Read Online Devil's Oven by Laura Benedict - Free Book Online Page A

know, to wake up. I thought it was a dog or a deer or something.” He’d had the entire night to think about what his story should be and had decided to keep it simple.
    •  •  •
    “You know him?” Keith said.
    Tripp shook his head. “It’s not like I could tell if I did.”
    Staring down at the body, Keith gave a grunt of assent.
    “Maybe check his ID?” Tripp said, hoping to take Keith’s focus off of him. He didn’t like the way he had to weigh every word against the lies he had already told. He had only been at it in the hour or so since he had called Keith, and he was already weary of the whole thing. It wasn’t even like he had murdered the guy or was hiding anything significant. That Lila—or anyone else for that matter—had been with him when the body had basically fallen from the sky and onto his driveway was irrelevant. They had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Period.
    “I’ve got gloves in the cruiser,” Keith said. “Don’t suppose you could come up with any coffee there?” He nodded toward the cabin. “Somebody got my ass out of bed awfully early this morning.”
    “I could probably dig some out of the freezer,” Tripp said, thinking about the instant he kept for his very occasional visitors. Then he remembered the machine on his counter. “Or, hey, I can do cappuccino.”
    •  •  •
    Getting Lila calmed down and into some kind of shape to drive herself home had been tough. As they walked past the body she had held tight to him, hiding her face against his shirt, and he had stayed at the truck with her for another ten minutes before letting her drive away. He had watched the taillights of the truck disappear into the dark, then reappear briefly as the road curved away and down the hillside.
    Walking back up the drive, he had shined his flashlight on the body, not really wanting to look but feeling compelled. There was no way even to tell what color the guy’s hair had been. It was as though the skull had been sucked out the top of the head, leaving behind flaps of lumpy, chewed-up skin. The neck was twisted and stretched, longer and much thinner than it should have been.
    Tripp stared, trying to imagine it wasn’t human, that it wasn’t real. But despite the hash atop the body’s shoulders, it was obviously a man. One of his arms had broken at the elbow and lay at an impossible angle. Tripp could only think it had happened as the body landed. He had knelt to take out the wallet whose shape had worn a faded square in the back of the man’s pants, but stopped himself, knowing he would be better off not touching the body at all. Later, as he lay in bed not sleeping, he thought he should have covered the body with a tarp or something. That would’ve been a bad idea, too. If only a bear or pack of coyotes had come through and dragged the thing away. It wasn’t a thought he liked; it just would have made everything easier.
    Lila called him around four a.m. She had taken a sedative and sounded better, calmer, but wasn’t able to sleep, either.
    “What will we do?” she said. Her voice was soft in his ear. Tripp hated that she might have been there beside him all night, if it hadn’t been for…well, if it hadn’t been for a lot of things.
    “It’s handled,” he said. “You can forget about it.”
    “Sure,” she said, giving a rueful laugh.
    “Go to sleep,” he said. “I love you.”
    “You sleep, too,” she said.
    He held the phone to his ear, wanting to hear more, but there was only the sound of the call disconnecting.
    •  •  •
    “The body” turned out to be Claude Dixon, a dispatcher at Bud Tucker’s trucking company. When Tripp came back carrying the steaming cup of cappuccino, Keith showed him Dixon’s ID card with its two-inch-square photo. A grinning Claude Dixon hunched forward, squinting at the camera so that his narrow, freckled face loomed. But the eyes beneath his bowl haircut were bright and intelligent, and one got the sense he