When a strange man contacts you online, it pays to be cautious. At best he wants pictures of your feet. At worst he plans to kill you.
– Ep 32: Dunky Business
To: keelywiththetette
From: Cash Khorsandi
Subject: Job opportunity (podcast producer)
Ms South,
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with my podcast, Down in the Dunks. I cover local true crime cases, specifically the many unsolved disappearances and murders that have taken place in Dunkerton.
Due to the podcast’s recent growth, I’m no longer able to do everything myself and I have been looking to hire a producer. A mutual acquaintance recommended you for the position as you have a degree in sound design and live locally.
It would be a full-time position, salary negotiable. I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
Cash Khorsandi
To: keelywiththetette
From: Cash Khorsandi
Subject: RE: Job opportunity (podcast producer)
Ms South,
I have no idea what you’re talking about when you say Dr Chen ‘warned you about me.’ I promise you, I was unaware of your friendship with the city’s forensic pathologist when I initially emailed.
However, if you take the job, obviously I would not be above exploiting your connections. It’s not every day something like that gets dropped in your lap.
Cash Khorsandi
To: keelywiththetette
From: Cash Khorsandi
Subject: RE: RE: Job opportunity (podcast producer)
Keely,
I assure you I didn’t pull the story about our mutual acquaintance out of my ‘probably sexy (but soon to fall off from all the lying) arse.’ It was Jodi Tanaka, your media professor from UDUNK. We met while I was giving a guest lecture. She said you were at the top of her class during your time there so I did some background research and decided to contact you.
Is there anything I can do to entice you to meet with me about this job? Are you still working at the murder walking tour place as listed on your profile? The job I’m offering you involves all the talking about murder with none of the exercise. Something to think about.
Cash
P.S. I am curious how you came to the conclusion that my arse was ‘probably sexy’ without having met me. Have you been doing some background research of your own?
That sweaty summer evening, I arrived ten minutes late for my Italian class. I’d just finished my shift at Dunkerton Murder Walking Tours: The cheapest tours of local slaying hotspots or we’ll refund the difference! (In gift vouchers – not able to be redeemed in conjunction with any other offer.) I was dressed in a uniform more revealing than most swimming costumes I owned, coated all over in a greasy layer of sunscreen, and not looking forward to the lesson ahead.
I didn’t hate the class or anything. Sometimes I even got kind of into it, especially learning new names for my favourite pieces of anatomy. But other times it was hot and I had my period and the shorts I was wearing would not be forgiving of a leak AT ALL and two dogs had sniffed my crotch on the way here and I was feeling a little fragile and bloated and ill and all I wanted was to lie down in bed except I didn’t have a bed, I was staying on a friend’s couch, and I’d needed a cocktail since eleven in the morning.
(Obviously a Bloody Mary. Yes, that’s a period joke. Don’t cramp my style.)
I hadn’t actually meant to end up enrolled in an Italian class. Life had conspired against me as it always did and now here I was, discovering new frontiers of the things I was horrendous at.
It all started with a dinner invitation, like many terrible decisions in my life. This one came from my mother.
Mum had recently decided to marry her boyfriend of five weeks, proving once and for all that my atrocious track record with men was a result of genetics. As much as I liked a free meal, I didn’t particularly want to hang out with Mummy’s hubby Elvis, so I told a teensy lie about needing to get to my evening class. Elvis asked what I was studying and I plucked a random subject out of the air. If you guessed that I said ‘Italian,’ you’re right.
Elvis informed me, for the first time, that he actually lived in Italy for a while and spoke fluently and would love to help me study. Then he said something in Italian I didn’t understand, seemed concerned when I didn’t get it, and gave me a twenty-minute speech on verb conjugation.
Because I didn’t want to admit that I’d lied – and I didn’t think I could handle listening to a lecture on the virtues of perseverance from a man currently on his sixth wife – I couldn’t come clean and I couldn’t pretend I’d dropped out, so enrolling in an Italian class for real seemed like the path of least resistance.
The first sentence I ever learned? Okay, it was ‘My name is Keely.’ But the first sentence I learned after I had the basics down?
‘My mother’s husband is an anus.’
(Give me a break. I’m still new to this. When I graduate to Intermediate Beginners Italian I’ll be able to craft more interesting insults for Elvis. And you never know when you’ll need to be able to say ‘anus’ in another language. What if you’re on holiday and you have a weird sexual mishap and end up in the hospital? Exactly. This saves you having to mime what happened, which is a relief for everybody. Useful life skills. Don’t be such an ano.)
(Ano means anus.)
The fan in the university classroom spun around lazily, like it couldn’t be fucked to do anything in this heat either, wafting some warm air downwards and basically doing the opposite of what it was meant to. UDUNK hadn’t updated the air conditioning since I was an actual student a decade ago, it seemed. I swung into the seat next to my friend Lisa with a sigh.
“Ciao, bella,” she said. “You look like the demons of menstruation are doing their best to slaughter you from within.”
She had a way with words. Never before had someone conjured up such a vivid image of my uterine lining.
As the demons sliced me with their pitchforks once again, I put my head on the desk in front of me and mumbled, “If I die, you’ll know who killed me.”
In hindsight, that joke was in ridiculously bad taste. But I didn’t know at the time – and wouldn’t until fifteen hours later, when I stumbled across Lisa’s dead body down by the beach.
Lisa was easily one of the coolest people I knew, which made it baffling that she’d chosen me as a friend. Though having said that, we’d only met up outside of this classroom once, and we’d spent that time working on an assignment. Maybe she considered me more of an acquaintance. I’d have to invite her for a drink at Brandy’s and see what she said to determine her feelings. This kind of stuff was so much easier when you were a kid and could ask people if they were your friends instead of having to do this weird dance and become a detective to figure out if you’d made a buddy.
Today she wore a lacy black top that was more of a bra, a long flowy mauve skirt, no shoes (yes, she went shoeless and I still liked her – a testament to her incredible personality, because I was definitely an arch support gal), and the necklace with the teeny fake cactus on it that I’d never seen her without. She had loose black curls to her waist and big brown eyes and skin a couple shades more tanned than mine because she wasn’t quite as diligent with her sunscreen application. I guess in a way we looked similar, with our freckles and wavy locks and sturdy legs, though my hair was a dark brown rather than black and my eyes were the colour of absinthe. I wondered how often guys at bars around here told her to look out because she was ‘just the Emu’s type.’
The Emu was our most prolific local serial killer. Not many towns have enough serials to bother with a ranking system, but here murder was a thriving industry – hence my tour guide job. Most of the death dealers in Dunkerton went for one-off crimes, but they still happened plenty often enough to keep my bestie Jed (the forensic pathologist) busy. Given that the Emu had been dormant for five years now, he wasn’t sending much work across Jed’s desk, so it was lucky that there were some lower tier killers pitching in.
‘You look like someone the local serial killer would want to murder’ was the pick-up line I heard the most, which told you something about the quality of single males in my area. Not that it stopped me from making bad choices with a few of them. Making bad choices was my superpower, like Lisa’s was to wear no shoes and still be likeable.
On the first night we met, Lisa told me her mother died when she was young. Her mother was Italian, so she’d taken this class to feel closer to her. Then she asked why I enrolled and I had to explain that I’d lied about having an Italian class to get out of a family dinner and then found out my mother’s new husband spoke Italian so then I had to join an Italian class for real or be forced to expose the lie. She’d laughed hysterically, which was basically evidence that she was an angel and we should be friends forever.
“Keely,” said the teacher, reading my name from her list. Lucky she had the roll as a prompt because I doubted she could even pick me out of a lineup. I was not the kind of student teachers remembered – despite what a certain lying podcaster might have tried to trick me into believing in his latest email.
The teacher followed my name with a long string of words of which I understood maybe three. Rather than try to figure it out, I took the three words I did understand and guessed she was asking if I’d done my homework.
“Si,” I replied. I know, right? Nailing it. For you, though, my darling, from now on I’ll translate using my mad italiano skills. (No, ‘italiano’ isn’t meant to have a capital letter. See? I know stuff.) “I have a job.”
“What do you do?”
“I take the tourists to the spaces where the people unfortunate find the cadavers.” I was proud of myself for adding a new word to my vocabulary. Knowing how to say ‘cadavere’ was going to come in super handy for living in Dunkerton, where corpses practically rained from the sky.
“Have you a uniform?”
“I wear a shirt white and the men watch the titties.” (That’s ‘tette’ in italiano, in case you needed to know. You definitely needed to know.)
A man at a nearby desk snorted and then coughed to cover up his laughter. He’d understood? Impressive. Clearly he’d gone straight to the rude words in the translation dictionary as well. I turned to check out this fine specimen and nearly fired my eyeballs out of my head at him with all the eye widening.
Cash Khorsandi was here in my Italian class. Laughing at my tette.
He smiled when we made eye contact and I swear the sight alleviated some period pain.
Yeah. He was that gorgeous. It defied science.
Even sitting down, I could tell he was huge. Taller than me on my tippiest toes, shoulders so broad they were probably inconvenient for such things as moving through crowds and using doorways, arms that looked like he could easily pick me up and carry me away from here and to his bed where I could rest upon expensive sheets that I wouldn’t have to wash while he fed me snacks and fawned over me…
He had wavy black hair that looked kind of messy-by-design, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it simply fell into place each morning, charmed by the way he winked at it in the mirror. I was similarly tempted to fall all over myself messily from being in his proximity. Square jaw, straight nose, scruffy stubble, mouth so distracting it had to be the result of some sort of dark magic…
Damn. That smile. All white teeth and soft, kissable lips that probably tasted like pineapple and coconut and bad decisions. My three favourite flavours. Also known as the piña colada trio.
He was wearing dark jeans, lace-up boots and a buttoned black shirt with palm leaves and big yellow flowers printed on it. My immediate thought (when I recovered from swooning at the sight of him) was that I should ask where he got it, because when I wasn’t at work I lived in Hawaiian shirts.
My second thought was uh oh, because if I was attracted to a guy he was probably going to become a local star in the near future – in the Dunkerton Daily’s This Week In Mugshots: Who’s Hot and Who’s Not? section. It was like I had a sixth sense for future criminals. Want to bang the guy? Seventy percent chance he’ll be arrested for attempting to smuggle ferrets across state lines in the car he stole from my mother within the week.
I had bad taste, to put it mildly.
This guy, though? Extra bad. I recognised him from my background research, and I knew what his game was.
He was here to offer me a job, the scoundrel.
Well, that might explain why he knew at least one of the words I’d said. He had my online username and email address, both of which contained my favourite bit of Italian vocab. What wasn’t explained at all was his presence. How was he here? Was he following me? God, of course he was. Just my luck I’d sort of flirted with yet another stalker. Even if this time it was via email.
Apparently Lisa’s taste in men was as terrible as mine, because when her eyes locked on to him they went as glazed as two doughnuts.
“Hello, handsome,” she muttered. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that her judgment sucked. Last lesson she’d told the class that she was in love with a dirty dog, which I gathered she hadn’t meant literally.
“That’s the guy who keeps emailing me about the job,” I told her, voice low.
“Take it,” she breathed. “Then take him.”
“I’m not taking the job. I’m extra not taking it now that he’s apparently stalking me.”
“Maybe he has an actual interest in learning Italian,” she said. “He laughed at your boobs joke. He must have understood.”
“He’s not here for Italian. He’s here for me.”
“There’s a storage cupboard not far down the hall.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
She smirked. “Sure you didn’t, babe. Sure you didn’t. You know orgasms are great for period pain, right?”
Truth be told, I kind of wanted to say yes to Cash.
About the job. Obviously about the job.
Why? Partly because my current employer didn’t pay well and, as the Italians would say, sono al verde. For those who don’t speak italiano like me, the supremely cultured murder tour guide with her tette hanging out, your girl’s broke. (That’s me. I am your girl. Figuratively speaking – don’t go getting any ideas.)
Plus, you know, showing people former crime scenes just wasn’t my greatest passion. Admittedly it would be somewhat tricky to be employed in the areas of my greatest passions, namely wearing Hawaiian shirts and imbibing cocktails at Brandy’s beachside bar, but a job on a true crime podcast would still be pretty cool.
And for all his faults, Cash hadn’t glanced at my tette or invited me to ‘sexually harass him any time I liked’ even once, which put him leaps and bounds ahead of my current boss.
Unfortunately, he didn’t want to employ me. He wanted to employ the girl who was friends with the local forensic pathologist and could get him insider info. And that pissed me off.
Which was why he could stick his job up his ano.
Tall Drink of Slaughter is out now! Grab your copy.
Want to keep reading? Here’s Chapter 2.