She Told a Lie

by P. D. Workman

  He couldn’t worry about Noah or Rhys or Madison. He would be no help to them if he didn’t ditch the traffickers. So he shut it all out, focusing just on losing any tails. When he thought he had managed to lose anyone who was following him, he pulled over to the side under an overpass, getting out of the roadway. He took his foot off of the pedals and turned off the ignition. He sat there in the sudden quiet, heart pounding, watching every vehicle that went by. He watched for any of them to slow down, looking for him or for anyone taking notice of the car pulled over under the bridge. He watched any nondescript vans or SUVs. He looked for any windows that were open or broken. They sat there for what seemed like a long time, Madison still crying and Rhys moaning something under his breath.

  As he watched, Zachary deliberated about what to do next. If he showed up at the emergency room with Noah, they were going to have a lot of questions. The police would get involved and word would get back to Burkholdt, the policeman who had stopped them at Madison’s apartment building. He had written all of their information down. He would be watching for any reports that included their names.

  Zachary turned around and craned his head around his seat to look at Noah. The boy was still unresponsive, even though Madison had been shaking him and trying to rouse him. It was too dark for Zachary to be able to see any details other than that his face was streaked with blood tracks.

  Noah needed medical attention. And Zachary needed to make sure that everyone else was okay. Just because they didn’t look like they’d been hit, that didn’t mean that they hadn’t been. Sometimes people didn’t even know that they had been injured until the adrenaline burned off and they were out of danger.

  Thinking about that, Zachary did a quick self-assessment, checking his hands, arms, and chest for any injuries. He quickly felt his head and his shoulders and back, as far as he could reach. He seemed to be uninjured by any of the flying glass or bullets. That was lucky.

  “Rhys, are you okay?”

  Rhys was murmuring something under his breath. Zachary had never heard him say more than a word or two at a time, and strained to make out what he was saying.

  “Just stop it. Just stop it.” Rhys kept repeating the words over and over again.

  Zachary’s heart gave a painful squeeze. He remembered Vera telling him about Rhys’s traumatic reaction to his grandfather’s murder. He had been in the house and had witnessed what had happened.

  “Just stop it,” Vera had said. “That’s all Rhys would say for days after it happened. Just stop it. Just stop it. Any time anyone tried to ask him about it, that was all he would say.”

  “But eventually, he stopped saying that too,” Gloria, Rhys’s mother, added. After that, he had suffered a breakdown that had left him institutionalized for some time, and he had never regained the ability to speak or communicate in the usual way.

  The gunshots had clearly thrown Rhys into a flashback of his grandfather’s murder.

  “Rhys. It’s okay. You’re safe. The shooting has stopped, and you’re okay. Can you tell me what you can see and hear? What can you hear right now? The traffic driving by the car. The wind. Madison. Do you hear that? You’re here, Rhys. In the car with Zachary. You’re not back there.”

  He could see Rhys nod, his head bobbing up and down in the shadows. He reached toward Rhys.

  “I’m going to touch you, okay? It’s just me. You’re safe.”

  He rested his hand gently on Rhys’s shoulder. “It’s okay now. Can you look around? Tell me what you see?”

  At first, Rhys didn’t uncover his face. He just hunched there, curled up into himself, like the little boy he had been when his grandfather had died.

  “Look around, Rhys. I’m going to pull out soon, but I want you to see that you’re safe. They’re gone. Whoever was shooting at us, they’re gone now. Look around.”

  Rhys slowly pulled his hands away from his face and raised his head slightly. He looked ahead of the car, then out Zachary’s window, and his head swiveled to look out his own. He grasped at Zachary’s fingers, still resting on his shoulder, squeezing them, holding himself anchored. He swallowed and nodded.

  Then he turned his head and saw Noah in the back seat, and that was a mistake. Zachary should have anticipated it. Zachary’s grandfather had been shot in the face, and Noah slumped in the back seat, face covered with blood. Rhys went rigid, letting go of Zachary’s hand. He gave a squeal like a hurt animal and again buried his face, sobbing.

  “Oh, Rhys…” Zachary squeezed Rhys’s shoulder. But he couldn’t delay any longer, hoping to be able to get Rhys into a better mental space. Noah’s injuries might be critical. Zachary couldn’t delay seeking treatment. He restarted the engine. “Okay. We’re going to pull out now. Everybody be calm. We don’t want to attract the attention of other drivers. Try to look natural.”

  Hopefully, no one would look into the car, because there was no way that any one of the three teens was going to act naturally. All he could do was to hope that no one would notice the broken window and the boy slumped over with blood running down his face.

  “We’re on the move now. Hang in there.”

  Rhys continued to sob, as did Madison. Zachary could feel everything spinning out of control. He tried to hang on and act like an adult who knew what he was doing. He pulled out from under the bridge, merging into the traffic, and tried to match the speed of the traffic around him. Nothing that would attract attention. There was nothing about his car that would attract attention, other than the broken window. Nothing that the bad guys would be able to see from far away. Hopefully, no police who had been called about the gunfire would notice it. It was just a detail on an otherwise nondescript car.

  Picking up his phone, he held down the home button and told it to call Kenzie. Shutting off the engine seemed to have rebooted the Bluetooth, and he heard it ring over the car speakers.

  “Zachary,” Kenzie picked up after half a ring. “How did it go?”

  He remembered he was supposed to have called her back after speaking with Jocelyn. But events had overtaken that resolution.

  “Uh… things are getting complicated. Where are you?”

  “I’m at your apartment.”

  “Can you go home?”

  “You’re not going to be back tonight?”

  “I’ll come to your house. Can you open the garage for me so I can drive in?”

  “And where am I supposed to park my baby?”

  “On the street. Just for a few minutes. I can’t make it up to my apartment.”

  Even taking Noah into Kenzie’s house was going to be complicated. Usually, he parked on the street and walked across the lot to get to the door.

  “Are you okay, Zachary? What do you mean, you can’t make it up to your apartment?”

  “I’m okay. But… we have a casualty.”

  “A casualty? How bad? Go to the hospital.”

  “Too dangerous. They’re going to be watching the emergency room. And the police will get called.”

  “And you think you’ve got a dirty cop.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is not a good idea, Zachary! I’m not qualified to be treating serious injuries. And if it’s… something that has to be reported to the police, then I’m required to report it too.”

  “Can we just meet at your house? We can discuss it there.”

  “How bad is it? Are you putting lives in danger?”

  Zachary looked in his rear-view mirror at the slumped, unmoving body. “No.”

  Kenzie let out a long breath, then grudgingly agreed. “Okay, I’ll meet you at the house. But you’d better not be lying to me.”

  Zachary grimaced. She wasn’t going to be happy when she saw Noah. But he had to do everything he could to protect the teenagers, and he didn’t think he could do that by taking them to the emergency room. He needed to split them up. Kept in a group, he would just put all of them in danger.

  “I’ll see you there.”

  43

  Neither Rh
ys nor Madison said anything to Zachary about lying to Kenzie on the phone. Neither seemed to be in any shape to talk.

  He kept a close eye on the mirrors for any more gangsters or the police. A couple of other drivers gave him odd looks, but no one seemed to be paying too much attention to the little car with the broken window. Luckily, with the way that Madison had pulled Noah’s face toward her, he was facing away from the broken window, hidden by shadows.

  It seemed like it took much longer than it should have to get to Kenzie’s house, like the timeline was stretching out, getting tight and thin as a rubber band. As promised, Kenzie had left her red convertible parked at the curb and the garage door open for Zachary. The interior lights were on. Zachary drove straight in and slammed the gearshift into park.

  He jumped out of the car, ignoring the weakness in his knees, and walked past Noah’s door in order to open it. Kenzie opened the door that connected to the house.

  “Zachary?”

  “Close the garage door.”

  “You said that you’d park by the curb.”

  “And I will. But for now, you need to close the door.”

  She looked like she would argue with him, but instead, she reached over and clicked a button beside the door. The motor ground and the chain clanked and the big door started to lower into position.

  Zachary unbuckled Noah’s seatbelt and retracted it, looking for any sign of a bullet hole or bleeding on Noah’s torso. He turned Noah’s head toward him and quickly evaluated his facial injuries in the light. It seemed to mostly be superficial cuts from the glass, but there was a long, straight, blackened line from his chin to his ear that Zachary thought was a bullet track. He gave the headrest a quick once-over for a bullet hole, but didn’t see one.

  “Times like this, I wish I’d done weight training,” Zachary muttered. He tried to pull Noah out of the car and pick him up, like he’d seen done on hundreds of action movies on TV but, despite the teen’s slight frame, he was a dead weight and Zachary couldn’t get good leverage to lift him. “Rhys, can you come around here and help me?”

  Rhys pulled his hands away from his face, but his expression was such a mask of grief and pain that Zachary knew he couldn’t expect any help from him.

  “Madison, can you shift him from your side? If you can push him up toward me, and I can get my arm underneath him…”

  As he wrestled to get a proper purchase on Noah, he was aware of Kenzie coming around the car for a look, and braced himself for her objections and criticism.

  “Oh, boy,” Kenzie said from behind his shoulder. “Hold on a minute, just hold him there.”

  Zachary couldn’t see what she was doing but, in a moment, heard something rolling across the concrete floor. She came around the car with a dolly; the kind that could be used as a vertical hand truck for a stack of three or four boxes and had a hinged section that could be pulled down to the horizontal to move several stacks of boxes at the same time. Kenzie wheeled it over to a wall of plastic storage boxes arranged in a grid and laid four boxes across the support rods of the horizontal section. Then she pushed it over to the car door.

  “Okay, move out of the way.”

  Zachary frowned, confused. How exactly did she think Noah was going to get from the seat to the dolly unless Zachary pulled him out? Noah wasn’t conscious; he wasn’t going to crawl over there himself.

  “Just do it,” Kenzie insisted.

  Zachary hesitated for a moment, then moved slowly back, keeping one hand on Noah to keep him from falling out. Kenzie moved into position beside him. She moved too quickly for him to anticipate what she was going to do. In a few seconds, she had rearranged Noah and somehow managed to pull him out of the car and lay him down on the layer of boxes.

  She smiled at Zachary’s stunned expression. “I help move bodies around all the time,” she pointed out. “I know a thing or two about how to handle them.”

  Zachary shook his head and couldn’t think of a clever comeback. He’d think of one in a day or two. In the meantime, he was just stunned at how effortless she had made it look.

  Kenzie pushed the dolly over to the door, which luckily was level with the floor of the garage and not up several steps. She opened the door and pushed the dolly through it into the house. Zachary scrambled after her. Madison climbed out of her side of the car, wiping her eyes, and followed her boyfriend through the door.

  Zachary stopped and opened Rhys’s door. “Come on, bud. Come inside and we’ll get this all sorted out. It will be okay.”

  With some encouragement, Rhys got out of the car. Zachary guided him into the house.

  Despite all of his reassurances to the others, Zachary entered the house and followed Kenzie with a lead ball in his stomach. He was waiting for the recriminations from Kenzie. He had lied to her and he knew he should have taken Noah directly to the hospital. But he was too concerned about the safety of the other teens. They needed to be protected too.

  Kenzie was in the kitchen bent over Noah, examining his face and torso, and then turning him on his side to look at his back. The boxes on the dolly were too low for her to work comfortably like she could over a gurney, but she made no complaint about the circumstances.

  “How does he look?” Zachary asked anxiously.

  “It all looks superficial. Lots of blood, but it always looks like more than it is, and facial wounds bleed like the dickens. He hasn’t lost a significant amount, and I don’t see any other injuries. Were you shot at?”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. I think that one along his jaw is a bullet track.”

  “Looks like it. But it just skimmed the surface. Lucky for him.” She continued to examine Noah. “There are cloths and towels in the linen closet at the end of the hallway. Bring me stacks of both, and fill a couple of bowls with warm water.”

  Zachary obeyed without asking more questions. He fetched the towels first, and then looked through the kitchen cupboards for large bowls.

  “The most concerning thing is his loss of consciousness. A bullet certainly has enough force to knock a person out if it hits the right place. I don’t see any entry point, so I don’t think we have any internal trauma, but if the blow causes swelling to the brain, that is a dangerous situation.”

  Zachary nodded. Kenzie took a bowl of water from him and started to wipe blood from Noah’s face. She worked in silence for a few minutes. She looked over at Madison and Rhys, huddled close by watching, both faces streaked with tears.

  “Why don’t you guys go wait in the living room. Zachary will make you some coffee.”

  Neither moved at first. Then Madison touched Rhys’s arm and encouraged him to move out of the kitchen into the living room.

  “Hot and sweet,” Kenzie told Zachary. “Good for shock. Make enough for all of us. I don’t think we need to worry about falling asleep tonight.”

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. Sure.”

  He worked with the single-cup coffee machine on Kenzie’s counter to produce one cup of coffee at a time and stirred copious amounts of sugar into them.

  “He’s so young,” Kenzie murmured as she cleaned the blood off of Noah’s face, revealing his smooth skin and rounded jaw.

  “I know,” Zachary agreed. “He says he’s been doing this since he was twelve or thirteen. I don’t know if it’s true,” he added quickly, anticipating her answer, “but I’d say he’s been in the business for quite a while. He’s pretty… skilled at what he does.” Zachary’s face heated as he realized how she might interpret that. “Managing Madison, I mean,” he explained. “I don’t have any experience with his other skills.”

  Kenzie looked up at Zachary briefly, laughing. “Oh, man, Zachary. I wasn’t even thinking that!”

  “Good.”

  Kenzie patted Noah’s face with the towel, leaning close to see if the lacerations were continuing to bleed.

  “So… he’s okay?” Zachary asked. “I mean, as far as you can tell? Other than not knowing if he’ll have a concussion?”

  “I thin
k you can count on him having a concussion. But his vital signs are all strong.”

  Zachary breathed a sigh of relief. He carried two cups of coffee into the living room and gave them to Rhys and Madison, then returned to the kitchen.

  “Now,” Kenzie said, “we need to figure out what to do next. What did Jocelyn say?”

  44

  At Kenzie’s suggestion, Zachary hired an Uber driver to take him and Rhys to the Salters’ house. Then his car could stay out of sight in the garage, and Rhys didn’t have to be subjected to the sight of the bullet-damaged car again.

  “Make sure Vera knows enough to understand that he’s been through a trauma. That he’s having flashbacks. She’ll want to get him in to see a therapist right away. Probably keep him company tonight, rather than letting him go to bed by himself.”

  Zachary nodded.

  “It’s probably best if she doesn’t know all of what happened,” Kenzie said, looking toward Noah, “I don’t want her worrying about these guys coming after them, but…”

  Zachary sighed. “If everything works out, then we won’t need to worry her about that, but…”

  “Just get him home,” Kenzie said, seeing the Uber car arrive in front of the house. “We’ll worry about the rest later…”

  Vera was waiting at the door when Zachary and Rhys arrived. Her face was drawn and tired. She looked Rhys over worriedly, reaching out to give him a hug to reassure herself that he was okay.

  “What’s wrong, Zachary? What happened? He was supposed to be at a friend’s…”

  “He came to me,” Zachary said uncomfortably. “Let’s go inside…”

  She took Rhys into the house. Zachary stood outside for a moment, looking for anyone keeping surveillance on the house.

  He joined them inside.

  Zachary cleared his throat and tried to think of the best way to explain it all to Vera. Memories of all of the times he’d had to explain to foster parents or school officials what he’d done wrong came rushing back to him. He hated disappointing them. He hated explaining that he’d broken a rule or done something on impulse that, on reflection, he should have known was a bad idea. He waited while Vera and Rhys sat on the couch, then sat in the easy chair across from them.