Airbag Scars

by Jim Heskett

  Donovan stifled a grin. Hayden certainly didn’t know what had actually happened that night a week ago. Now it was starting to seem that Micah really didn’t either. Whatever plan Donovan would come up with, knowing those two things would have to play into it. It was like a gift dropped right into his lap. Now he only had to find out which tit to squeeze to get the most milk.

  “I obviously haven’t been sober for very long,” Micah said, “but some days I feel okay, and other days, I’m just shit. It’s some goddamned twisted rollercoaster. I wake up angry at myself, and I want it to go away as quick as possible.” Micah paused, tapping the ball of his foot against the stained carpet. “But I'm supposed to keep doing the next right thing, right?”

  Donovan tried to look concerned in case Micah happened to make eye contact.

  “I don't really know where I'm going with this, so I'll shut up. Thanks for listening.”

  The group mumbled statements like “thanks, Micah,” “keep coming back,” and “one day at a time.”

  Donovan deliberated his next move. Confronting Micah head-on would be the most immediately satisfying path, no doubt about that. Donovan would follow him to his car, grab him by the neck scruff, and put his head through the windshield. Thought you could send me and all my friends to prison, then slip away, unnoticed, and we’d never figure it out? Donovan pictured Micah’s bloody face scraping against the cracked windshield. How do you like me now, dumbshit?

  Blood rushed to Donovan’s crotch at the thought of turning Micah’s pretty-boy face into a mush of meat.

  But, if Micah had been genuine that he didn’t remember Donovan from their dust-up last week, that would give him room to breathe. Come up with a good plan; something thorough. A way to break Micah down and make him more pliable.

  Short-term gain, or long-term gain?

  When Micah swiped his dribbling nose across the sleeve of his shirt, a switch flipped and Donovan decided that the drunk was telling the truth about his blackout. That also meant he didn’t remember Hayden. Since she apparently didn’t remember him, Donovan’s presence and ties to them both would look like a big fat coincidence. That was the biggest advantage yet.

  Donovan stood up and quietly exited the meeting. A few of the drunks threw glances at him as he left, but no one made any effort to stop him. Just as well, since he preferred not to attract attention now that his plan for vengeance was taking shape.

  He went home, took the dog out for a quick walk, and then grunted through eight sets of pushups while staring at the whiskey on the counter. Pantera rumbled his stereo’s speakers, pumping his adrenaline through each rep. While he preferred working the heavy bag for upper-body, anchoring a weight bag to the apartment ceiling was probably not an option.

  He opened one of the cardboard boxes—the last one that remained unpacked—and removed a small wooden box. Inside that, he thumbed through a collection of envelopes until he found one marked Caitlin. He opened it and grabbed a pair of black panties. Took a big whiff, then stuffed them back into the envelope, and the envelope back in the box.

  How long would they still smell like her?

  Panting and coated in sweat, he removed the cap from the handle of whiskey and tossed it into the trashcan. He felt an urge to jerk off to burn some tension, but he pushed that away. Then he opened a notebook to a blank page and began to put his life back in order.

  Chapter Ten

  MICAH’S HEADACHE this morning was like a fine aged cheese, exquisite in texture and taste. He was, at least, thrilled that it wasn’t a hangover headache. Something more mundane. His body was still an aching mess after only one week free of alcohol, so maybe it was lingering dehydration.

  Or maybe not having found the owner of the mystery shoe was eating his brain from inside out. And the fact that he hadn’t taken any action on that yet only made it worse, as if he could pretend it wasn’t a real problem to make it vanish.

  He stumbled into Frank’s office in the morning and went straight to the back kitchen for coffee. Frank was already standing there, rinsing a mug out in the sink.

  “Morning,” Frank mumbled as he poured his own cup of the black stuff into his freshly cleaned mug. “I know that dreary look. You sleeping okay yet?”

  “Not really,” Micah said as he snatched a bagel from a plate next to the microwave.

  “Drinking dreams?”

  Micah lifted a mug from a hook on the wall and took a bite of the doughy bagel. “Every night.”

  “Yeah, that happens. But they’ll go away eventually, and you’ll be able to sleep easy without booze again. I know it seems like you’ll never get there, but you will. As long as you don’t stop doing the next right thing.”

  “I keep hearing that, and maybe someday I’ll believe it.”

  Frank nodded. “At the trial that started all this for you, there were other witnesses, right?”

  “Sure,” Micah said.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Some went into the program, like me. Some didn’t. I know of two or three who also live in Denver, actually, but it’s not like we have monthly potluck dinners or anything. They probably don’t know about me.”

  “It sounds like a strange life. I don’t envy you.”

  Micah poured his coffee as the shoe danced through his head.

  “Something on your mind, kid?” Frank said.

  Micah knew he should tell. He knew he needed to tell, because this secret was making him sick and the only way to cure the sickness was to get it out.

  “You can unburden yourself,” Frank said, “or you can eventually drink over whatever it is. Your choice.”

  Micah’s heart thudded against his chest and a trickle of sweat ran down his back. “Yeah, okay, there is something. I haven’t been honest with you.”

  Frank studied Micah for a few seconds, then pointed at the desks in the main room and they each took their seats. “Go ahead.”

  Micah took in a deep breath, working up the courage. “The day you picked me up from detox and we went to my car, I found something in the car. Well, not in it, but stuck in the bumper.”

  Frank raised an eyebrow. “Bumper?”

  “Yeah. A shoe wedged underneath it. Woman’s shoe.”

  Frank sat back and held the coffee mug under his nose while he stared at the ceiling and Micah’s heart rate ramped up to death metal speed.

  “And you interpret that to be some evidence that you ran over someone?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the thing.”

  Frank set the coffee mug down and beckoned Micah to stand. “Let’s go.”

  They went outside and Frank popped a squat in front of the car. He rubbed his chin as he examined the crumpled front end. “You ran it into a ditch?”

  “Yeah, on Highway 287. I was downtown, then I was way up north. No idea how I got there.”

  “Was the ditch concrete or something like that?”

  Micah cocked his head. “No, I think it was grass. Why do you ask?”

  Frank pointed to the curve of the damage on the right side. “The way it’s crumpled here, I can see how you’d get that by slamming into a ditch. But this,” he said as he pointed to deeper damage on the other side, “is not the same. This looks like you hit something hard.”

  Micah dropped to one knee. “Like a person?” His stomach boiled while saying those words out loud.

  “No, I’d say something solid, like another car or the corner of a building.”

  “Or a stoplight pole?”

  Frank nodded and traced the sharp concave impression. “Sounds about right. Maybe a telephone pole. These are two separate impacts here.”

  “So I was in two car accidents.” A tiny blip of relief wafted through Micah. He didn’t have any answers, but he had fewer questions now, and an idea where to look.

  “I’d guess it wasn’t a building or a stop light anywhere with a lot of people around to see it,” Frank said, “or else there would have been cops.”

  Micah and Frank retu
rned inside, and Micah sat down at his computer. He could find out if there were any reports of mysterious car accidents on that Friday night. It was a good place to start.

  “How do you feel about what happened?” Frank said.

  Micah started searching local news websites. “Like I don’t deserve to be sober. Like I’ve probably killed someone.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “No,” Micah said. “I don’t. But even without this, I still feel like an imposter pretending to live here. Do you know how hard it is for me to sit in AA meetings? How everyone in there always talks about ‘rigorous honesty’ and every time I say my name, I’m lying?”

  “Technically, you’re not. Your name is legally Micah.”

  “You know what I mean. When people ask for my Facebook to friend me and I tell them I don’t have one, do you know the way they look at me? And then I have to lie about why I’m not on social media.”

  Frank leaned forward in his chair. “Being rigorously honest is more about being honest with yourself and your motives. I know it’s a challenge for you when dealing with people sometimes, but what matters most is staying away from a drink. If you don’t stay sober, you’ll never get the chance to fix anything else. This is why I was asking you about the other people from the trial before. You think you’re alone, but you’re not. I thought it would make you feel better to realize that.”

  “I’ll feel a lot better if I can find something that leads me to wherever I crashed my car.”

  “While you’re doing that,” Frank said, “why don’t you tell me about the Pink Door?”

  “I ran into some trouble. I think your guy’s there, but I didn’t see him. They tossed me out for basically nothing. I walked toward a table, and they got all up in my face.”

  “I’d guess it was the owner’s table you were getting a little too close to.”

  Micah paused his internet browsing to look Frank in the eye. “What is it with you and him? This ‘history’ you mentioned before?”

  Frank took his time in answering, draining the rest of his mug of coffee. “Tyson Darby. I investigated him back in my cop days, but I couldn’t ever make anything stick. He has a past association with our Roland Templeton.”

  “What’s his deal?”

  “Drugs, mostly. Some protection rackets. He thinks himself some kinda one man mafia in Denver.”

  “So if he’s…” Micah started, but the words dried up on his lips when he landed on an article from a news website about a telephone pole knocked down in an area directly north of downtown Denver. Same night as he’d checked into detox.

  This was exactly the lead he’d been searching for.

  Micah drove to the intersection where he had the first of his two car crashes. The image was starting to form in his mind, through a reconstruction of evidence, but not memory. He’d been at the Pink Door, left, then drove here and crashed his car. Then he’d taken off and had been driving north until he crashed into a ditch beside the highway. All the other bits and pieces in between were blank spots. Just a jumble of momentary flashes with no context.

  Somehow, he’d ended up in detox, maybe by hitching a ride or taking a bus.

  So close to downtown, yet the area he stopped at was like a ghost town near the sky-high blinking lights and sulfur stink of the industrial section of the city. He parked his car at the curb and walked to the new telephone pole that had replaced the one he’d knocked down. It was a different color than the rest of the wooden beams sprouting from the nearby area.

  As he observed that telephone pole, he had a distinct image of his body jerking forward as his car folded. Then thinking about airbags. The memory was too disconnected to form into anything coherent, but Micah felt sure that it had happened here.

  Standing in the shadow of the replacement pole, he glanced in every direction, hoping some landmark or other visual would spark more memories. Hardly any life existed at this intersection: a boarded-up former gas station on one corner, a parking lot overrun with grass on another, the third corner an apartment building, and the fourth an open field. A rusted sign reading For Sale swung from a chain fence encircling the field, creaking in the light breeze.

  That no one had seen anything seemed doubtful, even though this area appeared empty. Crashing into a telephone pole would have been like gunshots in this sleepy area. He crossed the street to the apartment building. It was four stories of dirty red brick and cloudy windows, some of which were covered in bed sheets or blacked out with shoe polish. No one greeted him on the front stoop, no lights flickered in any of the windows above. There were twelve buttons on a panel next to the front door, each corresponding to a different apartment.

  He impulsively pressed each of the twelve buttons and then cringed when he realized there was a good chance he was about to encounter some pissed-off people. It was, after all, around dinner time and this didn’t seem like a friendly building.

  A minute passed, then two. No one came to the intercom and no one buzzed him in. He stepped back and surveyed the windows of the apartment building, hoping for any sign of life. No movement and no sound came from any of those apartments. The street was dark and dead, like some tiny Colorado mountain town in the tourist off-season.

  He turned and faced the darkened street. “What am I supposed to do? How do I find you when there’s no information anywhere?”

  The street remained silent.

  A moment later, the door to the apartment building creaked, and an older lady with her hair in a tight bun leaned out. She looked Micah up and down. “What do you want?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but were you at home the Friday before last?”

  The woman clutched the door handle for security, with most of her body inside the building. Maybe she thought Micah would rush her at any second. It was a reasonable assumption in this neighborhood, and he kept his distance so as not to spook her.

  “Maybe. I’m home most evenings.”

  “That night, you would have remembered. There was a car crash, and someone knocked over that telephone pole over there. It would have been loud.”

  She gazed over at the new telephone pole. “I do remember them coming by to put in that new telephone pole. No idea why, because these phone lines haven’t been working in ages. Everyone has their cellulars now.”

  “No, ma’am, I’m not asking about them replacing the telephone pole.” He took a step closer and she shied away.

  “Wait, please,” he said, and his hands reached out for the door.

  She gasped and slammed it closed, disappearing back into the apartment building.

  “Go away!” she said behind the closed door. “I’m not going to talk to you.”

  “Shit,” he said. Dead end.

  What if the shoe was just on the street and bounced up into his bumper somehow as a result of the crash? That was as likely as him stealing it off someone’s foot.

  All of this grief could be for nothing.

  But there was no way he was going to answer that question standing at this empty intersection. Shaking his head, he walked back to his car, and then drove home.

  Chapter Eleven

  MICAH PARKED across the street from the Pink Door, watching the day crowd filter in and out of the strip club. Some lurkers with darting eyes, a few business types entering in twos and threes, and the only thing that separated them from the perverts were the suits and ties. At least the perverts were honest with the world.

  If Roland Templeton was hiding inside that strip club, Micah had to find out. He’d failed the other day, and although Frank hadn’t said anything about it, the old man had to have been disappointed. If Micah tipped off Roland, they might have only a few days left to catch him before he bolted for some other safe house location or made it out of the country.

  But Micah couldn’t waltz through the front door again. They’d probably given him the convenience-store-banning treatment, with a picture of his face taped up next to the entrance booth. Do not allow this
man to watch women shaking their boobies for money.

  The strip club was on the first floor of a three-story building, with apartments on the top two floors. Possible that Roland was camped out upstairs, maybe waiting for a new passport to come through so he could skip on down to Mexico and avoid jail time. Micah would start there because he hadn’t uncovered anywhere else to look.

  He eased across the street, keeping his head down but trying not to look like he was keeping his head down. Back before he went straight, he wasn’t usually the stealthy type. But now, he tried to keep a low profile as much as possible, for several reasons.

  He cut left through the street to find a way inside the apartments. Across from the building was a shooting range, and next to that, a homeless shelter. Quite an interesting array of buildings in this area.

  He found a door labeled 201-206, 301-306, which had to be the apartments. It was a glass door, and he peered inside at a row of mailboxes nailed to the wall. But no buzzer outside, and the door was locked.

  He had the tools to pick the lock, but he was too exposed out here on this street. So he could wait for someone to go in or out, but he might be waiting a long time, and whoever did come out might not be so accommodating. The frontal approach was a no-go.

  Micah rounded the back of the building until he stumbled upon a set of rusted fire escapes snaking from the rooftop down to the second floor. The bottom one hung suspended in the air, maybe eight or nine feet off the ground. He could jump it, as long as no one was looking.

  People were looking, of course, because he was across the street from a homeless shelter, and two dozen people milled about in the parking lot adjacent to the shelter. A giant crucifix hung over the entrance, which meant the homeless probably listened to nightly sermons to earn a bed and dinner. Micah wondered how many of them would convert, and how many would smile and pretend so they wouldn’t have to sleep in the frigid night air.

  A few heads had perked up as Micah skulked around the building, but none of them offered any commentary. He tossed a smile at a man wearing a down jacket way too warm for this sunny day. The man shook his head, coughed, and went back to digging through a trash can on the street corner.