Chapter Text
Florida sucks.
It’s a shithole. There, Eve said it — it’s a shithole.
Everyone thinks Florida is full of beautiful beaches and theme parks but really that’s just like, one-half of one percent of the deceptively large state. The rest is a truly heinous combination of swamp and absolutely fucking nothing, interspersed with the occasional trailer park and enough alligators to make you take a second look at every drainage ditch. Not to mention humidity so thick it's like wearing an extra layer of clothes, feels like you need gills to breathe. Like the mermaids at Weeki Wachee Springs which, of course, are state employees. It’s a state that employs official mermaids and truly, that’s all you need to know about it.
Her coworkers in the Atlanta office can eat a dick. Bill especially. It was his turn when this case came down the pipeline but oh no, he couldn’t possibly go to Florida for three months, he has a baby at home. As if the baby wouldn’t still be a baby when he got back. He probably isn’t even helping with the baby. No, he probably planned this baby so he could get out of going to Florida. That would be a dick thing to do. Right in Bill’s wheelhouse.
Eve passes another dead armadillo on the side of the highway. She’s yet to see an actual living one, but she’s seen at least 15 dead ones on this remote two-lane stretch alone. Not to mention an unsettling number of turkey vultures circling overhead. They’re practically following her, like they know something she doesn’t.
Don’t her coworkers know what this humidity does to thick, curly hair? Eve feels like she’s wearing some kind of woolly animal on her head, like a sheep. She’s never seriously considered shaving her head before now but she’s starting to see the appeal. She’s also going to burn her own personal hole in the ozone layer trying to run the rental car’s A/C high enough to stop her from sweating through her shirt. Her pit stains must be truly glorious at this point.
Oh look, another prison, she thinks absently to herself as she hurtles past another barbed-wire clad complex going well above the posted 70 mph speed limit. Florida may be known for its theme parks but its abundance of prisons is truly something to behold. For the last four hours all she’s seen is mile after mile of pine-logging forests with thousands of trees planted into unsettlingly perfect rows, broken up only by a new prison campus - complete with posted signs warning her not to pick up hitchhikers in the area, or warning her not to stop her car at all.
Not a problem, Eve thinks as she swerves around a gaggle of vultures picking at yet another smashed armadillo. They don’t even scatter at the sight of her car, just let Eve pass so close she can look at their shriveled heads, at their dead little eyes. Their heads turn and follow her. They regard each other through the driver’s side window. Some kind of understanding passes between them.
Eve almost doesn’t see the huge mass in the middle of the road until it’s too late, doesn’t even have time to fully comprehend what it is, just slams the brakes out of pure instinct. The tires scream as they try and find purchase, find some kind of friction against the smooth asphalt. There are a million lights on the dashboard flashing as the car’s backup systems wrestle control away from her, deem her unworthy of piloting and take over. What have you done?
The car comes to an ungraceful stop, jolting Eve against the strap of seatbelt now cutting angrily into her shoulder. She opens her eyes - apparently she’d shut them at some point while skidding on the highway so that wasn’t great - to find her nose pressed against the steering wheel, her palms flat against the soft leather. Her gaze trains slowly upward, over the dashboard and steaming hood of the car to find …
A fucking pig?
Boar would actually be more accurate - Eve doesn’t remember the cuddly pink pigs at petting zoos having giant fucking tusks . The swine, bristly and brindled, considers her and Eve’s rented Hyundai Elantra suddenly feels tiny and fragile, like being encased in a Faberge egg. If it so desired, it could probably climb right up onto the hood, charge her through the windshield. Eve swears the vultures have moved closer.
She is going to kill Bill.
“Get out of here!” Eve shouts from the driver’s seat, gesturing with her hands, the universal sign for ‘fuck off.’ The boar doesn’t understand, didn’t learn this crucial piece of communicating with humans or, far more likely, it doesn’t care. Its ears prick toward the sound of her voice but the boar doesn’t budge.
Eve’s fingers are undoing her seatbelt, flying to the door handle faster than her brain can have a second thought about confronting this beast that easily outweighs her by a good 300 lbs and wouldn’t be out of place stuffed and mounted in some hunting lodge somewhere, a world-class trophy. The pavement is hot, the exterior of the car is hot as she slams the door behind her, everything is hot because she’s in fucking Florida staring down a wild fucking pig. All she needs is an alligator to come up and bite her in the ass and she’ll have achieved some holy fucking trio. The real Florida, just like the brochures said.
“Listen to me you swine,” Eve snarls, advancing on the pig one step at a time, pointing her finger at it, accusing. Her best approximation of menacing. She has a passing thought that this is fucking stupid but she’s ready to go out in a blaze of glory truly worthy of Florida Man. Or woman, in this case. “I have driven six and a half hours to get here, leaving Atlanta, leaving civilization behind to travel back in time into the Stone Age. I stupidly got off I-75 because I was worried about traffic and now I’m in the middle of asshole nowhere with no cell service. I had to get gas at a station with no credit card machine and they had to take my number down by hand and my bank has already called to check if I really bought a 64 oz soda at the Busy Bee. I did and guess what? I have to pee. But there’s nowhere to stop because there’s nothing here! N-o-t-h-i-n-g.” She’s close enough to the pig now she could probably touch it, could probably tame it and ride it into the wilderness, give up on her job, her mind numbingly boring life and become the wild woman of Osceola National Forest.
“But no,” she continues. “I still have to drive another hour so I can sit in some dingy basement in a prison and waste the next three months of my life on a serial killer on death row who, by the way, is also carrying 15 consecutive life sentences, not to mention a few hundred years on lesser charges! All consecutive! That’s like, a thousand years in prison!”
Eve’s panting now in the viscid heat but the anger, the bubbling, boiling frustration has taken control now, is steering this ship and she is really leaning into it, letting it course through her. It’s the most alive she’s felt in months. Years, even. And she’s going to ride it, just like this boar.
“And I’m supposed to help her. Help her how, you ask? Fucked if I know!” She throws her hands up. The boar flinches. “So you, Mr. Pig, can either kill me or get out of the way. But we,” she gestures between the two of them. “Are not having a staring contest. What’s it gonna be?”
Sensing that it’s come to some sort of juncture, the boar begins to back away slowly, one deceptively delicate looking hoof at a time, having decided that Eve was too unhinged for a meal. The vultures, having watched the exchange with interest, turn back to squabbling over the armadillo corpse. Eve feels time start to flow again, a great rushing river carrying her forward, to Union Correctional Institution. To death row.
She climbs back into the driver’s seat and sits for a moment, closing her eyes. She can feel the sun beating against her forehead, the windshield acting like a magnifying glass, the beam burning a specific, concentrated hole into her cranium. At this rate she’ll have skin cancer at the end of her three month tour.
She fucking hates Florida.
***
The basement is sickeningly cold, yet still somehow so moist. Eve feels the unnatural temperature change as she descends the creaking stairs with the warden. It feels, she thinks, like a tuberculosis outbreak waiting to happen.
The warden is every bit the Southern stereotype, exactly who she would expect to see guarding inmates in some old prison movie, dragging his billy club along the bars, whistling some backwoods tune. He’s a stern country boy, his accent thick but genteel when he’s speaking to a lady. Tucked into a holster on his right hip is a shining steel revolver, a six-shooter. Eve guesses it was probably his daddy’s.
“Are you sure you don’t want a guard in the room with you?” he drawls as Eve rolls her eyes. They’ve been over this six times already. Yes, she wants to speak face-to-face with the inmate. No, she doesn’t want bulletproof glass between them. Yes, she’s aware said inmate has killed at least 16 people, several in close quarters, in her cell. No, she doesn’t want a guard in the room.
“I’m sure,” she answers, again. “These interviews require that both myself and the subject, the inmate, are able to speak freely. I can’t guarantee that with someone else in the room, listening.”
“You realize she’s a psychopath.”
“Actually,” Eve interjects, stopping suddenly to face the warden. She’s had enough. “The term ‘psychopath’ is considered horribly outdated in my line of work. Hardly anyone uses it and if they do, it’s because they’re trying to make someone out to be a villain, using pseudoscience and scare tactics to create a boogeyman so we don’t have to look too closely at our own shortcomings as a society in treating people with complex mental illnesses. The criteria to be considered a ‘psychopath’ are so broad and so subjective they could be twisted to include just about anyone, including you and me.” She takes a breath. “What’s more likely is this inmate is suffering from a cluster of personality disorders, coupled with childhood trauma and a system that let her slip through the cracks. She only gets labelled a ‘psychopath’ because it conveniently lets us shrug off the responsibility, the part we all played, in creating her.”
The warden looks at her like he has some comeback about 'snowflakes' ready, but Eve is already pushing past him and into the sparsely furnished space that will serve as their interview room. She can just catch him mumbling about how political correctness has gone too far, how if you can’t call a psychopath a psychopath than the terrorists have won. She manages to bite down a smug grin, but only barely.
Eve stands rooted in the center of the room as the warden paces the perimeter, insisting on giving her a tour, as if she doesn’t have eyes and can’t see everything. Table, check. Chairs, check. Door, check. Creepy flickering overhead light, check.
Having apparently gotten the hint, the warden doesn’t ask a seventh time if she’s sure she doesn’t want a guard. Or Eve has managed to piss him off enough that he’ll willingly offer her up to a convicted multiple murderer on a platter. Even better, she thinks.
Either way, Eve can handle herself.
“Are you ready?” he asks, clearly wanting to get this all over with, get this pencil-pushing brain out of his prison. Eve nods. He unclips the bulky radio at his hip.
“Bring her down.”