by Lissa Pelzer
‘I’m sure you told me your name when we sat down, but you know I’m not very good with names.’
‘It’s Valarie,’ she said as she pulled back onto the road.
‘Well, I’m Red.’
‘Red Rover, Red Rover?’ She asked.
‘Red Rider… If you need to call me.’
‘Red Rider? Like Tom Cochrane and Red Rider?’
Red put his hand to his mouth. ‘You know them? How the heck? You’re too young to know that band.’
‘Lunatic Fringe is a classic!’
‘Sure it is… But since before you were born.’
She was laughing now, her sweet mouth, all wide and wet, and shining from the glow of the dashboard.
‘So, is that your name Tom Cochrane?’
And it was like a rope had been tied around his waist and was pulling him back to fifteen years ago. His feet lost contact with the foot well and the road outside of the windscreen retracted into the distance.
‘No,’ he said. His voice had turned into a recording being played back to him. ’The name’s Ralph Adams.’
‘But you were probably a red head when you were younger.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Is this you coming up?’
They had reached the truck stop too soon and Red was unprepared for what he needed to do. He wanted to pray for himself and for her, but he could see the running lights from a couple of the other semis and knew the occupants would still be awake, knew that time was critical.
‘It is, but can you pull past a way? It doesn’t do to let these guys see you being dropped off by a beautiful woman. I wouldn’t hear the end of it.’
Valerie didn’t comment on that, but she kept on driving. ‘Can I drop you off here, by these trees? I don’t think anyone can see us here.’
‘Sure, that’ll be fine.’
The car slid into the sidings, but Valerie didn’t put it into park. She was just letting him out. She wasn’t looking for a make-out session. But even now Red felt somehow offended.
‘Here you go!’ she said as if to drive the point home.
Red laid his hand on the lever and jammed the car into park. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful night. Do you feel like a walk, maybe go look at the stars?’
‘Oh…’ She tilted her head softly, but Red felt the prickle in the air. ‘It’s late. I’ve really got to get home.’
‘Of course.’ He leaned back towards the door and made as if he were about to get out. He sensed her shoulders drop. She’d been tense for a moment, worried that he wanted more than she was willing to give. But of course, you can only give what is yours to give, and everything we have comes directly from The Lord.
Red coiled his fist around the roll of quarters he’d had lying in his pocket and grasped the edge of the seat with his other hand. He put all his force and weight behind the punch and made contact with her face just on the cheekbone.
The thud was hard and loud but only a small sound came out of her mouth as she reeled back. Red quickly hit her again in the same spot and felt how the bone there gave this time, and Valerie fell back against the seat.
Red got up on top of her. There was a small amount of blood coming up into her eye socket and trickling down from her nose over her mouth and he yanked open the door and let her head drop out. He reached up to switch the small internal light off and looked back towards the truck stop. There was no one in sight. There would be no one in sight, but he had to take precautions.
Valerie’s head lulled out of the open door, but her body was secured in by the seatbelt. He had knocked her out, but he knew from experience that she could come around again in a couple of seconds. He pulled the plastic bag out from his pocket and threw it over her pretty, young head, took out the duct tape and pulled off a long strip before leaning over her again and securing the bag around her neck.
The lack of air made her come to. It made her instinctive fight-for-life responses kick in. Red reached for her arms and held them to her, thinking that if he didn’t she might hurt herself. Because he wasn’t doing to this to hurt her, he was just letting her pass.
The Lord had sent him a good and hardworking young woman, one with morality. This was so obvious that Red knew it had been done to ease his own conscience. She didn’t need saving. This girl didn’t have any outstanding payments due upstairs.
But she was still struggling.
Valerie’s hand slithered out of his. One of her long nails caught his cheek and slipped up into his eye. He felt the hard talon catch inside his eyelid and a burning pain tore across his cornea. He reached up to her covered face, her eyes wide inside the misted over plastic and her cheeks sweaty and bloody like a side of beef wrapped in film. But with the sting in his cornea, he couldn’t look at her for long before he had to press his eye shut with the heel of his hand.
‘You do that again...’ he said, but his words trailed away. ‘Don’t do that again,’ he whispered. ‘Be at peace.’ He willed her. ‘Be at peace.’
But Valerie didn’t want to be at peace. She didn’t try to scream. She seemed to know enough not to do that. But with one hand free she found the seatbelt lock, managed to pop the buckle and fell heavily out of the car and into the gravel. A moment later, she got up and stumbled forward.
Red was surprised. Almost too surprised to react. He peered at her progress through one narrowed eye, knowing that her time was coming to an end. He was sorry that she was choosing to go out like this, stumbling around, so undignified. It made him remember someone, a woman on the farm. It made him shudder.
This woman was carrying another man’s baby and Red had known the only decent way to make sure the baby was never born was to let it die with its mother. He’d promised her a wedding and had taken her down to the river in a long, thick, cotton dress. This bride had struggled, grabbed on to branches and thrashed about until he’d been forced to bludgeon her with a log. It had been traumatic for him, but it would have been worse if she’d lived. This was no different.
Red heaved himself over into the driving seat. He popped the car into drive and braced himself for what he was about to do. He took his foot off the brake and muttered a small prayer for support, but just as he was doing so, he paused. Valerie hit the ground, the bag still stuck to her face and she began to thrash and convulse.
It might be kinder to drive still, to crush her skull and end her suffering, but life was suffering and this would be the last misery she would ever experience before joy. Also, Red needed to put her body in the back of the semi and drop her off in a different city. If she were bloody, that would mean more work. So he stayed where he was and watched her die.
Her hands were at her mouth for the final moments. The shaking and kicking intensified. It was like the last few seconds of a firework show, exciting and thrilling, but sad because you know it will be over soon.
Then finally, she was still.
Red breathed out. He watched her limp, lifeless body for a moment. He made himself appreciate the reality of the situation, that a soul had departed and that a corpse remained. He said a closing prayer, then took in a fresh breath and carried on.
The spot where Valerie had pulled over was shaded from the truck stop. Still, he’d need to move the car in case someone who knew her came by. He supposed the best option was simply to drive it back to the grill where she worked. That way, it would look like she had taken a ride with someone, and if he was stopped on the road coming back, it would make sense that he’d just been there.
Red reversed out into the road. In the dark behind the bushes, Valerie was almost completely invisible, but even if she wasn’t, an abandoned couch, rug or any kind of trash, wasn’t that unusual out here. He would put her in the back once he returned. Her body would be cooler by then and that would also make things easier.
The lot of the grill was deserted and Red pulled up into the same place he thought he had seen the waitress’s car parked before. He cleaned off the keys, left them in the clean ashtray
and headed off.
His eye stung like the devil as he walked along trying to make out the cracked and faded edge, so much so, that when a car pulled up behind him, he didn’t even see the lights.
‘You need a ride?’
Red stopped in his tracks. Folks out here really were very kind.
‘You’re heading towards the Trucker’s aren’t you? Sorry, I was in Patchy’s. I saw you there with Aaron and Jerrod.’
That was just how smoothly things could go when you had friends in high places. Even if Valerie was missed, this ride had just provided him with the perfect alibi.
They reached the truck stop and Red thanked the guy and wished him well. Then he headed straight towards his own truck, fetched a large piece of sacking that he used to pad the edge of loading docks sometimes and came back around towards the trees to collect Valerie. His eye still burnt, but Red knew he needed to clean her up before he went and sorted himself out.
For a moment, the pain was so sharp, Red had to stop. The agony traveled down his nose and cheek and made him say a few words he didn’t use too frequently. But after a minute, the pain eased and he opened one eye but when he did so, he saw that everything was not as it should be. Valerie was gone.
Red went to where she had been. The ground here was pale and flat like the spots in the fields around the old farmstead where the horses liked to roll in the dust. Red turned about. Had someone from the truck stop found her and taken her away, drove her to the hospital maybe, called the cops?
Red’s guts convulsed. Instinctively, he took a step towards the longer grass but felt the dirt give way under his toe. This wasn’t just grass, it was a cliff. He stopped, straightened up and squinted into the darkness. Being the dog-end of summer, the scrub was pretty much dried out. He couldn’t see how far down it went after that, but it must have been at least six foot because he could see a second ridge of scrub, just beyond. The bushes here had some thorns attached and he pulled back. Then he noticed a bit of white plastic stuck to one of the thorns and went over again.
There was another glint from the plastic bag below, maybe a quarter of the whole.
Red cringed. That meant two things. Firstly, that Valerie’s body had somehow made it over the edge, also that her face would be exposed and he could just imagine the reaction of the poor soul who would find her.
Should he go down there and bring her back up? Could he even manage to do that alone?
Red huffed. He wouldn’t. He didn’t need to. It was another example of intervention from above.
Who would be back here, looking over the edge into the scrub in the middle of the night? No one, that’s who. And only tonight mattered.
Tonight, he was going to take care of Carol Ann.
Janine
Sometimes when she couldn’t sleep, they gave her something to help her sleep. They always gave it in a small paper cup and even though she’d asked for it, they watched her take it. But these days when she asked for a pill, she didn’t take it to sleep, she had noticed interesting side effects, shortly before she fell asleep she would begin to dream.
At first, a series of strange ideas would come to her, one leading on from the other. She’d dream of a bird sitting on a fence and then see the nail holding the wooden plank to the pole and think of Jesus on the Cross. Wasn’t there also a bird perched on the crucifix? It was like going to the movies as one side of her brain shut down before the other, and that other part got to watch. One time, her brain theorized that Bryan was actually her father, and that explained how she knew about the place where he was from. Because it was either that or she really had known the Snells, and gone to Florida with them, right?
After she became aware of these ideas, these memories coming through, she started paying attention to them. She imagined herself in places, and doing things that Bryan and Karl would dispute. She was in an airport alone and when she looked down, she saw heels. Another time, she was on a sun lounger by a busy pool, drinking a blue cocktail. She didn’t need them to ask her, who would serve an eighteen-year-old a cocktail in a fancy hotel? She asked these questions herself.
Tonight, in her final crazy thought-scape, Janine imagined herself coming out of the sea and seeing hotels in the distance. She looked down at her body and saw a long tendril of wet hair in the colors of raw tuna fish, running with water down her stomach. She came up to a towel lying in the sand and another blonde girl was lying there already.
‘Your phone was ringing,’ the girl said. ‘It’s probably Bobby.’
‘Then I’ll just ignore it.’ She heard herself laugh.
She sat down on the white towel and breathed out into the salty air. The water on her skin began to dry and tingle.
‘It’s basically prostitution,’ the other girl said, ‘except you’re not getting paid.’
She shook her hair out. ‘We do get paid. We just don’t get the money yet.’
‘I reckon, you won’t get it, ever!’
‘You’ll see. Cassandra says Bobby’s investing it for our college fund. That’s how it works. If he just gave it to us, we’d spend it, like you spent that money Daryl gave you in just a month!’
‘At least I had the money in my hand. You’re being taken for a ride,’ the girl said, ‘by Bobby and...Cassandra.’
This made her start. There was truth in the words and now she was somewhere else, somewhere totally different. She was next to a fireplace in a lounge room, a Stetson hat rested on the mantelpiece and she was begging Bobby for the money.
‘Lilly,’ he said. ‘Ladies don’t ask for the money.’
Lilly.
The name struck a cord and she reached out for it like it was a physical object but just then the world began to speed up. She saw herself up ahead in the dark, searching for something, grabbing at semi trucks in a lot, when a woman spun her around and pinned her down. She didn’t know her, but was scared of her. Then there was a flash, like electricity surging through her head and she was running in place, wading through the thick air of her dream towards a man in a truck waving her on.
‘Come on, girl. I’ve got you,’ he said, and she paddled her way towards him without getting any closer. He had the door of his truck open and she knew if she could only get inside, she’d be okay. She took one last leap and her fingers caught on the rim of the step and slowly she hauled herself up. And then she was in. She closed the door and was safe.
Davies
She’d driven around the vicinity fifty times looking for that Freightliner with the flames down the side and the truth be told, she couldn’t find it. Perhaps when Ralph ‘Red’ Adams broke down here last time, his tracker broke too.
At the sheriff’s department, she had tried and failed to work her magic. And she’d been to the fast food strip, and spent close to a hundred dollars on burgers she wouldn’t eat, talking to drive-thru guys and no one had seen anything that night.
There was something utterly depressing about running out of leads to follow or tasks to complete. Davis starting to think, with no trucker, no video and no one to ask, she might as well appease Marques and head back home. Was this how it ended?
That was where her head was, when the boy from Patchy’s came out of the back, walking around like he owned the place. That kind of thing, kids doing things she knew they shouldn’t, struck her like a wet towel to the face.
He’d come out cool as cucumber and been turned back around by an officer to go down the corridor again. Twenty minutes later, while she’d been waiting to speak to someone about public security policies, he’d shown up again. He’d waved goodbye to the two detectives behind the desk as if he had something on them. Then, in a scene from a Keystone Cop movie, they all recognized him at once from a photo-fit on the wall and pounced on him.
Even with a twinge of pain still in her stomach every half an hour, at the sight of this, the thought going through her head was, ‘I wonder if that guy from Patchy’s knows his person of interest just got arrested for murder,’ because if the tables were
turned, she’d want to know.
‘I’ve got my own case,’ she said to herself as she started up her car. Except, she had no more leads. ‘Once I get back to Miami, I’m sure things will get straightened out pretty quick. They need me out there.’ But this too was a bluff of the worst kind.
So she managed to ignore the impulse until around ten thirty at night. After which she knew her window of opportunity was closing fast. Now, she was driving back to Patchy’s to ask the waitress if she knew where to get a hold of Bryan, watching the clock and her speed in equal measure.
And she realized that Alice was probably right about her mother. She was showing signs of being a workaholic, someone who would rather work than have a personal or family life, someone with so much social anxiety, that they were only happy within the controllable confines of their career. Because here she was looking for Carol Ann, just trying to find out if she was in the truck with Ralph Adams and what the hell had happened to her next and one little incident had her thinking about a totally different case, not even a case.
‘It’s really none of my business…’ she muttered, practicing the lines she would use on him. ‘I was just coming into eat and remembered the girl there as the one who served me.’
That was how it was sometimes. Your own leads went cold, but you still needed to keep your hands warm. Rubbing together the pieces of someone else’s problem was one way to keep the circulation going.
But as she approached the final stretch towards Patchy’s, she saw a crowd next to a truck stop and a cruiser with its lights still spinning. Davis pulled around quickly and was out of her car in five seconds flat.
Valerie
She had nothing – no phone, no wallet, no gun – nothing, but had seen the workshop shuddering in the corner of her eye and made it over. The side door was on the latch, overlooked or left open on purpose, and she’d got in there.
Now, she took a wrench from the worktop and swung it in front of her. That felt better. It gave her hands something to do and stopped them shaking so much, and she went slowly towards the roller door and looked out over the metal section. The see-thru top was scratched up like the bottom of a whiskey glass and all she could see were swirls and patterns. She knew he had gone, had taken her car, but didn’t know why. But just as she was telling herself it was over, another car pulled in. She crouched down. The wrench was one with her fist. Had he come back?
