by E. R. FALLON
They dragged me by my knees toward the pickup with its engine purring, tearing my pants in the process and exposing my skin to the dirty ground. Joyce let go of my hand and Albert hoisted me up into the truck’s front seats. I didn’t notice until then that my feet were raw and bleeding from running on the stony dirt road. Every inch of my body throbbed with pain, from first the running and then the beating and the dragging. They’d managed to debase me in ways I couldn’t have imagined.
Albert pushed me onto the seat closest to the door. Joyce took the handcuffs out of her pocket and swung them in her hand. “You’ve lost your freedom again, Peach. That’s too bad for you.” She put her head back and let out a peel of laughter so cold it sent shivers down my arms and legs.
Joyce roughly fixed the cuff around my wrist and put the other around the armrest on the door. She scowled down at me and then slapped me right across the face, across where I had those lines of cuts which burned fierce with pain. She made a move to hit me again but Albert stopped her.
He touched Joyce’s arm. “I think she’s learned her lesson.”
Joyce roughly wiped my face with one of the napkins from the truck stop and what little was left of the bottled water. She frowned at him.
“Don’t tell me she’s gotten to you, Albert. I always did think you were a big softie under all that hair and brawn. Don’t be fooled by this one’s nice face. She isn’t so pretty anymore, with those cuts she’s got all over her. She’s a murderer herself, no better than us. She’s already tried to escape twice, you can bet she’ll try it again. Maybe we should saw off her foot with that hacksaw that guy left in this truck. She could still fly a plane with just one foot.”
I swallowed and choked back a gasp. She wouldn’t really, would she? The fact that I didn’t know the answer to that question, terrified me. Because way down inside, way deep down inside myself, I felt it more than a bad joke and that Joyce could be capable of such a heinous act. I’d been wrong to sort of trust her more than Albert earlier on.
Much to my surprise, Albert chuckled a little. Joyce’s teasing seemed to have made him giddy. “You’re crazy, Joycee.” He shook his head. “But it’s not a bad idea.” He grinned at my shock. “Go get the saw,” he told her.
“What about the tire?” I asked, franticly trying to distract them.
I looked out the window as best I could, given that I was handcuffed with the cuffed arm twisted behind my back. I didn’t see the old tire or a new one.
“That man, that jogger, he had to have heard your gunshots,” I said. “The police will be here soon, and if you don’t finish changing the tire now, you won’t be able to leave and they’ll catch you.”
“I don’t have a tire iron to change it with,” Albert stated in a matter-of-fact manner. He had the driver’s side door open and stood next to it.
“Well, in that case, you can just—”
“Doesn’t matter,” he cut me off. “The tire’s fine. I was wrong about the noise. Must’ve been a pebble stuck in it or something, but there’s no damage, no need to change it. You’re out of luck, Emily Will.”
I couldn’t restrain my gasp.
At my side of the pickup truck Joyce stood on her toes and reached behind me into the car, into the tight space between the headrest and the rear window.
“The hacksaw’s back here,” she said. “I happen to notice it right after you shot the owner of this fancy truck.”
I didn’t know how Joyce knew saying that would upset me, but I flinched at the mention of the man’s death.
“Do you feel bad for him, feel bad for his family?” She dug around the space. “Don’t you, Peach?”
I didn’t nod. I didn’t shake my head. I didn’t move at all.
“I can tell you do,” she continued to goad me. “That poor guy, isn’t that right? No one asked me, but I’ll tell you what I think about the whole thing. I think that man had a nice house and a nice new pickup truck and a nice family. He had a nice life. Sure, he’s dead now, but at least he had a good go at it. I bet he had a nice childhood too. That’s a hell of a lot more than either I or Albert had. So, do I feel sorry for him? No, I don’t.”
I looked straight at her and spoke with a clear honesty I hadn’t experienced since returning home from the war. “You have a pretty twisted way of looking at life. I almost feel sorry for you.”
“I don’t want your pity, so don’t offer it.” Joyce hit me again, and this time Albert, who’d been watching us, didn’t intervene.
“There’s no hacksaw,” she finally said. “I tricked you.” She rubbed my face gently and I pulled away from her touch like an abused animal. “Poor Peach.” Yet her eyes were hollow and had lost even the faintest sparkle of kindness.
If in her twisted mind she expected me to show her gratitude or relief, it wasn’t going to happen. Albert got into the driver’s seat and Joyce climbed in next to me with the gun in her hand. She slammed the door shut.
I looked at the gun.
“I bet I know what you’re thinking: She can’t possibly have many more bullets in this gun.” Joyce smiled. “Wrong.” She reached into her pocket and threw a bullet at my face. It felt like a smooth stone. “We have plenty more.”
Seeming untroubled by what had happened, Albert commented on the great sound system. Then he pulled away and we were on the road once again. We drove in silence, with Joyce staring out the window but not daydreaming. I could tell because she still had the gun pointed at me. My wounds hadn’t been cleaned and I worried they’d get infected.
After a while Albert spoke.
“So, you were in the military,” he said to me.
I nodded. Every time I moved my arm my wrist rubbed against the handcuff’s cold metal and irritated my skin.
“So was I,” he said. “But I bet you already knew that.”
I couldn’t read Albert, and like Joyce, he ran warm and cold but had a more overall cruelness about him that initially I’d felt Joyce lacked, but I’d been wrong. I didn’t want to give away anything Joyce had told me in private, for fear of what she might do. It wasn’t as if a psycho like Albert and I would ever bond over anything.
“I suspected it, yeah,” I said.
“Army, Navy, Marines, or Air Force?”
“Huh?” I said.
“Take a guess. Where did I serve?”
I couldn’t tell whether he was being honest or if he was trying to play a trick on me.
“Why don’t you tell me?” I said. “I’m not going to guess.”
“No. Guess. This is the game I want to play.”
I held my hand out loosely from the cuff and gestured at the injuries on my face. “I don’t feel like playing.”
“Too bad. You have to.”
I caught Albert smirking to himself as he drove. He and Joyce didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Odd, given the situation. And now he wanted to play some sort of game with me? They didn’t seem at all worried about the jogger – or anybody – hearing the gunshots. I wasn’t in the mood and wanted to tell him to piss off, but given the power dynamic I couldn’t exactly do that.
“Fine, you win,” I said. “Army.”
Albert smiled as he shook his head. “Wrong. I’m a Navy man.”
His answer surprised me only because of the bomb Joyce said he’d made.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
He wouldn’t say.
“Maybe you should’ve stolen a boat instead,” I muttered.
“Nah. The waters are too heavily patrolled.”
“You worked with explosives?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah, small explosives, on ships.”
I didn’t think he’d lied. “Where did you serve?”
“Iraq. The Gulf War. I can’t tell you more, but the Navy was my way of getting out of a shit existence.”
“For me too, the Air Force was.”
Over the past few days I never would have imagined myself bonding with Albert, who didn’t seem like a guy you�
��d call “Al”. But I wasn’t a fool and I still didn’t trust either him or Joyce. Just because we’d both been in the military that didn’t mean we were anything alike. We were nothing alike.
And he reminded me we weren’t. “It’s nice we’re talking about this. It’s nice we have something to talk about. But I’m never going to be your friend. We’re never going to be friends.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Albert.”
I asked them for water. Joyce thrust what was left of a bottle in my face. I uncapped the water, poured a small amount onto my sleeve and started to use it to clean my face, especially my lips, which were caked with dried blood. I was careful not to accidentally rub what I thought was the animal crap into my cuts. Joyce stopped me and took back the water bottle before I even had sip.
“You’re wasting it preening yourself. Didn’t you ever get dirty in the military? Even if we wanted to stop and get some more water, there’s nothing around here.”
“I wasn’t going to use a lot. I’m just trying to make sure my wounds don’t get infected.”
“Bullshit. You’re not that hurt.”
“Can I have a drink?” My throat felt so parched I could barely croak out the words. Running from the truck and the depletion my injuries caused my body made me thirsty. “One drink?”
“Nah. Save it for before we go on the plane. You’ll need it then for energy to fly us.”
From the way she spoke I reckoned we were almost at the airport they had in mind. Maybe. Or maybe she was just stringing me along.
“What about food?” I asked. “I won’t be able to function properly without some. Do you have a piece of fruit or something I could have?” The idea of biting into a juicy piece of fruit made my mouth moist. I was so hungry even the thought of food had me drooling.
“No. Why would you think we might have that?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m delirious?” And maybe I was.
Joyce smiled and for a moment I thought she’d give me something to eat. Then she said, “You’ll have to wait for Cuba for that because there’s nothing left. But you’ll get some water before you fly us.”
“I need water to take my medication.”
“You’ve been swallowing your pills just fine without it.”
“It’s different now. My lip’s swollen from your hitting me. I won’t be able to swallow normally. I’m going to need water to help get my pill down.”
Joyce forced her hand into my pocket and grabbed my pill jar. She rolled down the window and started to throw the jar outside onto the road from the speeding truck. The jar disappeared out of my view and it looked like she’d dropped them.
“My God, how could you?” I shouted.
Joyce laughed and showed me the pill jar. “A little magic trick, that’s all, Peach.”
Sick asshole. The more they threatened to take away from me, the more I saw the control they had over me, and the more they tried to beat me down, not just physically but emotionally. I wouldn’t let them win.
Joyce tossed the pill jar to me and I struggled to put it back in my pocket with the handcuffs on. Joyce crossed her arms and watched me with amusement. Even Albert peeked and chuckled at me. But I didn’t give up. I didn’t give up until I’d tucked the jar away. I couldn’t lose my pills. Not. ever. I couldn’t. My life depended on them.
“Nobody can help you now,” Joyce said.
But I could help myself. That was a saying Peter liked to use. If I could be a pessimist at times, then Peter was the optimist in our relationship. Sometimes his sayings drove me crazy. Not literally, of course. I already was crazy. I certainly didn’t need anyone to drive me crazy. He used to say things like, “A good deed goes a long way”, and I used to counter it with, “No good deed goes unpunished.” A good deed like letting a man inside your house to use your phone and then stabbing him to death? I didn’t remember the man asking to use my phone like Joyce and Albert said he had, but the more I thought about it, the more I doubted myself.
Were Joyce and her brother even real? The wife of the man Albert shot in the driveway hadn’t looked at either him or Joyce. She’d only looked at me. Like she hadn’t seen them. Then that jogger had ignored my pleas as if Joyce and Albert weren’t inside the truck chasing me down. Did I need a higher dose of meds? I had missed a dose or two on the trip. My eyelids fluttered and I struggled to stay awake.
I took my pill without water.
“See, you didn’t need no water,” Joyce chuckled.
We kept driving and the hours passed. I must have fallen asleep because I awoke from a dream where I had been in bed with Peter at night, telling one another all about our days, as we often did before making love, to the sight of Joyce watching me sleep. I had felt them stop a few hours ago to switch places so Joyce could drive and Albert could rest. And then vice versa a few more hours later. How long had she been staring at me? Had she heard me call Peter’s name in my sleep as I remembered doing?
I was lying when I said I hadn’t loved Peter. I didn’t have any family so he had been like my family. But that was the past. And as much as it hurt to admit to myself, I knew I’d never see him again. What would Peter think of me if he saw me now? Beaten and bloodied but not defeated, and on the run with two murdering robbers because I was a murderer too? I imagined he’d feel sorry for me but he’d never say that out loud because he knew how much pride I had.
Then I thought of Sally’s death and wanted to cry, but I couldn’t let them see me that way.
Chapter Eight
Joyce watched Emily suffering in her handcuffs, without having the water or food she’d asked for provided to her. Soon they would be getting close to the place where the private and mostly smaller airplanes were stored by people with lots of money, where she and Albert would find one to take them to Cuba, with Emily as their pilot.
Albert had mentioned something about flying a plane once, but Joyce thought he was bullshiting her and sensed they needed Emily. Sometimes Albert lied so that people would think he was more exciting than he really was.
Joyce wanted to like Emily, and she wanted Emily to like her. But she kept thinking how, more and more, Emily reminded her of that woman who’d worked at the auction and who’d put up a fight. They were both warrior-types. If only that woman at the auction hadn’t put up a fight, then Joyce wouldn’t have had to kill her. Albert had killed the man for the same reason, he’d fought back.
She and Albert had planned the robbery out well, with her being the brains behind most of it, but they hadn’t planned on killing the two workers. They’d robbed the auction when it was finished and the money was being transported back to wherever they took it late at night. It had been the first, and she wanted it to be the last, crime she and Albert did together.
It had been Albert’s idea for them to wear the bandanas. Joyce had wanted them to wear masks that covered their entire faces but he had griped he wouldn’t be able to breathe so she’d given in to his whining and let him win that round.
After all, Albert had experience committing other crimes, but not Joyce. Although Joyce thought she made a better criminal than her younger brother. The thing with the masks? Sure, Albert looked menacing but she felt he lacked an acuity she herself had. He made an okay accomplice, but she was the real leader. At least that’s how she saw herself. And how did Albert see himself? She imagined he felt he was the leader, and that made her smile a little.
She didn’t know the full extent of Albert’s crimes or much of his background as an adult in general. They were recently reunited after years of separation – her long-lost brother.
She and Albert had pushed her small car into a thawed farm pond on a large secluded piece of property hours after escaping from the auction house and then went to Emily’s place farther down the road on foot. She knew when the cops found the car they’d know it was her car since it was still registered to her ex-husband, but he’d let her keep it. She had never gotten around to changing the registration.
Joyce had
planned to flee the country with her share of the auction money and make Emily her pilot regardless of having committed those murders, and Albert had gone along with her by default. They hadn’t planned the murders, but like a lot of things in their lives, they had just happened and then they had to be dealt with.
It had taken Joyce years to reconnect with her little brother Albert and she wasn’t planning on losing him anytime soon. He still called her ‘Joycee’ like he had done when they were young children. It touched her.
They’d been separated when she was ten and he was eight, after their father died and their mother committed suicide. They’d been passed around to a few distant relatives who stole and spent the money their parents had left them, and who neglected them in various horrible ways, before entering separate orphanages in their early teens. Joyce had escaped at seventeen, and it had taken her twenty years to find her brother. Neither of them drank alcohol because their mother had been a drunk, although Albert barely seemed to have any memories of her. Joyce remembered very well.
Once they found each other, Joyce promised her baby brother they would have the life they should have had all along. That’s what they needed the robbery money for, what must have been a couple million dollars, to start a better life, and the plan had gone perfectly well until those two auction employees had decided to resist and one even had a gun on him, something they hadn’t thought possible beforehand. That was just their luck, Joyce, figured, to form the perfect plan and then have someone ruin it for them.
Joyce had wanted to work at that doctor’s office in the first place to take part in helping people, because she felt that no one had helped her or her brother. Up until she was fired, her job had been one of the few things in her life that she was good at. Then some jerk had to go and take it away, like those cruel relatives had taken her and Albert’s money, and then how the government had taken Albert away from her because they had called her – what was it? – “too young and unfit to be his guardian”? It figured. Some jerk was always getting in the way of her and Albert finding happiness.