by Brent, Amy
“I’m fine,” I said, taking a step back. I tucked my hair behind my ears and looked at the ground between my feet. I could feel Mrs. Crown watching my every move so she could report it to my mother. “I’m sorry about that.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” Ryder asked with a smile that told me it wouldn’t make any difference if he was.
“No, just someone I hang out with,” I said. I glanced down at my dress and held out my arms to the side. “I was on my way to see you and he showed up.”
“You still coming over?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, stealing a quick glance at the old woman still watching us from across the street. “It would take more than a fucked-up idiot like that to keep me away from you.”
“Good,” he said. “I’ll go back inside and finish getting dressed.”
“Don’t get dressed on my account,” I said, giving him a sly glance. “Clothes just slow me down.”
For the neighbor’s sake, Ryder and I didn’t touch again as we said goodbye. He gave me a friendly nod and I gave him a friendly wave. He went back inside his house and I went back inside mine. I would wait a few minutes, long enough to give Mrs. Crown time to waddle her fat, nosey ass back inside her house, then sneak over to Ryder’s house to let the real fun begin.
Ryder
I won’t lie. I was tired as fuck on Monday morning when Quinn called to ask if I’d meet him for coffee around nine. I had spent a good part of the weekend doing wild and wondrous things with a gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl, and the rest of the time dealing with a rambunctious four-year-old boy, who Hank and Emily dropped by the house on Sunday right after church at noon. Honestly, I’m not sure which one wore me out the most.
Lolita was the most amazing girl—woman— in and out of bed. When we weren’t doing devious things to each other’s bodies we were talking and laughing and eating and drinking and bonding like old friends. It was as if we had known each other for years. To be so young, she had an old soul that seemed to connect immediately and directly with my own.
We had lots of things in common besides an insatiable appetite for sex. We both loved science fiction movies, greasy cheeseburgers and fries slathered in ketchup, Pearl Jam, long walks on the beach, hiking in the mountains, swimming in the ocean, The Black List, the Rock, Julia Roberts, and Dancing with The Stars (okay, I lied about liking that one, but we were on a roll).
Sunday afternoon I introduced Cody to his new nanny. He eyed Lolita suspiciously for a moment, then asked if she liked Legos and Barney and that was all she wrote. Within minutes they were the best of pals and Cody was dragging her all over the house by the hand showing off his room and his toys.
Lolita could not stop hugging and kissing him and telling him what a great little boy he was. Cody insisted that she stay for dinner (Domino’s Pizza because I had not had time to go to the grocery store) and demanded that she read him a story before going to bed.
As I walked her to the door around eight on Sunday night, I took her in my arms and gave her a goodnight kiss that was filled with passion and emotion. I thanked her for a wonderful weekend and told her I’d see her in my dreams.
Watching her tiptoe barefoot across the lawn to her front door, I could barely believe how happy I was that she was in my life. It took every ounce of willpower not to beg her to spend the night, but neither of us thought it was a good idea for Cody to wake up to find a strange woman sleeping in his daddy’s bed. Maybe someday, but not quite yet.
Besides, she’d be back first thing in the morning to watch Cody while I met Quinn and dealt with a few things. I fell asleep with her on my mind, and as I’d hoped, found her waiting for me in my dreams.
* * *
If you looked up the phrase pussy hound in the dictionary (if it was actually in the dictionary), my best friend Quinn Blackwell’s picture would pop up. Quinn was forty-two, 6’2, lean, muscular, with sandy brown hair and dark brown eyes that women couldn’t seem to resist.
He had never been married, never been engaged, never even been serious with a woman as far as I knew. He changed women as often as most guys changed socks.
Even in Iraq and Afghanistan, where willing, fuckable pussy was as scarce as clean water and edible food, he had bitches lined up outside the gates to fuck him.
I was always a little jealous of Quinn and his lifestyle. Good looking, rich, sexy, smart, successful. Yet, sometimes I thought he might be a little jealous of my settled home life. Married with a kid, nice little house in the ‘burbs.
He’d always been playfully flirty with Bethany, who would just roll her eyes and call him a pig, even though I could tell she thought he was a good-looking guy. He’d said more than once I should be thankful that I found Bethany before he did. And he thought my son was the greatest kid on earth. Cody loved Uncle Quinn and Uncle Quinn loved him. He made it a point to look after my son while I was away. There was no better friend in my eyes than Quinn Blackwell.
Quinn wanted to meet in a little coffee shop on the outskirts of Falls Church, in a strip mall a few miles from the enormous house in the hills he shared with two German Shepherds named Milo and Otis. His office was on the tenth floor of the Credit Suisse building in DC. It was a busy, noisy place; too chaotic to talk about the death of my wife and my future with his firm. The coffee shop would be a nice, quiet place to talk.
“So, how is Cody holding up?” Quinn asked as he watched the ass of the young waitress who had just delivered our coffee walk away. He picked up the steaming cup of black coffee and settled in with his elbows resting on the table. “Poor kid. Must be hard for him.”
I shrugged. “He’s okay. He’s too young to understand it all, thank God.”
Quinn held the cup to his lips and blew into it. Steam settled beneath his eyes. He set the cup aside to let it cool and gave me a wary look. “How are you holding up?”
I shrugged again. “You know, it is what it is. I’m sorry she’s gone, but things weren’t great between us. She told me she was divorcing me when I left for Mosul two months ago. Other than the occasional Skype chat to check on Cody, we hadn’t talked at all. Soon as Cody would lose interest in talking to me, Bethany would click off without even saying goodbye.”
“Yeah, you told me things weren’t going well,” Quinn said with a heavy sigh, as if he could feel my pain, or what little pain I was feeling. I felt guilty about not being more depressed by my wife’s death. I mean, this was a woman I once loved and would have died for. Now, it was almost like I barely knew her, like I was trying to grieve for a stranger.
“Don’t beat yourself up, man,” Quinn said, as if he had read my mind. “Marriages don’t last. People change. It wasn’t entirely your fault.”
“I know, still…” I picked up my coffee cup and took a careful sip. I set the cup on the table and tapped my fingers to the sides. “Did I tell you she was pregnant?”
Quinn had picked up his cup and was bringing it to his lips. His hands froze at the word pregnant. He slowly lowered the cup to the table. “Jesus, buddy, I’m sorry.”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t mine.”
He blinked a few times, then looked at me from beneath his perfectly manicured eyebrows. “Not yours? How the fuck do you know that?”
“I shipped out eight weeks ago for Mosul,” I said, holding up eight fingers, then folding down two. “The medical examiner said Bethany was six weeks along.”
“Son of a bitch…” Quinn shook his head and looked out the window at the gray sky. A storm was rolling in from the ocean, dark clouds on the horizon. The air was heavy with ozone and salt.
His eyes fixed on the sky, he said, “I can’t fucking believe it…”
“You can’t believe she was pregnant or that she was fucking around on me in the first place?” I asked.
He took a deep breath and thought it over. “Both, I guess.”
The waitress came back to see if we wanted to order anything. I wasn’t hungry and neither was Quinn, which was surprising because h
e could usually eat a tall stack of pancakes and a pound of bacon without blinking an eye. “Just coffee,” he said without looking at the waitress, who shrugged and walked away.
“Any idea who the guy was?” he asked.
“No, but I intend to find out,” I said.
He frowned at me. “How?”
“Bethany’s car has been released by the cops,” I said. “I’m headed to the tow yard as soon as I leave here.”
“What do you expect to find in her car?” Quinn asked. His voice had taken on an edge, as if talking about Bethany and her lover was getting under his skin more than it was getting under mine. That was Quinn for you. I was his best friend. If something was bothering me, it wouldn’t take long before it was bothering him.
“I talked to the cop in charge, a Lieutenant Mason. The lot manager has her purse. I assume her cell phone is still in the car. And I assume she had been calling or texting whomever she had been fucking. I’ll get a number and a name from her phone, and then—”
“And then what?”
“Then maybe I’ll pay the guy a little visit.”
“Why would you do that?”
I pushed up my eyebrows and frowned at him. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“You said it yourself,” Quinn said, head shaking. “Bethany’s dead. You guys were pretty much over months ago. Why does it matter who she was sleeping with?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Are you telling me you wouldn’t want to know?”
“I’m telling you that you need to move on,” he said, giving me a stern look. He picked up his cup and shook his head again. “No good can come of this, Ryder. Just let it go.”
“Again, are you telling me you would just let it go?” I cocked my head at him, already knowing the answer. “You’d track the guy down and gut him like a deer just on principle. Tell me you wouldn’t.”
“This isn’t about me,” Quinn said quietly. “It’s about you and your son. Don’t do anything stupid that’s going to jeopardize your time with Cody. It’s just not worth it.”
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” I said, draining the coffee cup and setting it aside. “But I have to know the truth, regardless of who gets hurt.”
Ryder
I arranged to have a car hauler meet me at the police department tow yard to pick up Bethany’s car. I found a scrap yard in Arlington that would haul it away for free and give me three hundred bucks for the wreck. Before the car went anywhere, however, I wanted to go through it and pull out anything personal Bethany left behind.
I went into the small office just inside the gate and handed the guy my ID. He had me sign a form, then gave me a sealed plastic bag containing Bethany’s purse, the $400 black Coach I had gotten her three Christmases ago. She was so fucking proud of the damn thing that she practically jumped my bones right there under the tree. At the time, I thought it was the best $400 I’d ever spent.
I set the purse on the counter and opened it up and rummaged my hand around inside. Her wallet was there, containing her driver’s license, credit cards, and thirty-six dollars in cash. I took out her driver’s license and stared at it for a moment. The photo was a couple of years old. In it, Bethany’s hair was longer. Her eyes were bright. She was smiling. She looked happy. I wondered if Cody would want me to keep it so he could have it someday. I stuck it back in the wallet and set it aside. There was the usual assortment of crap women keep in their purses: makeup, lip balm, hand lotion, Target receipts, tissues (new and used), but no cell phone.
“Okay, sir, just follow me,” the lot manager said as he came around the counter to lead the way. I followed him out of the office with the purse tucked under my arm, down a long row of cars, most towed in for parking violations and DUIs, he said. He chattered away as we walked, though I wasn’t paying much attention until he said, “We keep the wrecks back here. I gotta tell you, I’ve seen a lot of cars that hit trees in my time, but this one might be the worst. Almost like a freak accident, you know?”
I frowned as a feeling of dread washed over me. The realization that I was about to see the car Bethany died in hit me like a ton of bricks. I started sweating and a wave of nausea started bubbling up in my throat. I asked, “Why is it the worst you’ve ever seen?”
“See for yourself,” he said, stopping at what was left of Bethany’s charcoal gray Maxima. He spread out his hands like he was presenting me with a gift. “She must have been doing eighty or ninety when she went over the side of the road.” He demonstrated how the wreck happened with his greasy hands. “The embankment was pretty steep, so she was probably airborne for a few seconds. According to the wrecker driver who brought it in, she must’ve hit the tree twenty or thirty feet up from its trunk. And when the front end smashed into the tree, the force threw the top of the car up and forward into the tree, then it nose-dived straight down.”
I held my breath as I watched his hands go through the motions.
“When the driver got there, he said the car was on its nose, the roof leaning against the tree. See the mud and shit caking the front there. And that deep dent running all down the center of the roof?”
I nodded. I could taste vomit in the back of my throat.
“Was one hell of an impact, got it from the front and the top. Anyway, I’ll go let the car hauler in the gate and give you time to clean it out. Do you need a bag or something?”
“No, thanks, I’ll use the purse,” I said quietly, taking deep breaths, trying not to puke on my shoes. As he walked away, I mustered the courage to let my eyes go over the wreck fully for the first time. The front of the Maxima was smashed in nearly to the shattered windshield, the hood buckled, the fenders gone, the engine pushed partially back into the interior compartment. There was mud and grass and pine needles caked into every crease and dent. The roof was caved in at the center from the impact with the tree, a deep vee ran along the center from front to back. The sides were scraped and dented. The tires were all flat and hanging off the rims. There was a swipe of white on the driver’s side rear fender, probably from the car being dragged back up the embankment.
I could see the deflated airbag draped over the steering wheel. When I walked around to peer inside the broken driver’s side window, I saw that the white airbag was covered in dark brown blood. Bethany’s blood. I could actually see the imprint of her face in blood on the bag.
My stomach erupted into my throat. I had seen a lot of death and destruction in my time and none of it had ever made me the least bit nauseous. I was trained to deal with that shit. Men, women and children with arms and legs and heads blown off. Bodies riddled with bullet holes or hacked to death my machetes, crushed beneath tanks and trucks, body parts littered along the sides of the road like trash on a Texas highway.
None of it affected me, at least not after I got used to it. But this… this… I ran behind the car and clutched my knees and puked until there was nothing left to give.
* * *
The driver’s door had been pried open by the jaws-of-life. It was hanging precariously on the bent hinges. I grabbed it at the top and gave it a hard tug. I fell back as the door creaked open, metal scraping metal. I paused for a moment, unable to keep my eyes off the bloodied airbag. It was hot as fuck outside, even though the sky was rolling with rain clouds. I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand and let out a long breath.
The car hauler driver was watching me now, frowning, tapping his watch. I held up a hand, took a deep breath, and leaned inside. Like the airbag, the front seat was covered in blood. The seatbelt was still buckled, caked in blood that had died dark brown. The straps had been cut in two at the shoulder harness and lap belt by the paramedics.
“Fuck,” I sighed, trying not to picture Bethany laying there, bleeding out with her neck broken, waiting for paramedics to make it down the steep embankment to rescue her. I wondered what the last thoughts were that went through her mind. Surely, she thought of Cody. Maybe she thought of me. She must have thought about the baby dyin
g in her stomach and the man who put it there. I wondered if she even knew that she was pregnant. I wiped tears from my eyes and shook off the feeling that somehow this was all my fault.
I bent down and peered inside the car. A cloud of dusty heat rolled over my face. It reminded me of the “death clouds” that floated out of Humvees or tanks when you opened the door after it had been destroyed by a bomb. Hot, musty, stale air, wreaking of blood and shit and death. I waved it away, held my breath, and leaned inside.
There was nothing in the seat, so I leaned down and felt around the floorboard, being careful not to cut up my fingertips from the shards of broken glass. Lodged behind the gas pedal, thrown there during impact, was Bethany’s cell phone.
“Hey man, you about done?” the car hauler called as I pulled back from inside the car. “I need to get this thing out of here.”
“Yeah, one second,” I shot back. Cody’s car seat was still strapped in the back and looked none the worse for wear, but I didn’t bother pulling it out. Call me superstitious, but I didn’t want anything to do with this car or the stuff inside it. I had what I’d come for. I had everything I needed.
“All yours,” I said as I walked past the driver with the phone clutched in my hand.
“Don’t you want your check?” he asked, holding up an envelope that contained the check from the salvage yard.
I shook my head and kept going. “You keep it,” I said. “I have what I came for.”
* * *
I felt like I’d just survived a firefight with Al Qaida assholes by the time I climbed into the Range Rover and cranked up the air. I sat with the purse in my lap and my head on the rest, eyes closed, breathing deeply. My t-shirt stuck to me like a second skin. I was covered in an oily film of sweat and dust. I could feel sweat streaking down the sides of my face and neck. My heart was racing. My hands were shaking. I wrapped my fingers around the steering wheel and forced my pulse to slow down.