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I rap on a window so greasy I can barely see inside—until I realize who I’m looking at.
My heart stops, weird prickles shooting through the tips of my fingers like arcing electricity.
Culver Jacobin.
The younger of the two creepers who stare at me every time we cross paths in town.
I’ve never spoken to them once. I only know their names thanks to Nora.
He’s slouched in the front seat, wearing a pair of muddy overalls, and—is he playing Bejeweled on his phone?
Oof.
Well, there goes the image of the scary crazy hillbilly who wouldn’t know what to do with a smartphone if it fell out of the sky and popped him on the head.
I flush guiltily.
You can’t tell the kids to stop making assumptions if you don’t.
So I muster up a smile and knock gently again, this time a tad louder.
“Hey,” I call. “Is there something I can help you with?”
He looks up with a surprised jolt and grins, showing off a mouth full of very large, very white teeth. Apparently these hillfolk keep up with their dentistry, too.
Then he rolls down the window.
“Hey there! I was waiting for you, wasn’t sure if I had the right address,” he says with a friendly twang. His eyes crease. “Miss Clarendon, right? Three p.m. appointment?”
“Huh?” I shake my head. “I don’t think I made an appointment for anything with you, Mr. Jacobin?”
“Not with me, no.” He reaches over and thumps the toolkit in the passenger seat with one dirt-smeared hand, grins wider and—oh, crap, he’s doing it again.
Staring at me.
Not just holding eye contact, but gawking with this fixed, unblinking stare boring through me. “Cable company sent me over to wire up your internet and TV. Tried to wave at you this morning, just to let you know I’d be seeing you later, but you sped by like a bullet.”
“Oh!” Now my guilt turns into shame. “I’m so sorry. I’m such an idiot. I must’ve accidentally scheduled it for my first day at work. How long have you been waiting?”
“Oh, not much more’n an hour or two. Wasn’t no problem. Thought I might have the wrong address, but it’s real hard to have the wrong address around here.” He unlatches the door and I step back, giving him room to swing it open. “Guess I don’t need to introduce myself, huh?”
Now I feel like the creep.
I smile sheepishly.
“Sorry,” I say. “I’ve seen you around town, and Nora and Mr. Arrendell—Ulysses, I mean—told me your name.”
“Ain’t no worry at all, ma’am, I know how Redhaven is. It’s like that song in Cheers, y’know?” He hefts himself out, pulling his toolbox with him and pockets his phone in front of his overalls with a sad little bloop-bloop sound of the game ending. “Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name.”
I fidget awkwardly for a second, then force another smile.
“Yeah, I guess so. Um, if you still have time to do the job, I think the cable hookup is out back.”
“Sure! I’m not too busy today. Just do this stuff part-time for a little extra coin to pay for things around the farm.” Culver slams the door of the pickup shut and follows me as I head toward the gate.
But as I unlatch it and step inside, leading him around the side of the house opposite from the one with the police tape, he stops, craning his head toward the glimpses of yellow and black visible around the other side.
“Hey, what happened there?” he says.
“I don’t know, don’t—”
Before I can stop him, he’s traipsing through the grass, disappearing around the corner.
Crap.
I dash after him, dropping my messenger bag on the porch.
“Wait! I think that’s still a crime scene!” I rush out quickly. “You shouldn’t—”
Too late.
He’s crouched in front of the yellow tape, reaching right under it to touch the bloody red X on the paint. Even though it’s long dried, a few flakes still smear his fingers.
He brings them to his face, sniffs them, and then—
No.
No, no, no.
He licks them as I watch in abject horror.
“Oh my God, why would you—there could be diseases, I—”
“Nah,” he says. “Blood this dry, out this long? Anything in it’s dead. Can’t make a man sick. ’Sides. Unless this fella had swine flu, nothing in it that can jump to a human. It’s pig’s blood, ma’am.”
I swallow hard.
I feel sick, my mouth flooding with saliva.
“How... how c-can you tell?”
“Tastes a little sweeter, a little grassier. Our pigs eat sweet corn, mostly, so it changes the taste of their blood. Humans taste kinda gamier, more metallic, y’know? Since we’re meat-eaters,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.
I just stare at him, my pulse tracking every horrified second that seems to last way too long.
Culver blinks and gives me a wry smile, full of self-mocking humor.
“You can relax. I never ate no one before. When we slaughter our hogs for the meat, we collect the blood and sell it in the butcher’s shop down in the square. People use it for cooking, making sausage, all that good stuff. Sometimes if a pig seems like it might’ve been sick, we taste the blood to make sure it’s clean before we sell it. Test it, too. Hell, we practically got our own lab up at the house like big nerds.” He grins. “Now ask me how I know how human blood tastes.”
