Fully Loaded Thrillers

by Blake Crouch

  “Yeah. But whoever did was gone by the time the police arrived.”

  “No.”

  “This occurred in a residential area, and in one of the nearby houses, someone had happened to look out a window, see a man standing in the street over my daughter. But he was gone when the police showed up.”

  “A hit-and-run.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God. What about your wife? What—”

  “We separated four years ago.”

  Roger couldn’t look at him, turned instead to the summer moon, nearly full, and as large and white as he would ever see it, the Ocean of Storms clearly visible as a gray blemish two hundred thousand miles away.

  Donald said, “Sometimes, I can talk about it without ripping the stitches, but not tonight, I guess. I better go.” He got to his feet, leaving the scotch and cards on the blanket, and walked off into the dark.

  They were lying in their sleeping bags in the tent when Roger leaned over and whispered in Sue’s ear, “We have to leave right now.”

  “I was almost asleep, Roge, what are you—”

  “Just listen.” The whites of her eyes appeared in the dark. “I want you to quietly get dressed, put your boots on. We’ll leave everything here, just take our wallets and keys.”

  “Why?”

  “Donald’s planning to kill us tonight.”

  Sue sat up in her sleeping bag and pushed her brown hair out of her face. “This isn’t funny, Roger. Not even a little—”

  “Do I sound like I’m joking?”

  “Why are you saying this? ‘Cause he walks around with a machete and was in Vietnam and…” Sue covered her mouth. “Oh, Roger, no. Oh God, please tell me…” Sue turned away from him and buried her face in her sleeping bag.

  Roger lay beside her, whispering in her ear.

  “I was late for a meeting downtown. I turned a corner on Oak Street and the coffee spilled between my legs, burned me. I swerved, and when I looked up…

  “At first, I just sat stunned behind the wheel, like I could will the moment away, press undo on the keyboard. I got out and saw her on the pavement, half under the front bumper. I looked around. No other cars coming. No one else in the vicinity. Just a quiet Thursday morning, the trees turning, wet red leaves on the street. I thought about you, about Jennifer and Michelle, all the things that could be taken from me ‘cause of one stupid fucking lapse in concentration, and the next thing I knew I was on I-94.”

  Sue was crying. “That’s why you sold the Lexus. Why you moved us to Eden Prairie. How’d you keep this from me, Roger? How did you—”

  “Live with myself? I don’t know. I still don’t know.”

  “Are you sure it’s him? That Donald’s the father of the girl you hit?”

  “This thing happened in early October. Almost six years ago. In St. Paul.”

  “But what if it’s just a horrible coin—”

  “I still dream about the orange shoes and blue shorts, Sue.”

  “Oh God, baby.” She turned over and pulled her husband down onto her chest, ran her fingernails across the back of his neck. “What do you think he’s gonna try to do to us?”

  “I don’t know, but he didn’t come all this way, follow us up into the middle of nowhere just to talk.”

  “So we just leave? Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you get us back to the trailhead in the dark?”

  “I think so. If not, we’ll just hide somewhere until morning. What’s important is getting out of this tent and away from our camp as soon as possible.”

  “But he must know where we live, Roger.” Sue sat up, faced her husband. “He was able to find out we were coming to North Carolina. What keeps him from doing this when we get back to Minnesota? Or from turning you in?”

  “I don’t think this is about bringing me to justice in any legal sense of the word.”

  “We can’t just run away, Roger.”

  “Sure we can. And we will.”

  “He might know where our girls live. Might decide to go after them. We have no idea what he’s capable of.”

  “So what are we supposed—”

  “You wanna be free of this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have it never come back to haunt you as long as you live? Guarantee the safety of me and the girls? Your own freedom?”

  For a moment, there was no sound but the weeds brushing against the exterior of the tent.

  “Jesus, Sue. I don’t have that in me.”

  “Well, you had it in you to leave a teenage girl dying in the street. Now if that man came into this wilderness to murder us, he probably went out of his way to make sure no one knew he was coming here, which works out perfectly for us.”

  He heard his wife moving in the darkness, the separating teeth of a zipper.

  The leather case dropped in his lap.

  “You have to take the bullets out,” she whispered. “Wipe them down so they don’t have our prints. You probably won’t be able to find the shell casings in the dark.”

  “Sue, I can’t.”

  “You’re gonna make me handle this? Look, it breaks my heart that that man lost his daughter, and it makes me sick that it’s your fault, but I will not live the rest of my life in fear, looking over my shoulder, calling Jennifer and Michelle five times a day to make sure they’re okay. That morning, when you drove away, you decided you weren’t gonna let a mistake you made destroy our lives. Well, it’s too late to change course now.”

  “I am telling you I can’t—”

  “You don’t have a choice. This night’s been coming ever since that October morning. You started this six years ago. Now go finish it.”

  He left Sue lying in the tall grass several hundred feet down the mountainside and headed back up toward the meadows of Beech Spring Gap carrying a flashlight he didn’t need under the blazing wattage of the moon.

  He reached the gap, moved past their tent and along the trail that led to Shining Rock Mountain, the base of which stood cloaked in thickets of rhododendron that bloomed pink in the month of June.

  On a walk that morning, a thousand years ago, he’d noticed a piece of red tucked back among the glossy green leaves, wondered now if that had been Donald’s tent, and how he would find the man’s camp in the middle of the night.

  He walked off the trail and crouched down in the grass. Five yards ahead lay the edge of the rhododendron thicket. Roger thought he recalled that piece of red a hundred feet or so up the gentle slope, though he couldn’t be sure.

  For a while, he lay on the ground, just listening.

  The grass swayed, blades banging dryly against one another.

  Rhododendron leaves scraped together.

  Something scampered through the thicket.

  This was his thirteenth summer coming to Shining Rock, and he found that most of their time here had vanished completely from memory—more impression than detail. But a few of their trips remained clear, intact.

  The first time they’d come and accidentally discovered this place, the twins were only six years old, and Michelle had lost her front teeth to this gap while she and Jennifer wrestled and rolled in a meadow one sunny afternoon, cried her heart out, afraid the tooth fairy wouldn’t pay for lost teeth.

  There had been the trip seven years ago where he and Sue had to fake happy faces for the girls, crying at night in their tent, while fifteen hundred miles away, in a laboratory in Minneapolis, a biopsy cut from the underside of Sue’s left breast was screened for a cancer that wasn’t there.

  Three years back, he’d been anxiously awaiting news on an advertising campaign he’d pitched, which if chosen, might have netted him half a million dollars, remembered trying not to dwell on the phone call he’d make once they left these mountains, knowing if he got a yes, what that would mean for his family. He’d pulled over once they reentered cell phone coverage at an overlook outside of Asheville. Walked back toward the car a moment later, eyes locked with Sue’s, sh
aking his head.

  But looking at the time they’d spent here as a whole, forest instead of tree, it felt a lot like his life—so many good times, some pain, and it had all raced by faster than he could’ve imagined.

  Roger crawled to the thicket’s edge and started up the hill, the flashlight and the Glock shoved down the back of his fleece pants.

  After five minutes, he stopped to catch his breath.

  He thought he’d been making a horrible racket, dead leaves crunching under his elbows as he wriggled himself under the low branches of the rhododendron shrubs. But he assured himself it wasn’t as much noise as he thought. To anyone else, to Donald, it probably sounded like nothing more than the after-hour scavenging of a raccoon.

  Roger was breathing normally again and had rolled over on his stomach to continue crawling when he spotted the outline of a tent twenty yards uphill. The moon shone upon the rain fly, and in the lunar light, he could only tell that it was dark in color.

  He pulled the gun out of his waistband.

  His chest felt tight, and he had to take several deep breaths to make the lightheadedness dissolve.

  Then he was crawling again, though much slower now, taking care to avoid patches of dead leaves and low-clearance branches that might drag across his jacket.

  The tent stood just ahead, a one-man A-frame. He was still hidden in shadow, but another few feet and he’d emerge from the cover of darkness, into the moonlit glade.

  Roger lay beside the tent and held his breath, listening for deep breathing indicative of Donald sleeping, if in fact this was even the man’s tent. He didn’t know how long he lay there. Two minutes. A quarter of an hour. Whichever the case, it felt like ages elapsed, and he still hadn’t heard a sound from inside.

  Maybe Donald wasn’t in there. Maybe he’d already found a spot to hide and watch their tent. Maybe he was a silent sleeper. Maybe he’d heard Roger crawling toward him through the rhododendron and was sitting up right—

  “That you out there, Roger?”

  Roger jumped up and scrambled back toward the thicket.

  He stopped at the edge of the glade, his gun trained on the tent, trembling in his hand.

  “Would you tell me something?” Donald asked. “Was she alive right after you hit her? She was dead when the paramedics arrived.”

  Roger had to wet the roof of his mouth with his tongue so he could speak.

  “She was gone instantly,” he lied.

  “You didn’t tell your wife, did you?”

  “No.”

  “She seemed surprised. Does she know you came over here? Did you discuss it with her after I left? Tell her what you’d done?”

  “What were you going to do to us?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “I don’t believe that. How’d you find me?”

  “When the police gave up, I spent thousands of dollars on a PI who located and investigated everyone who owned a silver Lexus in the St. Paul area. I’ve had conversations like I had with you and Sue tonight with a half dozen other people I suspected, feeling them out, gauging their reactions.”

  “You didn’t know for sure it was me?”

  “Not until this moment, Roger. Not until you crept up to my tent at one in the morning with what I imagine is that Glock, registered to Sue. That pretty much convinces me.”

  “Do you have a gun in there?”

  “No.”

  Roger glanced over his shoulder into the thicket, then back toward the tent. There was a part of him dying to just slink away.

  “What do you want, Donald?”

  “I already got it.”

  “What?” Roger could hear Donald moving around in the tent.

  “The truth.”

  “So that’s it? We just go our separate ways, pretend this night never happened.”

  “No, it happened. But it doesn’t have to end like I suspect it will.”

  “How does this end, Donald?”

  “Are you asking if I’m going to turn you in?”

  “Are you?”

  “What would you do? If I’d hit Jennifer or Michelle, spread their brains all over the pavement?”

  “Are you threat—”

  “No, I’m asking you, father to father, if you knew who the man was who’d killed your daughter, what would you do?”

  “I’d want to kill—”

  “Not want. What would you do?”

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?”

  “Beat you to death with my bare hands. That’s what I want to do. Not what I will do.”

  Roger stood up, took six steps toward the tent.

  Donald said, “Roger? Where are you?”

  “Right here, Donald.”

  “You’re closer.”

  “Listen to me,” Roger said. “I want you to know that I am so sorry. And I know it doesn’t do a goddamn thing to bring Tabitha back, but it’s the truth. I was just so scared. You understand?”

  “Thank you, Roger.”

  “For what?”

  “Saying her name.”

  Roger fired six times into the tent.

  His ears ringing, gunshots still reverberating off the mountains, he said, “Donald?”

  There was no answer, only wet breathing.

  He went to the tent door and unzipped it and took out his flashlight and shined it inside.

  Donald lay on his back, the only visible wound a hole under his left eye, and the blood looked like oil running out of it.

  Roger moved the flashlight around, searching for a gun in Donald’s hand, something to mitigate what he’d done, but the only thing Donald clutched was a framed photograph of an auburn-haired teenager with a braces smile.

  Three days later, seated at the same table they’d occupied a week before at the Grove Park Inn’s Sunset Terrace, they watched the waiter place their entrees before them and top off their wineglasses from a bottle of pinot noir.

  The August night was cool, even here in the city, like maybe summer would end after all.

  Near the bar, a tuxedoed man was at a Steinway playing Mozart, one of his beautiful concertos.

  “How’s your filet?” Sue asked.

  “It’s perfect. Yours?”

  “I could eat this every day.”

  Roger forced a smile and took a big sip of wine.

  They ate in silence.

  After a while, Sue said, “Roger?”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “We did it right, yeah?”

  It annoyed him that she would bring it up over dinner, but he was well on his way toward inebriation, a nice buffer swelling between himself and all that had come before.

  “I don’t know how we could’ve been more thorough,” he said.

  “I keep thinking we should’ve moved his car.”

  “That would’ve been just another opportunity for us to leave evidence. Skin cells, sweat, hair, fibers of our clothing, prints. I thought it through, Sue.”

  She reached across the table and took his hand, the karat diamond he’d given her twenty-four years ago sending out a thousand slivered facets of candlelight.

  “Above all, it was for the girls. Their safety,” she said.

  “Yeah. For the girls.”

  The scent of a good cigar swept past.

  “You’ll be able to go on all right?” Sue asked. “With what…what you had to do?”

  Roger was cutting into his steak, and he kept cutting, didn’t meet her eyes as he answered, “I’ve had practice, right?”

  It was early October when it occurred to one of the forest rangers of the Pisgah district that the black Buick Regal with a Minnesota license plate, parked near the restrooms of the Big East Fork trailhead, had been there for a long damn time, which was particularly strange considering no one had been reported missing in the area.

  Over several days, the sheriff of Haywood County spoke briefly with two estranged, living relatives and an ex-wife in Duluth, none of whom had been in contact with Donald Kennington in over a year, a
ll of whom said he’d been on the downward spiral since his daughter’s death, that it had ruined him in every way imaginable, that he’d probably gone up into the mountains to die.

  A deputy found it in the glove box—a handwritten note folded between the vehicle’s owner’s manual and a laminated map of Minnesota.

  He read it aloud to the sheriff, the two of them sitting in the front seat as raindrops splattered on a windshield nearly pasted over with the violent red leaves of an oak tree that overhung the parking lot.

  My name is Donald Kennington. Please forward this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police Department.

  The death of my daughter, Tabitha Kennington, brings me to these mountains. I am writing this in my car on August 5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap. I have taken their photographs with a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover and license plate. You will find my camera containing these pictures in the trunk of my car.

  At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years ago. I plan to meet the Cockrells tonight and find out. To be clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife. If Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky. Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime and his shame?

  I suspect he does.

  The Cockrells will be thorough in disposing of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of business a little tricky.

  My camp is in a small glade in the rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain, approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech Spring Gap. The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder in the middle. Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass. My tent now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.

  Late tonight, if Mr. Cockrell admits his guilt, into this hole, sealed and safe in plastic, I will drop a tape recorder, and hopefully rebury it before he murders me.