Mantinas-I've been watching Hannibal too much. I may not write the police parts right, it's a weakness of mine for some reason.

Disclaimer-I don't own anything.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove down the road. He turned the radio on and looked through his rearview mirror, letting a smile slip when it came up empty; what one would expect from a stretch of road that does not receive much traffic during the day, let alone at night, but you never know.

An old Gwen Stefani song played. He listened with just a hint of regret as she sang about escaping into a perfect world.

"Oh Marie," he sighed, running a hand over his beanie clad head, steeling himself for what he was about to do.

Marie was his high school sweet heart. They met during some bon fire. To cast off the oppression of childhood and to grapple with the freedoms of being a teenager he mused. So he drank a little with friends and when one offered a blunt, they sat in a circle. Marie sat next to him.

Such a shame. He thought as he turned onto a dirt road. She was supposed to be different. He stopped, got out of his car, and walked towards the trunk for a shovel; ignoring the sound Marie made through her cloth gag. Once he found it he slammed the trunk lid once more.

The details of that night, and the years after, cascaded down his mind into an abyss. The happy memories, their wedding night, all up until he got a call from some hotshot for his wife were torn down from the mental structure that was his memory palace. No, she was nothing special. Though she was meant to be. She was meant to be someone he did not kill.

His mind jumped back to earlier this evening. Tony Barr, the man his wife was sleeping with, called and he was home to answer. He pretended to be Marie's cousin since the idiot already gave away his intentions with a greeting adorned with a ridiculous pet name. He invited him over and then proceeded to impale his hands and shins to his living room wall before dissecting him like a frog. The screams did little to make him feel better.

Marie came home right when he finally gave his last breath. He made her touch him with his gloved hands over her wrists. Like a marionette, he made her touch him, but in a way that spoke of love. A love that could only truly appear in the presence of a fresh corpse. She was crying, cursing him and belittling him in ways that would upset a Neanderthal with a rage problem, but not him. He was better than that. He was an old pro.

He finished digging. He tossed the shovel out first and then lifted himself up. Not wasting time, he went back to the trunk and opened it again, this time taking Marie's struggling, bound form in his arms.

She saw the hole and wiggled harder in his grasp. With a sigh he set her down by it and untied the gag. He stood tall, arms crossed as he eyed her.

"You sick fuck." Marie spat.

"Funny coming from you." He said, sounding calm and collected. "And do keep it down. I know there's no one for miles, but you know how I feel about yelling."

Marie yelled. He scowled and back handed her. She was silent for a moment and Edd reigned in his emotions. He never hit her before. Not once, though there were times when she would get in his face during a shouting match where he'd envision hitting her or grabbing her by the back of her head and slamming her face into the wall, but he kept those impulses down. She was special and he loved her. Still loves her, but the feeling isn't mutual and to top it off, she's a witness.

Marie let out a shrill bout of laughter. "Please, you couldn't actually kill me, Edd!"

"Oh really?" Edd said as he lifted up his right foot to push her into the hole. She let out a loud scream before letting out a pained sound as the wind got knocked out of her sails. "I've been doing things like this since I was in middle school." He sighed, running a hand over his beanie. "Animals when I was even younger. I just didn't want you to see this side of me, dearest. You were supposed to be special." He started to shovel dirt on top of her when she screams something about late nights. He stops shoveling. "I do work late, Marie." He said solemnly "But sometimes my added tardiness comes from something like this."

He continues to rain dirt upon her, only to stop once more when only her horrified face was showing. "I have forgiven you, Marie. I only hope that you can forgive me."

She pleaded and begged until she was covered in three feet of dirt and he could not hear her anymore. He pat the dirt flat when he was done, a content smirk on his face. He had loved her. She was his everything. But that means very little to someone like him going through something like this. He packed up his shovel and got back into his car.

He headed home. There was still Tony to deal with. His home was in the outskirts of Peach Creak, residing within the woods to provide enough privacy and a feeling of oneness with nature that Edd thoroughly enjoyed when he first saw it, the nearest neighbor a good five miles away.

Once he got home he stripped off his clothes. Normally he would have worn something over them, but with the situation as it was, he feared Tony might get suspicious of a man wearing a sealed raincoat when it wasn't raining. He placed his clothes in a bag to take to the cleaners tomorrow, got dressed in another suit, tossed the bag of bloodied clothes in the trunk, and got out his cell phone and dialed the police. As it rang he ran through his lines one last time.

"911, what's your emergency?" Came the dry voice on the other end.

"Yes, someone's been murdered in my house!" Edd said, sounding frantic.

After they hung up Edd made one more phone call.

The police arrived thirty minutes later due to the distance his house was from town. The police wasted their time looking on both stories of the house, dusting everything and taking pictures and samples from the corpse before loading it up and hauling it out. Apparently Tony Barr was a rich owner of the Peach Creek Jawbreaker factory as well as a husband to a beautiful wife and father to a boy four years younger than Edd.

It peeked his interest a little, but he mostly played the grieving husband who told the police 'no, I don't know this man. I just got home from Paddy's with Ed' and 'Oh god…She was doing what?' and 'No, I haven't seen her. She has family in the trailer park, sisters, but I doubt she'd go there'. And when asked why he thought that he responded with: 'Because they haven't spoken in months, a falling out of some sort'.

The police had left a little after that and Edd sat down in the hotel room's chair, a cup of hot tea in his hand. He had to relocate for the time being considering his house was a crime scene. A pain really, since they would never find Marie. Yes, Marie had run off, perhaps to Mexico to hop on a boat to some tropical island she always wanted to go to where she would drink out of a coconut on the beach just watching the tide come in and soak up the rays.

He smiled at that mental image and then his thoughts replayed the song from the car. She had escaped and she was still his favorite girl. He sighed. If only he could go with her.

Mantinas—If you're not sure, the song was "Sweet Escape". It doesn't make much sense in this right now, but the original story it kind of did more…I mostly kept it in so that when my friend reads this, she'll know this is more of the couple paragraphs that I tried texting her many months back when I went on vacation.