Because Alice B’s lawyer had entered the text message into evidence. The text message I thought I had sent to Alice A. I had, immediately after pressing SEND, realized my mistake and deleted the message. I’d reassured myself with the fact that, when I tried to send it, I was underground on the subway, where there was no signal. Besides, I was just venting to my old friend Alice A, who could blame me? Alice B had insisted we all had one another’s contact info on our phones, something I usually reserved for friends. But the message had clearly been sent.
I wish she was dead. I miss you so much. I hate her. Her and her tight white jeans that show every single detail. Can I say camel toe? LOL. Witch. How will I survive without you?
And Alice B had the message. And she showed it to the court. And that was me, done for. And you know what? I felt relief. I would be released from the hellhole she had me trapped in. I didn’t even care. I had tried to stay under the radar, keep my head down and not cause any waves. But my best-laid plans had been tripped up by the fire alarm, the temptation offered by the empty stairwell and the unspeakable urge to shut Alice B up. Yeah, I’d lost everything but I didn’t even care. Alice A would take care of Chester.
The judge asked me if I had anything to say and for a moment, I thought there was no point. But then I changed my mind and I got up and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
“I bumped into you by mistake,” I said, looking Alice B straight in the eyes. “It was an accident. You made us late, you made us rush, the fire marshal even said so. I was pulling on my coat and I tripped. And yes I wrote that text, so what? I was venting to a friend.”
I turned to the judge. “But I am sorry about Adwar. I really am. I loved that woman. You can ask anybody. I tried to help her out wherever I could.”
And that’s when I broke down and cried my heart out. All the tears of rage and pain and fear that had piled up since Alice B had returned. All those months of her needling me and humiliating me as often as she could.
The judge took my tears of release as tears of remorse and dismissed the charges against me, agreeing the whole thing had been an accident.
Then the judge addressed Alice B. “It was an accident, there was no premeditation, do you see the difference? She didn’t mean to kill you. You should have left the room as soon as the fire alarm went off. You put yourself and your employee in an unnecessary position of danger. You see what I mean? You need to take responsibility for this.”
I cried even harder, hearing Alice B’s patronizing words come back to haunt her.
Things worked out just fine for Chester and me. I got severance from work, a full year’s pay with benefits. Alice A found me a job at her new gig and soon I was back at my desk, another desk but still, my desk, with my oatmeal and my stevia-sweetened decaf.
And I sent Adwar’s family money every month. Because I really was sorry about that.
Tom Barlow
Tom Barlow is an Ohio writer. His other works can be found in several anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2013, Dames and Sin, and Plan B Omnibus, as well as periodicals including Pulp Modern, Red Room, Heater, Plots With Guns, Mystery Weekly, Needle, Thuglit, Manslaughter Review, Switchblade, and Tough. His novel I’ll Meet You Yesterday and new crime short story collection Odds of Survival are available on Amazon. Tom is a member of Sisters in Crime National and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Find him at tjbarlow.com.
Heirloom
Tom Barlow
Seth’s dad, whereabouts unknown, had promised his mother, Harmony, a ring, a home, a family of her own—all sounding like nirvana to the daughter of a West Virginia coal miner. What he’d given her instead was a fetus to resent, and her only fourteen years old.
She raised the boy and his brother, Aaron, that came along a year later (father again unknown but suspected to be the husband of her cousin Jewel), by herself. They lived in a third-generation shack in Diamond, West Virginia, left to her by her Uncle Ralph after he took off the top of his head. He had used the same shotgun his own father had used to commit suicide when the miners first went on strike back in the 1930s. Every time the mine closed, even for a long weekend, Harmony hid the gun from the family under the wooden remains of an old outhouse at the edge of their property.
Seth and Aaron grew up riding all-terrain vehicles, gifts from their mother’s brother, Heath, who repaired them on the side. They knew the mountains for thirty miles in every direction, all the backwoods ways to travel from town to town without seeing even a trailer or an abandoned school bus full of squatters.
Seth was not only the older of the brothers, nineteen to Aaron’s eighteen, he was the one with an imagination. Aaron had the looks: a square chin, deep-set amber eyes, and hair the color of egg custard, but he’d been unable to handle the high school curriculum and only graduated by the grace of a scam, pulled by the school board, to avoid losing No Child Left Behind funding.
Seth, on the other hand, was a small, wiry kid with a weak chin hiding behind a threadbare goatee; a face that seemed to invite bar fights. He had long blamed his appearance for his mother’s detached attitude toward him, so different from the way she treated Aaron, her baby.
“You know what we need to do?” Seth said one November evening, handing his brother a joint rolled with weed from the patch they’d found growing on Cutter Mountain that fall.
“We need to get out of this town,” Aaron said, giggling. “We need a truck, so we can move to Atlanta, get jobs that don’t give you black lung.”
“You speak the truth,” Seth said, “but to do that, we need some money. What we need to do is stick up that gas station over to Marlington.”
Aaron sat up, nibbling his bottom lip. “No way. What if we get caught?”
Caught didn’t figure as an option as Seth envisioned the heist; it was completely tight. “We haven’t been in Marlington for years,” Seth said, speaking slowly so Aaron could keep up. “So nobody’s going to know us, especially with masks on. We do the deed late in the evening, when they have the most cash, then we ride the trails home. In the dark. They’ll never be able to follow us.”
“Neither of us have headlights that work,” Aaron pointed out.
“Then nobody can follow us by our lights, right? The way we know those trails, it’ll be no problem finding our way home by moonlight.”
“How much you think we’d get?” Aaron said.
“I figure a couple of grand easy, maybe three. They’re the only gas station in town.”
“And you promise we won’t get caught?”
“Trust me. Have I ever steered you wrong?” Aaron was unlikely to remember the many times he’d done just that.
Aaron leaned back until his head bumped against the wall. “Mom’s going to be so pissed if we mess this up.”
“Don’t worry, she’ll blame me. She always does.”
Seth kept an eye on the weather and the moon phases until he concluded that the last day in November was perfect for the job: a full moon, clear skies in the forecast, cold but no snow on the ground. He waited until Harmony departed for her part-time job at the local tourism bureau before raiding her closet for the Smith & Wesson .38 their grandfather had used while working guard duty at the mines decades before. It was still loaded.
He also rifled through her dresser looking for pantyhose to use as masks. To his dismay, there weren’t any.
“As far as masks go, these have got to be the worst,” Aaron said.
They were astride their ATVs in the dark, on the bike path that ran behind the Gas & Grub Mart in Marlington, twenty-five miles as the crow flies from home. Seth had cut out eye and mouth holes in a couple of small brown paper grocery bags for masks. Aaron’s barely fit over his head, and the eyeholes were spaced too closely together, cutting off his peripheral vision. His mouth was a good inch above the mouth hole, and Seth could barely make out what he was saying.
“I wish we was home playing World of Warcraft,” Aaron said.
&
nbsp; “I wish we were in Atlanta at a titty bar,” Seth said. “We pull this off, and I might just take you to one.” He stepped off his ATV, stretched his arms over his head, and yawned wide. “Well, it’s show time. You ready?”
Aaron tugged at his mask. “I suppose so.”
The two crept to the dark side of the store. There were a couple of trucks gassing up at the pumps in front, and they waited for them to leave.
“Hey Seth,” Aaron whispered. “You scared?”
“Just pretend you’re Iron Man,” Seth said. “Ice water in your veins. And remember—no names.”
Once the last truck rolled away, Seth motioned with the crook of a finger and they strode to the door, Seth fingering the pistol inside his jacket pocket.
Aaron opened the door and Seth entered, raising the .38 as he reached the counter. Aaron followed him in.
The clerk was a young black-haired woman with multiple piercings, thin to the point of ghoulishness.
“Don’t shoot,” she said. “I’m no hero.” She thrust her arms, like two pipe cleaners, in the air.
“Put the cash register money in a bag,” Seth said, his voice cracking slightly.
The clerk lowered her hands and reached under the counter. Seth tracked her with the pistol, but she came up with, not a gun, but a plastic bag. “Keep cool,” she said. “This isn’t my first holdup.”
She opened the register and quickly filled the bag with cash. “You want the change?”
Seth thought for a moment. “Just the quarters.”
She finished filling the bag and tossed it onto the counter, knocking over a display of beef jerky. Aaron reached around Seth and picked up the bag.
“Show me,” Seth said. Aaron opened the bag, revealing a small pile of cash, mostly ones.
“Where’s the rest?” Seth asked, gun still leveled at the clerk.
She swallowed hard. “The manager does a deposit at the bank at five p.m. every evening, before he goes home for the day.”
“Bull,” Seth said. Anger flashed through him. He turned the pistol toward the glass-fronted beer cooler a dozen feet to his left and fired. The glass exploded and beer began raining down inside the cooler from the punctured cans.
“What the heck is wrong with you?” the clerk asked from the floor where she’d ducked as he fired.
Seth looked frantically around for anything else of value he could steal, his eyes coming to rest on the box containing lottery tickets.
“Hey,” he said. “Stand up.”
“Don’t shoot me, okay?” the clerk said.
“Gimme some lottery tickets.”
Her head appeared above the counter. “They’ll know the numbers of the ones you stole. You’ll never be able to redeem them.”
“You let me worry about that.”
“Okay. Don’t shoot anymore. You want instant or ones for the drawing?”
“Instant. The whole wheel.”
The clerk unreeled the tickets, rolling them up as they came off. As she did, Seth heard Aaron behind him whimper.
“What’s wrong?” he asked softly.
“I got cut.”
Seth backed away from the counter until he could see his brother. Blood was spreading down the left side of his paper bag from a cut on his forehead. “A piece of the glass from the cooler hit me,” Aaron said.
Seth looked down. There were drops of blood on the floor. He grabbed a loaf of bread from the counter next to him, ripped it open and handed Aaron a handful of slices. “Use that to stop the bleeding.”
The clerk finished rolling the lottery tickets, turned and dropped them on the counter. “Anything else you need?”
He grabbed the tickets and said, “Thanks, sugar. Now let’s get out of here.” His brother, bread clasped fast to the cut on his forehead, preceded him out.
They jogged over to the bike path, jumped on their ATVs and started them up. Seth pulled off his mask, took the cash and lottery tickets from Aaron, shoved them under his jacket, and set off, Aaron close behind.
The bike path was straight and paved, following the bank of the Greenbrier River, remote from the highway. They rode in the moonlight for ten minutes before crossing the wooden-decked Sharps Bridge. On the other side, Seth stopped so they could top off their gas tanks from the extra gas they carried in cans.
“How’s your head?” Seth asked.
“It’s stopped bleeding,” Aaron said. “But I think there’s a piece of glass still in it.”
“They have your DNA now,” Seth said. “They won’t be able to match it to you since you’ve never been arrested. But if they do come for you, you’re screwed. In that case, you’ll have to keep me out of it.”
“They’ll know it was you with me,” Aaron said, “since we’re always together. They know I’m not bright enough to pull this off on my own.”
“Make somebody up. Some guy you met while hunting, a guy that took off and you don’t know where he is. His name was Peanut, and you don’t know any other name.”
“Peanut. Me and Peanut stuck up the convenience store?”
“And he had the gun,” Seth said.
“And he had the gun.” Aaron repeated, his face knotted in concentration.
“Yeah, he had the gun.”
Ten minutes later they were deep in the woods. Riding the rough trails, gnarled with tree roots and large limestone outcroppings, and shaded by the overarching limbs of hardwood trees, was much more difficult in the half-light of the moon than Seth had anticipated and he crept along.
For the next three hours, they picked their way along the trail, occasionally hitting low spots where water gathered, splashing onto their boots and jeans until their shoes were drenched.
Finally Seth, reaching an overlook, stopped for a break.
“What are we stopping for?” Aaron asked.
“Let’s look at your head.”
They dismounted and took seats on a downed oak that stretched alongside the trail. Aaron’s forehead was still bloody. Seth stood and bent over his brother, using his lighter to illuminate the wound. A piece of glass was sticking out of his skin.
“Hold still a minute,” he said. He pulled out his pocket knife and gently pried the glass out of the wound. The cut began to bleed again. “You got any of that bread left?”
“I ate it,” Aaron said. “And I’m still hungry.”
Seth cut a sleeve off of a sweatshirt he’d brought along in case it got really cold and wrapped it around his brother’s head.
Seth and Aaron wrestled the machines down a long series of switchbacks, many washed out and full of mud the consistency of burnt motor oil. Seth’s hand began to ache from squeezing his brakes. They were still miles from home around midnight when disaster struck.
Seth was turning his ATV through a steep, sharp right-hand curve when he saw, too late, that a section of the trail had collapsed. He hit the brakes hard, but his machine slid into the ditch and, out of control, headed straight for a twelve-foot drop-off. Seth bailed at the last second, landing hard on his back, his head whipping against a boulder.
He woke some time later to a sharp, grating pain in his ankle, already so swollen it pressed against the leather of his Red Wings. The moon was further west than it had been.
Aaron was seated next to him, scratching off instant lottery tickets with his pocket knife. The fog of his breath drifted across the moon.
“How about a little help?” Seth said.
Aaron reached out a hand, grasped Seth’s, and pulled him to a seated position. Seth saw stars for a moment.
“Win anything?” he said.
Aaron held up a ticket. “A thousand dollars, if I could ever cash it in. You hurt bad?”
“Broken ankle, I’m guessing. How’s my ATV?”
“Landed on its side down on the next switchback. I’d say it’s totaled.”
“Man, this is a mess if I ever saw one,” Seth said. His teeth began to chatter.
“I counted the money,” Aaron said, “while you were o
ut. I didn’t have nothing else to do.”
“And?”
“Two hundred and twenty-three dollars and seventy-five cents.”
“Damn.”
“What do we do now, smart brother?” Aaron said.
“Let me think,” Seth said, rubbing the knot where his head had collided with rock. “I got to get off this mountain. I might die out here in the cold with my injuries. Once a man gets a concussion, you never know what complications can set in.”
“Well we can’t two-up on my ATV, not on these trails.”
“I’ll tell you what we got to do,” Seth said, keeping his voice calm and business-like. “I need to borrow your ATV. Otherwise we’ll get caught up here. There’s too many people use these trails during the day for us to go undiscovered.”
“But what am I supposed to do?” Aaron said.
Seth patted him on the shoulder. “You can still walk. I can’t. You hike out, catch the fire road at the bottom of the mountain and follow that on out to the highway. I’ll come pick you up with Mom’s truck. If you don’t see me, thumb a ride into town.”
“Won’t that look bad if the cops see me?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Seth said. “I’ll have your ATV back at the house. I’m more worried about them finding mine wrecked up here.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Well who does? And don’t forget about Peanut.”
“Peanut?”
“Your partner, if you get caught.”
Seth labored down the mountain, cursing with pain every time he used his bad foot to change gear. He ended up leaving it in second most of the way, sacrificing time for a lower pain level. He almost cried with relief when he finally hit the dirt road that led past their shack, around five a.m.
He glanced at Harmony’s truck as he parking the ATV. The way his ankle hurt, he thought, he shouldn’t be doing any more driving. He needed to ice it down, and probably go get an x-ray if it didn’t feel better soon. And if Harmony caught him with her truck, how would he explain?
The Best Laid Plans Page 9