by Mark Lukens
“I understand why you may not have wanted to call me,” Phil said as tears stung at his eyes, a lump of emotion forming in his throat.
An awkward silence hung between Phil and Mr. Baker for a moment. But Phil didn’t want to lose this call; he didn’t want to lose this chance to find out some information. “What happened to Travis?” he asked even though he’d read the vague articles on the internet.
“He was murdered,” Ted said. “Someone . . .” he tried to control his trembling voice. “Someone killed Travis. I don’t know why someone would do that to him.”
But that wasn’t really true, was it? Phil thought. There were some people—Dolores’s family members, for instance—who might have had every reason in the world to hurt Travis, to kill him, to exact revenge. And they would want to do the same thing to him now.
“How long ago did this happen?” Phil asked. Again, he already knew the answers, but he wanted to keep Ted talking.
Ted cleared his throat, regaining some control of his voice. “Uh, about two months ago. We just had the funeral last month. It took them a few weeks to . . . to examine his body for evidence.”
Phil was silent for a moment.
“I’m sorry we didn’t call you,” Ted said. “I know you and Travis were good friends when you two were younger.”
“Yes,” Phil agreed.
Phil wanted to ask a question, but he didn’t know how to word it. He was afraid of angering Mr. Baker, and Mrs. Baker if she was listening on another line. He knew they wouldn’t answer his calls again after tonight. But he needed to ask the question, so he blurted it out. “How exactly was Travis murdered?”
Silence on the phone.
“I mean,” Phil continued quickly. “Was he shot or stabbed? Strangled?” He almost let it slip that the news articles he’d read about Travis’ death had been vague, but he caught himself just in time.
“What kind of question is that?” Ted breathed out in shock.
“I know how it sounds,” Phil said. “I’m only asking because someone is after me. Someone’s been stalking my family.”
There was silence on the phone, and once again Phil thought they had hung up on him. But then he heard Ted breathe into the phone—a long, slow breath.
“He was . . . he was tortured,” Ted said in a low voice, muffled slightly like his mouth was close to the phone. A sob escaped him, and for a moment he couldn’t speak, but then he went on. “Travis was cut open. Gutted with a hunting knife.” Ted was crying harder now.
“Oh God,” Phil whispered.
“You satisfied now?” Ted asked. “Does that answer your question?”
“Listen, Mr. Baker, I think the same person who killed Travis is after me and my family now.”
“Then you’d better run.”
Click.
“Hello?” Phil asked, but no one was there.
Phil dialed the number back, but it went right to an answering machine.
From outside, Phil noticed a flash of light, but he knew instinctively that it wasn’t from the lightning. And then he heard that familiar rumbling sound that had woken him up the other night.
He darted to the window and looked out through the blinds at the street. The white pickup truck was parked there.
“Oh God,” Phil whispered.
THIRTY-ONE
Cathy
The pickup truck was there in the road; idling . . . waiting. Cathy couldn’t see the driver behind the windshield because of the headlights, and she couldn’t even see him when the lightning lit up the world for a second.
Carlos was real, and maybe he’d already been here earlier and killed the detective.
Cathy looked back at Detective Grady’s car. His eyes popped open as he snapped awake. He wasn’t dead—he’d just fallen asleep.
“Cathy!”
She turned back to the truck, but then she saw Phil running across the front yard towards her, his head whipping back and forth from the white pickup truck to her, and then back to the truck again.
Cathy heard the detective getting out of the car behind her, running towards the driveway.
The truck spun its tires, already in reverse now. It sped backwards down the street.
Detective Grady ran down the driveway, his gun in his hand and aimed at the truck, but it was already too far down the street now, its headlights turned off. The screech of the truck’s tires filled the night air as it turned around and then sped away.
The detective stopped in the middle of the driveway and dropped his arm with the gun back down to his side. He turned and looked at them, and Cathy saw the anger in his eyes. “I thought I told you two to stay inside.”
Cathy looked at Phil who was beside her now.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded.
Detective Grady marched back up the driveway, and for a moment Cathy thought he was going to yell at them again, but he went to his car. A few seconds later she heard him barking orders into his car radio, giving a description of the pickup truck.
Cathy looked back at Phil. “I’m sorry . . . I thought . . .”
“I know,” he said.
“What’s going on?” she asked in a low voice. “You said you would tell me everything.”
Phil didn’t say anything.
Detective Grady walked up to them. “I put out an APB on the pickup truck.”
Cathy looked at Phil, giving him a chance to explain. “Did you make your phone call?” she asked him.
“Yes.”
“And you’re going to tell me everything now?”
Phil nodded.
“Hey,” Detective Grady said as if they might have forgotten he was still standing there. “What’s going on?” His eyes darted down to the calendar book in Cathy’s hand. “What’s that?”
Cathy didn’t answer the detective; she looked at Phil, giving him a chance to explain.
Phil looked at the detective and sighed. “I think I know why Carlos is after me.”
Detective Grady stared at Phil for a long moment. “And?”
“Let’s go inside,” Phil said. “I’ll tell you two everything.”
THIRTY-TWO
Phil
Phil made himself a drink. He knew Cathy probably wouldn’t approve of him drinking right now, and Detective Grady probably wouldn’t be too fond of the idea either, but he really needed one right now. He felt shaky and scared. All of this was bigger than he thought, worse than he thought.
Cathy sat on the longer couch against the wall. Detective Grady sat in the middle of the other couch, the one closer to the front windows, the one they didn’t use too often. The house was still murky, but there was enough light coming from the kitchen and the dining room. Cathy and the detective were both hunched forward on the couches, both tense and ready to hear his explanation.
He took a sip from his drink at the counter and then brought it with him to the living room. He had already locked the front door, but he kept the alarm system turned off for now. Carlos wasn’t coming back now that he’d seen the detective.
Phil sat down on the couch beside Cathy. He took another sip from his drink before setting it down on a coaster on the coffee table right next to his calendar book.
“When I was a kid I didn’t have too many friends,” Phil said. “I wasn’t really a popular kid in high school. I didn’t play sports or hang out with the cool kids. But I had one really good friend. His name was Travis Baker. Travis was a little nerdy, but he was a lot more outgoing than I was, a lot more fearless, less concerned with what the other kids thought about him. He came from a wealthy family, so maybe that’s where some of his confidence came from. When it happened, we were both juniors in high school, and it was late in the school year, middle of April. Travis got invited to a house party. Finally, we were going to hang out with the cool kids. We were going to be around the girls who ignored us in class. Travis’ parents bought him a car a few months before that. It was a late nineties Lincoln; it was only a few years old at the
time, kind of an expensive car for a seventeen-year-old kid.”
• • •
Phil thought back to that time as he talked, and he was suddenly there again, suddenly seventeen years old and at that house party. He couldn’t really remember whose house they were at or who had thrown the party . . . maybe it had been Misha Fleischman, but he couldn’t be exactly sure.
The house was remote, way out on Tonkata Farms Road. Misha’s dad was a long-haul truck driver, and her mom did something in the medical field. They weren’t as rich as Travis’ parents, not even close, but they were doing okay for themselves. Their house sat on seven acres of land, much of which was woods.
There had to have been at least thirty or forty kids there. It was far enough from any neighbors and there were plenty of places to park. Inside, loud music blared and some of the girls danced. Some of the guys were playing quarters at a kitchen table, getting very drunk.
Phil and Travis talked to a few of the other kids as they drank beer out of red plastic cups, draft beer from a keg. After four or five beers, Phil’s inhibitions had melted away, along with everyone else’s. He realized that these kids weren’t so bad, many of them were a little like he was—shy and afraid to make a fool of themselves, afraid to face any kind of rejection.
The night wore on, and soon it was two o’clock in the morning. Phil and Travis were being kicked out along with the few stragglers left. Phil was surprised to find that so many of the other kids had left already; he hadn’t even noticed.
Phil and Travis stumbled out to his Lincoln. They were going to drive back to Travis’ house where they could sneak in through a basement door without his parents ever knowing. Travis’ parents were good people, but they believed in giving Travis anything he wanted, and that included letting him stay out late on the weekends. To Phil, it seemed like they wanted to be his friend more than they wanted to be his parents.
They sat down in the car and Phil’s head was spinning. But he wasn’t so drunk that he wasn’t a little concerned about Travis’ driving.
“You okay to drive?” Phil asked Travis.
“I’m fine. I didn’t drink as much as you did.”
That was a lie of course, but Phil believed him. And Phil, being the “worry wart” that he was, was still concerned about running into cops on the way home.
“I know a back way,” Travis said as he turned the car around in the dirt drive. He shoved the shifter into drive and idled down the curvy driveway through the woods. “We’ll take a road through the woods. Probably won’t even see a single car on the way home.”
That made Phil feel a little better.
Phil stared out the windshield. “Your lights,” he told Travis.
“What about ‘em?”
“You need to turn them on.”
“Oh,” Travis said. He turned on his headlights, illuminating the dirt drive and then he busted out with laughter.
Phil couldn’t help it, he laughed too.
The drive down Tonkata Farms Road was as desolate as Travis had promised, and then they entered the Tonkata woods, driving down the deserted road. Phil didn’t remember much of the drive until they saw the girl.
As they drove past the woods, the trees thinned out a little and there were some open meadows in the distance, but then the trees took over again, crowding both sides of the street. A full moon lit up the dark world with a silvery glow. It was beautiful, a cool night, but not too cold. No rain or fog.
They were talking as Travis sped down the road. Travis was telling stories about a family of cannibals that lived in the woods around there. He said they took people that had broken down on the side of the road, taking them back to their cabins so they could cut them up, cook them, and then eat them.
“I hope my car doesn’t break down,” he said, grinning at Phil.
While Travis was smiling at him, Phil saw a blur of movement in the road. The headlights washed over a girl on a bicycle; she was riding right out of the woods and onto the road.
“Travis, look out!” Phil yelled.
Travis slammed on the brakes, trying to stop the car, but not before the front of it slammed into the girl on the bicycle. Phil heard the sickening crunch as the girl flew over the hood, then smashed into the windshield. She was up and over the car, and then gone.
Travis’ car finally slid to a stop in the road, the skidding tires screeching in the night air. The Lincoln was angled off of the road a little, the one working headlight pointed at the woods and the mangled bicycle that lay just at the edge of the tree line.
• • •
“We hit her,” Phil told Cathy and Detective Grady. He took another sip from his drink, but he gulped down a few swallows, nearly finishing it.
Cathy touched Phil’s thigh, rubbing it gently.
“I’m sorry,” Phil told her as he set his glass back down on the coaster. He tried his best to hold back his tears. “I never wanted to tell you any of this. I never wanted you to know.”
She nodded, her lips tight, her eyes locked on to his. “You need to go on,” she told him. “You need to tell the rest of it.”
Phil didn’t want to continue, but he knew Cathy was right—he needed to get it out now, he needed to tell everyone the truth.
Phil began talking again, but he didn’t look at his wife or the detective as he continued.
• • •
Phil remembered Travis sitting there behind the steering wheel, frozen with shock for a moment, his hands gripping the wheel like he was still driving. He stared out through the cracked windshield. One headlight was out, the other one pointing at the woods, a splash of light across the grasses and trees and the twisted piece of metal that used to be the girl’s bicycle. There were no other cars in sight on the lonely road, no other sounds except for the rumbling of the Lincoln’s engine.
“Oh shit,” Travis whispered. He started trembling. His voice grew louder and more panicked. “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit!”
Phil was suddenly sober. And suddenly nauseous. He opened up the door and stumbled out. He thought for a moment that he was going to puke, but he held it down. He walked to the rear of the car on legs that were somehow both rubbery with fear and buzzing with adrenaline at the same time. He looked for the girl that they’d just hit, praying that she wasn’t dead, praying that she wasn’t hurt too badly.
He saw her in the road, thirty feet beyond the rear of the car. She was sprawled out on the pavement, her arms and legs contorted in painful-looking positions.
Phil hurried towards the girl, his legs seeming to move on their own. He felt almost like he was floating across the pavement towards her, like he was a hostage in some kind of dream, trapped in a nightmare.
And then he was standing beside the girl. She looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old. She wore jeans, sneakers and a t-shirt with a big number twenty-four on it, like some kind of generic football jersey. Blood was seeping out of wounds in her head, out of her blond hair, and out of one ear. There were cuts and bruises on her face, her left eye nearly swollen shut. She stared up at Phil with her one good eye . . . it was so blue and so round with fear. She tried to speak, her split lips quivering.
Phil crouched down beside her. “Don’t talk,” he told her.
She still whispered, trying to move but wincing and moaning in pain. She looked towards the woods from where she’d come, then she looked back at Phil with panic in her one eye.
“You’re going to be okay,” Phil told her. He didn’t want to touch her. “We’re going to get you some help, okay? Just don’t move.”
She didn’t respond, and he wondered if she even knew what he was saying. Maybe her mind had been scrambled from the accident.
Running sneakers approached from behind Phil, and then Travis was beside him.
“Oh God,” Travis said. “This can’t be happening.”
Phil grabbed Travis’ arm. “Look at me.”
Travis met Phil’s eyes, but he still looked like he was going to sob, or maybe p
uke, or maybe run away.
“Use your cell phone to call an ambulance,” Phil told him. “Call 911.” Travis was one of the few teenagers that Phil knew of at that time whose parents had bought him his own cell phone.
But Travis wasn’t running back to his car to get the phone.
“Travis?”
“There’s no one around,” Travis said in a low voice.
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s no one around. No one saw us do this.”
Another wave of nausea wormed through Phil’s stomach. “Travis, go get your phone.”
“No one will ever know. That girl, she’s not going to make it. She’s going to die, and we’ll go to jail for murder.”
“Travis!” Phil barked at him. “Go get your fucking phone right now!”
“Just think about it, Phil. No one will know.”
“I’ll know,” Phil told him.
For a moment Phil thought Travis might leave him; he might run back to his car, get in and drive away. But it seemed like scenarios were running through Travis’ mind. Travis knew Phil would tell the truth. There was no running from this now. He seemed to almost collapse on himself in defeat, possibly humiliated by his suggestion of running. “I’m sorry. I . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Get your phone,” Phil said. “Call 911.”
Travis nodded and then ran back to his car, his sneakers slapping at the road as he ran. There were no street lights on the dark road, and the only light came from Travis’ Lincoln and the full moon shining down on them. There was enough light for Phil to see that Travis had been right—this girl wasn’t going to make it.
“Just hang on,” Phil told the girl. “You’re going to be okay. My friend’s calling an ambulance for you right now.”
The girl looked towards the woods again, swallowed with some difficulty, and then tried to whisper something. She only moved her mouth a little, like her jaw had been broken, like it was too painful to move it. But she still tried to speak. And Phil heard words from her that sounded like: “He’s there.”
