Free Serial by Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch Page B

he could no longer see the road. He killed the engine, set the parking brake—the Accord had transmission issues—then tugged out the keys to ensure it wouldn’t roll away.
    His passenger whimpered as Donaldson muscled him out of the car and dragged him into the stalks.
    He whimpered even more when Donaldson jerked his pants down around his ankles, got him loosened up with an ear of corn, and then forced himself inside.
    “Gonna stab me with your little knife?” he whispered in Brett’s ear between grunts. “Think that was going to save you?”
    When he’d finished, Donaldson sat on the kid’s chest and tried out all the attachments on the Swiss Army knife for himself. The tiny scissors worked well on eyelids. The nail file just reached the eardrums. The little two inch blade was surprisingly sharp and adept at whittling the nose down to the cartilage. And the corkscrew did a fine job on Brett’s Adam’s apple, popping it out in one piece and leaving a gaping hole that poured blood bright as a young cabernet.
    Apple was a misnomer. It tasted more like a peach pit. Sweet and stringy.
    He shoved another ear of corn into Brett’s neck hole, then stood up to watch.
    Donaldson had killed a lot of people in a lot of different ways, but suffocation especially tickled his funnybone. When people bled to death they just got sleepy. It was tough to see their expression when they were on fire, with all the thrashing and flames. Damaging internal organs, depending on the organ, was either too fast, too slow, or too loud.
    But a human being deprived of oxygen would panic for several minutes, providing quite a show. This kid lasted almost five, his eyes bulging out, wrenching his neck side to side in futile attempts to remove the cob, and turning all the colors of the rainbow before finally giving up the ghost. It got Donaldson so excited he almost raped him again. But the rest of the condoms were in the car, and befitting a man his age, once he got them and returned to the scene of death, his ardor probably would have waned.
    He didn’t bother trying to take Brett’s kidney, or any of his other parts. What the heck could he do with his organs anyway? Sell them on eBay?
    Cleanup was the part Donaldson hated most, but he always followed a strict procedure. First, he bagged everything associated with the crime. The rubber, the zip tie, the Swiss Army knife, and the two corn cobs, which might have his prints on them. Then he took a spray bottle of bleach solution and a roll of paper towels and cleaned out the interior of his car. He used baby wipes on himself, paying special attention to his fingernails. Everything went into the white plastic garbage bag, along with a full can of gasoline and more bleach spray.
    He took the money from Brett’s wallet—forty lousy bucks—and found nothing of interest in his backpack. These went into the bag as well, and then he soaked that and the body with lighter fluid.
    The fire started easily. Donaldson knew from experience that he had about five minutes before the gas can exploded. He drove out of the cornfield at a fast clip, part of him disappointed he couldn’t stay to watch the fireworks.
    The final result would be a mess for anyone trying to ID the victim, gather evidence, or figure out what exactly had happened. If the body wasn’t discovered right away, and the elements and hungry animals added to the chaos, it would be a crime scene investigator’s worst nightmare.
    Donaldson knew how effective his disposal method was, because he’d used it twenty-six times and hadn’t ever been so much as questioned by police.
    He wondered if the FBI had a nickname for him, something sexy like The Roadside Burner. But he wasn’t convinced those jokers had even connected his many crimes. Donaldson’s courier route took him across four large, Western states, a land area of over four hundred thousand square miles. He waited at least a year before returning to any particular spot, and he was