An introduction to “Serial” by Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath
Since we first met at Left Coast Crime in El Paso, Texas in 2005, we’d always talked about writing something together. Of course, talking is easier than writing, so we talked and talked and talked but never wrote anything. Then, last year, Joe sent Blake an email:
“Now, let's consider hitchhiking. You aren't supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver who picks you up could be crazy. You aren't supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy. Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together...”
Blake responded:
“Oooooh, I love that idea...let's do it.....should we write our initial pieces in isolation? And then bring our characters together? I’ll write 2 pages, you write 2, back and forth, and let the ending just emerge naturally from the story. This is gonna be fun.”
And it was. We never could have imagined the response this story would get. From staying #1 on the Amazon Kindle bestseller list for six weeks, to a quarter-million downloads, to a film deal, to the expanded Serial Uncut edition and Killers Uncut, this story has turned out to be the most loved, most hated, and unquestionably most-read thing either of us has written.
And if we’ve saved one potential hitch-hiker from sticking out their thumb and being brutally murdered, or one driver from picking up a hitch-hiker and being brutally murdered, then it’s all been worth it.
Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath
May, 2010
serial
-1-
The hardest thing about killing a hitchhiker was finding one to pick up.
Donaldson could remember just ten years ago, when interstates boasted a hitcher every ten miles, and a discriminating killer could pick and choose who looked the easiest, the most fun, the juiciest. These days, cops kept the expressways clear of easy marks, and Donaldson was forced to cruise off-ramps, underpasses, and rest areas, prowl back roads, take one hour coffee breaks at oases. Recreational murder was becoming more trouble than it was worth.
He’d finally found one standing in a Cracker Barrel parking lot. The kid had been obvious, leaning against the cement ashtray near the entrance, an oversize hiking pack strapped to his back. He was approaching every patron leaving the restaurant, practicing his grin between rejections.
A ripe plum, ready to pluck.
Donaldson tucked the cell phone into his pocket and got out of the car. He didn’t even have to initiate contact. He walked in to use the bathroom and strolled out with his car keys in hand, letting them jingle a bit. The kid solicited him almost immediately.
“Excuse me, sir. Are you heading up north?”
Donaldson stopped, pretending to notice the man for the first time. He was young, maybe mid-twenties. Short, reddish hair, a few freckles on his face, mostly hidden by glasses. His clothing looked worn but of good quality. Donaldson was twice his age, and damn near twice his weight.
Donaldson rubbed his chin, which he knew softened his harsh features.
“In fact I am, son.”
The boy’s eyes lit up, but he kept a lid on his excitement. Any hitcher worth his salt knew to test the waters before sealing the deal.
“I am, too. If you’d like some company, I can chip in for gas.” He hooded his eyes and quickly added, “No funny stuff. I’m just looking for a ride. I was hoping to get to Ogden by midnight. Got family up there. My name’s Brett, by the way.”
Well played, Donaldson thought. Friendly, a little desperate, making clear this wasn’t a sexual hookup and that he had people waiting for him.
As if any of that would keep him safe.
“How do I know you’re not some psycho?” Donaldson asked. He knew that was pushing it, but he liked the irony.
“There’s a gas station across the street. I can top off the tank, pay with a credit card. All gas stations have cameras these days. Credit card is a paper trail. If anything happens to you, that would link me to your car, and I’d get caught.”
Smart kid. But not that smart.
The really smart ones don’t hitchhike.
“Won’t need gas for a few hundred miles.” Donaldson took off his Cubs baseball hat, running a hand over his gray, thinning hair. Another way to disarm the victim. No one feared grandfatherly types. “Until then, if you promise not to sing any show tunes, you got yourself a ride.”
Brett smiled, hefted his pack onto his shoulders, and followed his ride into the parking lot. Donaldson unlocked the doors and the kid loaded his pack into the backseat of Donaldson’s 2006 black Honda Accord, pausing when he saw the clear plastic covers on the front seats.
“My dog, Neil, usually rides up front with me,” Donaldson said, shrugging. “I don’t like him messing up the upholstery.”
Brett flashed skepticism until he noticed the picture taped to the dash: Donaldson and a furry dachshund.
“Sheds like crazy,” Donaldson said. “If you buy a dog, stick with short-haired breeds.”
That was apparently reassurance enough, because Brett climbed in.
Donaldson heaved himself into the driver’s seat, the car bouncing on its shocks.
“Buckle up for safety.” Donaldson resisted the urge to lick his lips, then released the brake, started the car, and pulled onto the highway.
The first ten miles were awkward. Always were. Strangers tended to stay strangers. How often did a person initiate conversation on a plane or while waiting in line? People kept to themselves. It made them feel safe.
Donaldson broke the tension by asking the standard questions. Where’d you go to school? What do you do for a living? Where you headed? When’d you start hitchhiking? Invariably, the conversation turned to him.
“So what’s your name?” Brett asked.
“Donaldson.” No point in lying. Brett wouldn’t be alive long enough to tell anyone.
“What do you do, Donaldson?”
“I’m a courier.”
Donaldson sipped from the Big Gulp container in the cup holder, taking a hit of caffeinated sugar water. He offered the cup to Brett, who shook his head. Probably worried about germs. Donaldson smiled. That should have been the least of his worries.
“So you mean you deliver packages?”
“I deliver anything. Sometimes overnight delivery isn’t fast enough, and people are willing to pay a premium to get it same day.”
“What sort of things?”
“Things people need right away. Legal documents. Car parts for repairs. A diabetic forgets his insulin, guy loses his glasses and can’t drive home without them, kid needs his cello for a recital. Or a kidney needs to get to a transplant location on time. That’s the run I’m on right now.”
Donaldson jerked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing to the backseat floorboard. Brett glanced back, saw a cooler sitting there, a biohazard sticker on the lid.
“No kidding, there’s a kidney in there?”
“There will be, once I get it.” Donaldson winked at the kid. “By the way, what’s your blood type?”
The kid chuckled nervously. Donaldson joined in.
A long stretch of road approaching. No cars in either direction.
“Sounds like an interesting job,” Brett said.
“It is. Perfect for a loner like me. That’s why it’s nice to have company every so often. Gets lonely on the road.”
“What about Neil?”
“Neil?”
Brett pointed at the photograph on the dashboard. “Your dog. You said he rode with you sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah. Neil. Of course. But it isn’t the same as having a human companion. Know what I mean?”
Brett nodded, then glanced at the fuel gauge.
“You’re down to a quarter tank,” he said.
“Really? I thought I just filled up. Next place we see, I’ll take you up on that offer to pay.”
It was a bright, sun
ny late afternoon, clean country air blowing in through the inch of window Donaldson had open. A perfect day for a drive. The road ahead was clear, no one behind them.
“So seriously,” Donaldson asked, “What’s your blood type?”
Brett’s chuckle sounded forced this time, and Donaldson didn’t join in. Brett put his hand in his pocket. Going for a weapon, or holding one for reassurance, Donaldson figured. Not many hitchers traveled without some form of reassurance.
But Donaldson had something better than a knife, or a gun. His weapon weighed thirty-six hundred pounds and was barreling down the road at eighty miles per hour.
Checking once more for traffic, Donaldson gripped the wheel, braced himself, and stood on the brake.
The car screeched toward a skidding halt, Brett’s seatbelt popping open exactly the way Donaldson had rigged it to, and the kid launched headfirst into the dashboard. The spongy plastic, beneath the veneer, had been reinforced with unforgiving steel.
The car shuddered to a stop, the stench of scorched rubber in the air. Brett was in bad shape. With no seatbelt and one hand in his pocket, he’d banged his nose up pretty good. Donaldson grasped his hair, rammed his face into the dashboard two more times, then opened the glove compartment. He grabbed a plastic zip tie, checked again for oncoming traffic, and quickly secured the kid’s hands behind his back. In Brett’s coat pocket, he found a tiny Swiss Army knife. Donaldson barked out a laugh.
If memory served, and it usually did, there was an off ramp less than a mile ahead, and then a remote stretch of farmland. Donaldson pulled back onto the highway and headed for it, whistling as he drove.
The farm stood just where he remembered it. Donaldson pulled offroad into a cornfield and drove through the dead stalks until he could no longer see the street. He killed the engine, set the parking brake—the Accord had transmission issues—and tugged out the keys to ensure it wouldn’t roll away. Then he picked a few choice tools from his toolbox and stuck them in his pocket.
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. 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.
Donaldson also used some tools of his own. Pliers, for cracking teeth and pulling off lips. When used in tandem with some garden shears, he was able to get Brett’s tongue out in one piece. And of course, there was the muddler.
Normally wielded by bartenders to mash fruit in the bottom of drink glasses, Donaldson had his own special use for the instrument. People usually reacted strongly to being fed parts of their own face, and even under the threat of more pain, they’d spit those parts out. Donaldson used the plastic muddler like a ram, forcing those juicy bits down their throats.
After all, it was sinful to waste all of those delectable little morsels like that.
When the fighting and screams began to wind down, the Swiss Army knife’s corkscrew attachment 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 funny bone. 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 the muddler, shears, and pliers, and swabbed out the interior of his car. He used baby wipes on himself, paying special attention to his fingernails. He put his tools back into his toolbox. Everything else 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 this particular 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 all across the country, over a million square miles of hunting ground. He waited at least a year before returning to any particular spot, and he was finding new places to play all the time.
Donaldson knew he would never be caught. He was smart, patient, and never compulsive. He could keep on doing this until he died or his pecker wore out, and they had pills these days to fix that.
He reached I-15 at rush hour, traffic clogging routes both in and out of Salt Lake, and he was feeling happy and immortal until some jerk in a Winnebago decided to drive ten miles under the speed limit. Irritated motorists tagged along like ducklings, many of them using their horns, and everyone taking their good sweet time getting by in the passing lane.
Seriously, they shouldn’t allow some people on the road.
Donaldson was considering passing the whole lot of them on the shoulder, and as he surveyed the route and got ready to gun it, he saw a cute chick in pink shoes standing at the cloverleaf. Short, lugging a guitar case, jutting out a hip and shaking her thumb at everyone who passed.
Two in one day? he thought. Do I have the energy?
He cranked open the window to get rid of the bleach smell, and pulled up next to her under the overpass, feeling his arousal returning.
-2-
She set the guitar case on the pavement and stuck out her thumb. The minivan shrieked by. She turned her head, watched it go—no brakelights. The disappointment blossomed hot and sharp in her gut, like a shot of iced Stoli. Despite the midmorning brilliance of the rising sun, she could feel the cold gnawing through the tips of her gloved fingers, the earflaps of her black woolen hat.
According to her Internet research, 491 (previously 666) ranked as the third least
traveled highway in the Lower-Forty-Eight, with an average of four cars passing a fixed point any given hour. Less of course at night. The downside of hitchhiking these little-known thoroughfares was the waiting, but the upside paid generous dividends in privacy.
She exhaled a steaming breath and looked around. Painfully blue sky. Treeless high desert. Mountains thirty miles east. A further range to the northwest. They stood blanketed in snow, and on some level she understood that others would find them dramatic and beautiful, and she wondered what it felt like to be moved by nature.
Two hours later, she lifted her guitar case and walked up the shoulder toward the idling Subaru Outback, heard the front passenger window humming down. She mustered a faint smile as she reached the door. Two young men in the front seats stared at her. They seemed roughly her age and friendly enough, if a little hungover. Open cans of Bud in the center console drink holders had perfumed the interior with the sour stench of beer—a good omen, she thought. Might make things easier.
“Where you headed?” the driver asked. He had sandy hair and an elaborate goatee. Impressive cords of bicep strained the cotton fibers of his muscle shirt. The passenger looked native—dark hair and eyes, brown skin, a thin, implausible mustache.
“Salt Lake,” she said.
“We’re going to Tahoe. We could take you at least to I-15.”
She surveyed the rear storage compartment—crammed with two snowboards and the requisite boots, parkas, snow pants, goggles, and…she suppressed the jolt of pleasure—helmets. She hadn’t thought of that before.
A duffle bag took up the left side of the backseat. A little tight, but then she stood just five feet in her pink crocs. She could manage.
“Comfortable back there?” the driver asked.
“Yes.”
Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.
“What’s your name?”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy, I’m Matt. This is Kenny. We were just about to have us a morning toke before we picked you up. Would it bother you if we did?”