Coffin Dodgers

by Gary Marshall

  Not that there's much to concentrate on. The car does all the work apart from steering, and it only lets humans do that because the manufacturer doesn't want to get sued if you smack into a tree for no good reason. Everything else -- the brakes, the speed, the not-smashing-into-other-cars -- is done for you. It's not exactly fun, but the upside is that you get plenty of time to think.

  Inevitably, that means I'm thinking about Amy.

  I've already told you how I feel about her. What I'm trying to work out is what I'm going to do about it. She's my best friend, the person who knows all my secrets, the one person I don’t feel weird around. I want to ask her out on a date -- a date date, not a friends date -- but I'm scared that if I do, it'll freak her out and I'll lose her altogether. But I don't think I can keep on like this either. Is it worth the risk? Should I let her know how I feel? Should I --

  What the hell?

  The car's accelerating, hard. That's not always a bad thing, but there's a sweeping right-hander up ahead and I'm already going a bit faster than is strictly sensible. I hit the brakes. Nothing happens. I press the accelerator in case it's stuck. It isn't. I stab at the control buttons on the dashboard. They don't do anything.

  The engine is making scary noises. The display's rev counter is showing silly numbers. The speedo is climbing. The corner is getting very close.

  I'm kicking at the pedals but it isn't making any difference.

  I've read that when you think you're going to die, your brain goes into economy mode. You see in black and white, because your brain needs the processing power to look for a way out, not to show you things in Technicolor. Time slows down, because -- again -- your brain is trying to find a way for you to survive.

  Turns out that's all true. I've never been so alert in my life.

  The car reaches the corner, and I haul on the steering wheel with all my strength. The car turns, but then there's a loud pop. I think it's a tyre blowing. Suddenly everything's moving in the wrong direction. The car slews into the crash barrier and bounces backwards. The steering wheel is spinning like crazy and I know that if I try to stop it, I'll break my arm. So I fold my arms and let whatever's going to happen happen.

  What happens is this. The car goes backwards, still spinning, and there's a crunch as it hits the barrier on the other side of the road. So now I go forward, still spinning, the steering wheel acting like it's got a mind of its own.

  Another crunch, and another, and another.

  And then, nothing.

  Everything's in colour again. I sit for a moment and then climb out of the car. I'm in a field. My face is wet. I think I've cut my head somewhere. The car is a mess, like somebody took a hammer to every inch of the bodywork. I wonder if the car will go on fire. I hope it doesn't.

  I take a few steps but something trips me up, and I'm face down in the wet grass. I'm tired, I think. So very tired.

  I need to get up, I know.

  I'll do it in a minute.

  I close my eyes and everything goes black.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Being dead is brilliant. I'm warm and cosy and feeling all nice and floaty, and Amy's just kissed me on the cheek. If I'd known that being dead was this good, I'd have done it ages ago.

  "You're such an arse," Amy says.

  I'm pretty sure that you're not allowed to talk like that in Heaven, and since nobody appears to be stabbing me with red-hot pokers I guess I'm not in Hell either.

  I blink until my vision clears and the room swims into focus. I'm in a small hospital ward. It's dark, and the other beds appear to be unoccupied. What little light there is comes from the reading lamp above my bed and through the gap between the doors and the floor.

  Amy is sitting in a hard plastic chair next to the bed. Her eyeliner is smudged. I think she's been crying.

  "How are you feeling?" she asks.

  "I'm not sure," I say. "I think I'm okay."

  "The doctor says they've pumped you full of drugs, so you'll probably be sore when they wear off. You haven't broken anything, but you've been bashed about quite a bit."

  I give Amy my most earnest look. "Tell me the truth," I say.

  "Okay."

  "Will I ever dance again?"

  "I bloody hope not. You're a menace on the dance floor."

  "Ah. Good point."

  Amy smiles, but I can tell her heart isn't really in it.

  "Do you remember what happened?"

  "More or less," I say. "I was driving home and then the car went nuts. I think one of the tyres blew."

  Amy nods. "You're lucky to be alive, you know. That road's usually busy. A few minutes earlier or later and you'd have ended up underneath a truck."

  "Somebody up there must like me."

  "They've got a funny way of showing it."

  Amy looks away. I don't say anything. When she looks back I think her eyeliner is even more smudged than before.

  "Were you scared?"

  "No," I say, and I mean it. Amy looks surprised. "Seriously. It was weird. When I realised there wasn't anything I could do, I just felt really calm. My life didn't flash before my eyes, or anything like that. Everything happened in slow motion. It felt like I was watching it all happening to somebody else."

  The door opens. It's one of the nurses. Visiting time is up.

  Amy gets up, leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. Again.

  "I'm glad you're okay."

  I want to say something, but the words don't come.

  Amy gives me a small wave.

  "See you tomorrow," she says.

  "Heavily bearded transvestite man!"

  It's Dave's turn to visit me. The serious chat didn’t last very long. Of course it didn't. We're blokes. So now we're trying to outdo one another by inventing superheroes with really bad superpowers.

  "The Black Banjo!" Dave suggests.

  "Eh?"

  "He's this really tall black guy who appears from nowhere and torments the bad guys with his banjo playing."

  "That's pretty bad."

  "You're one to talk. You were the one who came up with Shortsighted Viagra Man."

  "Oh, come on," I say. "That one's brilliant."

  Dave laughs. "Lock up your daughters! And anything else nearby!"

  We happily talk bollocks for another ten minutes or so before a new visitor arrives. This one has a badge.

  "I need a few minutes with your friend," he tells Dave.

  Dave looks at me. I nod.

  "See you in a bit," Dave says, and leaves.

  His name is Burke, and he's police. He's tall, fiftyish, with big shoulders and the air of somebody who's seen things you really don't want to ask him about. The plastic chair complains when he sits on it.

  He sits and looks at me for a while. When he finally speaks, I wonder if he gargles gravel for breakfast.

  "I've spoken to the Doc," he says. "I know you weren't drunk, and you weren't high. Want to tell me what happened?" He stabs at his notebook with his index finger and it beeps. Recording.

  "There's not much to tell," I say. "I was driving home --"

  "From where?"

  "From Ottomatik. I'd just had the car serviced."

  He nods as if to say carry on. I carry on.

  "I'm about halfway home and then the car goes crazy."

  "Crazy?"

  "It was as if the accelerator stuck," I tell him. "The brakes didn't work, none of the buttons on the dash worked, the car just kept on accelerating."

  "What did you do then?"

  "I thought the pedal might be stuck, so I tried pressing on it. I tried the brakes. I pressed every single button I could reach."

  "And?"

  "And none of it made any difference. And then I crashed."

  Burke stares at me for a very long time. If I'd had anything to confess, I'd have spilled the beans there and then.

  "Was your car modified in any way?"

  "No."

  "You haven't had it chipped?"

  "No."

 
Burke stabs at his notebook again. It beeps. He stands up, the chair making a noise that sounds awfully like a sigh of relief.

  "Thanks for your time," he says, dropping a business card on the bedside table. "I'll be in touch."

  I get out the following morning. Amy was right. When the painkillers wear off I feel like somebody has hit every bit of my body with a frying pan. I spend most of the day munching Ibuprofen before heading for work. Being off sick is a luxury I can't afford.

  I've barely taken off my coat before Sleazy Bob summons me to his office.

  "You need to go home, Matt," he says.

  This isn't like him. Sleazy Bob is not the caring type.

  "Thanks, Mr Hannah, but I'm fine. Honestly. It looks much worse than it is."

  Sleazy Bob looks confused, then realises what I've just said. "Matt, you work in a customer facing role. You're an ambassador for Hannah's. And ambassadors don't look like they've been in a bar fight."

  "I wasn't in a fight. It was a car accident."

  "I don't think that really matters," he says. "Take the time off. Come back when the bruises have gone." He makes a dismissive gesture with his hand. I go home.

  Amy and Dave are both working and I've got nothing to do, so I wanderki past the supermarket and stock up on beer and painkillers. I go home, play video games until I get bored, make a half-hearted attempt at tidying up and flick through my messages, email and news feeds. I call up the local paper to see if anything interesting is going on. They've got a picture of my car on the front page.

  I look again at the photo. Something isn't right. It looks like my car. It's more smashed up than I remember, but then I wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders the last time I saw it. But it's not just the damage to the car that's wrong. It's the photo itself. When I crashed, I ended up in a field. The photo shows a suburban street.

  Either the local paper has been faking things again, or…

  I scan the text. Two words jump out.

  Scott Marsden.

  According to the paper, Scott was a "boy racer" who lost control of his car at roughly the same time I was spinning into a field. I escaped with a few lumps and bumps. Scott didn't. The paper doesn't say it explicitly, but the tone of the article is clear enough: Scott was a young man with a fast car, a crazed thrill seeker whose driving ability wasn't as good as he thought it was.

  Scott "Had some pasta for dinner. It was very nice" Marsden? A crazed thrill seeker?

  Scott Marsden? Dead?

  I really need to talk to Amy.

  "You need to go to the police."

  I've never seen Amy like this. She's pacing around my apartment like an angry tiger.

  "What am I going to say?"

  "Matt, there's something seriously screwed up going on here."

  She's still pacing. Her arms are going too.

  "Your car goes crazy and damn near kills you. If you hadn't been where you were, you'd have hit something even harder than your own head."

  I don't think I'm supposed to laugh at that, or even smirk. So I don't do either.

  "The same night, Scott Marsden -- who we both know isn't exactly renowned for his crazy risk-taking behaviour -- suddenly decides he's a racing driver. And Comedy Jim does the same a few days before. Doesn't that strike you as strange?"

  I'd forgotten about Comedy Jim. Shit. She's right.

  "You think it's deliberate? Someone's tampered with my car?"

  "Yes. You were at the same garage at the same time as Scott Marsden. Both of you crashed on the same night. That's one hell of a coincidence."

  "But why would somebody in a garage want to kill me? Why would anybody want to kill me, full stop?"

  "That's why you need to go to the police. They'll find out."

  Amy made it clear that whatever I had planned for the morning, I was going to the police station first. She can be very persuasive -- that, and she turned up this morning in the Dentmobile to pick me up.

  The Dentmobile is our name for the collection of dents, scrapes, rust and flaking paint that Amy calls a car, the long-suffering victim of Amy's gung-ho approach to parking, her inability to judge gaps and her complete lack of fear behind the wheel. Dave and I think that one day it'll break in two like a clown car, with Amy going in one direction and her passengers in the other.

  Today, though, the Dentmobile stays in one piece. Amy drops me at the front door and drives off to park, so I go to the front desk and ask to see Burke. The duty sergeant points up the stairs. "First floor, second on the right," he says.

  Burke's office doesn't look as if it's had much in the way of tender loving care of late, if ever. The door frames are yellow with age, the windows are filthy, the plaster on the ceiling is cracked, there's what looks like damp on the walls and the desk is scratched and stained.

  You know how some people end up looking like their pets? Burke looks like his office.

  "Why would anybody want to kill you?" Burke asks. His chair groans in protest as he leans back and steeples his fingers.

  "I don't know."

  "Did you have any connection to Scott Marsden or James Colvin?"

  I didn't know that was Comedy Jim's last name. "Not that I can think of. We went to school together."

  Burke sighs. "Maybe that's it," he says. "An angry ex-teacher is wreaking terrible revenge, perhaps. Or a former pupil, driven crazy by your success, is going to make you pay. Or maybe you borrowed a lot of books, never took them back, and the school librarian is angry. Happens all the time."

  I get the distinct impression that Burke isn't entirely sympathetic.

  "Mr Burke --"

  "Detective."

  "Sorry. Detective Burke. I don't know what's going on. All I know is that two people are dead, and I was nearly number three. Don't you think it's possible that what happened to me might have happened to the other guys, too? I don't know about James Colvin, but Scott Marsden was getting his car fixed in the same place at the same time as me -- and we both had crashes afterwards. Doesn't that strike you as suspicious?"

  Burke does a slow blink and then speaks very slowly. "I have been a policeman for a very long time," he says. "And while I don’t normally investigate car accidents – aren’t you the lucky one? -- I've seen a few. And do you know what I’ve learnt?"

  "No, sir."

  "I’ve learnt that when young men lose control of their cars, it’s rarely because they were speeding, or showing off, or fiddling with the radio, or thinking about girls," he says.

  He pauses. "No. More often than not, it’s because of a murder conspiracy."

  It takes me a moment to realise that he’s being sarcastic.

  "I wasn’t speeding."

  "I know," Burke says. "You said that."

  I try not to get exasperated. "I wasn’t. Look, there must be some way you can check the car. The black box, maybe. That'll tell you if somebody's been messing with the car."

  The black box is a little in-car computer that records everything you do, from the speed you’re doing to the way you drive. It’s possible to buy a car that doesn’t have one, but good luck getting it insured.

  Burke is quiet for a moment and then stands up. "Okay," he says. "I'll look into it."

  Amy is pacing around the reception area and doesn't spot me until I've reached the bottom of the stairs.

  "Well?"

  "He'll look into it, he says."

  "Think he will?"

  "God knows."

  "So what are you going to do now?"

  "No plans."

  "I need to get back to work. Want me to come round after?"

  "That'd be good."

  "Okay, then. Need a lift?"

  "No thanks," I say. "I could do with some fresh air."

  "Suit yourself." But she says it with a smile.

  I walk Amy to the Dentmobile and wave as she drives off. I don't need fresh air at all, but I don't want to tell her that her driving on the way over scared the crap out of me. Amy's a fast driver and it doesn't usually bother m
e, but after the crash I'm a bit more sensitive -- okay, scared -- than usual. If somebody's trying to kill me then wandering around in broad daylight is probably a bit risky, but the way I feel right now, another car ride with Amy behind the wheel would kill me for sure.

  I take the long way back, wandering in and out of shops to kill a few hours, then go home, grab something to eat and play video games until Dave and Amy turn up. The more beer we have, the more convoluted the conspiracy theories we come up with. And then Dave does something that doesn't happen very often. He says something that makes total sense.

  "You know, this whole thing could be a great big cock-up," he says.

  Amy looks at him. "What do you mean?"

  "Well, we're sitting here trying to think of reasons why somebody might want Matt dead, and we can't think of any. What if there isn't a somebody? What if the whole thing's a cock-up?"

  "I don't follow you," I say.

  "You and Scott both took your cars to Otto at the same time. Chances are Comedy Jim gets his car done there too. Everyone knows Otto's the cheapest place to go."

  I nod.

  "So maybe that's what you've all got in common. Most of the stuff's done on computer now, isn't it? Maybe Otto's computer system's got something wrong with it. A virus, or a bug, or something like that."

  "Dave, I think you might be onto something," Amy says.

  We talk about it some more, and agree that when you've got a choice between conspiracy and cock-up, cock-up wins every time.

  "You should tell Burke about this," Amy suggests.

  "I will," I promise.

  We talk about other things, with Dave going off on tangents as usual. He's mid-way through a particularly opinionated rant about nothing in particular when Amy starts rummaging in her bag. She grabs a thin tube of something and throws it to me. "I almost forgot," she says. "Go and see Sleazy Bob tomorrow, and make sure you use this."

  "What is it? Pepper spray?"

  "Not quite. Concealer. Use it on those scratches. They haven't completely gone yet."