Wrecker

by Dave Conifer

  Before she got there the brake lights of the jeep flashed to life. Jane was shocked. The driver of the jeep had to know Manteo was no more than a couple of feet from his rear bumper as they traveled at high speed. Was he willing to risk serious injury or even his life to go for the win by making his opponent flinch? Yes he was, apparently. She pushed hard on her own brakes to keep herself out of the danger zone.

  Manteo was in trouble and he knew it. One of the bizarre but accepted premises of road rage battles was that if the other driver forces you to hit his car, you are the loser. He slammed on the brakes but it wasn’t enough. His truck swung violently into the right lane, filling the space that Jane’s car would have occupied had she not slowed down a split second earlier. By the way the back end led the truck into the right lane she thought there might have been contact with the jeep. The truck swerved from side to side, its tires squealing until Manteo regained control. Even sitting in relative safety in another car she was afraid as she smelled the burnt rubber of Manteo’s tires. They should be scared too, she thought. How is it possible to get so insanely angry?

  With Manteo and the jeep side by side in separate lanes it became a drag race on the now wide open road. Still shaken, Jane didn’t try to keep up. She’d be able to see all she needed from where she was. The jeep had built a lead when Manteo nearly lost control, but now the white truck was steadily catching up. It appeared that the driver of the jeep wanted only to escape but now Manteo was on the verge of overtaking him. A cloud of blue exhaust smoke puffed from the tailpipe of the truck as it shot forward in one last burst. She could see Manteo turn his head to glare into the jeep when he’d completely caught up. The other driver must have seen something in Manteo’s face that he didn’t like. Or maybe he was finally afraid now that the enemy had taken his best punch and was still standing. The jeep’s speed dropped markedly. After Manteo rocketed past the jeep it moved into the right lane and onto the shoulder where it stopped abruptly.

  Jane drove past, relieved that it was over. She let out a gasp of air and wiped her forehead. She would take the next exit, turn around and go back home. By the looks of her perspiring face Steve would never know that she’d skipped yoga class and gone for a drive. All she had to do now was stay out of Manteo’s sight until she reached an exit.

  That seemed like an easy feat at the moment, but that all changed when Manteo barreled across her lane and stopped the truck on the right shoulder. That’s bad, she knew. There was nothing she could do but keep driving and hope he didn’t notice her. When his white reverse lights came on she knew for certain that the trouble wasn’t over after all. She glanced in the rear view mirror just in time to see that the truck was flying backwards toward the parked jeep. She pulled onto the shoulder and parked until she could decide what to do. Or pretend to decide. She already knew.

  Manteo had almost reached his target when Jane turned her head to back up the same way he had. Traffic flew by, inches away. The engine whined as she picked up speed. By the time she cut the engine some fifty feet away both Manteo and the jeep driver were already out of their cars.

  The body language of the two men said it all as they walked toward each other. She wasn’t close enough to get a good look at Jeep Driver but she could tell what he was thinking. His arms were spread as he smiled, shrugged and talked. It was clear that he was suddenly feeling either apologetic or frightened about the whole thing. Jane had the feeling that if he got through this, Jeep Driver would find a way to control his road rage for the rest of his life.

  Manteo, on the other hand, looked angrier than ever as he stalked at Jeep Driver as if he was going to walk right through him. As cars rushed past Jane asked herself if she really wanted to get involved with what she was watching. Things like this happened all the time to people she didn’t know. And Manteo was nothing but that – somebody she didn’t know. It wasn’t too late to start the car and pull away without looking back. Neither man had noticed her.

  But she couldn’t. She stepped out of the car.

  Jeep Driver probably wasn’t even twenty years old, and not very big. Over a crew cut he wore a backwards baseball cap and baggy shorts, the uniform worn by most college-aged kids on a lazy fall day like this one. He had just started to smile or even laugh his way into an obvious attempt at a “Sorry man, these things happen, we’re cool, right?” ending when he and Manteo reached each other. Manteo grabbed him by the front of his shirt and dragged him almost effortlessly back to the side of the jeep that faced away from the road. Jeep Driver tried to put up a fight but he was no match for a giant like Manteo. By the time Jane reached them he was pinned against the door with Manteo’s hands wrapped around his neck, flailing away helplessly with his arms as his face reddened.

  “Rob!” Jane yelled, trying to be heard above the rush of the roadway. “Let him go!” Both men turned toward her as best they could under the circumstances. A choking, grunting sound that could only be coming from Jeep Driver filled the air as the three eyed each other. “Let him go!” she repeated. Manteo turned back toward his prey without changing his grip.

  “You’re going to kill him! Do you understand that! Let go!” Another car passed. “Somebody’s probably called the police already! Let him go!” She took a step forward without knowing what she would do. “You’re going to kill him!”

  Manteo glared at her with his cloudy, yellowy eyes but released his grip. She could feel the hate. Jeep Driver’s hands went to his own neck, which he probed carefully. His body slid down against the door, landing him in a seated position on the gravelly roadside as he gasped and coughed without looking at Jane or Manteo.

  “Come on!” Jane told Manteo. When he didn’t respond she reached out and pulled him at the elbow, but he was as immovable as he looked. He neither moved nor pulled his arm out of her grasp. He wouldn’t even look at her.

  “I’m leaving,” she said. “You have to go right now, too.” She looked down at Jeep Driver, who was breathing hard but no longer looked to be in distress. “You’ll be all right,” she told him. “But you better get out of here. It’ll be nothing but trouble. You’re as bad as he is. He’s just bigger.” This time when she tugged on Manteo’s arm he followed. He still hadn’t uttered a syllable. Nobody else had either. Nobody but her.

  When they reached his truck, which was still running, she opened the driver side door and let go of his arm. Without a word he climbed in and pulled the door shut. Jane wanted to say something, anything, but the words didn’t come. She waved at him through the window to pull away. Jeep Driver hadn’t moved from where he was slumped on the side of the road. Good, Jane thought. No use having these two near each other on the road again. She walked up the shoulder and slipped into her own car. Only then did Manteo pull back onto the road and head away into the dusk.

  ~~~

  She could have taken the next exit and doubled back toward home, but she decided not to. It was already too late for class and it was too early for her to show up at the house without Steve asking questions she didn’t feel like answering. Instead, she followed Manteo past exit after exit as he drove up the expressway toward Philadelphia. Where was he going? And why do I care?

  She wondered how different things would have been had she not happened to see him at a traffic light and decide to follow him. Would he have killed that kid? It sure looked as though he intended to until he spotted her, and he’d nearly succeeded before she convinced him to let go. What if I hadn’t been there? And what if this wasn’t the first time? If it had happened before, how had it turned out those times?

  It was near dark when she trailed him down an exit ramp fifteen miles later. Traffic thinned quickly after they turned onto county 571, a two-lane blacktop with a double yellow line. One thing she knew for sure as they wound through the thickening forest. They were nowhere near Pleasantville. In his state of mind she didn’t think he’d recognize her car, assuming he even remembered it, but she stayed back as far as she could anyway.

  The novelty of foll
owing him had subsided and now she was growing anxious about how she was going to explain why she was home so late from yoga. Despite the worry about what Manteo had done, she knew she’d be angry at herself for the rest of the night because she’d done something impulsive and gotten involved in a dangerous situation. Yet, she knew why she had done it. Somehow she was intrigued by what little she’d learned about his background. But not enough for this, she argued with herself. What was I thinking?

  After a few miles on the county road the white truck made a left turn through a yellow light onto another two-laner. She waited for the light to turn green again, hoping he’d still be within sight while at the same time vowing that she would turn around and go home after five more minutes. Manteo was nowhere to be seen after she made the turn but she kept going anyway, keeping to the five minute pledge. Just as she was scouting the side of the road for a place to turn around, the glare of brake lights appeared ahead.

  When she came to a break in the woods, marked by two brick pillars on either side of a driveway, she was sure she’d reached the spot where Manteo had hit the brakes and vanished. 621 Falling Run Road, an ornate plaque on one of the pillars told her. She slowed nearly to a stop and looked up the driveway as she crawled past. Sure enough, there was the truck, stopped about fifty yards away next to a small building.

  At the far end of the driveway past the spot where the truck was parked was a well-lit brick house. No, a mansion. It looked to be five times the size of her own. From what she could see in the twilight it was surrounded by several acres of well-manicured lawn. Somebody had carved a space out of the forest and built a beautiful house out there in the middle of nowhere. She wasn’t even sure exactly where she was anymore, although she knew it would be easy to retrace her path to get back home.

  Next to the truck, silhouetted against a landscaped patch bathed in artificial lighting in front of the house, was a hulking figure that could only be Manteo. He approached the structure, which was either a small garage or a large shed. Asking herself yet again what she thought she was doing and why any of this mattered to her, she turned off her headlights and rolled down the window. Through the trees she could hear thumps and clanks, the same ones she heard every night when he packed up his equipment after a day’s work. Apparently, she decided, he was transferring tools between the shed and truck. It must be that whoever lives in the mansion lets him keep his gear here. But why would he keep anything here when he lives in Pleasantville? As she tried to make sense of it she heard the truck door slam just before it roared away and disappeared behind the house.

  There was nothing left to see. She started the engine and drove up the road until she found a place in the dark to turn around. This time she didn’t plan to stop as she passed the house. But when a gleaming burgundy Mercedes-Benz shot out into the beams of her headlights from between the pillars and onto the road ahead of her she had to hit the brakes again after all.

  Chapter 9

  “Speaking,” Steve said into his cell phone. He scrambled for the remote and then muted the sound on the movie that he and Jane were watching. “It’s the techie guy from work,” he whispered to his wife after putting his hand over the phone. “What’s up, Nick? Did you find anything?”

  He stood up to listen to the answer. A few seconds later he was scowling. “That can’t be,” he insisted. “Are you sure? Did you double check?” He shook his head from side to side as he listened to the answer. “Did you email that to me? Okay. Do me a favor, Nick. Check it one more time. Please.”

  Jane knew enough about what was going on to understand what Nick the intern was telling Steve. Even though the promotion had already been awarded, her husband still had his sights set on that job and he’d pinned his hopes on proving that Cindy sabotaged his programs. Now his mole in the IT department was telling him that it never happened and that the files were clean. She pitied Nick because she knew Steve was going to bulldog him until he got what he wanted, even if there was no evidence to find because there had been no tampering.

  “You know it’s not by name, right? Did you look up her computer account ID?” Another pause.

  “Okay. But don’t call me at work. Call me here tomorrow night just like you did now. Make sure you look at every file, now. Okay? Okay. Thanks, Nick.” He snapped the phone shut. “He didn’t find shit. Maybe he’s too green for this after all. I wish there was somebody else I could ask.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing to find,” Jane said. “You have to admit it’s a long shot that Cindy would do something like that.”

  “I don’t know about that. This is a pretty big promotion, especially for her. I think she went all out for it.” He reached for the remote. “Nick will have something for me tomorrow. He half-assed it but now he knows I’m not kidding around. I lit a fire under his butt this time.”

  ~~~

  A lot happened the next morning with regard to Steve’s secret probe of the Regal computers, none of it being what he had hoped for. The first email he saw in his box after logging on was from Cindy Cary, the new Director of Programming Quality Control. He popped it open and the news wasn’t good.

  Steve,

  What in the world is this? What are you doing? If you have something to accuse me of please do it to my face. Did you get permission to have IT snooping around my account? We need to talk, and I plan to pass this on to Javier. I’ll come by.

  Cindy.

  Embedded in the email was a copy of the note that Nick the intern had sent to Steve the night before in which described what he’d done and summarized the results of his efforts. He studied the time stamps and addressing history and realized that they’d been modified so that it was impossible to tell who had sent what, and when. Since he knew he was the only recipient of that email, and he knew he himself hadn’t forwarded it to anybody, the only logical conclusion was that his secret weapon in the IT department wasn’t so secret after all. It appeared that Nick had double-crossed him, or at least betrayed his trust, by forwarding his report to Cindy as well as to Steve. The worst part of Cindy’s email was that as Cindy had mentioned, Javier Ramos had been copied. This was going to be bad.

  He started to type an angry email to Nick, but then deleted it. This was something that needed to be done in person, with no paper or electronic trail. The chair flew backwards as he jumped to his feet to go confront Nick. Everything stopped when he looked up and saw Cindy in the doorway.

  ~~~

  After making her online log entries Jane found herself with a few minutes of free time before she needed to get back to the hallways for her rounds. Since all she could think about was the journey up the expressway from the night before, she indulged herself by clicking on the Google Earth icon. She typed in the address from memory and watched the image zoom into North America, the east coast of the United States and finally the blotchy green spaces of Southern New Jersey. A few mouse clicks later she was looking from the perspective of a satellite at the brick mansion that she had secretly followed Manteo to. She could even see the shed next to the driveway that he’d moved his tools to. Surrounded by lush lawns and thick woods, it was as magnificent from space as it had appeared to be in the dusk.

  ~~~

  “You can’t do that!” Cindy said loudly. “You can’t just do stuff like this! Who said you could snoop around my account? You violated about ten SOPs and most of the code of conduct. Is this about my promotion? Of course it is!” She shook her head and spread her arms. “Have you lost your mind, Steve? What were you thinking?”

  “How did you get that email?” Steve yelled back at her. “That was private! Is that little rat working for you?”

  “That’s your problem,” she retorted. “This is a lot more serious than finding out how I got that email. But I outrank you now, don’t I? Maybe the kid’s smarter than you think.”

  “I know those programs worked!” Steve shouted. “You were the only one who was ever around them and then blammo, two thirds of them are fucked! What am I supposed to thin
k? The system fucked up but only wrecked my programs?”

  “Just come out and say it. I have to hear you say it.”

  He hesitated before answering, but not for long. “Okay, I will. I think you fucked up my programs,” he said firmly. “I think you waited as late as you could so there wasn’t any time for me to fix them. You wanted to make me look as bad as possible. Then you and that other girl swoop in and save the day. Because somehow, in ten thousand lines of code, you knew exactly what to fix. Nobody could have gone through all that code and gotten it working unless they knew where to look. And I’ll prove it. Make no mistake about it.”

  “You really have lost your mind. Steve, it’s me, Cindy. Hello!”

  “And it fucking worked! Your whole fucking plan worked! You stole my fucking job!” He’d lost count of the f-bombs he’d been dropping. As the last one was rolling off his tongue he noticed that Javier Ramos had appeared at Cindy’s shoulder just inside the doorway and had probably heard more than Steve would have wanted him to hear.

  ~~~

  I know where it is and I know what it looks like, but who lives there? She clicked into Google and typed the address in the box. Seconds later a few hits appeared. She heard footsteps. She wasn’t doing anything wrong but it wouldn’t be wise to be caught sitting at the computer when there was always something that needed doing. She quickly found a common denominator in the hits on the screen before clearing it. One name. Richard Creedmoor. But who is Richard Creedmoor and what does he have to do with Manteo?