by T. K. Madrid
“Probably.”
“What’s next,” he said, flexing now, confident he was gaining the upper hand. “Tie me up with curtains and stuff a gag in my mouth?”
“No,” she said.
She’d already thought that out.
She tossed him the key to the green Ford Taurus.
“You’re coming with me.”
He looked at the key, which had landed on the desk and looked to her, confused, expectant.
“You’re kidnapping me and I’m driving?”
“No, we’re taking separate cars. You’re taking your father’s car and I’m in the cruiser. You’re going to lead. I’m going to tap the horn, flash lights, then signal, and you’ll follow the direction of the signal.”
She guessed what he was thinking.
“And if you abandon me, make a run for it, you’ll lose me and I’ll lose you. But you’ll burn up time.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“I’ll take you to your father.”
The boy remained defiant.
“I’ll wait for him, thanks. And for mom. She’ll be here any second and maybe you can take her instead. And maybe she’ll bring Wilcox.”
He said Wilcox the way someone might say asshole.
Like Ruggles, Sebastian, he did not have to die.
“You have to come with me. You can’t stay here. I can’t guarantee your safety if you stay.”
She was dancing around it, trying to scare him.
It didn’t work.
“Nice try.”
Sam, staring at him, spoke forcefully.
“Your father is dead.”
The boy’s mouth clamped tight.
“I will take you to him.”
She put her gun in her pocket and went to him, close enough for to her to detect a trace of sweat at the top of his hairline.
She picked up the laptop.
“Or you can stay. It’s up to you.”
He was solemn.
“How do you know?”
“Wilcox murdered him in my house. I put him where he would be safe, to where no one could harm him or me or anyone else.”
“Who does something like that?”
“Murder?”
“Who moves a body to save it?”
“You have to understand – I needed time. If I had left him, I’d probably be hanging from a pipe in the Foursquare holding tank, another coroner ruled suicide.”
“I’m supposed to believe that.”
“Why would I come to your house in a stolen cruiser and say all this, do all this?”
“Because you’re out of your mind.”
“Then as I leave you can shoot me and claim self-defense, home-invasion, that a crazy woman attacked you…there’s a bullet hole in the wall. No one will doubt you. You said your name is Tyler?”
He said nothing.
To hell with the cars. To hell with it all.
“Call the police as soon as I leave, Tyler. I’m headed north, to my house in Vernon Castle, to your father. If I don’t make it, you’ll find him there. He’s in the barn, in a horse trough.”
“You bitch…”
“He’s safe there.”
She turned from him.
She walked away
She felt safe as she strapped into the cruiser. She put the computer on the passenger seat, adjusted the radio volume and pulled out of the driveway in reverse faster than she should have, the car shifting slightly in the thickening snow but gaining its traction as she corrected it.
She headed north on the road she could not spell and within a half-mile headlights came up behind her at a speed she thought was going to lead to a collision.
Her father said that when you drove to escape you ignored what was behind you.
She flipped the rearview mirror up.
A few seconds later, a white Ford Bronco 4 x 4 blew by her, emergency lights flashing.
The boy knew how to drive.
(14) The Lemonade Stand
The radio was quiet; she assumed her pursuers were on a different frequency. As she drove, she reached under the dash and tore at wires leading to the radio but stopped when the sirens erupted once: something had shorted.
After two miles, she flashed her lights and slowed. The boy was six car lengths ahead of her and was using his rearview; he stopped and waited. There was no other traffic. She got out of her car.
It was gray and almost dark despite sunset being an hour away. She wanted to make it home before then. She had to fortify her position.
He brandished a gun; she left hers in her pocket.
“Who taught you to drive?”
“What’s up?”
“We need to ride together. I’ve changed my mind about this beast. We’ll take yours.”
“Why?”
It was then she noticed that like his father he wasn’t wearing a coat. She also realized he had blue eyes; the grayness of the world and his pallor accentuated them, made them seem impossibly blue.
“I’m betting they can locate this thing. GPS.”
“Of course,” he said.
Young men know everything.
“There’s a road ahead, we turn right, east to the 365. I can run it into an abutment. Make it look like I spun out.”
“Boy you are something, lady.”
“Watch and learn, Tyler. Let’s go.”
“Lead the way, Magellan.”
She smiled. Well, he did know something.
He did not smile, but he got into the Bronco and allowed her to pass. They drove for a few more minutes. She made a hairpin turn on the road to the freeway. He missed it and caught up to her.
They came to an off and on ramp, on and off ramps on either side. She slowed. Twenty miles an hour and airbags. It would look perfect. It was an easy lie.
She hit the bridge, tapping the brakes, going no more than 15, destroying the front end of the car, sparking the airbags, effectively killing the car.
She laughed, swore to herself as it seemed the thing to do. She sensed nothing broken or bloody. But she’d forgotten to secure the laptop, and it was now on the passenger floor, open. She closed it; she would worry about it later.
She got out of the car and found herself alone.
He’d abandoned her.
She was far from home, far from where she’d been forty-eight hours ago. It was as if she’d crash-landed on a strange, hostile planet: the natives were definitely not friendly.
Overhead, a car zipped by. A wet road, melting snow, ice and slush.
It was time to make lemonade.
It was when she began to walk that she realized her left foot tingled and dragged. It would not totally obey her thoughts. It was broken or fractured; it wasn’t numb from snow, cold, and ice.
She purposely stepped into a snow bank on the side of the freeway entrance. One footprint, one dumb clue, she hoped, that would make them think she decided to hitchhike to Foursquare. She then walked under the bridge and walked up the side of the road, to the opposite exit ramp, and put herself into position, intending to hitchhike north.
Head north. Canada. Michigan. Anywhere.
Run. There’s nothing to hold onto.
One night her and her parents were watching The Bourne Identity. Toward the end of the movie, her father had burst out laughing. In the movies, you crashed a car, limped away, and ended up killing men as you flew down the center of a stairwell, clutching a dead man.
“In real life they catch you, kill you, and toss your body in a ditch and you never happened.” He made one of his jokes. “You were never Bourne.”
One car. Two cars. Three Cars.
And then a Ford Bronco, rattling, wobbling, it’s bumper ripped off, its undercarriage exposed, came at her, horn blaring, and veered off the freeway, brakes engaged, a crazy stunt at a speed she couldn’t even guess at.
She laughed despite herself, despite the moment, despite the ridiculousness of what she was seeing, relieved and happy.
The Calva
ry, the man in shining armor on the white mechanical horse, the boy named Tyler, came to a stop halfway down the exit.
She hobbled toward him.
He got out.
She was moving as fast as she could but not fast enough.
He yelled.
“Let’s go!”
It was the coolest thing she’d ever heard.
(15) A Change of Heart
“Are you nuts? You ran into the bridge!”
Limping, laughing, she didn’t care he had a gun in his hand. The truck would be warm.
“You ran into it!”
She smiled, she couldn’t help it; he was so beautiful and so unintentionally funny.
“I sure did.”
“What the hell is wrong with you? You crazy woman! You idiot!”
“Why didn’t you wait?”
He let his arm fall, bringing the weapon to his side.
“I thought you were going to park it!”
She limped closer.
“I said I was going to hit it.”
“No you didn’t!”
It was good to argue, good to talk.
“I said I was going to hit the abutment.”
“I thought you meant you were going to run it off the road!”
“You were wrong,” she said, walking to the passenger door.
He raised his gun, pointed it to her.
“Give me your shooter.”
Her shoulders sagged.
“Are you kidding?”
He held up his left hand, palm open.
“Whatever,” she said and opened the door and got in.
He was flummoxed. He opened his door and before he sat down saw she had placed her gun on his seat. He put it in the waist of his pants, attempted to sit, which wasn’t practical, and then placed it on the dashboard. He got in the truck and looked at the gun and then to her. He placed it in the door compartment.
“Comfortable?”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Nice language.”
He turned onto the road below the freeway and they traveled west, toward her home in Vernon Castle. Sam realized it would be dark by the time they got there.
She looked at her foot, her ankle, which was swelling, and uttered her favorite expletive.
“For god’s sakes…”
“What?”
“I think I broke my foot.”
Tyler said nothing.
“Thank you for coming back.”
He didn’t respond.
She was emphatic.
“Really.”
He nodded.
“I came back for dad.”
His eyes were red and glazed and she understood. She imagined she looked like this when the FBI men came to her door to tell her of her parent’s deaths.
“Okay…”
After a few seconds he said, “You say ‘okay’ a lot.”
“I know.”
The car rattled.
“At least you didn’t say okay.”
They were like a couple on a long trip, arguing whether or not to ask for directions.
“You were gone for a while. I thought you’d abandoned me. What happened?”
She looked at his profile.
“I rolled onto the freeway with a semi on my ass. Plus I needed to think.”
“Okay…”
“I realized that even if I don’t know you, you were on his computer, so he knows you in a way.”
For a few moments, there was only the frozen land of open white fields and the sound of tires.
“What happened to your truck?”
“There isn’t another off ramp for maybe six, seven miles and I thought if you were hurt and…I couldn’t just leave you there, okay? I was scared but I knew it wasn’t right. I cut across the median, tore up the front a little.”
“So you believe me?”
“I think you’re a lying sack of shit and I’m only here because I don’t let people down, especially girls, and maybe it’s not smart but that is what I thought.”
“Okay,” she said.
Then, reluctantly it seemed to her, he said one more thing.
“I had a change of heart.”
She shared two words.
“Thank you.”
“But just we’re clear about this, if you did kill my dad I want to be the one to kill you.”
Sam inhaled and exhaled.
“Fair enough.”
(16) Two Lost Sheep
They arrived just after the man in the red Ford with the massive tires reversed his truck behind the house in a vain attempt to hide. There were the tire tracks in fresh snow: you could’ve seen them from space.
Sam hadn’t alerted Tyler to the address, but she guessed he knew that by the way she peered past him into the darkness.
But she didn’t catch the way he was looking at the house.
“I don’t believe it,” the boy said.
“What’s that?"
“This is where we bought this.”
Now she was flummoxed.
“This? This truck?”
“You look like your mother. I remember her more than your dad.” He looked at her. “She was beautiful.”
“They were each handsome.”
“Where are they? Your parents?”
“Murdered. At that Safeway shooting last November.”
The vehicle continued down the empty road.
“You shitting me?”
“No,” she said. “I am not.”
He understood.
“I’m afraid I’ve mislead you, Tyler. You have to leave. Drive a mile up the road and let me out.”
He stared into the dark, headlights the only source of light as the house faded from view.
“I can’t leave you out here.”
“Sure you can. It happens all the time. People quarrel and are abandoned. I’ll need my gun.”
They were going maybe thirty miles an hour, slower than the speed limit, as fast as conditions allowed.
“I’m not leaving dad.”
“Please, listen…”
He extinguished the lights and put the car in neutral.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t want the man in the red truck to know we’re slowing. I hit the brakes out here, in all this snow, and it’ll light up the country like a meteor.”
Samantha thought this was clever.
“How would you know something like that?”
“I used to know a girl that lives out here.”
The truck rolled to a stop. Snow swirled around them.
“We need a better plan than to have you walk up on that place and say – what were you going to do?”
“Ring the bell. Trick or treat.”
He laughed.
“Jesus, you are crazy.”
“I can make it. I need my gun.”
Her knight in the shining Bronco was undeterred.
“I don’t like or trust Wilcox.”
“I liked him for about two hours.”
He shifted into Drive and they rolled forward for another half-mile.
“The first part of what you said. That makes sense. But I’ve got to ring the doorbell.”
“You can’t,” she said.
She could see he was thinking, making estimates, rolling over scenarios just as she was.
“He didn’t see us,” she said. “He couldn’t have. He was rolling.”
“I agree, but you’re hurt and you’re not thinking like I am. You’re all jittery and cold, lady. What’s your name again? Moore?”
“Moretti. Samantha.”
He quickly shifted to the familiar, to a name only her parents and intimate friends used.
“Sammy, you ever go hunting?”
She hadn’t.
“And you didn’t kill my dad, but your parents; they were in that mess last year?”
“Yes.”
“To both questions?”
“Yes, to both.”
She didn’t mind the
interrogation. He was thinking. She wanted his advice. But what he said next startled her.
“So you’ve never killed anything?”
She felt like she’d been punched.
“No.”
“Not even a rabbit?”
She spoke truthfully.
“No.”
“But you think you’re going to limp and crawl a mile or so in this god awful shit and shoot a human? Put a bullet in his head or gut and maybe kill said human. That about right?”
“Yes.”
The truck picked up and the lights came on.
“You’ve got balls, Sammy. But you haven’t thought it out much so I’m going to help you.”
She was thinking this boy might shoot her, that she would be shot by the man in the red Ford, and that her last kiss before she died was from a man that wanted her dead.
“Where am I going wrong?”
“You’re making false assumptions and mistakes left and right. I mean, I don’t know how you got this far what with stealing and crashing a cop car – showing up at my place with that bullshit story. You’re assuming there’s one guy in that house. We don’t know how many people are in it or if there’s another car there, tucked away. Besides, if you’re smart, when you go hunting you go with someone so if you get hurt he can help you or get help. And you sure as shit can’t hobble in there with that peashooter – you need a real gun.”
The car came to a halt in the road, shifting into idle one more time.
“It’s dark,” she said. “We’re in no rush. Let them settle in, do what they want. They’re expecting me but not us, so we have the element of surprise. Let’s breathe for a minute, think this out…”
“Exactly. Get what you want. Anything you want. Just leave me the big one, the AK.”
She peered into the darkness and saw the outline of a dozen rifles and handguns.
“That’s a lot of firepower…”
“I didn’t know which one I was going to kill you with after you took me to dad.”
Her mouth was dry. The last thing she’d drank, if you could call it a drink, was a mouthful of vodka.
“What’d you decide?”
“While we were driving, and when I ran from you, I tried calling mom like fifty times. She didn’t answer. She always answers, never lets you go to voicemail. She hates voicemail.” He paused. The next words were a painful whisper. “Do you think she’s okay?”
Sam let out another long breath before she answered.