Empty Mile

by Matthew Stokoe

  I went to stand up but he held me down and whispered, “I want to make sure he doesn’t come back.”

  We waited another five minutes but there was no further movement on the road, so we moved back through the forest and started down toward Gareth’s Jeep. The journey was more difficult in the dark and both of us slipped and fell more than once on the pine needles. We couldn’t risk using the flashlight. Luckily, the fire trail cut right across that part of the mountain and all we had to do was keep stumbling downhill till we hit it. We veered off course quite a way and when we finally came out of the forest we were a couple of hundred yards further along the trail than where we’d left the Jeep.

  There was no moon but there were stars and the dry flattened grass of the trail was silver as we walked back along it not talking and rubbing at the scratches the forest had left on our arms.

  When we got to the car we climbed inside and closed the doors. I was exhausted and it seemed to me that we had done more than enough for this thing to be over with.

  Gareth looked at me as he started the Jeep. “That was the easy part. It’s going to get nastier now, Johnny. You’re not going to fuck up, are you?”

  I shook my head, though truthfully I was now so scared I felt outside my body, felt that I observed and acted, but had no ability whatsoever to influence events around me.

  “Good.”

  We drove slowly back along the fire trail to the road with our lights out. Just before we emerged Gareth stopped and rolled his window down and listened for other cars. When he was satisfied there was no other traffic he pulled out and we rolled down the long straight slope of tarmac with the engine in neutral to make as little noise as possible.

  Half a mile on, Gareth slowed to a crawl as we reached the part of the road where it made a sharp bend to the right. I assumed he was just being cautious in case there was oncoming traffic that we couldn’t yet see. But rather than rounding the bend and kicking the car into drive, Gareth stopped completely.

  The Jeep was still fully on the tarmac, blocking the right lane, and I glanced nervously back up the road, wondering if this was where fate had decreed we should be caught.

  Gareth dropped the backpack in my lap. “This is where you get out.”

  “What!”

  “Hurry up before someone comes.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  The world slipped sideways and for a moment I felt I had become the night’s victim, that Gareth was now finally taking revenge on me for having stolen Marla from him.

  He put his hand on my knee. “Dude, get a grip. We have to get Tripp to drive down the hill. When he tries to take this corner his brakes will fail and he’ll go straight into the trees. Bingo, one dead asshole. But it has to happen tonight. And it has to happen where we want it to happen. It’s no good if he just drives his car to Vivian’s or something, he’ll know the brakes are fucked up and he’ll get them fixed. So I’m going to Back Town to call him from a pay phone, anonymously, and tell him to come meet me. It’s a ten-to fifteen-minute drive. I’ll tell him not to come for forty-five minutes, so I will definitely be back here before he comes down the hill. But just in case, you have to be here to make sure everything works.”

  “Why don’t you call him on your cell?”

  “Phone records, dumb-ass.”

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  Gareth smiled a little. “I’m going to tell him I have evidence that Patricia Prentice’s death wasn’t a suicide.”

  “Do you?”

  “How would I have something like that, you idiot? Come on, get out. We get seen here, we’re fucked.”

  He gave me a shove and I opened the door and got out. “What do I need the backpack for?”

  “I don’t want it in the car if I get stopped by a cop. Just hide in the trees there and stay out of sight till I get back. There’s another fire trail about twenty yards past the bend. I’ll park there and walk up. Look out for me.”

  He put the car in gear and drove away before I could say anything else, and I was left alone in the sudden silence of the night. Gareth’s explanation for what he was doing sounded plausible, but just the same I felt terribly vulnerable and very, very lonely.

  I ran across the tarmac and into the trees. The starshine fell away almost immediately and I only had to go a few yards to find a place where I was invisible from the road but could still see its long silvered sweep running uphill.

  I didn’t want to sit down. The situation was so grave, so electric with deadly potential, that making myself comfortable seemed wrong. For long minutes I stood motionless, one hand pressed against the trunk of a tree, straining my eyes against the road, listening as hard as I could for the sound of a car coming down from the Slopes. And all the time praying that I would never see or hear it, that Jeremy Tripp’s car would never leave its carport.

  He had to die. I knew that. Stan and Marla and I would never be safe if he didn’t. But in that dark, lonely time at the edge of the forest all I wanted was for this plan never to have been hatched, for me never to have approached Gareth, and for him never to have accepted.

  Twenty minutes passed and I was still alone. I sank into a crouch. I had the backpack between my knees, the piece of pipe it held stuck up through its opening. By Gareth’s projected schedule there was still plenty of time for him to get back before anything happened but I was so frightened I had already convinced myself that he wouldn’t.

  And he didn’t. I’d been crouching for five minutes when I heard the throb of a large engine being pushed hard. I wanted it to come from my left, for it to be Gareth racing uphill to park on the fire trail and take over from me. I tried to fool my hearing, but it was no use. Though I couldn’t see it yet, the car was unmistakably further up the mountain, coming down.

  I stood and leaned out around my tree. For a moment the road was as dark and empty as it had been since I got there, but then, far back at the top of the slope, the trees on either side bloomed yellow. For a moment there was nothing else, just the light against the trees, as though it were caught there and could not come any further, as though the howling engine noise pressed against it, squeezing it against the night, thickening it with some horrible pressure.

  And then the light burst and the car was there on the hill, rocketing down the long strip of tarmac. At first the distance made it impossible to see anything behind the hard bright fan of the headlights, but I knew it was the E-type by the sound of the engine. And because there wasn’t anyone else it could be.

  Jeremy Tripp was driving fast and it was only a matter of seconds before I could see the faint gleam of bodywork and chrome behind the headlights. And then the outline of the car itself. And then the star-mirrored glass of the windshield in its metal frame.

  I stood frozen, watching through the trees as the car’s rear wheels locked and smoked against the asphalt. Its front wheels, though, kept turning and the back of the car slid out to the left until the whole vehicle was drifting diagonally across the road, across the beginning of the bend, going far too fast to ever have any hope of escaping the forest.

  I was directly back from the apex of the bend and Jeremy Tripp passed me by twenty yards before ploughing into the trees, but still I felt the impact beneath my feet and in all the trees around me. And the sound of metal slamming against living wood, like the discharge of some monstrous piece of artillery, echoed in the forest and rolled back up the hill and away, and after it had gone there seemed a vacuum about me, as though all the forest sounds, its smells, the quality of its light, had been blown away, leaving me in a silent and alien dream world where things could be seen but not understood.

  Gradually, a sound made its way through this new world, a faint hissing and, behind it, the creaking of hot metal settling. I picked up the backpack and crept through the trees until I came to the wreck of Jeremy Tripp’s car.

  He could have been fortunate, perhaps, and hit a stand of thin saplings that would have drained his speed a
s he crashed through them, reducing the destruction of whatever final impact brought him to a halt. But Jeremy Tripp had not been fortunate. He had hit a tree with a trunk three feet wide and there had been no gradual slowing. The long hood of the E-type had jack-knifed upwards as though some giant had tried to fold the vehicle in two. What was left of the front of the car was so badly disintegrated that I could not see one of its wheels. The windshield had shattered and granules of safety glass glinted on the floor of the forest. A thin rill of steam escaped from somewhere under the chassis and in the air there was a smell of gasoline and hot water.

  Jeremy Tripp was slumped forward in his seat, chin resting almost on his chest, his head a few inches from the windshield frame. If he had not been held in place by his seat belt he would have collapsed against the steering wheel. He was wearing a white windbreaker, and his left arm hung outside the car. His hand had been half torn from his wrist and there was blood over most of his sleeve and in great smears across the car door. There was blood on the side of his head as well, running from his ear and from his scalp, and though I could not see his face clearly it looked as though Gareth’s brake tampering had done everything it was supposed to do.

  As I approached the car I felt a visceral revulsion at the sight of so much blood and human damage, but there was a sense of resignation, too, that was almost peaceful. The thing was done. Questions of whether to go through with it or not, issues of right and wrong, opportunities to change my mind, had all been settled. It occurred to me that it might still be possible to resuscitate him. But I wasn’t going to try. Despite all the sickening fear I’d felt in the lead up to this moment I was glad he was dead.

  The car had traveled several yards through the forest’s fringe before it hit the tree but it would still be visible from the road if anyone in a passing car happened to look the right way at the right moment. There had been no other traffic so far that night but that wouldn’t last forever. I decided to hike through the forest until I reached the fire trail where Gareth had said he’d park when he came back. I didn’t let myself think about what I’d do if he hadn’t turned up by the time I got there.

  I was about to skirt the car and move away when Jeremy Tripp made a sound and the blood in my body turned to ice. The noise from his throat was wet and ragged, like a long, gulping breath through something too thick to swallow. For a moment I thought I might scream, but then my explanation-seeking mind kicked in and I told myself it was a death rattle, just the lungs letting go of the last of their air. Yet I knew I was wrong even before he sank back into his seat and turned his head and looked at me.

  I don’t know what other kind of injuries he might have had, but Jeremy Tripp had hit the top edge of the windshield frame, that much was obvious. His forehead had a deep trough running horizontally across it. It was not just a split in the skin. The skull had actually been pushed back into itself in a furrow about an inch deep. Below the wound Jeremy Tripp’s eyebrows bulged grotesquely.

  One of his eyes had burst but the other one held mine and blinked as his mouth twisted into a lopsided grin and he tried to speak.

  “Johnny…”

  The word came out slurred and malformed but it was unmistakable. He’d recognized me. I knew right then he wasn’t going to die as a result of this car wreck. He would live and he would tell people I was there and I would spend the rest of my life in jail and Stan would end up ruined in some state-run institution.

  I stared at him for more than a minute as he grinned back at me and repeated my name. Then I dropped the backpack on the ground and took the length of pipe out of it.

  His head had begun to droop forward again and was lolling toward his right shoulder. I pushed it back against the headrest and straightened it and when I had it set so that it would not move I lifted the pipe and lay it along the trench in his forehead. It fit snugly into the wound. I made a few slow practice passes with it. The windshield frame got in the way and it was difficult swinging from the left, so I had to turn his head toward me and then shift a little to the side to get a clear enough shot.

  When I was ready I drew the pipe back one last time and took a breath. I’d planned to just breathe out and swing, to slam the pipe across his forehead, but my lungs would not release their air and my muscles would not perform the task my brain so desperately wanted to be finished with. I stood, like a batter frozen at the plate, fighting against myself to make this last dreadful commitment.

  For a moment there was only the silent pounding of this struggle within me. Then, faintly, another sound started high up on the hill. At first I didn’t realize what it was, but it grew louder and I breathed out and turned my head. Through the trees, already a quarter of the way down the hill, the headlights of a car were moving toward me.

  When it got to the bend its driver would only have to glace to his left and he would see the short corridor the Etype had ploughed through the forest, and at the end of that corridor the car itself. And if he saw that he’d stop and get out and find Jeremy Tripp alive and sometime after that Jeremy Tripp would tell everyone about me.

  I turned back to the E-type and tightened my grip on the pipe. But still I hesitated, paralyzed by my fear of becoming a killer.

  Then Gareth was there. I hadn’t heard him arrive but I saw him now, a few yards away on the other side of the car, raking his eyes across Jeremy Tripp, instantly taking in the fact that he wasn’t dead, knowing what had to be done.

  The car on the road was seconds away. There was no time for Gareth to cross to my side of the Jaguar and relieve me of this hideous task.

  “Do it, Johnny! Do it!”

  His words severed whatever shred of decency it was that had been holding me in check and I brought the pipe across in a clean, flat arc as hard as I could. It slammed perfectly into Jeremy Tripp’s wound. His head bounced off the headrest and the arm hanging over the door flapped into the air. He made a loud sneezing noise and a spray of blood shot from his nostrils. Then he slumped forward against his seat belt and was still.

  “Move! We have to go!”

  Gareth waved urgently at me then ran back into the forest the way he’d come. I grabbed the backpack, skirted the car, and followed. A second later I almost fell over him. He was crouched behind a bush, peering intently toward the road. He pulled me down and put a finger to his lips and together we watched the headlights approach. They came down the last yards of the hill, slowing as they made the bend, then accelerating again as they passed where Jeremy Tripp’s Jaguar had entered the trees. The car did not stop. It kept on downhill, passing where we hid, moving on into the night until its light was gone. Whoever was driving it had not seen what had happened to Jeremy Tripp.

  Gareth grinned and put his hand up for a high-five. When I didn’t respond he took the backpack from me, got a plastic garbage bag out of it, and held it open for me to drop the pipe into. He carefully rolled it up and returned it to the backpack. We waited another minute to make sure the car wasn’t coming back, then we got up and walked as quickly as we could along the edge of the forest, far enough in from the road not to be seen, but close enough to use it as a guide to the fire trail where Gareth had parked.

  We didn’t speak until we were in the Jeep driving toward Back Town.

  “Where were you?”

  “It wasn’t my fault, Johnny. I called him, I told him not to come for an hour. I can’t help it if he got straight into his fucking car. Anyhow, it worked out okay.”

  “Except I had to do what you were supposed to.”

  “And you fucking held up good, man.”

  He gave me a solid, sincere look-there was even a trace of sympathy in it-but I couldn’t help wondering just how long he’d been standing there on the other side of Jeremy Tripp’s car before I noticed him. Or exactly what time he’d told Jeremy Tripp to get to the bogus meeting.

  Back in Old Town Gareth parked behind my pickup. As I started to get out of the Jeep he stopped me.

  “Johnny, we got a result tonight. He’s
not going to be fucking either of us up ever again and no one’s going to think it was anything but an accident. Did you see the front of the car? There won’t be enough of the brake lines left to examine properly even if anyone gets suspicious. He crashed, he banged his head, and he died. Don’t think anything else, even to yourself. In a month or two it’ll be like it never happened. Game plan now, dude, is we don’t contact each other for the next two weeks, just to be on the safe side, okay? After that it’s you, me, and Empty Mile, baby.”

  It wasn’t until I was out of the Jeep that I remembered the backpack lying on the backseat. I felt my stomach twist inside me, but it was too late. Gareth had already pulled the door closed and locked it. I wrenched at the handle and hammered on the roof. Inside the car Gareth smiled and wound the window down an inch.

  “You don’t need to worry about a thing, Johnny. I’ll take care of that stuff.”

  “I want the pipe.”

  He made an expression like he couldn’t hear me and pulled away from the curb. “Be cool, dude.”

  I watched him U-turn and drive along the street. Then I got into my pickup and sat without moving for a long time, cursing myself. My fingerprints and Jeremy Tripp’s blood. I couldn’t have given Gareth a bigger threat to hold over me if I’d tried.

  Marla was awake in bed when I got home, she sat with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest, as though preparing to receive some dreadful assault. I’d picked up a bottle of bourbon on my way through the kitchen and I sat next to her and drank and closed my eyes and then opened them again when I could no longer stand what I saw there.

  For a long time Marla clung mutely to me and I felt how frightened she was that Jeremy Tripp’s murder would reach into our future and destroy what little hope we had left for a normal life together. If we could have stayed silent forever, never speaking, never admitting or acknowledging what I had done, we would have-but horror demands its say and so, around mouthfuls of the coarse, burning whiskey, I told her about the night.