Chapter 1

Room 9 and Haikus

Lewis sent me a haiku again on his cellphone:

Underneath the earth,

insects eating body parts,

an unfound torso.

* * * *

The body was buried on top of a body. I knew that.

All the bodies were buried on top of bodies.

James Sander, our leader, the head cheese, knew that.

Lewis didn’t, though, always out of the loop, “slower” than me and Sander. The poor bastard landed at the bottom of our food chain, and he probably didn’t even realize it.

Sander said, “If it continues to rain, the body will be found.”

Sander talked out his ass sometimes. The body couldn’t be found. I had helped bury many of them, too many to count, and it wasn’t going to be the last, or so I convinced myself. Both Sander and Lewis knew I could bury a fucking body.

Lewis looked across the room at me, high again, wide-eyed and not blinking. He trusted me and maybe wondered what I was thinking. He always did and always would. I could see that in his gray eyes, hidden there in his pupils, mysterious and awkward. I thought the guy shady, dark, and strange, but I still loved him.

He kept licking his lips, sometimes cutting them with his teeth. That told me he had something to say, but he just couldn’t say what cramped his mind, without a tongue.

“Text me, Lewis,” I requested, making eye contact with him. “You know how we talk to each other. Put it in a text, guy.”

He pulled his phone out of his black leather jacket and keyed in a message to me.

The two of us communicated that way. The only way for the last three years.

His text said, You left the shovel at the grave.

I looked up from my cellphone and shook my head. “The shovel is in the Caddy’s trunk.”

It’s notGo look.

“Hey, Sander,” I said across the room, gaining his attention.

Sander lifted his pretty boy blond head. A scar around the left side of his mouth always caused me to drop to my knees and want to do fun things with my mouth and his cock. His eyes told many lies, but they were a beautiful blue. He looked at a map of western Pennsylvania, leading us from Pittsburgh to Erie.

“What?”

“Tell Lewis that the shovel is in the Caddy’s trunk.”

Sander shook his head. “I don’t know fuck like that.”

My cellphone buzzed. Another message from Lewis.

“Go look.”

So I went to look.

* * * *

The Rankin Motel housed three others that night. A light blue Fusion in the parking lot, a PT Cruiser, and a GMC truck that was twice the size of our Caddy, occupied the dimly lit parking lot. The four-by-four truck with Tennessee plates belonged to the man staring at me from room three as I made my way to the Caddy’s trunk.

The handsome guy looked brawny and clean-shaven. He clutched a can of beer in his right hand. Thick darkness prevented me from making out the color of his eyes, although I wanted to know. Eyes were my weakness and dropped me to my knees. Eyes never lied; the translation of good and evil.

Watching me.

Watching him.

Back and forth. Communication between us.

Six-two or—three. Like steel. A kind of man I wanted to push around, but couldn’t. Thirty-two or—three? A pioneer of the highways. Trouble. Probably wanted in three states. But who the fuck cared since he could have fucked me with his good looks.

“What do you want?” I whispered to myself.

Was he undercover? Maybe. Maybe not. I wasn’t sure. Did he know that Sander, Lewis, and I had murdered three men that day? Was he onto us? With the FBI? A state police officer?

He opened the room’s door and waved me inside.

I didn’t budge, visually consumed his massiveness. Fucking attractive. Like a sexy wall. Handsome. His eyes told me that he wanted me; the eyes always want things from other men. Danger. Sin. Something.

He removed his T-shirt and dropped it to the floor, next to his feet. His chest flexed as he ran a palm and fingers through his ginger hair. The chest bulged, titanic in size; and just what I wanted and needed. His nipples were twice the size of any other man’s I had fucked: pink, hard, almost the size of a soda pop can’s bottom. Delicious nipples that whetted my appetite.

Fuck the trunk. Fuck the shovel.

I walked toward his room, stepped inside, and he shut the door behind me. “Who are you?”

“Names aren’t important. Bodies are. Dicks, too.”

I told him my name anyway. “Kal…Kalvin Cromby.”

He touched my chin, checking every part of my body out, from toes to head. Feeling me. Investigating my skin. “I like black-haired men with blue eyes. You’re in shape, too. You take care of your body. What are you, five-ten and one-sixty?”

“Five-eleven and one-seventy-five.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-eight.”

“The perfect age.”

“What do you want with me?”

He passed me a joint after lighting it.