Asking For Trouble

by Simon Wood

  “What’s wrong?” Toby asked.

  Mike blushed, embarrassed. “Nothing.”

  He retook Barnett’s wrists. His friend was still warm, not normal body temperature warm, but warm enough not to feel like a corpse. Mike was reminded of an old girlfriend he’d had in school. She blamed her cool touch on poor circulation. It couldn’t be any worse than Barnett’s was now.

  They lifted and flipped Barnett onto his back in one fluid move, but Barnett’s dead weight was too much for them and they dropped him onto the blanket with a thud.

  “Jesus Christ,” Mike said.

  He saw Barnett in all his slaughtered glory. His stomach was a mass of puncture wounds. Toby had to have stabbed him at least twenty times. Barnett had really met his match.

  Mike glanced at Toby. He had a hand to his mouth, just as shocked to see the carnage as Mike was. Mike supposed the horror was just sinking in for him.

  “Let’s wrap him up,” Mike suggested after a long moment.

  Mike padded Barnett’s stomach with a pillow to help soak up the blood. They swaddled him in the blanket and bound it in place with packing tape. He looked mummified after they were finished.

  “I’ll bring Barnett’s car around,” Mike said.

  “What about the blood?”

  “We’ll clean everything up when we get back. I just want to get rid of Barnett first.”

  Mike brought Barnett’s Bug as close as he could to the apartment. Before leaving the apartment with Barnett’s corpse, Mike sneaked a look for passing neighbors. Luck was on their side: the coast was clear. They manhandled Barnett’s corpse over to the car and into the backseat. It was an awkward fit, and Mike would have been better off putting Barnett in his van, but he didn’t want any traces of Barnett in his vehicle.

  Mike drove out to the reservoir in Barnett’s car and let Toby drive his van. He rarely stared at the road ahead, instead keeping his gaze locked on the glare of the van’s headlights in the rearview mirror. He didn’t want to lose sight of Toby. Toby was barely keeping it together. The last thing Mike needed was Toby going AWOL on him while he was stuck driving a car with a corpse in it. He could have made Toby drive Barnett’s car; he was that malleable, but it seemed the lesser of two evils to let him drive the van.

  Mike wondered what this experience would do to Toby. Would tonight force him to take deeper refuge inside himself than he already had? Or would he blossom, flushed with the confidence of killing a man? Mike feared either outcome. Both mindsets drew attention to Toby, as would Barnett’s disappearance. People knew Toby was having dinner with Barnett, and they would ask questions. If he cracked, Mike knew the cops would end up at his door. Accessory after the fact had a sour taste to it. Maybe he’d made the wrong decision in getting involved. If he had, it was too late now. He turned the bend, and the hourglass-shaped lake came into view.

  Mike pulled up on the bridge that crossed the lake at its narrowest point. Campers and fishermen used the road, but it was out of season, so it was deserted. They unloaded the body next to the railings and drove off the bridge to stash the cars. They trotted back to the corpse, each of them carrying makeshift weights to keep the body on the bottom. They bundled Barnett over the side, and the last Mike saw of his friend were the bubbles left as he descended below the surface.

  “Now his car,” Mike said.

  Mike had thought about leaving it in a bad neighborhood with the doors unlocked or just torching it, but both options ended with eventual police involvement. No, the car had to simply disappear. They wiped it down and dropped it off outside a scrap yard. He knew someone there he could pay to make the car disappear.

  Mike drove his van back to Barnett’s. It was after one and sleep was trying to get a grip on him, but he couldn’t call it a night yet. There was still the mopping up to do.

  “Remember, use paper towels first,” Mike instructed. “They’ll burn easier.”

  They soaked up the blood, disposing of the bloody rags in garbage bags. There was no mop, but Mike found a sponge in the bathroom. He was filling a bowl with soapy water when Toby spoke. He’d been quiet up until then, doing as he was told, and his question startled Mike so much he didn’t hear him clearly.

  “What?” Mike asked.

  “Why did you come here tonight?”

  Mike hemmed and hawed. He hadn’t been expecting the question, and he didn’t have a lie on tap. “I was passing.”

  Toby’s eyes were black beads.

  Sweat broke out on Mike’s brow. He turned the tap off and lifted the bowl out of the sink.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” Toby demanded, an edge in his voice.

  “Knew what?”

  “You knew what Barnett was planning to do tonight.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Mike plunked the bowl on the floor. Water slopped out onto the linoleum. He soaked it up before the suds went too far and scrubbed at the bloodstains.

  “You do know what I’m talking about. You knew this was a setup. Barnett wasn’t interested in being friends; he just wanted to fuck me.”

  Mike swallowed hard. Toby’s manner was changing. The hardcore introvert was casting his shell aside, and a new creature was being born. Mike scrubbed harder at the stains, his fear manifesting itself as elbow grease.

  Toby tied a knot in the top of the garbage bag he was holding and dropped it on the floor. “What did you come around for, Mike?” he repeated.

  “You’re right. I knew what he had planned. But I didn’t like it and I came here to stop him. All right?”

  Mike stared straight at Toby, who sneered back disdainfully.

  “He got the idea into his head that he had to fuck a guy, not because he was gay, but because it was something he had to experience.”

  “Why me?” Tears shone in Toby’s eyes. He brushed them away.

  Mike sighed. “Why do you think? Because you’re weak and you wouldn’t put up much of a fight.”

  “Well, he was wrong, wasn’t he?”

  “You’ve got that right.” Mike wrung the sponge into the bowl. Rose-colored water poured between his fingers and turned the bubbles in the bowl the same color.

  “Did you think it was funny?”

  Mike threw the sponge into the bowl, splashing water everywhere. “What do you think? Of course I didn’t think it was funny. I’ve been trying to talk him out of it for weeks.”

  “You’ve known for weeks, and you didn’t do a thing about it?”

  “I did my best.”

  “Well, it wasn’t good enough.”

  “Yeah, well, Barnett is a man unto himself. You don’t tell Barnett; he tells you.”

  Mike finished cleaning the floor and picked up the bowl. He took it over to the sink and poured it down the drain. Toby was on him in a second, knocking the bowl from his grasp. Toby pinned him against the sink with his body and held him in place with the knife he’d stabbed Barnett with, still sheathed in its plastic bag. Even through the plastic, Mike felt the blade sharp against his throat.

  “Did you really try that hard, Mike?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or did you think to yourself you wouldn’t mind a piece of that action too?”

  “No.” Mike’s answer was emphatic.

  “Are you sure, Mike?” Toby ground his groin against Mike’s backside. “Are you sure you weren’t tempted? Are you sure you didn’t want a taste?”

  Even though Toby had showered, he still stank of that damn medicated acne cream. The guy had to have had the stuff oozing from his pores.

  “I didn’t want a taste. I just didn’t want him hurting you.”

  “Ah, I didn’t know you cared,” Toby mocked. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you have a soft spot for me, even a queer thing for me. Hmm? Am I on to something?” Toby pumped his hips against Mike again.

  “Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t give a shit about you other than I didn’t see why you should be hurt. And if you really want to know, I tried t
o stop him because I pitied you.”

  It was rough stuff to say to someone with a knife pressed against your throat, but Mike didn’t care. He’d made a mistake by not doing more, but he’d made up for it as best he could. Toby pressed the knife harder. It pierced its plastic skin and pricked Mike’s flesh.

  “Maybe you don’t care for me, but maybe I care for you. Maybe Barnett has awakened something in me that I didn’t know existed. And maybe I need to explore it.” Toby reached around Mike’s waist and fumbled with his belt and fly. “Maybe you’re the man who can help me discover that something.”

  “Don’t do it, Toby,” Mike instructed, his words slow and carefully spoken.

  But Toby wasn’t listening to Mike anymore. Mike had lost his control over him. Toby had grown into his own man—a man like Barnett. He finished undoing Mike’s jeans, yanking them down with his underwear, before working on his own trousers.

  “Toby, you know this is wrong.”

  Toby cut Mike’s breath off with the knife, forcing his head back. “How can it be wrong, if I haven’t done anything yet?”

  “Toby, please stop,” Mike pleaded.

  “No!” Toby snapped.

  Toby didn’t back down, and Mike knew he never would. His hand found the knife block and curled around a knife handle.

  BIG SKY KILL

  The aging Buick Century followed in the ruts left by better-handling vehicles. In these snowy conditions, it wouldn’t take much for the car to end up upside down in a ditch, and at this time of night no one would come across it until morning. Torrance couldn’t afford an accident tonight. His failure would cost Rachel her life. He’d wrecked his own life during the past week in order to save her, but everything was in place now. The money was in the bag on the passenger seat next to him, weighed down by a nickel-plated .32. Fyker was in the trunk, bleeding, not mortally, but bleeding. Mackey had insisted that Fyker still had to be breathing.

  Mackey had told him not to think of his demands as a ransom, but as a purchase. “This is the price you have to pay to take Rachel off my hands.”

  Everything had been going so well. His and Rachel’s relationship had bloomed so fast that he’d thought she might be the one. Only when Mackey had accosted them in a restaurant had he found out about her psychotic ex-husband she’d crossed four provinces to avoid. He’d feared that Mackey would kill them both, but it turned out he didn’t want blood; he wanted a payoff.

  Torrance had brought something to the exchange that wasn’t on Mackey’s list—a Celtic cross. Rachel had a thing for all things Celtic, and he’d seen the necklace the day following her abduction. He’d bought it, and he intended to give it to her the moment she was released. The necklace hung around his neck, the thick silver cross resting against his heart. He touched it for luck.

  With Rachel’s life hanging heavy on his shoulders, his reactions were sharp to the point of being feral. He caught every twitch from the Buick’s rear. The headlights cut a tunnel of light thirty meters ahead of him, but he could see beyond that thanks to a full moon. He reached over and turned up the heat to push out the bitter Alberta night.

  The countryside slipped by. The change was stunning. He was barely thirty minutes south of Edmonton, and he’d left the urban world behind. Under the full moon and clear skies, a dinnerplate flat landscape stretched beyond the horizon. The fields on either side of the two-lane highway would be chest high in crops come summer, but in the dead of winter they were apocalyptically barren under a blanket of uninterrupted white. The occasional tree created a blemish to blight the perfect nothingness. Civilization had stopped back at the city limits. Light didn’t exist out here. The moon and night drained the color from the landscape, reducing it to a monochromatic world. This view out the windshield would continue until Calgary. Fyker kicked at the backseats from inside the trunk and yelled something Torrance couldn’t make out.

  “Shut up,” Torrance shouted and switched on the radio to drown out any further pleas. He swept through the frequencies trying to find a station with good reception. He didn’t care what he found as long as he didn’t have to listen to a man beg for his life. He found a crackly country western station and cranked up the volume.

  Fyker isn’t important. The thought had returned to him repeatedly in the days leading up to the snatch, and he didn’t doubt it would continue to do so long after tonight was over. It was hard not to admit he was going to have a hand in this man’s death, even if he wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. That honor belonged to Mackey. He had to believe his part in Fyker’s murder was a necessary evil. When Fyker was dead, he could have Rachel back. That was the deal. Very simple to understand and not too hard to carry out. Fyker cried out again, and Torrance cranked the radio up to the max.

  Finally, after thirty minutes, Torrance exchanged headlight glare with another vehicle. For a second, he glimpsed a bundled-up mass of man driving an ancient Ford pickup. Just as quickly this stranger in the night raced past and was nothing more than a pair of retreating taillights reducing to red dots in Torrance’s rearview mirror.

  Again status quo returned: dark night, lousy grip on slippery roads, loud radio, Fyker’s begging, and Torrance’s thoughts, now a malignant mass in his gut.

  The Buick’s headlights lit up a sign for Red Deer. Torrance checked the trip meter—eighty kilometers. Thirty kilometers to go, he thought, not far now. He was to stop the Buick when he was exactly one hundred and ten kilometers from the Edmonton city limit.

  Even in the poor conditions, the Buick ate up the distance swiftly. The rotary dials revolved up, each digit replaced by an increasing number. He couldn’t take his eyes off the numbers. At ninety kilometers, he remained a kidnapper, just like Mackey. The same applied when the trip meter read one hundred, and all the way to one hundred and nine and nine-tenths. He slowed the Buick to a halt, half on the road and half on the shoulder, about two hundred meters behind an SUV. He was no longer just a kidnapper. In a few minutes, he would be a co-conspirator in a man’s death.

  “Thank God!” Fyker shouted. “Thank you, thank you, thank you. I knew I could convince you.”

  Torrance started to correct the man’s misunderstanding but decided not to. He had no axe to grind with Fyker. Why take away his moment of joy?

  A flare shot up and erupted in the field to Torrance’s left, lighting up the landscape, featureless except for two figures some four hundred meters from the roadside in the snow.

  “Rachel,” he murmured.

  Torrance killed the engine, stuffed the .32 in his pocket, and snatched up the bag with the cash. He rounded the Buick and dropped the bag when he reached the trunk. He slipped the key in the lock.

  “I’m opening the trunk now. Remember I have a gun. Any funny business and I’ll shoot. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Fyker’s weak voice filtered through the metal door.

  Torrance pulled out the .32 and aimed it at the trunk while he twisted the key in the lock. The trunk popped up, and Torrance stepped back two paces, gripping the pistol with both hands.

  Fyker knocked the trunk open with his knees. To Torrance’s relief, his hands were still tied. Fyker wormed and wriggled his way into a sitting position.

  “Can you give me a hand?” he asked.

  Torrance took a step forward and caught sight of Fyker’s head. Blood caked one side of his face where Torrance had pistol-whipped him one too many times when he’d taken him from his city center office. Under the moon and flare light, his wound appeared black in stark contrast to his ghostly face. “Don’t try anything,” Torrance warned.

  “It’s a bit late for that,” Fyker conceded.

  Torrance gave one-handed assistance to Fyker, keeping his gun pressed against Fyker’s side. Although clumsy, his partial assistance was enough for Fyker to free himself from the cold trunk.

  Torrance stood back and aimed the .32 at Fyker’s chest. “Step out to the middle of the road.”

  Fyker did as he was told. Torrance removed the keys, pocketed t
hem, and slammed the trunk closed. He picked up the bag and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  The flare had reached its pinnacle and now gravity was dragging it back down to earth. As it plummeted to the ground, the flare’s luminescence turned the snow varying shades of purple. The light cast distorted shadows off Rachel and Mackey.

  The wind that whipped at Torrance when he stepped from the Buick died and with it, all sound. He heard only his footsteps compacting the virgin snow and Fyker’s breath ripping in and out of his chest. Fyker had no coat, and by the sounds of him, he’d caught a chill, but he wouldn’t have to worry about that chill developing into anything nasty. Mackey would have medication to cure any ills.

  Rachel and Mackey were talking to each other. Torrance strained to hear their conversation, but even with the dead silence, he was too far away. He hoped Rachel was giving Mackey hell, but didn’t think so from her stance.

  “You know what will happen to me, don’t you?” Fyker said.

  “We’ve had this conversation before, and I told you I don’t care. You’re currency. You’re just part of the ransom. You’re no different than one of these one hundred dollar bills in this bag.”

  Tough talk, Torrance thought. He almost believed what he was selling.

  “This isn’t you,” Fyker said, as if reading Torrance’s mind. “You’re no henchman. You’re what—a computer programmer?”

  “An IT support specialist.”

  “How did an IT support specialist come up with half a mil and a gun?”

  “I fell in love,” Torrance responded. “Now shut up and keep walking.”

  “You surpassed my expectations,” Mackey said when Torrance brought Fyker to a halt in front of him.

  “Thanks.” Torrance eyed the revolver in Mackey’s hand, loosely gripped against his side. “You okay, Rachel?”

  She smiled at Torrance. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  She did look fine. Mackey had been true to his word, not harming a hair on her head. Relief washed through Torrance and warmed him in a way that the Buick’s heater hadn’t managed. He smiled back.