Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

6

Andy drove up and down what seemed like the city of Carrollton’s main drag. She had easily found the Walmart, but unlike the Walmart, the Get-Em-Go storage facility did not have a gigantic, glowing sign that you could see from the interstate.

The bypass into Atlanta had been tedious and—worse—unnecessary. Andy had been tempted to use the truck’s navigation system, but in the end decided to follow Laura’s orders. She’d bought a folding map of Georgia once she was inside the Atlanta city limits. The drive from Belle Isle to Carrollton should have been around four and a half hours. Because Andy had driven straight through Atlanta during morning rush hour, six hours had passed before she’d finally reached the Walmart. Her eyelids had been so heavy that she’d been forced to take a two-hour nap in the parking lot.

How did people locate businesses before they had the internet?

The white pages seemed like an obvious source, but there were no phone booths in sight. Andy had already asked a Walmart security guard for directions. She sensed it was too dangerous to keep asking around. Someone might get suspicious. Someone might call a cop. She did not have her driver’s license or proof of insurance. Her rain-soaked hair had dried in crazy, unkempt swirls. She was driving a stolen truck with Florida plates and dressed like a teenager who had woken up in the wrong bed during spring break.

Andy had been in such a panicked hurry to get to Carrollton that she hadn’t bothered to wonder why her mother was sending her here in the first place. What was inside the storage facility? Why did Laura have a hidden key and a flip phone and money and what was Andy going to find if she ever located the Get-Em-Go?

The questions seemed pointless after over an hour of searching. Carrollton wasn’t a Podunk town, but it wasn’t a buzzing metropolis, either. Andy had figured her best bet was to aimlessly drive around in search of her destination, but now she was worried that she would never find it.

The library.

Andy felt the idea hit her like an anvil. She had passed the building at least five times, but she was just now making the connection. Libraries had computers and, more importantly, anonymous access to the internet. At the very least, she would be able to locate the Get-Em-Go.

Andy swerved a massive U-turn and got into the turning lane for the library. The big tires bumped over the sidewalk. She had her choice of parking spaces, so she drove to the far end. There were only two other cars, both old clunkers. She assumed they belonged to the library staff. The branch was small, probably the size of Laura’s bungalow. The plaque beside the front door said the building opened at 9 a.m.

Eight minutes.

She stared at the squat building, the crisp edges of the red brick, the grainy pores in the mortar. Her vision was oddly sharp. Her mouth was still dry, but her hands had stopped shaking and her heart no longer felt like it was going to explode. The stress and exhaustion from the last few days had peaked around Macon. Andy was numb to almost everything now.

She felt no remorse.

Even when she thought about the horrible last few seconds of Hoodie’s life, she could not summon an ounce of pity for the man who had tortured her mother.

What Andy did feel was guilt over her lack of remorse.

She remembered years ago one of her college friends proclaiming that everyone was capable of murder. At the time, Andy had silently bristled at the generalization, because if everyone were truly capable of murder, there would be no such thing as rape. It was the kind of stupid what if question that came up at college parties—what if you had to defend yourself? Could you kill someone? Would you be able to do it? Guys always said yes because guys were hardwired to say yes to everything. Girls tended to equivocate, maybe because statistically they were a billion times more likely to be attacked. When the question invariably came round to Andy, she had always joked that she would do exactly what she’d ended up doing at the diner: cower and wait to die.

Andy hadn’t cowered in her mother’s kitchen. Maybe it was different when someone you loved was being threatened. Maybe it was genetic.

Suicides ran in families. Was it the same with killing?

What Andy really wanted to know was what had her face looked like. In that moment, as she kicked open the office door and swung the pan, she had been thoughtless, as in, there was not a single thought in her mind. Her brain was filled with the equivalent of white noise. There was a complete disconnect between her head and her body. She was not considering her own safety. She was not thinking about her mother’s life or death. She was just acting.

A killing machine.

Hoodie had a name. Andy had looked at his driver’s license before she’d thrown the wallet into the bay.

Samuel Godfrey Beckett, resident of Neptune Beach, Florida, born October 10, 1981.

The Samuel Beckett part had thrown her off, because Hoodie’s existence outside Laura’s office had taken shape with the name. He’d had a parent who was a fan of Irish avant-garde poetry. That somehow made his life more vivid than the Maria tattoo. Andy could picture Hoodie’s mother sitting on her back porch watching the sunrise, asking her son, “Do you know who I named you after?” the same way that Laura always told Andy the story about how the H got dropped from her middle name.

Andy pushed away the image.

She had to remind herself that Samuel Godfrey Beckett was, in Detective Palazzolo’s parlance, a bad guy. There were likely a lot of bad things Samuel or Sam or Sammy had done in his lifetime. You didn’t darken all the interior lights in your truck and cover your taillights on a whim. You did these things deliberately, with malice aforethought.

And someone probably paid you for your expertise.

Nine a.m. A librarian unlocked the door and waved Andy in.

Andy waved back, then waited until the woman went inside before retrieving the black make-up bag from under the seat. She opened the brass zip. She checked the phone to make sure the battery was full. No calls registered on the screen. She closed the phone and shoved it back into the bag alongside the keycard, the padlock key, the thick bundle of twenties.

She had counted the stash in Atlanta. There was only $1,061 to get Andy through however many days she needed to get through before the phone rang and her mother said it was safe to come home.

Andy felt stricken by the thought that she would have to devise some kind of budget. A Gordon budget. Not an Andy budget, which consisted of praying that cash would appear from the ether. She had no way of making more money. She couldn’t get a job without using her social security number and even then, she had no idea how long she’d need the job for. And she especially did not know what kind of job she could possibly be qualified to do in Idaho.