by Eric Beetner
“Toss the bag over here.”
“Let her go.”
“Throw me the fucking bag!”
Nash felt a slow drip of his own blood down his wrist and onto the gun hidden behind his hip. “You want your money or not?”
The headlights crested the hill, lighting them for the main event. The semi trailer’s brakes hissed as he saw the police car blocking lanes and the standoff.
The gunman turned to the sound of the straining engine and hydraulic blast of brakes. Jacy pulled with her shoulder and tore away from him. She fell to the ground.
Nash dropped the bag with his left hand, raised Jacy’s pistol with his right and fired. If the man hadn’t been so perfectly lit up by the semi truck’s headlights, he doubted he would have hit him. But both shots he squeezed off in a tight pair landed in the man’s chest. A spray of blood was backlit in the tractor trailer’s lights as the man fell.
Jacy ran to Nash, stumbling into his arms as the truck finally ground to a halt only feet from the stopped cop car. She started crying and Nash thought he might too. The weird waking nightmare seemed to be over. Nash couldn’t wait to thank the truck driver who unwillingly saved his life. But first, Nash brought the knife from his pocket and sawed through Jacy’s flex cuffs, careful not to cut her the way he’d done himself.
The door to the semi opened. A pot-bellied gut led the way for a sleeveless flannel shirt, mesh baseball hat, cowboy boots, and a rifle. The trucker stepped down from his cab and spoke in a redneck drawl that made Nash’s skin slimy, as if a snake slid by him while he was swimming in the lake.
“You just killed a cop,” the trucker said. Nash could understand how he might assume such a thing. He reasoned by the rifle barrel’s aim that he might not have time to explain himself. “I bring you in dead and I still get my reward, motherfucker.”
The driver stalked forward with at least as much authority as his semi-truck. And he was armed. He loaded a shell into the chamber with a metallic clack. “What have we here? A pair of thrill killers. One of ’em jailbait too. Jesus H. Christ, I thought them kind of stories was made up.”
The trucker kept on coming. He passed over the dead body in the road, kept his eyes and his aim on Nash and Jacy. He noticed the gun in Nash’s hand, the knife in the other. “Looks like I got me a clear case of self-defense now.” He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, preparing to exercise his second amendment rights.
Nash put his hands out to make a plea. “Now, wait—”
The shot made Nash jump. Jacy gripped his shoulder tighter, but that was the only pain he felt. He watched as the trucker’s hat flew forward, a chunk of skull still inside it.
As the trucker fell away, his body going limp in slow motion as the folds of his fat were slow to catch up with the gravity pulling him down, Nash saw the gunman on the ground with the cop’s gun hanging loosely in his hand. Whether he meant to shoot the trucker, or simply wanted to kill someone else before he died, Nash couldn’t be sure. It may have been an errant shot aiming for Nash’s own skull. And he may have one more in the chamber with the same goal in mind.
Nash stepped forward and put two more bullets into him. He immediately grabbed his gut and felt like he might vomit.
The air settled again to stillness. The low grumble of the truck’s engine and the Honda’s harmonized like giant metal insects in the night. Nash looked at the two bodies glowing in the headlamp beams.
“Oh, holy shit,” he said.
“He was gonna shoot us,” Jacy said. “You had to.”
Nash’s nausea crested, but he held it down. Killing someone, even someone aiming a gun at you, was not easy. It brought him back to a night he wanted never to relive. He tamped down the thought like the bile in his throat and asked, “What now?”
“Well, we can’t stay here. That cop called for backup.”
“We can’t go back to Mom’s.”
As if the thought had just occurred to her, Jacy said, “Fuck, Nash. When Brian hears about this…”
“And he will. That cop radioed in our names.”
“Three, no, four dead bodies?”
“I know.”
They stood, killing time, breathing diesel fumes. “We can keep going,” Nash said.
“You don’t think they’ll be looking for us?”
“Yes, I do think that. You got a better idea?”
Jacy bit her lip, let it go. “I know someone we can stay with for a little while.”
“Where?”
“Back in Bishop.”
“You really think that’s the best idea?”
Jacy shrugged. “Like someone once said, you got a better idea?”
Nash pocketed the gun, turned back to look at his car. “What about the money?”
She kept her eyes on the bodies, a fine white mist rising off the trucker as the cool night stole his last remaining body heat. “We take that with us.”
CHAPTER 4
Two things you do not want to interrupt Sheriff Brian Thorpe in the act of doing: his drinking and his sleeping.
When the phone rang, it was 3:49 a.m. Brian started his day in the short distance between surly and grumpy on the best of days with ample sleep the night before. He palmed the phone receiver in his fist which generously wrapped around the plastic casing. His knuckles were thick around it, like walnuts sprouting hair.
“Yeah?” The snarl in his voice was part wolverine and part V-8 engine missing a muffler.
“Sheriff?” a timid voice began. “Hate to wake you, but we got a call from the state cops.”
“Something you can’t handle on your own, Sutherland?”
“No, Sheriff. Not exactly,” Deputy Sutherland said. “It’s your daughter.”
Brian jostled his wife awake as he left the bed and went down the hall to Jacy’s bedroom, a trip he normally took great pains to traverse as quietly as possible.
His deputy kept talking, filling in the whole story as Brian stalked the hallway to his stepdaughter’s room. He pounded open the door like he was serving a warrant. Empty. It would take a thorough going over to determine what exactly was missing, but even in the half dark Brian could tell the room was lighter by a few things.
“A dead cop?” Brian asked. He still couldn’t decide what of the deputy’s story had still been the lingering fog of sleep.
“Yeah. And three others.”
All true. Son of a bitch. Literally. The other name the deputy mentioned was Nash, first boy to Martha. A goddamn runaway coward. Split town and barely finds time to send a Mother’s Day card to Martha. Not that Brian wanted him back. Definitely not in this way.
“I’ll be down,” he said to the deputy.
His heavy footfalls thudded down the hall and it was a wonder he even had the capability to make the twenty-two paces from his bedroom to Jacy’s without rattling the paintings off the wall.
He sat down on the bed, bending the mattress with his bulk. The extra forty since he moved in with Martha, the extra inches over average he’d carried with him since high school.
“What’s the trouble?” Martha asked.
“You don’t wanna know,” he said with a sigh. He ran a hand down his face from forehead to chin, the stubble on his cheeks making audible scratches against the rough skin of his palm.
“Of course I do,” Martha said.
“Jacy’s gone.”
Martha gasped and clutched at her mouth. “What?” She pushed the sheets down, ready to leap out of bed.
Brian put out two hands, halting her. “It’s okay. I’m handling it.”
“How? You know where she is?”
“I told you I’m handling it.” Brian stood and walked to the closet. He dropped his saggy pajama bottoms on the floor and tossed his T-shirt there too, no intention of picking them up later.
“Brian, she’s my daughter. You need to tell me what you know.”
“How about this—it’s none of your goddamn business.” Sta
ndard discourse in a house under Brian’s roof. Everyone was his inferior, especially women. Especially this dumb-ass one he made the lazy blunder of marrying.
“A phone call comes in at nearly four in the morning and you tell me my daughter is missing? I’d say it is my business.”
Brian finished pulling on his uniform pants, pulled the belt tight under the overhang of gut that seemed to lean farther out each month. He remained shirtless. Fading, poorly inked tattoos cowered under tufts of chest hair and dark swaths of fuzz crawling across his shoulders. Tattoos of nothing. Generic designs inked on solely as proof of a misspent youth.
“Fine. You wanna know?” He turned to Martha and spoke to her with the revved-up bravado he used on suspects. “Your whore-in-training daughter ran away from home and got involved with the murder of a state cop and three other people with the assistance of your shit stain of a son.”
Martha reeled, undone by the revelation. “You mean Nash?”
“You got any other shit stain sons I need to know about?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Exactly why it’s none of your goddamn business.” He pulled on his tan uniform shirt, sheriff badge already attached. “Now quit sitting there like a bump on a log and go fix me some coffee. I got police work to do.”
CHAPTER 5
Nash stood on the porch and thought, this is exactly the kind of place I wanted to get her away from.
“Not one for yard work, is she?” Nash said.
“Shut up,” Jacy said in a whisper. “Robin’s cool. You’ll see. She’ll help us out, no questions asked.”
“I might have a few,” Nash mumbled to himself.
The single-level house had meth lab written all over it. Deep in the nothing-filled countryside where neighbors kept to their own and every house had some variation on the classic “Never mind the dog, beware of the owner” sign, the house ran the risk of being consumed by its own front yard, or the shingles covering the house suddenly peeling away like a snake shedding skin. The requisite nonfunctioning car was parked beside the house and a rusty swing-set gave a sad reminder of what the house had once been. Now it was no place you’d ever bring a kid.
A girl answered the door in a black Nine Inch Nails shirt, probably a men’s XL, and no pants on underneath. Nash assumed he’d be waking her up at four something in the morning, but she was probably the up-till-six, sleep-till-noon type.
She looked at Jacy with one eye and slow gears began turning in her head.
“Hey, Robin. I need a huge favor,” Jacy said. Nash hung back and let her make the deal. He was curious about what she would leave out of the story.
“Jacy?”
“Yeah. Look, we’re kind of in some shit.”
“Who’s the narc?”
Jacy turned over her shoulder as if she expected to see someone else. “Oh, this is my brother, Nash.”
Nash gave Robin a small wave, resisting the urge to detail all the ways he and his pals tore shit up all over Bishop and the neighboring towns when this girl was still in diapers. Narc? Fuck her.
Robin pushed open the door and walked deeper into the house, her way of an invitation. Jacy followed her and urged Nash inside with a behind-the-back wave of her hand.
After a highly sanitized retelling of the story, Robin’s eyes had come as awake as Nash figured they could. The room reeked. The couch he sat on was stained and cigarette burned to the point it obliterated whatever fabric pattern used to adorn the sad, droopy thing. Ashtrays overflowed like popped piñatas, mysterious squares of tin foil lay crumpled in corners, burn marks on one side.
They may not have been making meth here, at least not today, but Nash could recognize the signs of users. Another reason he got out of town. The vice grip of the drugs began to squeeze and he knew it would only get tighter.
He’d been right.
“That’s fucked up, girl,” Robin said.
“Yeah,” Jacy said. “So, can we crash here for a day or two while we figure things out?”
“Of course.” Robin’s eye makeup from the day before had slumped halfway down her face. There was enough black around her eyes for her to go total blackface if she wanted to. Her jet-black hair ran over her shoulder on one side and was shaved Marines-short on the other.
“So, where do we…?” Nash looked around the living room, hoping to god she wasn’t about to offer the couch for him to sleep on.
“There’s a bedroom in back. Long as you guys don’t mind sharing.”
“Sharing with each other?” Nash asked. “Or sharing with someone else?”
Robin cocked a quizzical eyebrow at him. “I don’t think there’s anyone else in there right now.”
A cell phone blasted a dubstep drop ringtone. It stopped after five seconds, then started up again. Wub-wub-wub.
Robin hunted for her phone which turned up wedged between the cushion and the arm of the chair she sat in.
“The fuck, Randy? I got guests.”
Her anger at the interruption was worth mentioning to Randy, but his offense not so great she didn’t answer the call.
Nash watched her listen to whoever Randy was tell her a story and by the look on her face, he had a feeling he knew what story she was getting, this time from a different point of view.
Nash met Jacy’s eye. Urged her silently to get up and out of the place. She turned her eyes to the floor and the rug that was more cigarette ash than thread. Nash listened to Robin’s end of her phone call, the faux gangster speak learned from rap albums. The purposefully inept language adopted to ensure the listener she was cool, she didn’t give a fuck.
Nash’s unease at being back in town crawled on his skin like a rash. The small-mindedness and self-destructive patterns of a small town like Bishop all seemed so obvious to him. Nash had been the kid who identified with Holden Caulfield, with Jack Kerouac. He wanted out even before the trouble. He was grateful he escaped with his secrets still bundled and packed away, off to howl against the night and burn like roman candles without anyone knowing the real reason he left when he did.
Life in a new place had been nothing brighter than his forty-watt existence allowed, but it wasn’t here.
Robin hung up the phone and turned to Jacy.
“Do you know who the guys were that got wasted?”
Jacy looked to Nash, back to Robin. “No. Just some crazy psycho fucks.”
“Those were two of Evel’s guys. They were moving product.”
Nash noticed how easily Robin took the news of the killings before her phone call versus how she reacted now that she knew it meant the local supply of drugs would be interrupted. Her legs fell open and Nash looked away from her black panties. Her legs were thin and her body lithe, but the bruises and protruding bones in her joints sucked away any attraction left in the parts yet to rot on her frame.
“Shit,” Jacy mumbled.
“Who’s Evel?” Nash asked.
“Who’s Evel?” Robin said as if Nash had asked who Elvis or Jay-Z were. “For a narc you don’t know shit, do you?”
“I’m not a narc. I was trying to get her the hell out of here. If you know something I should know about the shit that went down tonight, I’d appreciate you telling me.”
Nash’s greatest quality: drilling straight to the point and not suffering bullshit.
Jacy stepped in to answer for Robin. “He’s the local supplier. Kind of a big deal.”
“A big deal?” Robin said. “He’s king of crystal mountain around here. If he ain’t holding, ain’t nobody holding. And if you guys just fucked up a delivery, then you’re going to have a lot of antsy hicks with a serious jones and itchy trigger fingers.”
Nash stood up, trying to get Jacy to join him and get back on the road. “They were in the act of killing each other when we got there. I don’t know what kind of double cross we walked in on, but none of this shit is our fault.”
“Try telling Evel that.”
“Why the hell would we have to?”
“Seems like your names is all attached to this shit.”
Nash thought about the police call. His name and Jacy’s broadcast over police radio and any good drug dealer has a police band receiver to keep tabs on the locals. Nash made a fist and almost punched a wall until he saw someone had beaten him to it. A depression in the drywall next to the open guts of the thermostat seemed to be stained with dried blood in grooves shaped like knuckles.
“Do you know this Evel?”
“Yeah.” Robin seemed proud of the fact. Mixing with local celebrity.
“Okay,” Nash said, his speech the same take-charge cadence from his high school football captain days. “Here’s what you do. You take the money and give it to him. Explain what happened, how we walked in on one of his guys already killing the other one. You give him his cash and tell him we’ll never see him. We’ll be long gone.”
He didn’t check with Jacy to see if she was okay with the plan. This was it.
“How much money?” Robin asked.
“Enough. Just keep in mind, it’s better for you to do him this favor than to steal from him only to give him all the money back one stack at a time for drugs.” Robin’s eyes went to the floor. “He’ll know you stole it.”
Jacy said to Nash, “You sure you want to—”
“Yes. It’s not our money to keep. And if it’s his, he won’t let us leave. If you really want to get out of here, you have to cut all ties. With Mom and Brian, and with anything else that will drag you back to this shithole. Including a guy who’ll probably kill us if we take his overstuffed bag of cash from a busted-up drug deal.”
“Including a pain-in-the-ass little sister? Something like that to drag you back?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
Jacy looked away and bit on a nail.
“Where’s this money?” Robin asked. Her face glowed under the smeared black makeup, thoughts of the reward of thanks from Evel. The free bump of crystal, the discounted prices. Maybe he’d even bring her into his crew, the most lucrative and stable employment in the county, practically.