by Peter Ackers
"…BUT NOOOOOOOO…"
An unnerving sight awaited me back at the truck. I saw something was wrong from way out, some fifty metres, but could no more stop myself moving onward than a spaceship without thrusters. So I drew close, my anticipation and apprehension growing with every step. And with every step, I saw a little bit more, understood a little bit more, much as you might increasingly recognise a picture the more jigsaw pieces you put together.
I saw smoke, first, and realised that someone had lit a fire because it was cold out here - this was November, after all. I would have to tell them about the presence of cops nearby. If they saw the fire, it might make them forgo chasing the bikers to God knows where and return to check this place out.
Jigsaw piece in place. The smoke was fireless, and it wasn't the thick smoke that flame creates, either. This smoke didn't rise high into the sky, it just kind of existed in a bubble around the front of Coyote's truck. Not smoke but steam, steam that was coming from the radiator grille. I could see that it was dented and buckled as if from a heavy impact. But the truck was in the same place as before, which meant any impact had been by a moving force.
Jigsaw piece. A dark shape in the dark air grew dimensions, until I recognised one of the black vans, tipped on its side about fifteen feet in front of the truck.. It seemed obvious that the van had smacked the truck. Coyote had obviously concluded his business here, but some kind of accident had occurred when his partners were leaving. With headlamps off, the black van would have been invisible in the dark. Easily done.
"Coyote," I called out as I got within twenty metres, but that was when I stopped - instantly, I might add. Whatever had been pulling me along had stopped me. The guiding hand had sensed possible danger, too. From this distance I could see that the truck's long trailer listed like a sinking ship. I looked carefully and saw another of the black vans, this one by the truck's rear, with its crushed front end slotted between the ground and one set of the truck's rear wheels, which caused the trailer to lean like a drunken man half-asleep against a pub wall.
Jigsaw piece. When the first van had hit the truck, it had knocked the larger vehicle backwards, riding it up onto the second van's bonnet, crushing it. But where was everybody? Nobody seemed to be attending to the accident, and surely everyone here was in a hurry…?
"Coyote? Chinese guy?"
I was here. I stood between the truck and the first van, listening to the hiss of the truck's radiator as it voided boiling water. It was slowing now as the volume of water decreased. This accident hadn't happened long ago.
Jigsaw piece. The first van had a ravaged flank, but no damage to the front. That suggested it hadn't driven into the truck, but had been driven into by the bigger vehicle. And any ideas that Coyote hadn't seen the black van in the night were wrong. If the van hadn't hit the truck, then when the truck had moved backwards into the second van, it had done so in reverse gear, with Coyote driving. Now, suddenly, this simple accident scene looked as if two vans had tried to bookend the truck to prevent it moving. And Coyote had tried to ram his way free, until lodging the truck's rear up on the squashed bonnet of the van at its rear.
Something had gone wrong. A chill tickled my neck.
"Avenger!" came a shout. Coyote, from somewhere over near or in the trees. "Don't just stare, gimme a hand here."
Stare? Could he see me? I couldn't see him -
- and then I could. By the trees, waving at me. Surprising myself, I jogged over.
He was kneeling just inside the shadow thrown by the trees. I stopped a few feet short of it, still in a puddle of moonlight and fully exposed to him and the four guys he'd met here. But those guys weren't looking at me. Face-down on a carpet of fallen leaves, they couldn't. My god, I thought, he's knocked out four guys single-handed.
"That's right, they're dead," Coyote said, nodding. "And I didn't need no gun like these bozos. He tilted his body to free a leg, extended it and kicked one of the dead guys in the head. "I might have let them live if they'd not pulled a gun." He looked into the sky. "Yeah," he told the air, "regret pulling it now, don't you? No gun and you could have gone home to the wives with nought but headaches tomorrow. But nooooooooo."
Despite my shock, I said, "You're looking the wrong way." And I pointed down at the ground, towards Hell. Coyote looked at the ground, too, and laughed, once, like a guy who experiences a moment of humour but quickly remembers the shit he's facing. His face was serious again.
"Ground's too hard, almost frozen. Can't bury them, anyway. Too many to bury in one night."
So, no accident, then. Not here a case of self-defence gone awry, resulting in death. Such an event might have preceded a wave of tearful guilt and a long drive to a police station, there to unload a confession. But this guy wanted to erase these four pieces of evidence. I thought he could maybe leave the bodies where they lay and hope the police drew a blank after they realised they couldn't locate all two-hundred of the Ravers here tonight. If nobody had seen his truck arrive - and despite its size, the Ravers might have been too pre-occupied with drugs and dancing to do so - then he was home free. But Coyote didn't seem to think so. I didn't think it was paranoia, either: I started to believe that the bodies, once identified, could be linked to him. Corpse disposal is, after all, the domain of the calculated mind.
"We'll have to clear this area," he said. "Help me."
Help him cover up four murders? Risk my own freedom just to get his vote?
"Okay." I said it before I fully realised I had planned to.
Coyote got to his feet. I heard his knees pop as they took his great weight. He brushed dirt off his ass. "There's keys for the vans in these guys' pockets. You check them and bring the first van over here. Put these guys inside, then run it on round the back of my truck. We've only got a few hours before sunup."
Hours? How slow a worker was he? I didn't ask. I bent straight over the dead guys and fumbled in their pockets like a cheap robber. I found only one key and nothing else - no money, no ID. The key was long and thin and sharp, like a little screwdriver. Was this some hotwiring tool? As an afterthought, I checked each unconscious man for a pulse, and they weren't unconscious men. I shrugged it off with surprising ease.
"Got it," I called out, but Coyote was gone, off to do his own thing. I looked over at the tent; the rave was still going strong. And it might do so until long after sunup, but that didn't mean that with the coming light Ravers wouldn't come out for a piss or a secret shag or something. And then they'd see everything.
I picked the nearest van, jogged over, slotted the key in the door. It opened. They key slid in the ignition just as comfortably. The engine coughed into life and growled like a little dog sensing a trespasser in the back garden. It had an automatic gearbox, which was good because I hadn't driven a vehicle since my dad gave me control of his in a supermarket car park on my 16th birthday, backhoe loaders not included. I didn't think there was much chance of crashing this one into some lady's loaded trolley, though.
I whipped the van over to Coyote. He told me to turn it around and back up, which I did. If he'd thought the job would be made easier by doing this because he wouldn't have to heft the bodies along the length of the van, he might have been right - but it took me two full minutes to spin the van on the hard, pitted earth because I kept stalling it and had trouble shifting into reverse, and I was sure he could have relayed the four bodies, like a contest strongman stacking Atlas stones atop barrels, quicker. Back, he moaned after I thought I was in position. Back, back man. And I shuffled that van back and back until I thought I might hear the squelch of a head being crushed under a wheel. Only when Coyote called me and I got out to help did I understand his tactic: shrouded in shadow thrown by the trees, we could load the bodies in virtual darkness.
We started with the two heaviest and the going was fairly easy. Then our muscles started to burn and the going got tougher. We had to sit the Chinese guy in the back of the van with his legs over the edge as if he were resting, so t
hat we could rest.
"Sure the mind turns fucking solid or something after death," Coyote wheezed. I wondered if this was his way of explaining the extra weight these guys seemed to have acquired. I was holding the dead guy up by his chest, just sort of balancing him, but I must have pushed slightly, because he fell back and slammed his head on the metal floor, hard enough to send a great bong reeling across the open land (a brief image flashed in my head: the Rank Films opening, that half-naked guy striking a gong, which I always associate with the Carry-On Films that I so-loved to watch as a kid). I sucked in a loud breath through pursed lips, much as you might if you saw someone trip or slip and hurt themselves. Of course, the Chinese guy wasn't hurt by this bang.
I lifted his legs and tossed them inside, and was about to close the doors when Coyote grabbed my shoulder and started literally trying to urge me into the van.
"Go in, get the bodies to the back, stack them up, make room."
Sounded as if he meant, Get in the truck with them so I can lock you in and go dispose of all five of you.
"They're fine," I said, pulling away. I kicked one door shut and without putting my foot down extended my leg, hooked my shoe around the other door and slammed it shut, too. I faced the bigger man. Coyote had lost that lucid sparkle from his eyes, the gleam that didn't share the years of his body. I knew that he sensed in me a power that - maybe - he had discovered in himself many years ago. Or a knowledge of power. I pictured Muhammad Ali meeting Mike Tyson with the same feelings. The nerves - what little nerves remained, anyway - drained out of me in that moment. The expanse of my world blew out like the Big Bang that created the cosmos, until it had encircled the world and all it contained, making it my domain, my slave. I knew in that flash second that I would never again be unnerved or intimidated by anything or anyone in my future, no matter how far I travelled, or how deep into the shady world of people. And some dark field in Yorkshire, bodies or no bodies, was nought but a walk in a familiar, comfortable park.
"You're hiding something from me. What?"
He gave a blink that answered my question. At least, it told me that I was right. I repeated my last word again, but took the threat out of it.
He turned and walked and I followed. To his truck. "Gotta ride it down off that bloody van," he told me, then did it. The noise of it - the van's bodywork creaked and rumbled as the mammoth truck rolled down off its crushed front - was tremendous, but all I felt was a sense of having to delay our work here a few moments should the sounds carry far enough to bring gawkers, be them inebriated Ravers or cops. At least there was room in the van… My world, remember.
The truck was undamaged except for a few scratches, so the rear doors opened easily, swinging slowly apart to emphasise the mystery of what lay within. The darkness inside did not conceal as well as it should have.
The first thing I thought upon seeing the truck's cargo was that I might have vastly underestimated Coyote - my second was that this didn't necessarily mean I wasn't still his equal, which meant I had also underestimated myself.
"That's right, they're dead," Coyote said, and I took his word for it this time, because I wasn't about to check for fifty pulses.
