Night Road

by Brendan DuBois

  Tom pulled the Jeep up next to the Lexus, the lights illuminating the dirt lot, blending into exposed rock, blending into a dark opening. He had a brief shiver of fear, knotting in his guts and balls, knowing a slip of his foot on the accelerator would propel him off into the dark oblivion of the quarry before him. He carefully set the parking brake, turned the engine off, and got out, leaving the headlights on.

  His older cousin came over and said, “Okay, we’re going to—”

  “Hey, cuz, got an idea.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” Dickie said with a sigh. “Make it quick.”

  Tom looked around. “Look. This is a fucking waste and you know it.”

  “Know what?” his cousin said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Tom knew what he was talking about but wasn’t sure how he could explain it. He was just two years out of high school and it seemed like everything he touched turned to shit. He had worked as a dry waller and a roofer and had gotten fired from both. Now he worked as a clerk at an Irving service station, making sure customers paid for their gas instead of driving off and ensuring there was enough coffee, doughnuts, and pastries for the worker bees to get before going off to their drudge jobs and drudge lives.

  Shit, come to think about it, about the only excitement he’d had since getting out of high school was last winter, when he was at Sparky’s Pub, and somebody asked him if he was interested in working at the new super Wal-Mart that had opened up, about an hour’s drive south. He had said, shit no, he wasn’t going to work for a bunch of assholes like that. He had heard once that before each shift, crews had to hold hands and chant stuff like some religious cult, and down at the other end of the bar, some college cutie that was with some of her friends, heading up to one of the ski areas in Quebec, had overheard him. Funny thing was, she was half drunk and thought that Tom didn’t want to work for Wal-Mart because of its antiunion activities, and she bought him a drink and they got laughing. For about an hour she talked his ears off about something called Marxist labor theory and the oppression of the underclass and the rights of workers to organize. He didn’t give a shit about any of that, but later on, she took him to her BMW and as the car warmed up, she gave him a blow job before she had to leave to meet some friends.

  A fun night, even though the phone number she gave him proved to be fake, and—

  “Damn it, Tom, what did you want to tell me?”

  Embarrassed, Tom said, “Look, cuz, we’re about to drop a thirty-

  five-thousand-dollar piece of fine machinery into this quarry. That’s a goddamn waste and you know it, just as well as I do. So what I’m thinking, we just take those two body bags out and toss ’em into the quarry, and then we take the Lexus down south. Head to Manchester, maybe Boston. Sell it for cash, right up front. Might get ten grand, something like that. We split it, fifty-fifty. What do you think about that?”

  His cousin glared at him. He had on a dirty sheepskin coat, dark green chinos, and work boots. He used to work for a timber company up by the Canadian border until a tree fell the wrong way and nearly took off his right foot. Disability should have set him up for life, except the insurance company sent an investigator to check up on him, and got pics of him shoveling out his driveway some months ago after a nor’easter. Christ, of course he was going to shovel out his driveway, what did they expect? But the insurance company convinced some judge to take away the disability, and since then, like his younger cousin, Dickie had been scraping by.

  “No,” Dickie said. “Forget it.”

  He turned and Tom stepped forward, grabbed his arm. “Oh, come on, what’s the deal, hunh? The two body bags get dumped here, that’s fine, and the Lexus gets dumped, too. Except the Lexus gets dumped someplace where we get some good money for it. Hell, we’ll split sixty-forty, you get the bigger chunk, and—”

  Dickie violently shrugged off his grasp. “I said forget it. So let’s get this thing done.”

  His cousin limped back to the front seat of the Lexus, shifted it into neutral, and then switched off the engine. He left the front door open and went to the other side, popping open the front passenger’s-side door. The dome light lit everything inside up, and a couple of curious night bugs started banging around the light.

  Dickie grabbed the doorframe and called out, “Get over here, Tom. Not going to push this bastard by myself.”

  Tom swore under his breath and went over, grabbed the smooth and cold doorframe. He dug in his heels, grunted, pushed. Dickie said, “C’mon, Tommy, put your goddamn back into it!”

  He kept his mouth shut though he wanted to say if Dickie didn’t kiss Cameron Crowley’s ass so much—Jesus, they had to clean that place three times, even though after one go-through it was clean enough—they’d be home by now. With a crunch of gravel, the car started rolling. There was a slight decline to the open stone maw of the quarry, and once the Lexus got moving, it picked up speed. Tom stepped back and so did Dickie, and Tom felt sick watching thousands of dollars in cash roll out into the darkness.

  Stupid cousin Dickie, he thought. Why was he so pussy around that scrawny biker?

  The Lexus crunched its undercarriage on exposed stone and flipped over, and in seconds, was nothing but a hard splash. Fuck. That would have been some payoff.

  Tom quietly put his hand into his coat pocket, felt the cold metal of a watch. The Tag Heuer he had robbed off one of the stiffs.

  When Dickie had been in the shed, steam-cleaning out the grates, he had been struggling with the body bags, trying to make them fit in the trunk of the Lexus. One was particularly lumpy so he had unzippered it enough to move the arms around, and under the trunk light, he had spotted the fancy watch on the dead guy’s wrist.

  Not as good as the car, but not bad.

  Dickie said, “Let’s make sure it’s sinking.”

  Tom walked with his cousin close to the edge of the quarry. The lights from the Jeep illuminated the far side—showing the gouges and cuts where the stone had been taken away—and the light bounced off the stone and lit up the water, maybe fifty or sixty feet down. Tom peered over and sure enough, the Lexus was bubbling its way under.

  Tom said, “Looks good from here, cuz, and—”

  Something punched him hard in the back, he waved his arms and screamed as he fell over into the darkness.

  And he suddenly stopped, hanging over the abyss, his feet barely holding onto the edge of the cut stone. Somebody strong was holding the collar of his jacket. He moved his arms, tried to hold onto something, found nothing, choked, cried out, “Dickie, Dickie, please, please …”

  The collar twisted tighter around his neck. All he could see was the lit stonework across the way and the dark tree line. Dickie said, “You stupid little shit, take it out. Take it out now and toss the fucking thing into the water!”

  Tom felt like he was going to crap his pants and with one shaking hand, tried three times to find his coat pocket before he succeeded. He found the watch and held it out so Dickie could see it. “It’s right here, it’s right here!” he screamed. “I’m gonna toss it now, cuz, just you watch!”

  He tossed it and waited, wondering how cold the water was. Would he pass out when he hit it, or would he hit a rock—

  Dickie grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back. Tom couldn’t help it, he sobbed, and then his cousin threw him to the ground, kicked his ribs. “You numbnut, I saw you back there at the gun shop, saw you open the trunk and unzip the body bag … what, you think I didn’t know you were doing something? Did you?”

  Tom rolled, held his hands up around his head. “I just wanted to score something, that’s all! Who’d miss it? Hunh?”

  Dickie reached down, grabbed his coat, pulled him up so he was standing. His breath stank. He said, “Cameron Crowley told us what to do, what exactly to do, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m goin’ to let you fuck it up. You understand?”

  No
w that he was off the edge of the quarry, Tom felt bolder. “Why do you have to kiss his ass so much, hunh? Jesus Christ on a crutch, you know that place was clean when we finished it the first time. But he made us do it twice more! The fuck is he, the pope?”

  His cousin shook him. “No, you moron, his younger brother’s the fucking pope. He’s the senior cardinal, and I’m just a goddamn deacon. He tells me to do something, I do it. You know why? ’Cause I get paid, right away, and it’s cash. Look at me, bum foot and all. Where am I gonna get work? Food stamps is gone, unemployment ain’t there no more and job training is for folks with computers, which I ain’t got. What I got is that Cameron trusts me to do a job. So I do it right, no whining, no questions, and I get paid. He trusts me … and what you did tonight … Jesus Christ, Tom, why ain’t you thinking?”

  Dickie dropped his hands and wiped at his face, took a deep breath. “Let’s say you hawk that pricey watch. Somewhere along the line, maybe it gets spotted in a pawnshop. Or some nosey cop wonders why a guy who works at a 7-Eleven is sporting a such a fine piece. Then it comes back to you, and me, eventually gets traced back to that guy down there. If you think Cameron and his brother Duncan are gonna stand up for us after we screwed them over, forget it. There’s enough quarries in this part of the state … oh, forget it.”

  Tom thought his uncle was about to cry. He didn’t know what to say. Christ, all right, maybe it was a dumb thing to try to score that watch, but still, what a sweet, sweet payoff.

  His older cousin said, “You know, down there in Massachusetts, in Quincy and other places, there are quarries bigger than this one where morons go swimming every summer, even though it’s against the law. They got rivers and streams and fucking public swimming pools, but they gotta go swim and dive in the quarries. Each summer, one or two of them drowns.”

  Dickie stepped closer and flung his right arm around Tom’s shoulders, squeezed him hard. “You’re my cousin, Tom, and part of the family, but I swear to all that’s holy, you ever try to dick around with my line of work doing stuff for Cameron and his brother, I’ll fucking dump you in this quarry myself. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Tom whispered.

  “Good,” Dickie said. “Let’s get going. I don’t want to miss SportsCenter.”

  four

  In Purmort, New Hampshire, Zach Morrow stood out in his dirt driveway, ready to put more windshield wiper fluid in his Ford F-150 pickup truck, when trouble came up the driveway in the guise of a dark blue Crown Victoria, bearing white US government license plates. Well, what do you know, he thought. He went around to the front of his truck, reached in past the grille, undid the latch, and pulled the hood up with a satisfying squeak. It was morning and his big plan for the day was to write yet another letter to his congressman, and then cut some brush in the rear yard, and then read John Keegan’s latest work on World War II.

  The arrival of someone from the Feds wasn’t entirely unexpected, but it sure promised to break up his day.

  The Crown Victoria pulled up in front of his white double-wide. The car’s sides were stained white with road salt. They had come a long way. He unscrewed the top of the Wal-Mart wiper fluid container, opened up the near-empty reservoir in his truck, topped it off, and then he was done. The hood came down with an equally satisfying thunk. He looked to his double-wide, remembered a time early on when this was going to be just a temporary shelter, until something better could be built on the fifty acres he owned here. The double-wide was old, used, leaked in a fine drizzle, and although Zach couldn’t prove it, he was sure its provenance included being temporary housing for muddy refugees in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.

  During the past several rugged months, temporary was unfortunately beginning to look more and more permanent.

  The left rear door of the Crown Victoria snapped open and a woman stepped out. She had on sensible black shoes, tight black slacks and a buttoned dark gray coat. She was petite, looking like she was barely out of high school. Her fine hair was blond and was sculpted around her slight head, cascading just a bit over her shoulders. There was a sprinkling of freckles across her small nose. In one hand she carried a bulging manila folder. She was a Fed, no doubt, but she was the most attractive Fed he had seen in a very long time.

  “Zach Morrow?” she asked in a soft voice. “Chief Petty Officer Zachary Morrow?”

  “The same,” he said, leaning across the hood of the truck. It was five years old, six months overdue for an oil change, and once upon a time it was light red. Now it was the color of muddy clay.

  Her voice quiet, she said, “Tanya Gibbs, Department of Homeland Security.”

  “Good for you,” he said.

  She stood across from him, put the folder down on the truck’s hood. As she was doing that, her driver got out and stared at Zach, eyes not blinking. He had on a long belted black trench coat, black trousers, and shoes. The woman’s driver looked like a hockey player who had been released for skating too little and fighting too much. His biceps seemed as thick as his boss’s thighs. Zach stared right back at him and then turned away. It was too early in the day to get into a pissing contest.

  “I need to talk to you about something,” she said.

  “Lucky for us, my afternoon is free.”

  She opened up the manila folder. “From what I’ve seen, you’ve spent most of your career serving in the Coast Guard, all across the world, mostly in Africa and the Middle East, in rivers and ports. Mind telling me how you ended up in this little village, so far away from the coast?”

  “Finally got tired of being in and around water all the time.”

  She looked to his home. “Seems pretty remote. What do you do all day long?”

  He said, “Cut brush. Write letters to my congressman. Read a lot of history books.”

  “So why Purmort?”

  Zach said, “When I got discharged, I left First District Headquarters in Boston, started walking. Not hitchhiking, mind you, but walking. Over my shoulder I carried an oar. First time somebody asked me what the hell I was carrying on my shoulder, I knew I had gone far enough from the Atlantic.”

  Tanya smiled and flipped through another page. “I think I’ve heard that old tale before. Did you like the Coast Guard?”

  “Had its moments,” he said.

  “Why did you join up with them? Why not the Navy? Or the Air Force?”

  Zach didn’t like being asked all these questions, but he found it hard to be angry with her. With her size and soft voice, she seemed like somebody’s daughter who had stolen a government vehicle during “Take Your Daughter To Work” day. Despite the fact she was probably ten or so years younger than him, she was still good-looking in a sort of fresh-washed, enthusiastic-government-employee kind of way.

  “Figured with the Coast Guard, if something bad was going to happen, I could always wade to shore,” Zach said, trying hard not to smile. “Look, this is nice and all, but why are you here?”

  Her driver drifted over, not walking fast, not moving with a purpose, but getting closer, barely out of Zach’s field of vision. Zach found it hard to keep his eye on the both of them. In his double-wide he had a variety of weapons, and he was out here with this bruiser, unarmed. He didn’t like the sensation.

  “Funny thing about your records, Zach, is that you belonged to an outfit that hardly anybody knows anything about,” she said, flipping through another set of pages. “Coast Guard Special Forces. Sounds very odd, like killer nuns or obese ballet dancers.” She offered him a slight smile. “Very elite, very small. Just how small are you?”

  “Staff meetings were held in the nearest phone booth,” he said.

  “And what did you do for Coast Guard Special Forces?”

  “You look like a smart young woman. I’m sure you know already.”

  “You would think,” Tanya said, her voice sounding distressed. “But your record’s been mostly redacte
d and the originals are in a classification level so high even I can’t access it. About the only thing I found was one case of insubordination from your last covert mission that got you dishonorably discharged. Someplace in West Africa. Which means no pension. No benefits. No nothing. Am I right?”

  Zach felt something stirring inside of him, something he hadn’t felt in a long time. Hope? Anticipation? The chance to make it all right? He wasn’t sure.

  “So what’s the deal?” he asked.

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  He tried to smile at her with some sort of grace, not sure if he was doing it right. “Once upon a time, the Coast Guard was under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department. In case of war, like Korea or Vietnam, it was controlled by the Navy. Now, because of a bureaucratic clusterfuck of epic proportions that took place after 9/11, it belongs to you busy ladies and gentlemen of Homeland Security.”

  “That’s quite observant of you, Chief Morrow, but—”

  “Lady, wanna come around the truck and give me a kiss and a pat on the ass?”

  Her face flushed. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ma’am, when I’m getting screwed, I like getting kissed and having my ass patted. I know you’re not up here to console me on my bad discharge. So you have something to offer me, something you want done for the greater glory of the Department of Homeland Security, so cut to it. Save us both a lot of time and aggravation.”

  Face still flushed, Tanya lowered her head to her folder and said, “You grew up in Turner.”

  “A fair number of people did,” he said, now regretting his earlier words about a kiss and a pat on the ass, but that regret left the moment she started speaking again.

  “Your dad was an executive councilor for the state. What does an executive councilor do?”

  Zach said, “Should have read up a bit more on this state instead of me. Around here, people don’t trust the government that much, Miss Gibbs. Governor is only elected to a two-year term. The legislature is the biggest in the world, with more than four hundred representatives. Executive councilors serve as a brake on the governor. Left over from Revolutionary War times. There’s five of them, from different districts in the state. My dad was from the one up north.”