Take the Edge Off

by TA Moore

  “What the hell are you doing, Joe?” Cal asked, his voice pitched to carry over the sound of traffic and the hiss of the wind. “If you get hurt, I’m going to kick your ass. Answer the fucking phone.”

  He ended the call and revved the bike. It growled between his legs and the vibration of it caught in his hipbones as he wove haphazardly between the fast-moving traffic. This time of day, everyone had gotten to work, no one had left work yet, and the only people on the road where stay-at-home parents and airport cabs. It made for a straight shot down, but worry gnawed at the nape of Cal’s neck that he wouldn’t be fast enough.

  It was a good thing Joe had texted him the address in Reading before he left the hotel or Cal would really have panicked.

  As opposed to this—he thought wryly as he passed a fat, bubble-shaped people carrier on the inside, close enough that their wing mirror caught on his sleeve—completely reasonable reaction.

  He left the people carrier and the pissed-off driver behind as he gunned the bike and peeled onto the turnoff to Reading. It took him twenty minutes and one foul-mouthed rant at his bike’s satnav to find the street that Joe claimed was important.

  The heavy rumble of the bike as he rolled down the street twitched curtains in every few houses. A few cars flashed their lights as someone behind a door decided to check if they’d remembered to lock them last night.

  Cal snorted to himself. Nobody who could afford his bike would go out of their way to drive out there and trade it for a hard-driven Nissan Leaf. The resale value was shit on the legit market.

  The rust-pocked 45 screwed into the brickwork on one house finally caught his eye and Cal pulled up to the curb. It didn’t look like the sort of place that had a dark secret behind the dusty lace curtains. It looked like a normal house, the sort of place Cal would have bought as his starter home if he hadn’t blown all his money on whiskey, motorbikes, and bail.

  He kicked the stand down with the heel of his boot and left the bike to cool down as he walked up to the front door. Instead of the doorbell or the slot of the letterbox, Cal rapped his knuckles against the door. No answer. He tried again and shifted his weight impatiently on the worn bald doormat—the Welcome blurred where years of feet had scraped over it—as he waited for someone to come down the stairs or yell from the downstairs loo for him to wait.

  When neither happened he pushed the letterbox open with a finger and leaned down to peer inside. Some people might have mistaken the stain on the carpet for something else—tomato juice, mud, anything that excused them from having to acknowledge the ugliness—but Cal had cleaned bloodstains out of the carpet of his grandad’s Rolls to earn his pocket money. He knew what it looked like.

  “Joe,” he yelled. “Joe, are you there?”

  No answer. Fuck it. He stepped back and kicked the door. It was heavy PVC and the impact of his boot rattled it in the frame but didn’t pop it open. He kicked it again and one of the panels popped at the side.

  A window cracked in the house next door, and an old man poked his head out. “If you’re after Daisy’s gentleman friend, you’ve just missed him,” he snapped. His lips folded in over his worn yellow teeth as he took a drag on a crooked cigar. “I don’t know what this place is coming to. First that woman down the road gets that boy of hers a scooter—up and down the street like a demented bee at all hours—and now some fella around, yelling the odds at—”

  “Where’d they go?” Cal asked.

  The old man squinted at him from under the glasses he’d shoved up onto his high, bare forehead. “Don’t see what right you have to know.”

  Cal put his hand on the fence between the gardens and braced his weight on it. “I can come and kick your door in instead, old man.”

  The old man pulled back into the house like a turtle into a shell and pulled the window in with him. “No one tells me where they’re going,” he spat out. “All I know is the car left from out back, him still giving her the worst word in his mouth. Nice friends you have, young man.”

  “When?” Cal asked.

  “Few minutes ago.” The words squeezed out through the gap in the window as the old guy latched it. “You can catch them if you run.”

  “Fuck off,” Cal said.

  He didn’t bother to ask what sort of car that Daisy/Rosie drove. It was a Volvo, the same one he’d seen at the graveyard and in his rearview mirror. His bike coughed in protest at being gunned back up so soon, but the engine smoothed out as he pulled into the street. Where was he going? Where would she go?

  Bleak panic swelled in Cal’s chest. It was already there, ready to go, because he’d expected this all along. Even if he had been quick enough it would still have ended like this. Cal wasn’t someone who people stayed for. He was someone they left.

  He stopped the bike outside a corner shop and felt the black, stupid compulsion to smash the narrow, fly-spotted windows. It wouldn’t help, but that had never stopped him before. There was a certain sick satisfaction in a failure that was so defiantly on your own terms.

  Except this time it wasn’t the exams he knew he was going to fail at school or the faith that El put in him and Cal figured he might as well disappoint sooner than later. It wasn’t Cal this time—it was Joe.

  Cal braced his foot on the curb, the weight of the bike against his thigh, tugged his helmet off, and reached into his jacket for his phone. Part of him wished this was something he could blackmail or bribe Van into sorting out for him.

  Not that it made any sense to expect his mum to come through for him, but he called her anyhow, five times in a row, until she finally answered with the clipped, irritated “yes” that people gave cold callers.

  “What happened the night Edward fucked up Grandad’s Bentley?” he asked.

  It was a longshot, but how else would a mediocre London copper end up as the lifetime employee of an American millionaire and surrogate dad to the millionaire’s kid? The timing fit too. That didn’t mean it would help, but it was the only idea Cal had.

  “That was a long time ago,” his mum said, her voice slow with surprise. It was the kindest her voice had ever sounded on a phone call with him. Not that it lasted, the usual edge of tension crawled back into it as she added, “And this isn’t a good time. Can you call back later?”

  “No,” Cal said. “Either we talk now, or I fucking move to Newcastle. How much of a good time would that be?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “This is important,” Cal said. It wasn’t the first important thing that his mum had missed, ignored, or ruined, but this time, if she let him down, Cal would actually follow through on his threat. “If you don’t talk to me, I will come up there and ruin my life all over your shiny new one. So answer me, what happened the night Edward crashed the Bentley?”

  “He didn’t crash it,” his mom said sharply. There was a muffled pause and he heard her make the excuse of “insurance salesman” to someone. Then a door clicked and she came back. “We were on our way to Cirencester for the night. A band I liked was on, and this red Lexus veered across the motorway. It clipped the front of the Bentley, bashed up the headlights, and then hit the guardrail and went down the embankment. I don’t talk about this, Caleb.”

  “Surprised you remember my name.”

  “I picked it.’

  “Whatever. Look, we both know you’ve seen worse than a car accident. Don’t pretend you’re some shrinking violet now. What happened?”

  There was a pause. Cal wondered, with a touch of surprise, if his mother actually was upset.

  “It wasn’t the accident,” she said quietly. “It was the screaming. It was a mother and two children in the car. The older child, a girl, crawled out of the broken windshield, but the other two were trapped. I called the ambulance. That’s what you’re meant to do. But by then the car was on fire. Edward went to help—his hands were ruined, all blistered from the metal—but the driver, their mother, wouldn’t let him help her. She told him to get the little boy out first, poor little brat.
He wasn’t very old, still a baby, and I remember wondering if I’d have done the same for you. Maybe she was a better mother, or she knew that… well, they took her in two pieces later. I don’t think Edward could have helped her even if she’d let him.”

  Cal swallowed the bitter taste in the back of his throat—he never learned where his mum was concerned—and focused on the fact he’d been right. The night Joe’s mum had died and been carefully erased from his world, Edward had been there. He’d kept the secret and Joe close. Cal wasn’t sure if he’d attribute that to Edward’s self-interest or to some sense of responsibility to the baby he’d rescued.

  Either way, thank God for his grandad’s soft spot for ex-squaddies and his daughter’s ex-boyfriends. It had been enough to make their firm Edward’s first call when he needed a driver.

  “Where did it—” he started to ask.

  “It was the little girl, though,” his mum said over him. He’d blackmailed her into this, but now she’d started to speak, Cal didn’t think she even really knew it was him on the line. “She’d caused the accident—that’s what the woman told Edward—grabbed the wheel and drove them off the road. Not even a teenager and so angry, just so… angry. She told Edward to put the baby back in the fire. That’s when I decided to move up north, to make a clean break of it. It was better for everyone, because I was that girl. Every time I came and got you boys, took you away to play house until it went wrong, I put you back in the fire.”

  That hadn’t happened. Cal had been five. He’d have remembered if he ever went to live with his mum for longer than a weekend in a grotty bedsit in Blackpool. Unless that had been it, the best she had to offer before it all went to hell again.

  “And Edward went to work for the boy’s dad, right?” Cal said, because that was something he could deal with.

  “Yes,” his mum said, her voice surprised. “He was a mess after it happened, he couldn’t get over the fact he let that woman die to save the boy. PTSD, I suppose. Nightmares. Drink. I was gone for the worst of it, but friends told me about it. They thought it was because I’d left him, but it was her. That poor dead woman. He lost his job, and when the boy’s father found out he offered Edward a job with him instead. In America. The last time I saw him, he’d come up to say goodbye. I don’t know why he bothered. We were broken up by then, but maybe he didn’t have anyone else to say it to.

  “Where did it happen?” Cal asked. “What road? It doesn’t have to be the address, just close enough.”

  He didn’t expect much. This was a woman who had once forgotten not only his birthday, but Christmas. To his surprise his mother answered precisely, in a small, firm voice. Cal had heard people give evidence like that.

  “The M4,” she said. “It was past Pond Farm. I’d made a joke about it, said that Edward could buy it and raise pigs. He didn’t think it was funny. That’s why I remember. He usually thought I was funny.”

  Cal exhaled. It felt like the first time since he’d seen the blood. His mother’s story wasn’t much, and he still didn’t know if Rosie was on her way back there, but it was something. It was enough that he mentally cut her free from a lot of things he blamed her for. This made up for it.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I won’t call again.”

  She surprised him when she didn’t hang up right away. “I knew you’d be okay,” she said. “I knew that my mum, your gran, she’d be like that woman in the car. She’d have saved you boys without a thought. So I knew. I had to stop putting you in the fire.”

  Cal couldn’t say anything. He’d spent too many years angry at her. It was easier to let her off the hook for her screwups than have to admit that maybe she hadn’t made as many as he thought.

  For the first time, Cal hung up on her.

  Pond Farm. He’d driven past that a couple of times, enough that he could find his way back with no problem. If he was right, then he’d find Joe, and if he wasn’t….

  Cal tugged his helmet down over his ears and gave the top of it a smack to settle it in place. There’d been a lot of blood in the hall. If Joe wasn’t at Pond Farm like Cal thought—if the emails and burned bears weren’t Rosie reliving her bad deeds—then maybe Cal wouldn’t find him at all.

  HE CAUGHT up with the car about twenty miles from Pond Farm. Rosie’s middle-aged sedan wasn’t built for speed, and he didn’t think she expected anyone to follow her. Cal tucked himself in behind her and called the police.

  Cal had been in enough car chases on the other side of the line to know what a bad idea they were. If he could get the police out there to wear Rosie down, to toss their spike strips over the road to slow her down, Cal would take that.

  He recited the license plate number to the chipper young policeman on the other end of the line, told them that Rosie drove erratically, and exaggerated the damage to the front of the car so they’d make the connection with the car accident at the Renaissance. It would take too long to explain the truth, and it was a bizarre enough story that he’d go through three sets of ears before someone believed him.

  Ahead of him Rosie abruptly switched lanes into the fast lane, her bumper an inch from the car behind. She ignored the agitated blare of horns and let her speed drop as the car fell back. Cal held his place and kept an eye on her in the rearview mirror.

  He was pretty confident she hadn’t recognized him. They’d met for a minute at the event, and he’d been in a suit instead of jeans, and bare-headed instead of hidden behind a matte-black visor. There was no way she could know who he was.

  But somehow she did. She abruptly switched lanes again in a hard diagonal that ended with the car on the hard shoulder. It juddered past Cal at panel-rattling speed, and he saw that she was the only person visible in the car.

  Cal hesitated as he weighed his options. He didn’t want anyone to get hurt, especially Rosie, since she might be the only one to know where Joe was, but he didn’t want her to get away either. Habit made the decision for him. It was easier, after all these years, to go fast than slow.

  So he stuck to Rosie’s tail as they wove in and out of traffic. Three times she scraped him out with a desperate, ass-clenched move around one of the massive trucks that lumbered around the road. He caught up with her every time she sped out from behind the truck or fell back to try and mingle with the other cars.

  Sweat itched under Cal’s hairline, rubbed raw against the nape of his neck by the helmet, and he was ashamed to admit there was a little part of him that enjoyed the speed. A gray Porsche tried to keep up with them as he mistook the chase for a race, but it had to fall back with a squeal of brakes as a Sainsbury’s delivery truck had to veer in front of him so it didn’t rear end Rosie.

  Cal could have caught her. In the end he was the better driver, with a better vehicle for the chase. The problem was that she didn’t want to get away, she wanted to reach the right spot. Ten miles after Pond Farm—farther than his mum had thought—Rosie pulled the wheel to the right and bounced up onto the hard shoulder. Then she just went on over. Her bumper crumpled against the corrugated iron guard rail and the car took flight.

  Only for a second. Then gravity caught it and smacked it back down into the ground. The windows popped and shattered by the pressure as the car scraped down the incline on its side and crashed into a fence post.

  A handful of birds who’d been perched on the fence took off in a surprised flurry of wings, and Cal’s stomach dropped down to his feet with dread as he pulled up onto the hard shoulder. He let the bike fall onto its side as he scrambled down the torn-up hillock of grass.

  He raced toward the car as small, frantic hands hammered out the flexible sheets of glass shards that used to be the windshield. For an odd, surreal moment, he heard his mum’s voice in the back of his head, her memory of the accident overlaid over this new one.

  Rosie crawled out over the steering wheel and the hood of the car. She collapsed into the mud as she slid down off the bumper, her legs as weak as his had felt earlier.

  “Where is he?”
Cal demanded as he grabbed her arm and dragged her back up onto her feet. He shook her to make her eyes focus on him. “Where’s Joe?”

  She stared at him for a second. “He’s… he’s gone to be with Mum,” she said. Her voice got more certain as she talked. “We’ll be with her forever now. Like we were meant to be.”

  Cal shook her again, hard enough make her head snap back and forth. “You crawled out. Again. Where’s Joe?”

  Rosie stared at him for a second, and then her stubbornly prim expression gave way to wide-eyed horror. She opened her mouth and closed it again, her lips pressed together to stop the tremble that picked at the corners. Her only answer to Cal’s question was to shake her head and screw her eyes up tight.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Cal yelled at her. He gave her a disgusted shove away from him, and she staggered back, tripped over a knot of grass, and fell down. She didn’t try to get back up. “Why did you do this?”

  If Rosie had an answer to that, she didn’t want to share it with Cal. He left her in the mud and lumbered over the long, matted grass to the car. The particular smell of gas and brake fluid hung heavy in the air, a smell so thick it had a taste. Under the dented hood, the engine still rattled and spat.

  Cal looked in the back seat of the car. No Joe. There was no sign of him in the car at all. For a second, Cal thought he had been wrong—not about the fact that Rosie had stopped being able to make good decisions a while ago, but that the bad decision she wanted to make was this.

  If she wanted to relive that night, Joe would have to be here.

  Something rattled in the boot. Cal froze, his hands pressed against hot metal. “Joe?”

  Another kick, the double-punch of fists against metal, and the sound of a desperate, muffled voice from inside as Joe begged desperately to get out.

  “Cal, please, get me out. Get me out! I can’t breathe. Cal… please!”

  “Wait,” Cal yelled as he pressed his hands against the metal. “I’ll be back. Wait.”

  He scrambled back up the bank on his hands and knees, fistfuls of grass used as handholds, to his bike. He’d promised El he’d behave himself when he got out of jail. But if he ever had to break that promise, he’d wanted to be prepared. Cal grabbed the heavy screwdriver from where he’d stashed it under the seat. It was nearly as old as him—stolen from his grandad’s shed when Cal was ten for… something, probably mischief—but it was still good enough for the job.