If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  Faster. Faster.

  Sure thing. Abby could always go faster.

  She remembered her father’s lullaby, the one from the old Robert Mitchum movie about an Appalachian bootlegger with a hot rod, the mountain boy who had G-men on his taillights and roadblocks up ahead. Being the motherless daughter of Jake Kaplan meant that such songs became lullabies. “The Ballad of Thunder Road” had been Abby’s favorite. Her father’s voice, off-key, his breath tinged with beer, singing, “Moonshine, moonshine, to quench the devil’s thirst…” had eased her to sleep many times, the two of them alone in the trailer.

  All these years later, the song could resurface clearly when she edged toward sleep.

  “He left the road at ninety,” her dead father crooned softly, “that’s all there is to say.”

  When the Chrysler left the road, Abby had no idea if she’d missed a curve or simply driven right through a dead end. All she knew was that suddenly she was awake and the car was bouncing over uneven ground and now it wasn’t branches whipping at the windows but whole trees, saplings that cracked with whip-snap sounds. Before she could move her foot to the brake, she hit a tree that did the stopping for her, an oak that slammed the car sideways. The airbag caught her rising body at stomach level, a gut punch that stole her breath but kept her from striking the windshield.

  She sat gasping for breath and trying to clear her vision, desperate for just a little time to get her bearings.

  Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror.

  There was no time.

  Abby got the door open and hauled herself out of the car, but her legs were wobbly and uncooperative, her vision spinning. She stumbled forward, trying to fight through the branches with her hands held up to protect her face. Her feet hit wet soil and went out from under her and suddenly she was down on her ass in the muck.

  She might’ve stayed there, disoriented and exhausted and near the point of collapse, but she could still see the glow from the headlights, and they triggered whatever primal impulses the brain stem held on to until the very end.

  Run. Flee.

  She fought ahead on hands and knees, and this was a blessing in disguise because she crawled faster than she could have run. The boggy soil yielded to actual water, cold and deep enough to cover her arms to the elbows. She’d splashed into a creek, and she couldn’t make sense of that. What creek? Where did it lead? She tried to remember and couldn’t. Hadn’t she hiked out here once with Hank and her father? Yes, absolutely. The winter before her father’s heart attack. There’d been snow that day and the iced-over creek had turned into a beautiful white boulevard through the pines and birches, leading down past an ancient stone wall and on toward…

  Toward nothing. There was nothing out here but trees and rocks and water. That was the point; Hank had never wanted neighbors. Abby needed a neighbor now, though. She needed anyone who could help, because something was behind her. Who or what was no longer clear. Her flight was now instinctual, not logical. Her body was working better than her brain.

  That’s fine, because all I need to do is keep running, she thought just before she slid over a moss-covered rock and bounced into the sinkhole below, where she lay covered in mud and decaying leaves and dampness. There, her body started to quit on her too.

  She knew that she needed to get up and get moving, but this hole with its pillow of old leaves and cool moss felt comfortable, almost safe, except for the dampness. There was something about being tucked into the earth like this that felt right.

  Like a grave. You are in your grave, Abby.

  She thought she could still see the headlights, but it was hard to tell with the fog gliding through the trees. It was a low, crawling mist that seemed to be searching for her. She wasn’t sure if the lights behind the mist were moving or stationary or if they were even out there at all. Her eyelids were heavy and her blood felt thick and slow.

  She wondered how long it would take the kid to find her.

  The kid. Yes, that’s who you’re running from. He’s a killer.

  And he was quick. The way he had ducked that punch? That was more than quick. So it would not take the kid long to find Abby now.

  What was his name? Had he said a name? Sure, he had. Gentleman Jack.

  Abby burrowed into the soft embrace of the leaves that smelled like death and waited on the arrival of Gentleman Jack.

  23

  Her first awareness was of the cold.

  She opened her eyes and saw a moss-covered rock, beads of water working slowly but resolutely over it, following the terrain like bands of determined pioneers. Then they reached the edge and fell, manifest destiny gone awry.

  Plink. Plink. Plink.

  She stared at the rock and the puddle for a while without recognition of anything else. Except for the cold. That was still there, and it was intensifying. Uncomfortable but also necessary, because it was pounding clarity into her brain.

  Get up. Get up and move before you freeze to death.

  She struggled upright, and the motion made her dizzy and nauseated. She rested on her hands and knees, head hanging, waiting for the vomit to come, but the nausea passed and she didn’t get sick. She worked a wooden tongue around a mouth so dry and swollen, it felt carpeted.

  What the hell happened?

  The kid.

  That was what had happened. The night chase came back to her, and she was suddenly convinced that she wasn’t alone here, that the kid had to be right behind her, the kid with his baby face and his grown-up gun.

  There was nothing in sight but the woods, though. Abby was in a gully below a forested ridge; above, white birches and emerald pines were packed in tight, and a stream there split and ran down swales on either side of her. No sound but the running water.

  She tried to walk up the hill but her feet tangled and she fell heavily and painfully onto her side. She rolled over and breathed for a while and then tried again, slower this time. Each motion required caution because her head spun and her stomach swirled. She tasted bitter bile and her throat was sore, as if she’d been retching. She didn’t remember doing that, though.

  The sky was bright enough to show some of the world, but not much of it. Predawn light. That meant she’d been down here for hours.

  What had happened to Hank in that time?

  She hobbled up the slope. Her left side and left hip hurt the worst, and she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t remember much about the drive, the run through the woods, or her fall. She just remembered that she’d been trying to get out in front of the kid and of whatever the whiskey had put in her bloodstream. They’d both been closing in on her fast.

  And Hank had been well behind them, tied to the chair. Had he gotten loose? He’d had some time alone while the kid pursued Abby. He’d had a window for escape, if he’d been able to free himself.

  She got to the top of the hill, but even from there, the Chrysler wasn’t visible. Just the trees. In her running and crawling through the night woods, she’d made it farther than she’d thought. The smell of rain was heavy in the air. She could find no clear track to show her how to get back to where she’d started, and she decided that following the stream made as much sense as anything. She started along it, walking uphill, breathing hard and fighting for each step, thinking, Maybe when I got out, that evil kid got scared and ran, and Hank’s still back there, tied to the chair and hurt, maybe, but alive. Waiting for help. For me.

  When she crested the next rise, struggling to keep her footing on the slick leaves, she finally saw her car.

  It was punched into an oak’s trunk and wedged between pines, and she was bizarrely pleased by how far she’d made it into such dense trees before getting hung up. When she stepped closer, she could see the dangling airbag visible through the shattered glass. Everything about the car was as she remembered.

  Then she saw Hank’s body in the passenger seat.

  Abby froze, then took a wavering step forward, knees going weak, and cried, “Hank!” Her voice was broken
and hoarse. “Hank!”

  Hank Bauer wasn’t going to answer. His head lay unnaturally on his left shoulder, and the right side of his face was swollen and bruised, his eyes open but unseeing. Abby wrenched open the passenger door, and Hank’s head dropped bonelessly forward, chin down on his chest, eyes still open, his neck obviously broken.

  Abby stepped back and sat down in the wet grass. She rubbed a filthy hand over her face. She breathed with her eyes closed, then opened them and looked at Hank once more.

  “What happened?” she said aloud.

  Hank offered no insight.

  The way he sat there, slumped in the passenger seat with the wound on the right side of his head and the broken neck, made it look as if he’d been in the car when it hit the tree and died on impact, when in reality he’d been dead before he was brought here.

  Or maybe not.

  Maybe he’d been alive and trying to stay alive by obeying orders, the kid saying, Get in the car, holding a gun to his head. Abby could picture him climbing into the wrecked car, hoping for mercy, only to have his skull smacked off the windshield, his neck snapped.

  Abby looked up the road then, searching for either help or threat, finding neither. It was peaceful and quiet and lonely. When the wind gusted, raindrops fell from the trees like a fresh shower. Hank’s house was the last one on the isolated camp road. Nobody would have heard the crash. The kid would have had time to go back and bring Hank down here and not be rushed, but still, it seemed a reckless choice because Abby had been out there in the darkness, free.

  He knew you were going to be down for a while, though. He was sure of that. He wasn’t rushing because he knew he didn’t need to.

  Thanks to whatever was in the whiskey, the kid knew he had time. Maybe he even thought Abby was dead. Plenty of time, then.

  Why move Hank’s body, though? Why bring him down here and put him in the passenger seat? Even if he’d thought Abby was dead, that arrangement didn’t make any sense, because there was no driver.

  Abby looked at the empty driver’s seat, and suddenly she understood.

  I didn’t realize your academic record was as poor as your driving record, the kid had said.

  It was Abby’s car, and Abby had wrecked it. The physical evidence would say that, because it was the truth.

  Hank hadn’t been riding shotgun when the Chrysler went into the trees, and he hadn’t broken his neck in the crash, but if the police found this scene and then found Abby dead in the woods, uninjured but with drugs and alcohol in her bloodstream, what would they think?

  The kid was panicked and tried to rig the scene. A bad plan, but he needed something.

  Was it that bad, though? When Abby called this in, she was going to have to tell the police that she’d been poisoned and that while she was sleeping it off in the woods, a teenager with a gun had killed Hank Bauer and belted him into the passenger seat. That was the truth, but it was going to be an awfully strange story to tell and an awfully hard story for a detective to believe. And if the detectives who heard it happened to know that Abby had ended up back in Maine working for Hank Bauer because of another night that went a lot like this one…

  Just call them. Let them figure it out.

  The man had been murdered, and Abby knew who’d killed him. In that case, you called the police. Period.

  When she stood up and reached for her phone, she realized it was gone, and only then did she remember the kid taking it and tossing it onto the kitchen counter after he’d looked at the photograph of Luke on the home screen.

  He’d known Luke was dead. He’d known what had happened. So this scenario, this scene he’d built with Hank, was maybe a little bit better than Abby wanted to imagine.

  I can tell the police the truth. They’ll need time to verify it, but they’ll believe it.

  Hank’s dead eyes stared through the shattered windshield. California isn’t the only problem, those eyes seemed to say.

  True. Police would learn quickly that Abby had also been arrested in Maine, and for stealing a car from Hank Bauer, no less. Never mind that Hank hadn’t pressed charges; whatever police records still existed from that, either on paper or in memory, would show yet another night very similar to this one—Hank Bauer had a fast car, Abby Kaplan had a thirst for speed, and it had ended badly.

  It’s easier to believe than the truth, she realized. Either Abby Kaplan fucked up for the third time behind the wheel or a hit man disguised as a Boy Scout killed an insurance investigator in rural Maine. Which would you pick?

  She needed evidence. At least one shot had connected with the car, and it went through the driver’s window. That would prove she wasn’t crazy, maybe even indicate the caliber of the bullet and the distance of the shot.

  She walked around the front of the car, stepping over a torn tree with white-pulped flesh protruding from shredded bark like an open fracture.

  The driver’s window was gone. Not just cracked with a clean hole through the center, but completely shattered. The sunroof was also demolished. So was the passenger window. Wherever the bullet might have left its mark, the kid had seen it and taken care of it.

  That doesn’t matter. It’s a weak-ass attempt to cover things up, but it won’t stick, and the faster you get the police out here, the faster you’ll be done.

  But she could imagine the cops’ faces as she told them about the kid with the gun and the bottle of Gentleman Jack. What would they look like when she got to the part about how she’d started the Chrysler with the remote and Hank had fallen on the gun, still tied to the chair, and from there it was all question marks and darkness…

  That was the truth, yes. And the truth should always be enough, yes.

  But she wasn’t so sure that it would be.

  What does the house look like? she wondered. If it looks like the place I left, then my story is fine. If he took the time to clean it up, though…

  She looked back at Hank. There was no need to rush for him. They didn’t use sirens and flashers when they were taking you to the morgue.

  Abby closed the door on her friend’s corpse and walked up the road. She followed the rain-filled ruts left by her own tires until Hank’s house came into view, and then she stopped and stared.

  The kitchen blinds were open again. The way they always were, or always had been until last night.

  Bad sign. If he took that much time to set things right…

  She crossed the yard like an inmate walking to her execution. Went to the window and looked in at the kitchen.

  The chairs were tucked under the table, which was bare except for a newspaper, open to the sports section. No whiskey, no tumbler glasses, no lantern. The generator was gone, and so was the space heater. The block of knives was back on the counter.

  You’ll have to tell them that this sociopath did all this while you were passed out in the woods. You will have to convince them of that, and you don’t even know anything about him.

  No, that wasn’t true. Looking in at the kitchen, all traces of chaos eradicated from it, Abby felt like she knew plenty about that kid.

  And all of it was terrifying.

  Could she describe him? Not in much more than general terms. And the kid did not fit the story, because the story seemed to be a professional killing, and baby-faced teenagers did not carry out professional hits.

  I’ll need to be able to tell them who he is, but I don’t know who he is. All I know is that he’s fucking scary, and he wanted the phone.

  He’d wanted it, yes. But did he have it? The bags of phones Abby had carried in were gone, but what about the one she’d jammed under the driver’s seat? Had the kid searched the car?

  Abby left the house and started back down the road, moving at a jog this time, but it was a long distance and she was hurting, so she quickly fell back to a labored walk. She opened the driver’s door, avoided staring at Hank’s face, and reached below the seat.

  The bag was there. Three iPhones inside.

  She took it out and s
tepped away from the car and looked up at the lightening sky—the day was moving along, and she needed to do the same. One way or the other, she had to make a decision.

  It was a memory that sealed the choice. When she’d been sitting at that table trying to reason her way out of the situation, she’d told the kid that he would end up in jail. The response had been immediate, and chilling: You’d be surprised how many friends I’ve got around jails. Some in cells, some in uniforms.

  Abby didn’t think he’d been lying.

  She looked at the dead man who’d backed her time and again throughout her life. “I’m sorry, Hank,” she said. She wanted to remember some other version of Hank’s face, not this death pallor and endless stare, not the broken-stem look of his neck. All she could see was that, though—that and the image of Hank’s face, sweaty and scared in the lantern light, as he screamed at Abby to run.

  Backing her one last time.

  “Thank you,” Abby told the dead man, and then she closed the door. She walked back up the lonely road to Hank’s house and up the steps. The screen was damaged from where she’d blasted through it—the only physical evidence that supported her story. The knob turned freely. Once inside, she didn’t waste much time looking for things the kid might’ve missed in his cleanup effort. She had a feeling there wouldn’t be any, and she needed to move quickly.

  Hank’s guns were stored in a glass-doored cabinet in the living room, impossible to miss. Some people were proud of guns and wanted them as conversation pieces. The cabinet had a lock, which was better than nothing, but a lock didn’t mean much when it secured thin glass doors. Abby wrapped her fist in a blanket that was draped over the back of the couch and then punched each door once, without much force. The glass shattered and she swept it away with the blanket. She took one shotgun, a black Remington over/under; one rifle, a scoped .308; and both handguns, a Glock .45 and a SIG Sauer nine-millimeter. The ammunition was stored on a shelf below the guns. She took all of it, boxes and boxes of shells and bullets, and wrapped them in the blanket with the guns.