by Holly Rayner
But as soon as the door closed beside me, Russell locked all the doors, started the engine, and said, “You don’t mind if I run an errand first.”
I didn’t answer his question that was really a demand; he was already pulling out onto the road anyway, driving out of Nederland. I stared out the window dully at the town I’d never see again now that I’d delivered what may have been a good man to the most unseemly creep I’d ever encountered. Was going against what I knew was right really worth the money?
“So you never said where he was,” Russell said.
“Didn’t I?”
“Nope. It was part of the agreement.”
I almost asked him, “Was it?” before I said, “Oh. Well, I’ll need to go home and look over a map to retrace my steps.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his face fall. Abruptly, he pulled the car over.
“I haven’t told you the full story,” he said, spreading his fingers on one hand and then bringing them in again.
“Oh?” I said.
“This job is important, really important, for personal reasons. It wasn’t just those guns Brock’s been involved in. He stole from my girl, my Kaya. I swore to her I’d get her jewelry back. The longer it takes, the less chance there is that it’ll be there. If I don’t have an address to give the police now, who knows how long it will take. I know you just stumbled on it, but the facts remain.”
I stayed silent, my gaze locked on my motionless fingers.
“I”—his voice cracked—“I don’t know what to do. Kaya has lost hope in me. My friends have all given up too. I…I’m out of options, Miss Combs.”
As unseemly and unwelcome as I found Russell Snow, my gaze was inescapably drawn to him. His face was even hollower, even paler. The line on his forehead looked like a full-on dent. It was incredible, and yet there was no denying it. Russell Snow was telling the truth. He was broken up about it.
I swallowed and shifted my gaze to my other hand. Really, it was wrong of me to withhold information from my client. He had paid as promised after all, and it wouldn’t hurt telling him the address now.
I cleared my throat and turned to Russell.
“He was living in a cabin in the woods,” I said. “You get there from a street connected to the parking lot of the East Street Garage.”
His face softened, and I let out a sigh of relief.
A few minutes later, we were approaching the East Street Garage where it had all begun. My ache of nostalgia transformed into a twist of suspicion as our car made a turn into the lot.
I turned around, stifling my gasp at what I saw: two other blacked-out cars behind us, exactly the same model and make.
Chapter Ten
“You don’t mind,” Russell said easily. “Brock is the sneakiest bastard we’ve had yet. Time is of the essence if we’re going to nab him.”
I said nothing. Clearly, this was not the time to admit that I’d been counting on a way to help Brock escape ever since Russell had walked into that café.
“And turn him over to the police, of course,” he said with a smirk, like he knew he was lying and didn’t care if I knew or not.
As we turned onto the dirt road off the parking lot, I sneakily checked the door again. Locked, of course.
“Maybe you could just…”
“Don’t have time to drop you off, unfortunately,” Russell returned coolly.
He hit a button which made music blare through the car. It took a minute for me to recognize the angry song.
The song was jarring, the singer’s voice a rebellious rasp, the guitar a groaning, percussive hit to the gut, the percussion itself just slamming along. It was ironically appropriate, when the singer yelled “screw you, I won’t do what you tell me”, almost like the universe thumbing its teeth at my predicament. I had chosen money over righteousness, and now I was going to pay the ultimate price. I was going to witness first-hand what Russell and his goons were going to do to the man I may have just fallen for.
My gaze slid around the car dully. I noticed everything: the floor mat littered with beer bottles at my feet, the cup holder of cigarette butts by my elbow, the hand sanitizer flopped atop them like a joke. The whole car was a hotbox of smoke and my own idiotic failure. My hand grabbed the window handle.
“Can I?”
Russell responded by leaning over and, as the car bumped along, twisting the handle around and around. Once the window was down enough, I stuck my whole head out the window and gulped in the fresh air greedily. A light snow still coated everything, and some icy leaves brushed my eager face. This was the calm before the storm, and what was coming was inevitable.
When I pulled my head back inside, my glance slid to the glove compartment. Its door was ajar. Inside, what looked like a gun glinted. This was bad. This was very, very bad. I felt in my pocket for my phone. Maybe if I just dialed…
“You understand, of course, that my friends and I take our work seriously,” Russell said, his voice light. He shot me a significant look. “Very seriously.”
I let my phone go. I would just have to go along for the ride. I didn’t have any choice.
The drive took even longer than I remembered. Russell spoke to me just once to ask how far in it was.
At my “not sure, pretty far though,” he grunted and said nothing more.
He turned off the radio in the middle of a country song that liberally used a cowbell.
The quiet was even more stifling, and the occasional clank of beer bottles didn’t help things. I was on edge. Every little movement Russell made and every tiny sound from the car or outside frightened me. Meanwhile, our blacked-out clones were still behind us. We passed a twisted ruin of a tree trunk, and my heart fell. We were almost there.
By the time we pulled into the all-too-familiar parking lot, I felt like I was going to pass out with fear.
“Finally,” Russell said.
Then, one hand on the steering wheel, he slipped the other into the glove compartment and took out the gun.
With a playful wag of it at me, he joked, “Now, don’t you go trying anything now.”
I clenched my fists, and he got out of the car.
As I watched him and seven men assemble in front of the cabin, unlikely explanations flew through my head. Maybe Russell was telling the truth. Maybe he and his men (who also happened to be wearing all black) just wanted to capture Brock and take him to the police. Maybe Brock was going to be fine and would just have to finally pay for his crimes. Maybe everything was going to be all right.
But when the other men took out their guns, even those unlikely reassurances disappeared.
Russell knocked on the door.
Please don’t answer, I silently begged Brock. Please, please be out on a walk, or peer out the window first. Please, don’t you open that door.
But then the door swung open, and I found myself terrified yet pleased. Seeing his handsome face again, even in these circumstances, was something I thought I’d never get to do again. Brock’s face went grave at the sight of Russell and the others, and then his gaze slid over their shoulders…to me. I shrank back, wanting to disappear into the black polyester seat or onto the beer-bottle-covered floor, but it was too late. It was too late entirely. Brock had seen me, and his face looked like he’d been shot already. He hung his head and then slammed the door shut.
The next second, Russell and his men were hammering on it, yelling. Finally, they kicked it, smashing into it with such force that it gave way. There was a crash and then Brock was on the roof, leaping into a snowbank below before taking off running. He disappeared into the forest.
I couldn’t sit still in the car any longer. I tried the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Somehow Russell had locked it so that I couldn’t leave, unless...
I climbed out the window and hopped onto the snow just as Russell and his men came running out.
Russell raced over to me, his face now a full-on snarl, his gun clutched in white-knuckled hands.
“W
hich way did he go?”
I gaped at him, and he took a casual look at his gun and then at me.
“Which way?”
“That way,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction I had seen Brock run.
As two of his beefy men ran up, Russell swept his gun out in the direction I had pointed. “That way.”
Then, turning to me with a put-on smile, Russell gently said, “You probably want to be getting home, now don’t you?”
I nodded dumbly, and he walked over to the car and unlocked it.
“Got it all fitted out with a whole bunch of customized features,” he said casually, slipping inside.
I stood there for a minute, staring at the seat I had been in. Did I really want to go back in there with him? How did I know that Russell was going to return me home safely, that he wasn’t going to get rid of me too for knowing too much?
“You coming?” Russell’s easy voice broke through my reverie.
He was turned to face me, his gun still in hand. Whatever he intended to do with me, I had no choice but to go with him. I opened the car door and sat down. Leaning over me, Russell closed the window.
“And we’re off,” he said, and then we were, rumbling down the way we’d come, down the road I’d gone up and down too many times now.
The last few minutes replayed in my head in a surreal haze, like scenes from a movie. The gun, Russell’s men, the fallen door, the crash, Brock’s look. That heartbreaking look of knowing, of realization. That look I would never forgive myself for.
As we passed it, I glared at the twisted trunk of the tree. It was strangely emblematic of all that was left of me, of how low I had let myself fall for my job. I had sacrificed a good man, had done what I knew was wrong, to save myself and my job.
Russell didn’t even try to have a conversation now. Lost in his own vile thoughts, he absently picked up a cigarette, lit it, and puffed away. It was all another job to him, all another day’s work, while to me, for a moment, this man, Brock Anderson, had been everything.
It was getting late now; the sky was an unimpressed gray, the trees all bowed over with the too-heavy snow, claws of branches extended towards me eerily, as if begging for the help they knew they couldn’t have. Still, I whispered a “sorry” to them, one that was meant for him, really. It was for everyone I had ever failed—myself most of all. It was a “sorry” for failing once more, for making the wrong choice.
By the time I checked my phone, I was hardly surprised to find his message: I’m at your apartment, waiting by the door. I won’t leave until I’ve seen you. It was Charlie. He always had a knack for coming at the worst times, the lowest times when I couldn’t say no.
When Russell pulled up to the darkened East Street Garage, we sat there for a minute. I was too tired for any more pretenses. I hardly even cared for the money. I just wanted to get out of this suffocating prison of a car.
Russell said, “You will tell me if he contacts you again, if you see him. If you find out anything about him.”
I nodded my head robotically and told him I would.
He handed me my envelope, and I got out.
One step away and—“Miss Combs!”
“Yes?”
“You must have been proud, happy to see your good detective work being put to use.”
I scrutinized his face for a minute and then finally produced the expected “yes.”
“Thanks again,” he said.
We stood there for another minute, staring at each other. Then I gave an awkward wave, and he gave one back. It was only once he had pulled away that I let the tears fall.
What had just happened? Other than me betraying all that was right, that was. That look on Russell’s face… He hadn’t believed those words any more than I had, and yet he had said them entirely for me. That look had been pure pity.
I shook my head and brushed aside the tears angrily. It was stupid, all of it. I was the last person in the world who deserved anyone’s pity.
Chapter Eleven
The garage had its lights out and looked closed when I walked up, but that didn’t seem to matter. The same old man was sitting there in his same old lime chair, sipping pink lemonade as if it were the middle of a scalding summer day.
“It’s ready,” he said, throwing his arm out when I was a few steps away.
I stopped and visually followed the sweep of his arm to my little brown car.
“Thank you!”
“Your boyfriend came by and checked it out too,” he said, and I stared at him.
“My boyfriend?”
“Yeah. Took a look inside before admitting we’d done a good job. Though we didn’t need him to tell us that.”
As I gaped at him, he let out a wheezy laugh. Had it been Brock? Russell Snow? Why?
“What did he look like?”
The old man shrugged, squinted at me, and then muttered, “Asian.”
I sighed. Clearly, this man didn’t care and wasn’t going to help me anymore.
So I went to my car. I checked around the exterior and then interior, scanning for anything out of place. But everything was untouched; even my Kleenex box was shoved in the side of my door as always. I got in. Then, after shoving Russell’s fat envelope into the glove compartment, I started driving out of Nederland right at the speed limit. I headed back to the home I didn’t want to go to while listening to some radio song I didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
I was exhausted and yet filled with a useless, frenetic energy; I needed to move. I wanted to go home, to my apartment, where I could sink into my bed and cry. I was starving, but I didn’t, and wouldn’t, stop for food. I deserved to suffer, and I needed to go home.
The drive seemed endless, but I liked it like that—the black mass of trees or rock or water or something in between. The cat-like yellow lights of another car passed me. I didn’t pass anyone. I puttered along at exactly the speed limit, nothing more. I drove to get there; I just didn’t want to arrive. I wanted to drive forever and escape into this dissociated, thoughtless state permanently. I wanted never to think about what I’d done. But it was all too soon that I pulled into the familiar underground parking garage, stopped in my spot, and then remembered.
Car lights still on, I sat there and stared desolately at the half-worn ‘C26’ painted onto the wall.
I had been so busy trying to escape the mistake I’d just made that I’d flown straight into the arms of the mistake I had made years ago: Charlie.
If his message was any indication, he was sitting outside my door, just like all the other times. Maybe he was asleep; maybe he was awake. It didn’t matter.
I sat there in my car, trembling with what I had to do when I got out of it. I laid my fingers against the plastic handle and took a deep breath. Then I switched them to the gear shift, changed it to reverse, eased my foot onto the gas, and pulled out of the lot. As soon as I was at the garage doors, I tore out of there. I wouldn’t give in this time. I couldn’t take it anymore.
Streets flew by. I got glimpses of lights and the occasional pedestrian. The traffic lights remained green, encouraging me. The darkness made things reassuring somehow. And finally, there was the library, my childhood escape where I had leaned over books half the size of me—sweeping Renoirs, lush Monets, lively Toulouse-Lautrecs—cocooned in that unmistakable, bookish scent, safe from my mother with her never-ending list of worries.
I stopped in the library parking lot, my headlights reflecting off the wall where Charlie and I had carved our names.
I turned off the car, climbed into the backseat, and curled up into myself. I probably wouldn’t sleep, but at least I’d be safe—for now.
Chapter Twelve
I awoke to Charlie.
Sitting primly beside me, he laughed at my surprise.
“You really thought you could escape?”
All suited up, he took my hand and tugged me along, out of the car and to the trunk.
“You should’ve believed me. I told you I’
d never change.”
He opened the trunk to show Brock. He was wide awake and staring at me with that same accusing expression. The bullet wound in his forehead didn’t stop him from blinking every so often.
“Poor guy. Should’ve given him a chance. People aren’t always how they seem, you know.” Charlie’s mocking hiss jarred me out of my reverie.
I turned to see Charlie scratching at a scab on his nose that hadn’t been there before with newly yellowed hands. His eyes were bloodshot and his yellowed hands grabbed me and shook me over and over again.
“You should have believed me. I told you I’d never change—never, never, never, never, never.”
I was shaking back and forth with the “never” when my eyes snapped open.
I scrambled to sit up, looking left and then right, even then not able to fully admit to myself that it had just been a dream. No, I had to get out of the car, stride to the trunk, open it, and stare into the emptiness before I could confirm that the whole episode with Charlie and Brock hadn’t been real.
And yet, the unreal dream had had some real effects. Charlie had said what I had known already, what I had been unwilling to say myself: Despite Russell Snow’s claims, Brock Anderson was a good man. I had made a mistake, and now I was going to right it.
I drove to Tiffany’s.
Seeing me at the door, she immediately asked, horrified, “Oh God, what’s wrong?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
She flung the front door open, spread her arms, and let me in.
Tiffany’s house was a meditative exercise in relaxation. She seated me in the well-named Blue Room on a cobalt, velvet divan before scurrying off to make tea.
While she was gone, I studied the familiar room, its sky-blue wallpaper, sapphire-studded lamps, and cyan pottery. Every blue item had its blue place. How could I tell Tiffany what I’d done? She would never understand me sleeping with a man I had barely known, taking a job I had immediately sensed was no good. And yet…maybe she would.