Last Breath: A Novella. Karin Slaughter

a wagon wheel of a U-turn across the empty four-lane highway and pulled up at the two-story cinder-block building tucked down in a ravine behind a long stretch of busted guard rail. To her surprise, she saw that the apartments had a name. A discreet sign welcomed visitors to the Ponderosa. Ropes twined around the border in homage to the Bonanza TV show, but this was no place for Little Joe to hang his hat. Unless he wanted to crack open a light bulb and smoke a bowl.

      The majority of the parking spaces were filled with beat-up old cars; not a good sign, considering most people should be at work this time of day. She drove to the end of the parking lot on the off-chance she would see the Porsche that Belinda had told her about, but Charlie’s three-year-old Subaru wagon was the sportiest car around. She took a space near the exit, thinking that was smart in case she needed to make a quick getaway. She remembered what Ben had said about the building being surveilled. It made her feel safer, knowing that some cops, somewhere, were watching her back.

      Or, if you looked at it another way, they were watching her go into a place known for drug traffickers and junkies.

      Charlie stared up at the sad, squat building. Twelve units total; six on the bottom, six on top. Cinder-block walls painted a dull gray, a rusty railing lining the second story, rotted-out wooden doors with faded plastic numbers, a low roof with a rotting overhang. Every door had a plate-glass window next to it, and every window had a whining air conditioning unit underneath. A steep pathway led to a filthy-looking pool. Unlit tiki torches circled the chain-link fence. The place reminded her of the airport motels her mother had forced them to stay in every vacation because they were cheap and close to mass transportation. Charlie’s clearest memories of Disney World were her night terrors that the wheels of an airplane were going to hit her head while she slept.

      “What do you think we’d get in the lawsuit?” her father had asked when she had shared with him the reason for her screaming.

      Charlie pulled her purse onto her shoulder as she got out of the car. Hot air hit her like a slap to the face. She was sweating by the time she turned around and locked the car door. The smell of fried chicken, pot and cat urine—which was either from a bunch of cats or from a bunch of meth—stung her nostrils.

      According to the Girl Scout roll, the Faulkners resided in unit three on the bottom floor, smack in the center, which was probably the worst of all worlds. Neighbors on each side, always waiting for the other shoe to drop upstairs. As she walked across the parking lot, she heard the distinct bass of Petey Pablo’s “Freek-A-Leek”.

       Earring in her tongue and she know what to do with it…

      The music got louder as Charlie navigated the broken sidewalk.

       With my eyes rolled back and my toes curled…

      “Ugh,” Charlie groaned, repulsed by the words and also irritated that she knew them by heart. She hated to trot out one of those in my day sentences, but she could still remember how reviled Madonna was for singing about her feelings of renewed virginity.

      Without warning, the music stopped.

      The silence tickled the hairs on the back of Charlie’s neck. She had the distinct feeling of being watched as she walked along the uneven path to unit three. The wooden door was warped, painted a dark red that did not hide the black underneath.

      She raised her hand. She knocked twice. She waited. She knocked again.

      The curtains rustled. The woman’s face behind the glass looked older than Charlie, but in a hard way, like the few years had been spent on a construction site or, more likely, in prison. Her eyeliner was a thick black line. Blue eyeshadow. Heavy foundation reminiscent of the coating of Doritos dust on Charlie’s steering wheel. She wore her shoulder-length bleached blonde hair in a “Barracuda”-era Nancy-Wilson-style feather.

      She saw Charlie and scowled before closing the curtains.

      Charlie stood on the hot sidewalk listening to the air conditioning units grumble in the quiet. She looked at her watch. She was wondering if she had been given the brush-off when she heard sounds from behind the door.

      A chain slid back. A deadbolt was turned. Then another one. The door opened. Tendrils of cold air caressed Charlie’s face. The whining a/c competed with OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” playing somewhere in the darkened room. The woman at the door was wearing jeans and a cropped red T-shirt with a Georgia Bulldog on it. A half-empty bottle of beer was in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Her fingernails were filed to long, sharp points, the polish bright red. She reminded Charlie of the trashy Culpepper girls who had relentlessly hounded her throughout high school. The woman had that look about her, like when the shit went down, she was ready to scratch out some eyes or pull out some hair or bite down real hard on an arm or a back if that’s what it took to win the fight.

      Charlie said, “I’m looking for Maude or Leroy Faulkner.”

      “I’m Maude.” Even her voice sounded mean, like a rattlesnake opening a switchblade.

      Charlie shook her head. There had to be two different Maudes. “I mean Flora’s grandmother.”

      “That’s me.”

      Charlie’s chin almost hit the ground.

      “Yeah.” She took a hit off her cigarette. “I was seventeen when I had Esme. Esme was fifteen when she had Flora. You can do the math.”

      Charlie didn’t want to do the math, because grandmothers had buns and wore bifocals and watched Hee Haw. They didn’t sport cropped shirts that showed pierced navels and drink beer in the middle of the day while OutKast played on their boom box.

      Maude said, “You gonna keep wasting my air conditioning or you gonna come inside?”

      Charlie stepped into the apartment. Cigarette smoke hung like dirty yellow lace in the air. There was no light except for what came in through the slim part in the curtains on the front window. Brown shag carpet cupped the soles of her sneakers. The cluttered kitchenette was part of the living room. The bathroom was at the end of a short hall, a bedroom on either side. Clothes were everywhere, unopened cardboard boxes, a sewing machine on a rickety table shoved against the wall by the kitchen. A large television set was jammed into the corner by the front window. The sound was muted as Jill Abbott screamed at Katherine Chancellor on The Young and the Restless