Come Join The Murder

by Holly Rae Garcia

  Jon tried to turn to face the man as he heard footsteps behind him, but a hard boot on his back pushed him flat into the dirt. Dust crept into Jon’s mouth and nose as he struggled to rise. Leaning down close to Jon’s ear, Leon whispered, “Let’s not make a scene, shall we? Wouldn’t want to scare the kid.” A rock cut into his ear as he lay there, head turned towards the flat tire, no longer able to move. He tried again to call out to Oliver, but the blood had mingled with the dirt, creating a thick heavy paste inside his mouth.

  There was a tug on his jeans as Leon pulled a wallet from Jon’s back pocket with a jerk. “Oliver...” Jon managed to mumble, but no one heard him. The man was already in his van. His tires threw dirt into the air as he spun around to get back onto the road before anyone came poking around. The van soon joined the low hum of traffic crossing over the bridge.

  Jon hoped the AAA guys would be there soon to take Oliver back to Rebecca safe and sound. He knew it was too late for him. Every breath was harder to draw in, and the warmth coming from his chest seemed to radiate out to the rest of his body, enveloping him. As Jon exhaled one more painful breath, he thought he heard a quiet click coming from the backseat of the car.

  Oliver knew he would be in trouble for unbuckling the seat belt that stretched across his booster seat, but he needed to find his dad. Something was wrong, his dad always answered him when he cried out. He climbed out of the seat and pulled himself up to the edge of the window. Nothing. He tried the door handle, but it never opened for him in the back, so he crawled over the console to the front seats, dragging his stuffed elephant along with him. He sat on his knees and set his hands on the steering wheel, trying to see over it. There was water in front of him, and the bridge above that and to the left. He thought he could feel the car shake as a large truck rumbled overhead. Oliver’s chin started to quiver, and he looked around again for his dad. No one ever left him alone like that. He wasn’t sure what he should do. He sat in the driver’s seat, his eyes wide and glistening with tears that threatened to spill over. He needed to get home to his mommy; she would help him find his dad.

  Cold air blew on his face from the vent as he leaned over to touch the gear shifter. He remembered his dad moving this around before but wasn’t sure which way it was supposed to go, or how it worked. He wiggled it but it didn’t budge from its spot next to the big ‘P’. Oliver knew his letters, his teacher at preschool made him and his friends go over them every day. That was definitely a ‘P’. P stood for... Puppies... and... Pumpkins! He smiled as he remembered the pictures on the wall at school. There were some other letters there with the P, and he traced them all with his finger. He hadn’t learned all of them yet. He jiggled the stick, but again it refused to move. Frustrated, he sat back in the seat and stared at it. There was a button on the side, he realized, and reached out to push it. Again, nothing happened. Maybe he wasn’t pushing it hard enough. He leaned forward and gripped the stick with both hands, pulling down as hard as he could. With a jolt, the stick moved down to the “D” spot. Oliver smiled as the car inched forward. He did it! He was moving! But as the water inched closer, the smile dropped from his face and his eyes widened. He needed to go in the other direction. He was moving towards the water, not the road.

  “Daaaaaaaaaaaad!!!” He looked out the window again, but still couldn’t see his dad. Oliver grabbed the stick again, pushing and pulling to try to get it to move to a different letter, not knowing what he had done the first time to get it to move.

  Jon’s eyes fluttered behind closed lids as he heard Oliver’s scream. With a burst of adrenaline, he pulled his hands toward his body and pushed up from the ground. He couldn’t stand, but he could pull his legs up enough to crawl towards the car. He inched forward.

  The car dipped down as the front wheels left the embankment, pushing Oliver forward into the steering wheel. The water rushed closer, covering the front of the car. He pounded on the window, screaming for his dad to help. He could finally see him, there on the ground, but he wasn’t getting up, he wasn’t helping. He caught his dad’s eye and waved at him through the window. He saw him! Oliver knew his dad would come fix this... but he wasn’t getting up. His dad was crawling towards the water like a baby and looking at Oliver, crying. His face was all dirty and twisted up. He lost sight of his dad as the car jolted one more time, left the bank completely, and sank into the brackish water.

  Once the car stopped tipping forward and had settled in the water, Oliver crawled back to the back seat, dragging Sammy along with him. He settled into his booster seat with the stuffed elephant on his lap. The car gently rocked as the water crept up, tickling Oliver’s bare feet. He pulled his knees up to his chest, crushing Sammy who was sitting on his lap, wrapped his arms around his legs, and lowered his face into Sammy’s blue fur.

  15

  Rebecca blinked rapidly to see through the tears that had filled her eyes. Shuddering, she took a deep breath and looked at the back of the man who killed her family.

  “Why?” she screamed at him, “Why did you have to kill them?”

  The man stopped, his hand on the van door, and spun around, “What?”

  “He was just a baby! And you could have just taken Jon’s wallet; he would have given it to you! You didn’t have to kill him!”

  Leon held his arms out in front of him, and stared at Rebecca’s hand, “Lady, I have no idea what you’re talking about, but we can figure this out. Just put the gun down.”

  Rebecca looked down at her white knuckles clutched around the handle of her late father-in-law’s gun. She couldn’t remember grabbing it from the car, cocking it, or raising it towards Leon.

  Leon opened the door to his van with a soft click. She looked up into his eyes, wide with fright. She tilted her head to the side, maybe it wasn’t the guy... maybe it was... but she couldn’t chance it. Everything went quiet as she took a deep breath. Rebecca gripped her hand around the gun, closed her eyes, and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked backwards as she fired, and the noise bounced around underneath the bridge. The bullet shattered a rock next to Leon’s feet. She opened her eyes and took a step back, covering her ears.

  “What the hell?!” All hope for a calm discussion had disintegrated with that rock.

  She needed to pull it together for Oliver. For Jon. She walked a few steps towards him and stopped. She brought her other hand up to help steady the gun. He was halfway into the van and reaching into his pocket for his keys when she pointed the gun at the biggest part of him and pulled the trigger again. His body lurched forward from the impact. He clutched his stomach with his hands as blood trickled down his shirt.

  “You BITCH!” He screamed at her and fumbled with the keys in his pocket.

  Rebecca’s hands were shaking as she took a deep breath and fired again. The bullet hit the metal door to his van with a clank and ricocheted off into the dirt. He dove to the ground and dropped his keys in the dust around his feet. She might not be the best shot, but she was the most determined. She knew she wasn’t walking away until she had some sort of justice for Oliver and Jon. As he bent down to get his keys, Rebecca closed the distance between them and planted herself just out of arm’s reach. When Leon collected his keys and raised his head, he was staring down the barrel of her gun.

  He held his hands in front of his face, “No! Please, I’m not who you think I am! Noooo…” She fired the gun again, cutting his cries short. The bullet tracked through his right palm and entered his forehead, an inch below his hairline. For a few seconds he stood there, oblivious to what had happened. Leon looked at her and frowned, blinking as the dripping blood began to blur his vision. He reached out to her, his hands covered in the deep red fluid. For the first time, he noticed his palm, disintegrated by the bullet. He turned his hand over and saw through the middle of it down to the ground where his keys sat on the gravel, perfectly framed by the shredded skin around the hole in his palm.

  Rebecca took a step back as Leon fell forward onto the dirt, covering up the key
s he had tried so desperately to retrieve. His chest heaved as he clutched the dirt around him and moaned.

  She stood over him as he bled onto the dirt and gravel, his brown hair stained black and matted around the wound at the back of his head. The gun slipped from her hand and fell, hitting the ground with a heavy thud and settling onto the loose dirt not far from her feet. She jumped back, as if it were a thing to be afraid of. She stood there trembling, arms limp at her sides and eyes wide with fright. A large truck rumbled overhead, bringing her focus back to where she was, and what she had done.

  Rebecca bent down to retrieve the gun and ran back to her car. She knew she needed to get out of there, and fast. There had been a lot of shots fired. Was it three, or four? She couldn’t remember. It had all happened so quickly. She threw herself into her car and slammed the door, throwing it into reverse to turn back around towards the road without stopping to put her seatbelt on. Gunning the gas as hard as she could, her tires spun dirt over Leon as she flew up the feeder towards the highway. Once there, she glanced at herself in the rear-view mirror. Almost unrecognizable, she wondered when she had turned into this wild-eyed woman. She was Rebecca, calm and cool and focused. She didn’t get emotional and she certainly didn’t kill people. She wasn’t positive she believed in a god, or karma, or whatever... but she was certain whoever or whatever would understand why she had done this. An eye for an eye, right?

  Rebecca slowed to the speed limit, aware she was going about twenty miles per hour over it. That was the last thing she needed right then, to get pulled over by a cop. She smirked at the irony. She was afraid they would finally do their job and pull her over, as she was leaving a place where she had to do their job for them. C’est la vie.

  Her hands had finally stopped shaking by the time she turned onto her road. Polly, the young single mother who lived a few houses down, was mowing her front yard. Polly looked up as she approached and waved to her. Rebecca returned the greeting before she realized what she was doing. Her car window was still down and she caught the scent of cut grass and the putter of a lawn mower as she drove past. A few more houses down, there were Andrew and Paul, having a glass of iced tea on their front porch. They also waved to Rebecca. She waved back to them. Can’t be rude, can’t be weird, can’t let anyone suspect she was anything but poor grieving Rebecca.

  Finally at her driveway, she pulled into her garage and let the door close behind her. She sat in her car, hands still on the wheel, staring ahead at the unpainted sheet rock wall of her garage. She just killed someone. He deserved it… but she had taken a life. She should feel... something. Remorse. Guilt. Fear. But she didn’t. She didn’t feel anything at all.

  She was tired. So very tired. She stepped through the small door into the kitchen, tossed her keys on the counter, and shuffled towards her bedroom.

  It was still weird, being in there without him. Without even the scent of him anymore. Everything was fading so fast. With her clothes and shoes still on, she climbed onto their bed and moved over to his side. She clutched his pillow and buried her face in it, trying to feel him one more time. She was asleep within minutes.

  ***

  She woke the next morning to a bright room, the light she hadn’t turned off last night glared down at her. As Rebecca leaned over to kick her shoes off, she noticed dust on her comforter. The dust she had carried into her home on her shoes, from that ground by the canal where she killed a man. She killed him. Shaking off the memory, Rebecca pulled her legs out of her jeans and slipped into her favorite pajama pants. She wasn’t planning on leaving the house that day, so she might as well be comfortable. She and Jon started every morning with a cup of coffee and that day was no different, except she finally felt like she could grieve in peace. She could think about her sweet boy and her missing husband and all the good things that they were. Finally knowing what had happened to Jon, she was no longer burdened with the unknown, with the realization that a killer was out there who was connected to her in the most intimate way. She had taken care of that. She sat in the kitchen while the coffee dripped into the pot, its strong aroma filling the small space. Walking with her cup into the living room, she settled onto the couch and turned on the TV.

  The volume kicked on before the black screen dissolved into a picture, so she knew it was Amy Andrews before she saw the flaming red hair and tight black dress. She used to have a dress like that, before pregnancy ruined her svelte figure and she was stuck wearing ‘mom’ jeans for the rest of her life. Rebecca twirled a few strands of her straight brown hair around her finger. She should dye it red. Jon always joked that he wanted a redhead. Rebecca leaned back against the couch pillows and sipped her coffee as Amy reported on the latest news.

  “... his body was found early this morning by local fishermen. Several bullet wounds indicate the cause of death, but the question remains: Why was Leon Phillips shot? Sources reveal nothing appeared to have been stolen. His wallet was still in his pocket, full of cash and credit cards. This is the exact same location as another mystery – a month back four-year-old Oliver Crow drowned here in his father’s car. His father, Jon Crow remains missing. Could this latest incident be related?

  Rebecca turned the channel, unable to see Oliver’s face plastered all over the TV yet again. She wished they would stop doing that: some people were trying to grieve in peace. The next station was also reporting on Leon, but thankfully they had left the Crows out of it or had already shown their faces.

  Most of it was standard news fare, after the shooting incident, anyway. Tide reports, hurricane outlooks, and more hot weather. Always with the hot weather. If she wasn’t so attached to their home, and the memories there, she would move somewhere cold. Somewhere that actually had all four seasons, not the unbearably long summers they had there on the Texas coast.

  Rebecca was pouring her second cup of coffee in the kitchen when she heard a new report faintly from the living room.

  “Leon Phillips was only in town for the week to visit family before he headed back to Florida. His mother said this was his first trip to Texas, and unfortunately this was also his last. Signing out, this is...”

  Coffee fell onto her hand as it overflowed the cup. She dropped the pot onto the counter and ran into the living room. The current station had already moved onto something else so she frantically switched channels, looking for someone still covering the story. She made it back around to Amy Andrews as they took a break to talk about traffic.

  Rebecca screamed at the TV, “Are you serious? No one cares about that right now!” She held her breath while they talked about another back-up on Highway 288, and more construction on I-10.

  Amy finally came back on and confirmed what the other station had said. Leon Phillips was only in town that week. He couldn’t have killed Jon and Oliver. He was in Florida a month before, not under a bridge by a canal in Texas. She sank to the floor as a whimper escaped her lips.

  She had killed an innocent man.

  She, Rebecca, had killed someone who had nothing at all to do with Jon and Oliver. He really was just a nice guy who was trying to help her out. That wasn’t how it was supposed to turn out. She was supposed to get justice and peace. She just wanted to be able to move on with her life. But she was a murderer, and the real killer was still out there.

  16

  Captain D’s was a neighborhood institution, and Tommy and James’ second favorite place to grab lunch. Their first was the Mexican Meat Market, but that was on the other side of town and they were in a hurry. D’s was shaped like a boat, or maybe it had been an actual boat. James could never tell. Sun-bleached oyster shells filled the previously grassy bits between the parking lot and the building. They must have saved a fortune on mowing. There was the obligatory thick rope following the walkway from the parking lot to the front door, a staple for every seafood restaurant. But you didn’t dare run your hand along it as you walked: the hardened rope fibers would poke the hell out of you. The main door had a boat wheel stuck to the front, and a
porthole peeking out from the middle of that. Inside, a U-shaped bar filled the small space, and customers sat around it on uneven bar stools, watching their lunch get shucked right in front of them.

  In the fall and winter, they liked the ice-cold oysters on the half shell. The flabby gray bits sitting in the palm of their shells didn’t look appetizing, but a bit of horseradish and a dash of hot sauce would make it just right. Tommy liked his on a cracker, but James sucked his right out of the shell. In the summer, they took their oysters Rockefeller or fried. James was the sort to take risks, but even he didn’t dare eat them raw in the off season. The warm waters off the Gulf of Mexico encouraged all sorts of bacteria to bloom and grow in the summers, and eating bad oysters was high on his list of things he never wanted to do.

  Tommy was already there, with a plate of Rockefeller and fries in front of him, when James arrived. He swiveled a bar stool around and eased into it. “What, you don’t wait for me?”

  “You’re late, and you know I gotta get back to the shop by twelve.” Tommy kept his eyes on the plate he was inhaling.

  “Screw ‘em, they won’t fire you for being late one day. You’re the best mechanic they got.”

  Tommy nodded his agreement while chewing. He was the best mechanic, and he knew it. “I ordered you the fried basket and tea.”

  “I hope you’re paying, I ain’t got shit.” Tommy always paid, but it was a fun little ritual to at least claim it was a surprise.

  “Yeah I’ll spot you, but you know rent is due in three days. Am I pickin’ up your end again?” Tommy glanced at James, gulped another bite down, and took a few swigs of his tea.

  “Yeah, I’ll pay you back,” James answered, though they both knew it was a lie.

  Tommy had been paying both halves of the rent for the past three months, and James knew he’d keep doing it as long as James kept hanging out with him. No matter how mean or cranky James could be, Tommy was always there. He didn’t know why Tommy stuck around, but he was glad he did. It meant the rent got paid, and most of his lunches were free. He was an all-right guy otherwise. Kind of funny, and super smart. Not as smart as James, of course, but right up there. He didn’t have many friends, he was kinda quiet, and a lot of people thought he was weird. He was, but a lot of people also thought it.