Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77205 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 386(@200wpm)___ 309(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
There were rules on the road too.
Stick to the speed limit, use turn signals, don’t switch lanes inappropriately, don’t follow too close. You had to make sure there was nothing suspicious about you driving alone late at night. No reason to be pulled over. To have the cops get suspicious about the bins.
It was a long drive, but not long enough for the scent of decomposition to make the trip miserable.
I got out of the city, out of Jersey, and up into New York state.
The key, I decided early in my career, was not to hide the bodies the same way often.
Sure, you could do the classic cement shoes at the bottom of a river here and there. But you didn’t want to do that shit too much.
And, yeah, I could melt a body here and there. But buying that much lye, then heating it up to the right temperature, was a long and arduous undertaking I didn’t want to do more than a few times, and then only when completely necessary. High value targets kinda shit.
This meant that I had about a dozen locations at the ready at all times to hide a body. Mostly, by burying it.
Most of these locations were in rural parts of upstate New York.
Like this one.
All property was owned by someone but a lot of it was unused. Like this thirty-acre stretch of woods that had a small hunting cabin located on it. The kind of hunting cabin that had no electricity, a water catchment system, and a composting toilet.
I’d walked the property before, all dressed up in a bright orange with yellow reflector vest with a rifle propped against my shoulder, looking like just another hunter who accidentally followed a deer or some shit onto the wrong property.
Shit like that happened when property lines were hard to determine.
That trip had solely been to find and to carefully turn all trail cameras in the direction I wanted, making it so there was no way for any of the cameras to find me if or when I might need the property to hide a body.
Four hours later, I was driving my car as deeply into the woods as the trees would allow before finally giving up and climbing out.
“Fuck,” I grumbled, rolling the tension out of my shoulders from the long drive, feeling the exhaustion deep into my bones.
And I had most of the hard work ahead of me.
But bitching about it wasn’t going to get the job done, so I went into the trunk, grabbing the shovel, and heading out.
There was a deep rumble, making me glance up to notice the stars and moon which were suddenly hidden behind a thick fog.
A storm was rolling in.
Which was only going to make this already strenuous task more difficult.
I got right to work, digging into the dirt, saying a silent prayer that the ground wasn’t frozen. Though who knew what it was like four feet down.
The rain would only help with that, I guessed, as the sky opened up, and started pouring down on me.
Grave digging by hand wasn’t as simple as you might think. Someone doing it for the first time would likely spend a solid eight hours working on just one six-foot hole.
Once you had some experience, you could usually get a grave done in four and a half to five hours.
This one was going to need to be an extra foot or two deep, though, since I had two bodies instead of one.
Then there would be the piling the dirt back on, and carefully making the area look like it hadn’t been disturbed.
That task was sometimes just scattering some leaves. Other times, I would move logs, or even fell a damn tree over it. Once or twice, I’d even planted a couple of trees around where the body was placed.
I didn’t have an axe with me this time, so it was likely gonna be dragging some logs into the area instead.
The rain pelted down relentlessly, cascading down over the brim of my baseball cap, keeping most of the water out of my face as the thunder clapped and the lightning cracked through the sky.
I was rushing against the sheets of rain to get the bodies out of the car, out of their bags, and into the ground before their graves filled up with water.
And, honestly, I’d been stressing out.
Which was probably all it was.
A flash out of the corner of my eye.
Red.
Something red.
But in the split second it took for me to turn, it was gone, leaving me sure I had to have imagined it. Sleeplessness and hard work just playing tricks on my mind.
I couldn’t shake the strange feeling, though, as I dropped the bodies into the hole, and started to fill the graves back in.
It was a prickling at the back of my neck.