Crushing (The Southern California Wine Country Series)

by Smith, J Gordon

  Amanda felt a hand on her shoulder that turned her around. Kyle’s voice purred, “I couldn’t resist any longer.” His lips touched hers, tasting of salt and lemon. Warmth spread from her mouth all through her body and she melted into him. She forgot all about the rest of the people, the noise, and the craziness. Her fingers brushed through the back of Kyle’s dark hair. The ends of his hair tickled the sides of her face. “You smell wonderful,” escaped from her lips between a moment their faces separated. Remnants of leather and just the smell of him. She wanted her body against his without any of these binding clothes that pinched her. Kyle’s lips skipped to her throat, sending waves of heat down her spine. His kisses moved across her shoulder. His teeth pulled the strap of her top, dragging it over to tip lightly against the side of her arm. Her eyes closed as Kyle kissed her neck again and then reached for new frontiers to trespass along her collarbone before proceeding lower. She needed his tongue further down. Her fingers pinched his hair. Her breast ached and her nipple firmed under the cloth, excited about its possible liberation.

  A scream pierced the party. Hookah pipes flailed the air now when sudden activity sprang around the hot tub. Sardis pulled the body of the redhead out of the water. She did not move. Sardis pushed on her chest. Her massive breasts flopped around as he attempted pumping life in and out of her. He tried to breathe on her mouth but his ineffective technique revealed he had only observed this on television. Kyle pulled Amanda toward the hot tub and Sardis.

  Haley appeared in her glowing tattoos, her eyes flamed, and her teeth flashed like a vampire’s, “What the fuck did you do?” The other band members stood quiet with their instruments shut down. The rest of the people around the pool hovered motionless. Only a few moans came out of the house that did not realize the outside world had changed.

  Sardis said, “We’d been smoking and she told me she wanted to blow me under water. Fucking fantastic feeling –”

  Haley touched her hand to the girl’s neck, “She’s dead.”

  Amanda saw the girl’s deathly stilled fingers curled up from her soggy hands. Hearts and cupid arrows tipped the girl’s fingernails.

  They heard police sirens wailing faintly in the distance.

  Bert yelled, “COPS! CLEAR OUT!” He sprinted around the pool and flipped over the pool fence, rattling the chain links. He wiggled his body over, careful with the wire top to not catch anything nakedly important on it. He disappeared barefoot into the darkness of the trees.

  Sardis said to Kyle, “I can’t stay. Neither can you. We have too many shoplifting, robbery, and vehicle theft dings already.”

  Amanda paused. What had Kyle done? Who was he – could he be the worst person she could want? Should she trust him? How dangerous could this man be?

  Others fled the party. They scooped up their clothes and shoes and sprinted for their cars. Lights and engine sounds filled the road in the opposite direction from where the police sirens approached.

  Haley looked from the girl to Sardis, “Too bad she’s naked. That will get her on the news tonight. If she had clothes on she’d be just another party girl that drank herself to death.”

  Amanda hooked her top’s strap over her shoulder. “We need to get Julie.”

  Haley looked at Amanda, “The house is already cleared out. You need to go.”

  Amanda ran behind Kyle and Sardis through the pool gate around the house to Kyle’s car.

  “Hey! How are you here, Amanda?” Startled by a voice she recognized, Amanda stopped. She saw Nicholas Cowger standing with an annoyed date. The whole confrontation bubbled up that she had with him at the fuel station back in Michigan. How could this be? Kyle yanked at Amanda’s hand toward his car and she followed.

  Nicholas yelled, “Hey, stop!” to a kid dragging the hookah and gripping a nearly empty bag of weed, but the kid already vanished into the brush along the house.

  Nicholas’ date said, “You told me your cabin was secluded and quiet and your weed stash huge. I just saw the last of your weed.” She jabbed her finger into his shoulder. “Take me home.”

  Red and blue police lights swept the treetops as the vehicles approached the house.

  “Shit! The police will think this is my party. You know how much weed I had in there?” He turned to his date, “You better be older than eighteen –”

  Amanda did not hear the girl’s response because she hurried after Kyle.

  Sardis stopped and vomited by the side of the car. He crawled in the back seat, wiping his cheek with the back of his hand, “Gah! That whiskey burns on the way out as much as on the way in.”

  Kyle pressed the car keys into Amanda’s fingers, “You’ve had the least to drink.” She could only think of how she was now the getaway driver – an accessory to second-degree manslaughter. She looked forward to a little excitement tonight, but not like this. “This is crazy.” Amanda scooted the seat forward and started the car. This car was a monster compared to any vehicle she had ever driven. The loose steering jerked under her fingers as if she held a boat’s tiller that only guided the thing between the edges of a canal. Swashes of other cars and dust spewed around them like a brown fog as they sped away.

  Haley padded through the house, taking a draw on her freshly lit cigarette. She threw a dozen bottles of booze across the great room to smash against the walls. A pair of bottles bounded down the carpeted hallway toward the bedrooms and burst when they struck the dressing mirror attached to the wall at the far end. Shards of broken mirror added to the sparkling rubble and the alcohol soak. She turned up the gas range and sniffed for the reek of natural gas. She splayed her fingers and picked up six bottles of high octane rum. She tipped her hands and poured the alcohol in a line that followed her out to the drum kit that she doused in a full bottle and the last bottle she traced a line behind her into the garage. A slug of rum remained in the bottle after she finished pouring. She brought the bottle to her lips, drank the last shot, and threw the bottle against the wall where it shattered.

  A year old, metallic blue Camaro rested in the garage under a light car cover. She stripped the canvas off and climbed in. The key she had taken earlier in the evening from the kitchen hook fit perfectly and started the engine. Haley loved the feeling of the engine along her thighs and bottom. Her bare breasts swayed with the rocking of the car as the engine throbbed beyond the firewall. She closed her eyes for a moment and enjoyed a long drag on her cigarette. The cigarette flared bright and hot.

  She could see out through a broken slat in the garage door that her bass player had smashed open so she could slip through and unlock the house. Out front, she saw Sardis collapse on the back seat of Kyle’s car. She watched Kyle push Amanda into the driver’s seat with the keys.

  Haley growled, “Sardis, you fucker! You were supposed to scare that bitch off with the shots. Now she’s found a savior. I was supposed to end up with Kyle tonight. Fucking fuck!” Haley flicked the cigarette to the concrete where it bounded into the puddle of alcohol. The vapors ignited like a fuse and ripped out of the garage, through the drum kit, and back into the house. Haley put the car in reverse and floored the accelerator. The car burst through the back wall of the garage. She spun the wheel around and bounded off through the side yard, brush scraping against the car like angry witch claws scratching at the growling beast. The car fishtailed as she hit the gravel road but she righted the wheel and disappeared down the shifting fog the others spun up during their escape. The garage wall smashed the car’s taillights and plate illumination so she vanished from sight just as the police rolled to the house on the crunchy gravel drive.

  Police sprinted from their cars around the sides of the house to the pool. They found the girl but then the house exploded. The officers not knocked down by the blast, ducked under the tumbling debris. One officer gripped his walkie-talkie and yelled a call to the fire department. Another shielded the girl from the broken lumber and hazy blown-in insulation that now fell like snowflakes around everyone.

  The red headed
girl lay next to the hot tub and wore an ill-fitting, too-small bikini top that barely covered the nipples of her huge breasts. The bikini strings were rudely tied under her arms and across her chest rather than behind her back. A gigantic pair of red swim trunks covered from her thighs to her belly but were not slid passed the weight of her bottom. “Good, she has clothes.” The first officer said as he pumped her chest up and down. The second officer tipped her head back, fitted her mouth with the breathing device, and pushed air into her lungs. “Less reporters chase news of a dressed party girl, so no chance we will be on television tonight.” The second officer said, “Yeah. EMS was only a mile back from us –”

  “Correction officer. We are here.” The EMS specialists flipped open their cases and waved the officers away from their work.

  “Pretty girl. Think she’ll live?” asked the second officer.

  “No idea. If she doesn’t then you’ll have more paperwork to complete.”

  “I just got here,” Nicholas told the detective. He rubbed his forehead where he struck the gravel between the sparse tufts of lawn grass when his house exploded. His date sat on the ground with her dirty arms and legs crossed, looking at the burning house. The officer saw the anger that bunched her eyebrows and stabbed along her spine like a spike into the ground.

  Nicholas said, “I bought this house years ago and I only come out here on holidays or work vacations.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I head up the IT department of a national trucking company. I work out of their Detroit headquarters.”

  “Who is your girlfriend? Seeing each other a long time?”

  “No. We met on the plane while sitting on the tarmac for an excruciating delay. A few drinks in the airport bar, I think that is a racket of theirs, and a taxicab ride stuck in LA traffic. Then, when we finally get out here, I find kids broke into my house, threw a huge party, and blew it up in front of me.”

  “You have quite a nice tan compared to most people I’ve met from Detroit. You must get out on vacation a lot?”

  “I negotiated six weeks of vacation. In addition, I can do remote telecommuting. I get a page on my phone if the servers go down or other problems happen so I log in from my equipment in the house.” He held up his pager. He shrugged; he needed to upgrade the computer systems at the house anyway.

  The detective asked him, “How can you prove your story?”

  Nicholas reached into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled slip of paper, “My bags are piled over there. This is my plane ticket and taxi receipt with the date and time stamp. See I just got here.”

  “Miss, do you have your ticket?”

  Her buzz from the bar had worn off. She replied flatly, “It’s in my purse with the other bags.”

  -:-:-:- -:-:-:-

  Benjamin turned the wheel of his hybrid vehicle. He knew this gravel road led through several vineyards and would get him on the other major road back home faster. The regular route was a long drive west and then a tedious series of stoplights not timed together to make traffic flow. Set up to reduce traffic speeds but he knew they wasted huge amounts of fuel stopping and starting people. If those traffic engineers only knew how much energy they wasted then the government might fix it.

  He looked out the side window. The dirt road was a much better route with the moonlight caressing the grape leaves in their silent but anxious rows. He looked across the car to Ophelia, his girlfriend of six years, a gorgeous woman ten years younger than he. “Look at how the moonlight bounces off the vineyard. Too bad my camera is at home.” He slowed his vehicle to a stop.

  “Are you going to propose to me here?”

  Benjamin looked at Ophelia, “We’ve discussed that. I don’t want to get married because it didn’t work out before.” He scrubbed his fingers in his blond hair. He looked at Ophelia with his pale gray eyes that might have been bright blue when he was younger before all the heartaches and sadness.

  “That was twenty years ago. I’m in my thirties and I want a family – a married family.”

  “I know you want that. However, I’m committed to you. Look at how we have been together for six years. It’s working, right?”

  Ophelia nodded, “Yes, but I want a ring on this finger.”

  “– and the noose of a ring around mine.”

  “If that is what you think it is then yes. I want you and I want the world to know you are taken. That I have taken you.” She pushed back her bleached blond hair and reset her glasses.

  “Knowing you took my heart is not enough?”

  Ophelia slumped back in the seat, “I love you Benjamin, but I want something permanent.”

  “I’m permanently yours. A ring does not ensure that. Standing in front of all our friends and family does not ensure that. Only you and I ensure we are permanently each other’s.”

  “I want you thinking about kids. I do not want to be one of those pining forty year olds that wonder if they should or if they still can. Reading the supermarket magazines with the beautiful actresses having their beautiful healthy babies in their forties, but never telling the stories of those that saw misfortune.”

  Benjamin put the vehicle in gear and drove up the next hill, a ridge between two sloping vineyards. “Fine. We will think about kids.”

  “I had a lot of fun with you today at the wineries and dinner was great.”

  “I enjoyed our day too.”

  Ophelia reached across the car and stroked her hand along his chin, “When we get home I want you in me,” She licked her lip, “And … I’m ovulating.”

  Lights from another car speeding up the other side of the ridge flashed across Benjamin’s windshield, high beams that blinded him as if looking into the rising sun. He twisted the steering wheel to the side, thinking it much better to strike grape trellis posts and vines than another car. The car flew through the air as if fleeing demons and crashed into Benjamin’s vehicle. Bits of glass shot sideways through the air. The airbags filled his senses with white cloth, dust, and thrown glass. Cuts and scrapes ran with blood down his exposed arms and legs and the side of his face.

  Ophelia screamed.

  “Ophelia! Where are you injured?” Benjamin yanked at his seat belt that had jammed. He freed himself and twisted in his seat to help Ophelia.

  “My leg!” She pushed herself up with her hands on the seat, covered in broken glass, trying to ease the pain in her leg. Then she screamed again, when her arm buckled. Her fractured lower arm split through her skin, showing blood and bone.

  Benjamin found his phone on the floor where it tumbled from the console and dialed 911. He gave them the briefest note but left the phone on. Benjamin clawed at his shirt and wrapped it tight around Ophelia’s arm, trying to slow the blood draining from her. He saw the passenger door crushed against Ophelia’s seat. Her leg bent in unnatural ways in several places. Her seat back was mostly broken off. He flipped the lever to mash his own seat down and wrenched on hers, it flopped around, and he dragged her back. A long gash of blood leaked along her thigh, saturating her pantyhose. He found a sweatshirt on the back seat and lashed that around Ophelia’s leg. He pulled the cloth tight and pressed on it hard with his palm, “Ophelia, you have to keep talking. I need to know you are staying with me.”

  “Benjamin, you’re a great guy. We’ll make this work.” She coughed, “Ow!”

  “Ribs?”

  “No. I jiggled my arm.”

  Benjamin could hear sirens; he hoped the sound came from the ones he called.

  He looked up and saw the other car.

  Ophelia said, “You should go check the other car.” Her eyelids had settled half closed.

  “I have to hold pressure on your leg. I don’t trust that sweatshirt on its own.”

  Benjamin looked at the other car again. Someone banged at broken glass still stuck in the door track. He saw a young woman climb out of the car. He could see in the light still shining from the headlamp that hung by the string of its wire, pointed across the ground. The
woman was nearly fine except for some small scratches. He saw her only clothes amounted to a bikini bottom. The woman looked at Benjamin, put her forearm across her breasts, turned, and jogged away barefoot between two rows of grape vines. Benjamin saw a biohazard tattoo on her shoulder blade just as the reaching grape leaves enveloped her in greenery and shadows.

  Then the emergency vehicle and police arrived.

  Green eyes, black hair, and a zombie apocalypse tattoo was all he could tell them. He remembered the shape of her hips and waist. He remembered how her bare breasts flashed him, but none of that would help the police. The police already knew everything about the car, reported stolen from another site with a girl left for dead.

  The detective that arrived shortly after said to Benjamin before the ambulance took Ophelia away, “The girl is good at stealing cars. She even wiped down the pedals that her bare feet touched so we don’t even have a toe print – not that our database might have such a thing but useful for evidence later.”

  Chapter 6

  “Shit!” Amanda wrenched Kyle’s car to the side of the road and stomped on the brakes.

  Sardis slid off the seat and thumped against the back of the front seats and into the foot well.

  Kyle asked, “What?”

  “I borrowed a car to get to the party. It’s still there.”

  Sardis moaned awake, holding his side where the drive shaft tunnel traveled, “It’s likely towed.”

  Kyle asked, “Where did you park it?”

  “We got there after the party was really going, so we were way down the road.”

  “I’m sure the car is fine.”

  “Julie and a friend were in the back bedrooms. We have to go back.”

  Sardis sat up holding his head as the world titled around him, “Haley said everyone left from the house.” He blinked and sat back in the seat, his arms flopping to his sides.

  Amanda dug out her phone. She sent a text message to Julie’s phone. Amanda’s arms draped over the top of the steering wheel holding the phone in her hands waiting. The slow idle of the loping engine vibrated the dash with a buzz that shook the steering wheel. Amanda’s phone rang. “Hi Julie. Thank God you are ok.”