The Crashers

by Cubed, Magen

  V.

  Adam’s apartment in Jonestown felt like a good enough place to dry out and, Bridger decided, clear his head while he figured out his next move. Dying didn’t do him much good, after all, and neither did languishing in his ratty hotel room waiting to do it again. Adam’s apartment was a quiet, comfortable womb filled with pictures and knickknacks. Adam fed him, kept him company, and gave him a spare key, which was a far kinder offer than he usually gave himself the latitude to accept. Adam was like that. His clear eyes and his honest smile were painful to look at sometimes. He had broad hands with palms roughened from fixing engines and trucks in the desert. They were strong like he was strong, despite the softness they cradled Bridger with whenever he fell. It was the kind of unselfish generosity that set Bridger’s teeth on edge. He was useless in the face of such good.

  Still, Bridger couldn’t help but feel restless and out of place in Adam’s tiny life. He disrupted Adam’s routines, forcing him to accommodate Bridger’s presence on his couch and at his table. Alone from 7:30 to 6:30, he was bored and without distractions or vices to keep his mind from his feverish dreams of water and fire. He never spent time indoors in the middle of the day like this; he was always at work, or a business luncheon. On his third day in Jonestown, he wandered into the street, got on a bus and rode across town to Bob’s Repair and Restoration. By 6:00 he was outside, leaning against Adam’s car. Adam walked out of the shop. Fiddling with his keys, he stopped when he found Bridger there.

  “I was bored,” Bridger said. “Don’t ask.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Bus.”

  “It’s a two-hour ride.”

  “Like I said, I was bored.”

  “Oh. So, do you want to go home?” Adam pulled on his leather jacket and straightened his collar. “Or do you need to go anywhere else? The store or something?”

  “I was thinking we could find a bar,” Bridger said. “Get a quick drink.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to not be sober for a while, if that’s all right with you.”

  Adam laughed gently. “I could handle not being sober for a while, too.”

  He had a place in mind that was easy to walk to this time of day. Bridger followed him to a little pub with a flickering OPEN sign in the dark window. Green paint peeled from the battered shutters, which barely clung to the exterior. Inside, the lights were dim and the carpets were dirty. Yet, Adam was all sweetness and light as he ordered a round at the bar: two beers so dark Bridger hadn’t heard of the brewer before and two shots of Jameson, because Adam was an Irishman after all. They found a table in the corner, drank their shots, and stacked their glasses among the empties left on the corner. Bridger didn’t waste time, swallowing his beer as Adam nursed his.

  “So, where are we now?”

  Bridger wiped his mouth with a knuckle. “Where are we with what?”

  “Well, I assume you didn’t claw your way out of the bathroom window to make your escape since you willingly made the trek to Camden.”

  “That.” Bridger shrugged. “I appreciate the hospitality. It probably doesn’t seem that way, but I do. I just needed to get out of the apartment.”

  “No, I get that.” Adam licked the beer from his bottom lip. “You going back home?”

  “Can’t.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Both. Neither. Something like that.”

  Adam nodded. “Do you guys have any kids?”

  “No, we don’t. Came close once, but she decided against it. It was for the best. I’m not cut out to be somebody’s father. What about you?”

  “What, kids?” Adam smirked. “It’s a little difficult for me to manage in my condition, don’t you think?”

  “Ha, ha. I mean, you seem to know so much about running away. I was just wondering how you got to be the resident expert.”

  “I know a thing or two, yeah.”

  “So, what?” Bridger bounced his eyebrows salaciously. “Inquiring minds and all that.”

  Straightening up, Adam cleared his throat and took another drink. “I came home from Delaram fucked up. I mean, I was fucked up, and where I come from a man doesn’t let himself get like that. A man handles his business, takes care of his shit. When I couldn’t, my father let me know I wasn’t a man in his eyes anymore. And where I come from, people don’t stand up to their father, no matter how wrong he is. So, I left home and I never went back.”

  “Does it still hurt?” Bridger asked softly.

  “Yeah,” Adam answered. “It does. I went from being the runt of five kids to having no family at all.”

  Bridger nodded slowly and took one last swallow to empty his bottle. “I was an only child. Grew up broke in East Essex like any upstanding Jewish cliché from the old neighborhood. My father was a petty sort of tyrant—the kind of guy who ruled the house through silence. He wasn’t interested in my mom and he certainly wasn’t interested in me, so my mom left.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Packed her bags when I was eight. She told me that she loved me and that she was sorry, and then she bounced for New Mexico and a painter who made her feel alive again, or whatever bullshit she needed to tell herself. She had more kids—two boys—but she never came back for me. Not even to help me bury my dad when he died of an aneurysm ten years ago. And I can never forgive her for that.”

  Adam took a drink. “Never?”

  “No. Because my father fucked me up like my grandfather fucked him up. I can understand that. But my mother knew that about my dad and she still left me with him. She left me in that house, so she could have beautiful children with her beautiful husband. So, yeah, the way I see it, our families are our problem, but that doesn’t mean we have to forgive them.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “I believe that it’s up to God to forgive. That shit’s way above my pay grade.”

  “And what if there is no God?” Adam asked. “Who forgives us?”

  “You don’t need to be forgiven.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “It’s not a couple of Hail Marys and a pat on the back that you need, Adam,” Bridger found himself saying. He wasn’t even drunk, yet his head felt fuzzy with bad ideas, and his hands were empty but for frivolous gestures. “It’s—light that you need. It’s kindness. Someone who can recognize what kind of man you are.”

  Adam sort of smiled and sort of looked away. His fingers held his bottle as softly as they would a child. “And how would you know what kind of man I am?”

  Something about the way Adam spoke gave Bridger pause. It was the way he pressed his lips together to wet them, pursing around the bottle when he took a drink. He looked Adam up and down, and he felt just a little bit guilty for it in the part of his brain that was still working properly. So, he tried a smile of his own instead, no matter how much it hurt.

  “I know you’re a better man than me, Adam. You’re a better man than most. Maybe the best I’ve met if I think about it long enough.”

  The redness in Adam’s cheeks and ears revealed his embarrassment. He took another drink. “I want to say you’re full of shit.”

  “Or, you could just accept the compliment,” Bridger said as he stood to gather up their empty shot glasses. “And I could buy you another drink.”

  After a moment, Adam nodded with the cautious beginnings of an honest smile. “Yeah, I guess I could.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I.

  The alarms were ringing across the quad when Clara came home to Baucher Hall. The morning time trials down at the abandoned industrial complex on Fatherton Road had left her muscles sore and her head empty. All she wanted to do was take a shower, shut off all the lights and sleep for as long as her mind would let her. Instead, she found students and faculty ambling out of the adjacent buildings and onto the lawn where police circled the doors to her dorm. Squad cars closed down the street in a wall of flashing lights and steel, forcing the crowd back as people drif
ted from corner to corner of the barricade. With their phones out and raised over their heads, they carefully angled their screens to get a look on the other side. Clara turned on her heels, gripped the strap of her bag, and readied to run. Seven hours in an interrogation room left her cagey at the sight of cops. The sudden touch of a hand on her shoulder made her jump as Padma emerged from the shifting crowd in a panic. She had her phone in one hand, and her other gripped Clara’s shirt.

  “What’s going on?” Clara asked, checking her roommate for signs of violence or struggle. “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’m okay, but, they’ve tossed us all out of the building,” Padma explained. “They just came in an hour ago and started shouting for us to leave. I don’t know what happened. Somebody called the cops... like, a bomb threat or something.”

  “What?” Clara dropped her bag. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Cops are just going from dorm to dorm kicking open doors. They’ve already arrested Amar—you know, Tyler’s friend? They dragged him out and tossed him in a squad car.”

  “Did the cops say anything?”

  “No. Nobody’s talking and it’s not even on the news. I had to call Tyler so I could get the number for Amar’s mom and tell her what’s going on. This isn’t right, Clara. They can’t do this, right? I mean, they need warrants, right?”

  “Okay. Okay, okay.” After digging out her phone, Clara thumbed through her contacts. “You should call your parents and tell them you need to stay over for a few days. Forget your stuff. Just get off campus and keep your head down.”

  “Yeah.” Padma nodded and pushed the hair back from her face. “What about you? Where are you going to stay?”

  “I’ll be fine, just get ahold of your mom,” she said, furiously typing messages to Adam, Norah, and Bridger. “I just need to figure something else out.”

  II.

  Bridger sat in the waiting room of his lawyers’ sprawling offices and felt entirely too small. He could see now how acutely unprepared he was for his inevitable divorce proceedings. He didn’t like that feeling; it had been far too long since he felt so ineffective, and it didn’t suit him in the slightest. That useless part of him had died in East Essex when he left for college, and it was buried where no one else could see.

  Giving away all his suits had been a bit hasty in retrospect. In his own defense, he had planned to die as quickly as possible, and where he was going he didn’t need a thousand-dollar suit. The white button-up he had was three years old and tight in the shoulders under the thrift store blazer. He rehearsed the entire scene over breakfast and again on the bus: How Caitlin would walk in, how he would remain completely stoic, and how he would fight back the powerful urge to touch and kiss and hold her. They would sit through the meeting without incident and go their separate ways. He would pretend their marriage could be compartmentalized into safe, little boxes so he could sleep at night on Adam’s ugly old sofa.

  Then, at 9:20, Caitlin arrived in a maroon dress. Her black heels matched the reptilian texture of her handbag. She didn’t sit down. He stood.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hello.” She looked like she wanted to smile but thought better of it. “Where did you find that suit?”

  He looked down, smoothed the creases from his shirt, and shrugged uselessly. “A thrift store in Jonestown.”

  “You’re really dedicated to this whole slumming venture, aren’t you?”

  “You look amazing.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “With a friend.” It was a little alarming how easily the word slipped out of his mouth. “I’m staying at his place.”

  She tipped up her chin. “Your friend, Adam, I assume.”

  “Cait, it’s not like that. He’s just a friend.”

  “I figured as much. I tried coming by your room at the hotel to drop off the deed, but you weren’t there.”

  “For what?”

  “The house, Bridger. What am I supposed to do with it now?”

  “Sell it. Rent it. Burn it. Doesn’t matter now.”

  She shook her head. “It’s your father’s house, Bridger. You grew up there. I’m not just going to sell it.”

  “I did say you could burn it.”

  “Bridger.”

  “Look, it’s not going to do me any good now. I don’t care what you do with any of it. It’s all yours now.”

  “I’m not taking your money.”

  “I don’t need it anymore.”

  “Stop talking like that.”

  “Like what? I haven’t changed my mind, Cait. I don’t want you to see what comes next. What I need to do is make sure you’re taken care of after I’m gone. Okay?”

  He didn’t tell her about the bank, the gun, or the hundred ways he thought of killing himself since. The cancer might take him; it might not. There were variables to consider, none of which involved Caitlin watching him rot away in a hospital bed. No matter how long it could take. But he didn’t say anything about that. He took her hands to bring her close.

  “So, can you let me have that? Please?”

  She paused, then finally nodded. “I’ll try.”

  III.

  Kyle opened the case file and spread its contents across the board in his makeshift living room. There were photos and reports, building plans and bomb schematics. He pinned the psychological profiles and interdepartmental memos next to potential bomb targets, political affiliations, and religious ties—anything that would jump out at him. This was the portrait of a bomber with no name or face. In the corner of the board, two notes scribbled on cloying pink sticky paper: Little Girl? Snow?

  Standing back, Kyle closed his arms across his chest and stared at the annotated city map. A warm bottle of bourbon sat on the dresser beside the police scanner. The scanner murmured about shots fired in the Hull and a traffic accident on the Percy Street Bridge. There had been an appreciable uptick in violence at corner stores and car washes against people dark enough to have been on that manifesto video. He knew there would be. There was nothing of use just yet, but things were just getting started. Amanda was right about one thing: Kyle never really changed. Then again, neither had she.

  “Now what?” he asked no one. “Where are you taking this?”

  Would it be a hospital next, or a school? Would it be something nice and splashy? No. It was too easy... too simplistic, like shooting up grocery stores for publicity. This wasn’t about fame or mayhem or some new social program. This was retribution—one widespread injustice to make up for another.

  “Snow,” he repeated to himself. “Snow, snow, snow.”

  Somewhere in the EBC, there was a man looking to watch the whole city bleed. Kyle just had to find him. First, he got on the crosstown bus to find the tape and barricades still up at Darrington Square. They confined the area around the bank in a half-block radius in every direction. The cops had already left, leaving the property management company that owned the shopping plaza to deal with the cleanup and remodeling. Teams of insurance claims adjustors had come and gone already, leaving the gaping hole in the bank lobby boarded up and covered by tarps. No one around would notice him traipsing through a crime scene; the flow of traffic on the street and sidewalk was too dense, and his act was commonplace enough not to rouse suspicion as people ducked under the police tape for short cuts.

  Behind the tape and barricades, Kyle went unnoticed as he surveyed the scene. The crushed cars and buses had been towed away. The debris had been cleared. Only broad scorch marks remained as evidence of the explosion. The bank’s busted insides told the full extent of the violence. He used his phone to take a few snapshots of the scene: the burn marks on the plaster, the wreckage of the exposed support structure, the gaping holes left where offices used to be.

  News segments of the released police reports pegged the bombing an improvised explosive device of commercially accessible chemicals and materials. It jived with Amanda’s files from the first bombing and his domestic terroris
t profile. He had floated the name Snow to Ben, using some of his access and contacts to search federal databases for any persons of interest. It might have been a long shot, but it was worth trying. If nothing else, he could pass a few names to Amanda and let her save the day with some good, old-fashioned detective work. He didn’t have a plan of action beyond that. Even if he did, he couldn’t trust himself not to do something drastic.

  The sound of footsteps brought Kyle around. His hand hovered over the gun under his jacket. Retreating footfalls led him out of the devastated lobby and back out onto the street. A shadow darted across a tarp, then disappeared. He followed after but only found a black sedan peeling away from the curb across the street. A man in a black suit sat in the driver’s seat. Civilian plates were on the back. The man didn’t look at Kyle, and Kyle already knew why.

  IV.

  Norah had an armful of grocery bags in tow when she saw the pink notice on the front door of her apartment. EVICTION stared back at her in fat, black letters, and something inside of her broke in a way she hadn’t the time or patience for. She abandoned the bags on the counter, ripped the notice from the door, and stormed downstairs to the landlord’s unit.

  She took a deep breath and tried not to think about tearing the building in half. With her thoughts sufficiently collected, she knocked on the door as calmly as she could manage. The door opened in a jerk of the chain lock to Mr. Doherty’s small, dark eyes and spindly, wire glasses. He looked at the note in her hand and drew back the chain.

  “You’re late on rent for the third month in a row. There’s no debate. You’ve got three days to clear out.”