White Lies

by Jeremy Bates

  “I really don’t feel comfortable with you driving the truck,” Jack said.

  “There’s nothing to do about it. I can’t drive manual.”

  “I know. I know.” He handed her the keys. They chimed as they switched hands. “Stay right behind me until I pull over. Then pull over in front of me. Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Stay calm. And don’t touch anything aside from the steering wheel and the ignition key.”

  Katrina climbed in the truck. Jack got in the Porsche. With a roar and a purr, the two vehicles revved to life. The headlights seared holes through the darkness. Dirt crunched beneath the rubber tires as they swung onto the narrow road. Zach ducked as the two sets of headlights swept past him. Then they were gone, and it was quiet once more. Zach remained right where he was, flabbergasted.

  Katrina was helping that jackass!

  A fresh swarm of jealousy buzzed through him, stinging his pride, because he knew she would never risk herself, her freedom, for him. Nevertheless, he stuffed those feelings aside and focused on what was important. The murder. He would have to report it now, wouldn’t he? He’d waited to see how it played out, and it had played out horribly. He had no qualms about ratting Jack out. But that meant he’d have to rat Katrina out as well, explain how she’d helped him get rid of the body. Could he do that? Because this wasn’t a game anymore. This wasn’t busting her for a lie she told. This was busting her over accessory to murder.

  But what other option did he have?

  He took out his phone and dialed 9-1-1.

  Chapter 18

  Katrina remained a few car lengths behind Jack’s Porsche as they made their way west on Highway 2 toward Skykomish. They were passing along the stretch of road where she’d picked Zach up eight days before, and a number of taunting questions popped into her head. What if she’d left Seattle Friday afternoon rather than Friday night? What if she’d taken a different route, following I-90 until Highway 97 and going north to Leavenworth from there? Or what if she’d simply never stopped for Zach? All those parallel-world scenarios inevitably led to the same conclusion: she would not have tipped the first domino. She would not have lied to Zach about where she lived. He would not have mentioned the make-believe cabin in front of everybody at Ducks & Drakes. There would have been no sign-up sheet, and she would not have rented the cabin to justify what never should have had to be justified in the first place. Consequently, Jack would not have been attacked by Charlie, and he would not have done what he had done. In fact, in that rose-colored reality, Katrina would probably be back at her bungalow with Crystal, maybe cooking together, or maybe watching a movie with the lights dimmed and a bowlful of popcorn and talking about sister stuff.

  In the distance the lights of a small town came into view. The taillights of the Porsche flashed red. Katrina slowed also. The highway cut straight through the center of the town. They passed kids on their skateboards loitering out front of a convenience store, a family strolling down the sidewalk, and an old man with a long beard sitting on the bench out front of the post office, not doing much of anything. The normalness of it all made Katrina realize just how nice normal was. In contrast, she was all too aware she was driving a stolen pickup truck with the owner’s bloody corpse sprawled out in the flatbed under a sheet. The last time she’d felt this depressed, this lost and confused, had been after the doctors had told her and Shawn that Shawn had less than six months to live.

  Death, she realized grimly, made you pay attention to living.

  They emerged on the other side of the town and sped up once more. Katrina hardened her resolve. She would get through this. Jack was right. They could make Charlie’s death look like a car accident. The police would have no reason to suspect foul play. Car accidents happened all the time. They would wake up tomorrow morning and read about it in the local paper: old man falls asleep behind wheel and dies in fatal crash. The sun would set and rise and life would go on. Come Monday morning she would be back at Cascade High School, plowing through her daily routine.

  It would be over.

  But then what would happen between her and Jack? Jack was a renegade. On the lam. One of society’s ghosts. Could she be with someone like that? Never knowing if his past was going to catch up with him? Always wondering if today was going to be the day he wasn’t there when she got home?

  Katrina shook her head. She was being a hypocrite.

  After all, she was now a felon too.

  Roughly twenty minutes later they were approaching the outskirts of Skykomish. Jack swung to the shoulder and watched as Katrina rolled past him, stopping ten feet or so ahead, as they’d discussed. He hopped out of the Porsche and met her as she got out of the truck. Crickets chirruped from the cheatgrass and coyote willow that lined the road, creating a wall of sound. Other than that, the night was silent. “We have to be quick,” he told her, throwing the sheet off Charlie. He lifted the old man out of the flatbed, carried him around to the truck’s driver’s side door, and shoved him in behind the wheel. He was still flippety-floppety. Rigor wouldn’t set in for at least another hour.

  “Why are you putting on his seat belt?” Katrina asked.

  “Because I don’t want him to fly through the windshield.”

  “But that would be good, wouldn’t it? It would explain the blood on his face.”

  “Corpses don’t bleed,” he told her. “He would have a bunch of fresh, bloodless cuts all over his face. The coroner would know he’d been dead before the crash. And dead men don’t drive trucks.”

  Jack noticed Katrina blanch at what he was saying. Likely wondering if she hadn’t thought of that, then what else had she failed to think about? He hoped she wasn’t going to crack under pressure.

  “So how do you explain the blood?” she asked.

  “I know what I’m doing here,” he snapped. There was no time for how-to-fake-an-accident 101. Not now. Someone could drive past any minute. “Go wait in the Porsche. I’ll be done here in a minute.”

  She left, looking relieved to be going. He reached inside the cab and twisted the key in the ignition. The engine turned over. He went to the side of the road and kicked around in the grass until he found a large stone. He returned to the truck, put the transmission in neutral, and set the stone on the gas pedal. The tachometer needle shot up to 4,000 rpms. He counted to three, then shoved the gearstick into drive, jumping clear as the truck lurched forward. The truck roared down the road in a straight line, picking up speed. It angled to the left, crossed the broken yellow line, then reached the far shoulder, where it shot off the road and collided head-on with a black cottonwood tree. The crash sounded oddly quiet.

  Jack ran back to the Porsche, got behind the wheel, and tipped Katrina an A-OK nod. He drove to the destroyed truck, careful not to spin his tires and leave any kind of skid marks on the macadam.

  “Was it supposed to do that?” she asked. “Go to the left?”

  “Doesn’t matter. If Charlie had fallen asleep, or swerved to avoid an animal, then he could just as easily have gone either way, left or right.” He stopped parallel to the truck. “I have to check it out. Keep an eye out for cars. You see any lights coming, you honk the horn.”

  Jack waded through the cheatgrass to the truck. One headlight had blown, while the other one shone a beam of light into the forest. The smoking engine was partly obscured by a patch of prickly phlox, but he could see enough of it to know it had taken a good licking. He opened the door and examined the interior of the cab. Charlie’s head was slumped limply against his chest. His arms hung at his sides. His wrinkled and bloodied face was turned toward Jack, his mouth open, and he almost appeared to be laughing, as if he’d died while thinking about one last crude joke.

  Remembering the old man’s foulness eliminated any pity Jack might have felt for him now. He retrieved the rock from the foot well, turned his head away to protect his eyes, then hurled it upward against the windshield, hard, just above the steering wheel. The glass spider-webbed arou
nd the point of impact. Satisfied, he lobbed the rock away into the trees. Next he wiped down the steering wheel with his shirt, took Charlie’s hands, and pressed them on the wheel at the ten and two positions. He believed what he’d told Katrina when he said the police would have no reason to be suspicious of a car accident. But it was better to be safe than sorry. If an investigator took fingerprints and found none on the steering wheel, he would be scratching his head for a little but would eventually figure it out. Lastly Jack undid Charlie’s seat belt and shoved him forward so his head was up between the top of the dashboard and the windshield. He studied his handiwork. An auspicious feeling he’d overlooked something nagged at him. But on the drive here he’d gone over the plan from every angle, and he knew the unease had to be paranoia. Besides, he had to move.

  He returned to the Porsche, slipped behind the wheel, and pulled a U-turn so they were now traveling back toward the direction of Charlie’s cabin and Leavenworth. Beside him Katrina was ashen-faced, her arms folded across her chest. She was looking straight ahead. Eventually she said, “Where do we tell everyone we were?”

  Jack shrugged. “Maybe no one will have noticed we were gone.”

  “By the time we get back it will be almost eleven. The bus will be waiting to leave. Surely people will be wondering where we are.”

  “I doubt they’ll notice my car is gone.”

  “So?”

  “So we tell them we walked up to the point. Let them fill in the rest.”

  She didn’t say anything more.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked her.

  “What do you think, Jack?”

  “I mean, right now.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Tell me.”

  “Nothing.”

  Jack didn’t press her. She’d been through a lot. One hell of a lot. And considering the risk that had been involved—that was still involved, at least until they saw how tomorrow unfolded—she was so far handling herself admirably. He didn’t know another woman quite like her, and he felt more attracted to her than ever. He reached over and squeezed her thigh reassuringly. He felt her flinch slightly. He let go. Time, he thought. That was all she needed. A little more time.

  He shifted into fifth. He was eager to get back to the cabin and thus tempted to speed. But the last thing he wanted was to be written up for speeding, an indisputable record he and Katrina had been near the scene of the crime. He kept up a steady sixty-five miles an hour.

  “It’s just another lie,” Katrina said quietly as they were passing a rest area.

  He glanced at her. “What is?”

  “Telling people we were in the bushes making out.”

  “Come on, Katrina. In light of the big picture, who cares about that?”

  “Don’t you see?” she said, and her voice was hard. Cold. “It was a stupid white lie that got me into this whole mess. It led to another lie, and another. And look what’s happened!”

  “It’s the last one.”

  “No, it isn’t. There’s no last one. I know that now. This will follow us around forever.”

  “It will be all right,” he said. “Have faith. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Shit!” Jack said, slamming on the brakes. The car fish tailed as it skidded to a stop.

  Katrina, who had been staring out the side window, snapped her head forward, wondering whether in some cruel twist of irony they’d hit an animal, just as Charlie was supposed to have done. But there had been no impact. Nothing lay sprawled on the road in front of them.

  “What happened?” she demanded.

  He didn’t reply.

  “Jack? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “I knew I had forgotten something.”

  “Know what?” she said, working herself into a panic. “What are you talking about?”

  “You stupid, stupid son of a bitch,” he mumbled to himself.

  “Jack! You’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”

  He looked at her, as if just registering she was sitting beside him. “The blood,” he said, shaking his head. “I forgot about the blood.”

  “What blood?”

  “The blood all over Charlie’s goddamn face.”

  “What about it? You said you knew what you were doing.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she nonetheless felt as though his supposedly unsinkable plan was springing a gaping leak.

  “Back at the truck I smashed the windshield, to make it look like Charlie hit his head, causing the blood. It didn’t matter if it was dry, because it would be a while before the cops reached there anyway. But I forgot about the other blood.”

  “What other blood?”

  “The blood splatter—the blood that was all over my cardigan. Because if he really collided with the windshield, then the blood from his wounds should also be splattered around inside the cab.”

  Katrina was silent as she let this new revelation sink in. “Is that really a big deal?”

  “Think about it, Katrina. There’s a dead man back there in that truck, his face a sheet of blood, which magically didn’t get on anything else. Yes, it’s a big deal. A big fucking deal. Even these hick cops aren’t going to miss that.”

  Springing a leak? she thought, and she felt a crazy laugh bubble up her throat. It seems we’ve just hit a goddamn iceberg, Captain.

  “So what does this mean?” she said. “What do we do? What can we do—?”

  “We have to go back.”

  “Absolutely not, Jack! We’ve been lucky this far. It’s not going to last.”

  “No cars have come toward us yet. Maybe none have come behind us either.”

  “If we go back, we’re going to get caught.” She said that as a statement.

  “Dammit, Katrina. Not now.”

  She felt what little there was left of her self-possession slipping, and she thought she knew how someone standing in the path of a tsunami felt. Hopeless. Like there was nothing you could do to prevent the oncoming disaster.

  “We can’t go back,” she insisted stubbornly.

  “What do you suggest then?” he demanded.

  “I don’t know. God, I don’t know.”

  “If someone has stopped, then we keep driving. That’s it.”

  “And if no one has stopped, what do we do?” she challenged. “Slit our wrists and spray the cab with our own blood?”

  “Burn it.”

  “The truck?” she said incredulously.

  “What else?”

  “I don’t know about you, Jack, but I’ve never heard of a car exploding into a ball of flames because of a collision. Maybe in the movies, if one happens to careen off a cliff. But not running into a tree.”

  “I’m not talking about a big explosion. Just a fire.”

  “You can’t just set the seats on fire with your Zippo. Investigators can tell where a fire starts.”

  “That’s why we make it look like an engine fire. Leaking fluids, spilled oil, short circuits, faulty carburetors, catalytic converters— these all start engine fires. And the odds skyrocket during an accident. Usually if a fire breaks out, people turn off the engine and call for help and stop the fire before it gets out of control. That’s why you don’t hear about it much. But if a fire started, and no one knew about it, and it was allowed to burn, enough heat generated, well, there’d be nothing left but a metal skeleton sitting on melted tires.”

  “And if someone comes by and puts it out?”

  “How many people do you know who drive around with fire extinguishers in their cars? Rig drivers, maybe. But it wouldn’t matter. We just need enough of a fire to tamper with the evidence. That way, even if the cops get suspicious, nothing short of a confession or an eyewitness could convict us.”

  Apparently the decision was made, because Jack wheeled the car around and sped back the way they’d come. He pushed the speedometer up over ninety miles an hour. It was the first time she felt the Porsche breaking a sweat. The engine whined like a torpedo and the trees outside flashed pa
st in one continuous blur. It was also the first time she’d seen Jack break a sweat. He wasn’t sweating, per se. But he was sitting straight, both hands on the wheels, staring straight ahead, intense, like a man on a mission. That should have been a comforting sight—Jack in control, Jack determined to make everything right—but in truth it freaked her out. Because up until this point, he had been as cool as a cucumber—snappish sometimes, yes—but in general treating the whole situation like someone who knew exactly what he was doing and couldn’t do wrong. Seeing him if not nervous then at least concerned was like seeing your pilot searching for a parachute in rough turbulence.

  During the suspense-laden trip back to the scene of the accident, her mind began exploring what would happen if they were caught. Funny enough—or more appropriately, narcissistically enough—it wasn’t the jail time she would serve that bothered her the most. It was what everyone she knew would think of her. Old friends back in Seattle. Relatives. Crystal. Even the students she used to teach, and the ones she was just getting to know now— kids who looked up to her as a role model. For the first time since her parents’ death, she was glad they were not around. She could not bear them to witness her humiliation and disgrace. Eventually, though, she did begin to wonder about jail time. What was the sentence for covering up a murder? Or, as the lawyers would put it, conspiracy to obstruct justice. Five years in a state prison? Eight? She wasn’t sure. But both those sentences seemed like an eternity. Cold cement cell. Tasteless food. Menial jobs. Lack of communication with the outside world. Worse, when she got out she would have a criminal record. She could never teach again. What would she do with herself? There was never anything else she had wanted to do besides teaching.

  She glanced at Jack. What would happen to him? Or, specifically, between her and him? She had to be realistic about that. They could write to each other for the first few years. When she got out, she could visit him. But was she just being romantic? Did she really want to spend twenty years visiting a man she could never be with? Never grow old together with? No, she would likely not visit him. Not even once. She would have to make a fresh break. She would have to look for a new man yet again.