Someone had planted something inside his portable toilet.
Then his breath caught. Had he interrupted a customer? A hiker maybe? Someone frightened by the required beep-beep-beep of the truck as it backed up?
He could just imagine some scrawny hiker in his Birkenstocks, huddled inside, waiting for civilization to go away.
“Hey!” he said. “C’mon out. It’s okay.”
He almost banged on the reinforced plastic wall, then thought the better of it. That would probably scare Mr. Birkenstock even more.
So he went around front and stopped as he peered at the door. It wasn’t latched from the inside. The little red sign that changed as the handle latched read VACANT.
He felt a little relief at that. Never once, in all his years as a POTS customer service representative had he ever tried to clean a toilet with someone in it.
Although that didn’t explain the weight shift. He might have to amend his record to never cleaning a toilet with someone obviously in it. There was no way to tell this thing was occupied. The parking lot was empty, there was no backpack or camping gear outside (not that there was a place to camp anywhere near Lonely Rocks, although there was a great hiking trail — if you didn’t mind that it could crumble out beneath you at any minute), and the door wasn’t latched.
He couldn’t be blamed for making this kind of mistake.
“Hey!” he said again. “My name’s Rollston. I service these toilets. No need to be scared of me. Are you okay?”
No one answered. And he had the odd feeling that no one would.
Then he frowned. Kids. Kids were the only downside of this job. Not little kids, who actually loved outdoor toilets, seeing them as an exotic novelty. Not even the local high school crowd, which mostly found the toilets gross, if they thought of them at all.
No, the kids that bothered him were the college kids. Old enough to come to the coast unsupervised for the weekend, but young enough to forget that the word “responsibility” applied even here.
Those kids would get drunk, build fires on the beaches, and toddle up to the nearest portable toilet to get rid of the excess beer. Then they’d get the bright idea in their head that they needed to mess with the toilet somehow. Sometimes that messing was just a team sticker. But most often, it manifested in the urge to turn the toilet turtle.
Oscar never understood why. Did the kids think there was a hole underneath it? The toilet just had a receptacle under the seat, a receptacle filled with chemicals to dissolve the waste and get rid of the smell. The things were designed so that they could be turned on their side and not spill (too much) unless they were overfull — and he never let his get overfull. So the irritation was just that he had to right the toilet before he could clean it.
An extra five minutes, which bothered him in the summer and usually didn’t disturb him at all in the winter.
But sometimes the kids were creative. Sometimes they stashed things inside the toilet. The worst was the bearhide wrapped around a wooden frame. The hide still had a head, and damn if that thing didn’t look real when he opened the door the first time, and damn if he didn’t let out a little scream as he slammed the door shut — not something he’d want his old football buddies to know. But not many of his old football buddies would’ve opened the door again either.
He had, and he’d been fine. (He’d half expected that bear to lunge out at him, but it hadn’t. It hadn’t moved at all, which was the thing that tipped him off to its fakeness.)
He expected something like that here. Some kind of prank — a log, maybe, or a mannequin. He’d come across things like that before, things people had intentionally or otherwise left inside the portable toilets, and while they’d given him a start, they’d never scared him.
Not like that fake bear.
He knocked one final time, hoping that someone would open the door. When no one did, he squared his shoulders, put his fingers in the little half-moon handle, and pulled.
The door came open easily enough. That surprised him, and looking back on it, he wasn’t sure why. Later, he realized that everything about the toilet had surprised him, and yet the parts registered separately, not as a cohesive whole.
First the door, then the flies — an entire swarm of them, buzzing around him as if it were summer. He tried to wipe them away from his face with his free arm.
Then the darkness. He thought the entire place was in shadow, even though he knew it wasn’t: There had been sunlight on the door, after all. But the interior looked dark, and these places only looked dark when they were in shadow.
Only he tried not to leave them in shadow, so no one would be tempted to pull a prank or get hurt using the facilities.
What he saw as darkness was actually blood, great gobs of it, dried black against the molded plastic walls.
And finally, he saw the body, wedged — which was the wrong word because obviously, he’d heard the body flopping around — between the tiny sink and the side wall. The body belonged to a man, a Birkenstock wearer just like Oscar had initially suspected, only this guy had a knife stuck up to the hilt in the left side of his flannel shirt. He had a pair of glasses hanging from one ear, and his face looked naked. It also looked weird, with the blood spatter on one side, but not on the other. It took Oscar a while to figure out that the glasses had been in place when the guy died.
Oscar had probably dislodged the glasses. He’d probably moved the entire body when he shoved the portable toilet.
That made his stomach heave. He backed out of the toilet and ran toward the guardrail, planning to let go of his breakfast over the edge.
He didn’t quite make it. He lost a great meal on the side of the asphalt, crouching so that he barely missed his shoes.
He stayed that way for a minute, afraid he’d lose more. He couldn’t very well leave the guy here, but he couldn’t take him either. That would be tampering with a crime scene, right? Oscar watched a lot of the detective programs on television — from CSI to all its spin-offs, and its nonfiction inspiration shows on Discovery and PBS — and he knew that touching stuff was the worst thing he could do.
So was panicking.
He swallowed against the bile still rising in his throat and made himself concentrate. No car, no other people, nothing obvious. He wasn’t in any danger, even though his heart was pounding.
He had time to consider his next move.
He stood slowly. His stomach was settling down. He headed to his truck. He had a cell phone in there, mounted on the sunflap. If he called for help, all he had to do was wait for it, here, with his portable toilets, and the poor soul who had died in one.
Obviously not in the act of using it either. The guy had died there, but he hadn’t locked the door when he had gone inside. You’d think if some guy was being attacked by a maniac with a knife, he’d go into the nearest building — even if it was made of plastic and had thin walls — and lock the door.
Maybe the guy didn’t have time. Maybe he had run inside, the killer had grabbed the door and stabbed him, and then left while the poor victim flailed about inside, trying to pull the knife free and failing.
Although, shouldn’t a knife hold the blood in? Hadn’t Oscar read somewhere that a stabbing victim should never remove a knife, that the knife would keep him from bleeding to death?
Oscar was breathing hard. He flipped open his cell and stared at the reception bar.
Nothing. He should’ve remembered that. One reason he loved this route was that his boss couldn’t call him and make him veer off it, not without exquisite timing and a lot of luck.
“Damn,” Oscar whispered. But he slipped the phone onto his belt clip and walked back to the scene.
He was already thinking of it as a crime scene. How TV of him. He wasn’t any kind of detective, and he couldn’t figure things out. He had just stumbled on something awful, and now, it seemed, his brain wasn’t working quite right.