I put the journal down and took a second to pity Karl. He was way more messed up than I thought. And the way he wrote about his addiction leading up to the moment he tried to kill himself was chilling. The fact that he called it his “roommate” was as poetic as it was unnerving.
“Heyo, Jack!”
I left and followed Jerry’s voice to the bathroom at the end of the hall. He was sitting on the sink counter, pulling a Ziplock bag out of an empty shampoo bottle when I walked in.
“Find something?” I asked.
“Yeah, check it out. I looked in the usual spots and found these guys hidden all over. Under the toilet, in the vents, behind the electrical outlets.” He dropped the little bag of white pills onto the pile with the others.
“Not too weird.”
“Actually,” Jerry said, “It is. I clocked some Horse and speed out in the open right when we walked in. Guy had Molly and weed sitting pretty in the drug cabinet.”
“Okay. So…”
“Think about it. Why’s he hiding naltrexone?” I stared at him, hoping I didn’t have to say it. Eventually, he got there on his own and said, “You don’t know what naltrexone is.”
“I don’t get out much.”
He proceeded to give me a crash course in recreational pharmacology—a topic he knew entirely too much about. Naltrexone, I learned, is a drug used to treat addiction. According to Jerry, if taken on a regular basis, it completely ruins any high one might get from drugs or alcohol.
I put the mystery together for him. “So why was this the only drug Karl was hiding, and who was he keeping it a secret from?”
Jerry pocketed the baggie of marijuana and said, “Who knows?”
I followed him out of the bathroom, hoping to find something more useful behind door number three. As soon as I flicked on the lights of the third bedroom, I realized we were in way over our heads and needed to leave immediately.
“Holy bad language,” said Jerry. “Is that what I think it is?”
I couldn’t say for sure, as I’ve only ever seen a real meth lab twice, and both times were when I was very young, but there was more than enough in there to warrant concern. A line of propane cylinders against the wall, a shit-ton of empty matchboxes, a table covered with lab beakers, funnels, coffee filters, drain cleaner, starter fluid, tubing, and fire extinguishers. Only one thing conspicuously missing.
There was absolutely no smell. Either my nose had stopped working, or the lab hadn’t taken its maiden voyage yet. Considering O’Brien was as observant as they come, I had to assume that all of this wasn’t here when she searched the place a week earlier.
Which meant yet another gut-punching realization. Someone else is actively using Karl’s trailer as a home base for their new meth lab.
“We should get out of here,” I said.
I started for the front door as fast as I could go with one crutch. If I’d been a little faster, I might have walked outside just in time to get busted by the two men coming up the steps. As it happened, Jerry and I were in the living room, only a few feet from the front door when we heard someone yank at the handle.
A voice on the other side cursed and said, “Did you lock it?”
Another voice from close by answered him, “No, it should still be open.”
I gave Jerry an oh shit what are we supposed to do now look as the men outside bickered back and forth.
“Well it’s not fucking open. You must have locked it behind you.”
“You were the last one out.”
“The fuck I was! Give me the keys.”
“I’m looking for them! Give me a fucking second.”
Jerry reached over, grabbed my ski mask, and yanked it down across my face. I took a second to adjust it. When I looked up, Jerry had his own mask pulled down and the gun from the pizza box in his hand.
Chapter Twelve
There was an intense smile on Jerry’s masked face. With his finger on the trigger, he whispered, “Do you trust me?”
“No, not really.”
“Well, you’d better start.”
We heard the key slide into the door lock. Whatever was about to happen was about to happen.
Jerry pulled the folding chair out and moved it to the other side of the table so it was facing the door, then he said, “Take a seat and follow my lead. I have…” He cocked his head to one side. “...an idea.”
The man outside grunted. “Shit! That ain’t the right key.”
I didn’t have time to argue or come up with a plan of my own, so I took my seat at the table. Jerry took my crutch and walked away towards the kitchen, leaving me stranded there, right by the front door, alone, with no way of running, no way of even walking away.
Did Jerry just set me up as a distraction so he could sneak out a window? No. Surely, he wouldn’t have…
The front door opened, and two men stepped inside. The one in front was a tall guy with a big moustache. He looked like the kind of person who probably had a gym membership and lifted weights for fun. He took a few steps before spotting me at the table and freezing in place. The shorter guy was much younger than him, with a buzz cut and two-day beard. Not quite as muscular as his larger companion, but still big enough to squish me in a one-on-one. When he saw that the first man had stopped, he searched the room for the problem, spotted me, and made like a deer in the headlights.
When the door closed behind them, Buzzcut reacted to the noise like it was a surprise attack. He jumped, pulled a gun out of nowhere, pointed it at my head, and screamed, “Who the fuck are you?!”
I tried to think of something to say, but improv was never one of my stronger virtues.
Moustache’s voice was booming. “You deaf? He asked you a question. Who are you? What are you doing in here?”
Right then, the door to the laundry room swung open. Jerry wandered into the living room with a half-empty beer bottle in hand and the gun tucked into the front of his pants.
“Where the fuck have you two been?” he said. Buzzcut pointed his gun at the masked Jerry, who casually walked into the center of the room, finished the beer in one long pull, then tossed the glass bottle over his shoulder. “What the fuck took you so long? Did you guys get lost on the way here or something?”
Buzzcut took his eyes off of Jerry and looked back at me. Then he looked back at Jerry and pointed his gun at me, then he looked at his partner and pointed the gun at the floor. His partner eyed us both hard, then said to Jerry, “Who the fuck are you two?”
“Who the fuck do you think we are? Your boss sent us as backup to make sure the job got done right.”
The two guys looked at each other. Then Moustache asked, “You’re saying you work for—”
Jerry interrupted, “We don’t say his name. You never know who’s listening.”
“How do we know you aren’t just two idiots who wandered in here off the street?”
Jerry laughed. “Yeah, we’re just two random guys who wandered in here with absolutely no idea what’s going on. Is that your theory? Does that really make sense? Look, if it’ll get this show on the road any faster, you’re welcome to call and double check. I’m sure he’ll love the interruption.”
He and Moustache stared each other down for a solid ten seconds before the other guy caved with a laugh and said, “That’s alright. We just weren’t expecting anyone to be here.”
His laughter gave the other one permission to relax. Buzzcut cracked a nervous smile, put his gun away, and said to me, “Man, I almost shot you in the face!”
I held my silence.
Buzzcut looked at Jerry, jerked his head in my direction, and asked, “What’s his deal?”
Jerry responded, “He’s my muscle.”
“Him?” another (slightly hurtful) laugh. “What’s he supposed to do?”
“Pray you never find out.”
They both looked at me doubtfully. I knew I needed to sell it, so I did the most intimidating thing I could think of. I winked. Apparently, that worked, becaus
e neither of them made eye contact with me again for the rest of the night.
“Where are your fucking masks?” Jerry demanded.
Moustache reacted exactly the way you might expect someone to react to such a completely nonsensical question. He looked around, shook his head, and asked, “What do you mean?”
Jerry turned to me and put a hand on his forehead, “Oh my God; it’s like they’ve never done this before!” He turned back and scolded them for their carelessness. “Is this your training mission? Jesus Christ! No wonder they sent us to help out. Fuck!”
They both looked at the ground and mumbled, “Sorry.”
Jerry walked right up to them and said, “It’s fine. We all gotta start somewhere. Now, are you ready to do this?”
Moustache tried to look like a professional. He stood up straight, put on a serious face, and said, “Yeah, we have the you-know-whats in the trunk.”
“Alright,” Jerry said. “Let’s go get them.”
As Moustache opened the door, Buzzcut started forward, but Jerry caught him by the shoulder. “Not you!” he said. “I don’t need some amateur with an itchy trigger finger cockin’ it up out there. Stay here and think about what you did.”
The guy stepped back and said, “Sorry, sir.”
Jerry shook his masked head. “I’m not mad. Just disappointed.”
They left Buzzcut alone with me. He looked around the room and tried to strike up a conversation. “I didn’t know you guys were going to be in here. I thought it was just going to be a quick… you know. Do you guys do a lot of this stuff?”
I said nothing. He shut up.
I was growing to like my character. On the inside, I was screaming like a baby on a rollercoaster, but on the outside, all I had to do was stay quiet. Easy peasy. Of course, it got slightly more difficult to remain stoic when Jerry and the big guy carried in the first body. And the second body. It was certainly awkward keeping still and saying nothing while they arranged the crime scene. I almost blew it all by laughing when Jerry and Moustache got into it over the best way to arrange the corpses.
“I know you think you know what you’re doing,” Jerry argued, “but I say we set them up to make it look like they were busy having sex when the meth lab exploded.”
“Look, I just think that’s really weird and unnecessary.”
“Hey, I’ve been doing this for a long time! That’s why I’m in charge here! I want my crime scene to tell a story. Get off my dick about it!”
In a matter of minutes, the entire place was rigged to burn. While the two goons were standing in the pristine meth lab, Jerry walked backwards out to the living room, saying “Alright guys, everything looks good to me. Give us a five-minute head start before the fireworks get going, yeah? Okay, I’ll see you at the next one. Don’t forget your masks next time. This was fun. Hit me up on Facebook. Bye guys!”
Jerry had backed up all the way over to where I was awkwardly standing, trying to figure out how I was supposed to get out of there without my crutch and without giving away that I only had one leg. If they saw me hopping out of there, it was going to raise suspicion, and mask or not, it wouldn’t take much effort to compile a list of one-legged men in our town.
Before I could express any of this to Jerry, he had already grabbed me and thrown me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He carried me over to the door, kicked it open, and carried me down the steps and all the way down the street to where our car was parked. We were speeding away before I could get my seatbelt on.
***
Jerry was the one to say, “We can not go to the cops with this. Our prints and DNA are all over the place. They’ll think we—”
I shut that down right away. “Of course we’re going to the cops! There is no way we’re not going to the cops! We’re going straight to the cops because you and I just witnessed a crime, and if we don’t go to the cops, the criminals who did the crime will still be out there, probably doing more crime, and possibly trying to figure out who we are so they can come and do some crime to us. In no scenario are we not going to the cops.”
“Fine!” he huffed. “In that case, we need to rehearse our cover story.”
“No! No cover story! We go to the police and tell them exactly what happened.”
He sputtered, “Sure-sure-yeah-sure Jack, let’s just-let’s go right to the sheriff’s station and tell them how we set up two dead guys to look like they were giving each other beejes while two real criminals staged a meth lab explosion.”
***
“You did WHAT?!”
I struggled to break eye contact with O’Brien, but this time she was the car, and I was the deer. She broke first, but only to drill her eyes into Jerry, who was sitting in the booth next to me. “You’re telling me that you two idiots sixty-nined a couple of corpses while two other chucklefucks eighty-sixed a crime scene?”
Our waitress dropped off a carafe of coffee and three mugs while Jerry blurted, “To be fair, we didn’t sixty-nine them. I just made them sixty-nine each other while Jack waited in the living room.” The waitress left without saying a word.
This was my best compromise with Jerry. Rather than go straight to the sheriff’s office, we called (and woke up) our trusty gas station guardian and asked her to meet us on neutral ground—the House of Breakfast Carbohydrates™ ten minutes outside of town. When she showed up, I almost didn’t recognize her. She was wearing a plain blue jacket and sweatpants. I didn’t expect her to arrive out of uniform, but it made perfect sense. Even she had a life outside of work, and here I was ruining it.
She poured herself a cup and took a swig. When she spoke again, she sounded slightly less pissed-off, so that was progress. “Can you describe the guys who fire-bombed Karl’s place?”
Jerry answered, “The dom was a big black guy with a huge moustache and kind eyes. The sub had a Forrest Gump haircut and a surly attitude, but he took direction really well.”
“Wait,” she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, opened her photos app, and extended it across the table. “Did they look like this?”
Jerry and I leaned over to inspect the two men standing side by side in the picture.
“Yeah,” I said. “They looked exactly like that. Except when we saw them, they weren’t wearing uniforms.”
She put the phone away, picked up her mug, and took another big sip before saying the uncomfortable words. “Deputies Franklin and Williams. I should have known.”
“Told you so,” Jerry beamed.
O’Brien blew the top of her mug and stared at the table. I could see the gears turning, and it wasn’t long before her thoughts became words. “Williams has been with the department for decades. He’s the guy the sheriff would go to if he needed to stage a cover-up. Like some junkies breaking into Karl’s place to use it as a meth lab after he passed away. A bad accident leads to an explosion leads to no more evidence… but no more evidence of what?”
Before I could offer any more unhelpful suggestions, she spoke again. “You know what? It doesn’t even matter. What matters is that the department’s been compromised. Let me handle this. In the meantime, you two were never there. You didn’t see anything. You don’t know anything. This never happened. Got it?”
We both nodded.
“And Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“If you ever do something like this again, I will kill you.”
The words escaped my mouth before I had the chance to consider. “What about Jerry?!”
He ripped open a handful of sugar packets and said, “No, I probably wouldn’t kill you.”
Our waitress never did come back to check on us. Eventually, I put some cash on the table, and we left.
***
Jerry celebrated our back-to-back combo survivals by getting shit-faced drunk and passing out on my couch.
Around noon the next day, I got a phone call from Mammaw, letting me know the good news: The official investigation into the burning man was a wrap. They had ruled the incide
nt as another run-of-the-mill accident, and now I needed to get the gas station reopened ASAP.
I brushed my teeth, packed up a new book, and woke up my houseguest. Once Jerry had wiped the sleep from his eyes, I made a deal with him.
I offered to let him borrow my Nissan under two conditions: First, he had to drive me around whenever O’Brien was unavailable, and second, he couldn’t break any laws in, on, or with my car. He swore on his life that he’d treat the vehicle like his own baby, then drove me to the gas station.
The reopening process was simple enough. A professional cleaning company came out and power-washed the concrete by the front door, replaced the broken glass panel, and sopped up all the squirrel goo behind the register. They were in and out in under an hour. I knew from experience that things were going to shake out like this, but I couldn’t help but feel annoyed by how easily the hobo fire faded from the town’s collective memory.
With the building more or less back to normal, there was only one thing left for me to do before I could settle into my regular routine. Amidst the excitement of the previous day’s events, I had completely forgotten to let the new employee know she didn’t have to come in. Now it was time for the awkward phone call.
When she answered, she sounded tired, “Hello?”
“Hi, Rosa?”
There was a short pause, and then, “Mom?”
“What? No! It’s… do I really…” I sighed. “It’s Jack, from the gas station.”
“Oh my god! I’m so sorry!”
“It’s okay. I wanted to call and see if you were still interested in the job.”
Another pause. This one a little longer. “But I came out to the gas station for my shift this morning. There was police tape everywhere and nobody there. I knocked on the door. I tried calling ten times. Nobody ever answered.”
“Well, I’m happy to say you passed our test. You can come work for us now.”
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