Sex-Crazed Killer on the Loose!
" or "Blonde Beauty Slain in Love Nest!" Often, a posed photograph or painting showed a terrified woman caught mid-scream, a shadowy man looming behind her with rope, pistol, or switchblade in hand. His heart rate sped up as he studied the details, though he planned to be an equal opportunity killer. He didn’t care if his victims were male or female.
The sensationalized true crime stories expanded his dark thoughts.
The blow-by-blow accounts of murders, mob hits, adulterous scandals, and criminal freak shows fed him much like food.
Every bloody knife, every desperate alibi, every fatal kiss was painted in breathless detail, and Larry couldn’t get enough.
He lived for his weekly passport into torture, homicide, and the morbid death dance.
The gruesome murders gave him the thrill he’d been missing in college.
He now had a front-row seat in the shadowy underworld most people only dared imagine. Even though the stories offered a mix of titillation and moral warnings where justice usually prevailed, it didn’t worry Larry. He could beat justice because he already had.
One afternoon, at a small store he’d only visited once before, another man perused the same magazines Larry was after. He knew others read them, but this was the first time he watched someone walk out with similar morbid choices.
The middle-aged man, dressed in jeans and a dark blue T-shirt, left the store and climbed into an 18-wheeler. Larry stared through the store’s front glass until the trucker drove away.
Trucking cross country might be the perfect job.
Larry researched everything he could find.
The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 took the trucking industry out of federal hands and opened the field to independent truckers.
Larry might not have the money to live his entire life without working, but he had enough to buy a long-haul truck and become an independent owner-operator.
A chauffeur's license was all that was required to drive a semi.
It was easy enough to obtain. He just had to wait three months for his twenty-first birthday.
He used the time to do more research at the library.
His studies were no longer dreary. The ins and outs of the long-haul trucking business fascinated him and he absorbed as much information as he could find.
The library gave him access to something else.
He was able to check out VHS tapes. In the small apartment he had finally rented above a bakery, two miles from the closed butcher shop, he watched them in privacy.
His movie choices were mostly horror because of the gore, but he also crossed into science fiction.
Over the next months, he watched Night of the Living Dead, Soylent Green, The Hills Have Eyes, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and his new favorite, Cannibal Holocaust.
These movies had a common theme: people eating human meat. He’d fantasized about eating a person for years. For him, it was the ultimate aphrodisiac. His movie choices proved other people held the same fascination. He wasn’t alone, and he would be doing what they didn’t dare.
His father told him humans tasted like pig, but was it true? Thoughts of doing his own experiments gave him even darker cravings. When he did sleep, garish dreams filled with the terror and the blood of his victims had him waking in pools of sweat.
He turned observing people for their taste potential into a disturbing hobby.
She’s thin, he would think to himself. So delicate, with bones pressed too close to the surface.
There would be no richness, just the faint whiff of tendon and sinew.
He imagined the meat would shrink on the pan, leaving nothing but stringy fibers and the flavor of fear.
Overweight people were different. They carried soft abundance. He could almost feel the warm, pliant give of it beneath his hands. They would have a slow-roasted sweetness, fat that would sizzle under heat. A feast for someone who appreciated excess.
These lurid images turned into workable plans. These thoughts consumed him. First, he had to leave the town where he killed his parents. Once he was out of sight, he would be out of the minds of the people he’d known since he was a young, strange boy they couldn’t quite pinpoint.
Second was buying an 18-wheeler. Nothing flashy. Something that would get him across the country without drawing attention. He checked out the Freightliner FLA Cabover, the Peterbilt 359, and the Kenworth W900.
The W900 was by far the best and could be customized to fit his needs.
It was flashy, though, and he had to stay away from anything that would draw attention, so he settled on a used Peterbilt.
He got it for a steal at forty-five thousand dollars.
It came with a 63-inch flat top sleeper.
Crucially, it had a storage area behind the seat that he could fit two large coolers in.
To get away with murder, you had to be smart.
Larry was beyond smart. He was brilliant.