The Devil's Highway

by Timothy C. Phillips

  “Had he ever done anything like that before? On impulse?”

  “Impulse? It isn’t what you’re thinking, Mr. Longville. I mean, it wasn’t ‘on impulse.’ It might seem that way, but Brad always plans things out, way in advance. It seems like he’s doing something impulsive, but the truth is he planned it months ago, and he’s just telling you about it at the last minute, because that’s when you need to know. Brad plans everything out in the minutest detail. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

  “I’d say that having your buddies drop you off in the middle of a strange city to meet some girl whom you’ve only known a few days is pretty impulsive.”

  “Yeah, you would, but the fact is, like I said, you don’t know Brad.” He paused for a second and took his cell phone out again, and checked the number of the incoming call. “Hang on a second, I’ve got to take this call.” He flipped open his phone and listened for a moment.

  “Yeah. Oh, that’s fine. Tell your mom I think that’ll be great. Bride’s Maids? I don’t care what color they are, honey. I’ll be happy with whatever you choose. Yeah, Okay, that’s fine, I’m really swamped right now, we’ll talk it over tonight at your folk’s place, okay? All right. Gotta go. Love you, too.”

  He looked at me sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  “It’s perfectly all right.”

  “Ok, see, the thing about Brad is, it may seem like he just met that girl, but I know him. He probably met her on the Internet months ago and planned to meet her in Florida, he just never told anyone. That’s the kind of thing he does. He probably planned the whole thing back then, he just told us when he needed to. It all seems spur of the moment, but Brad always knows his next move, you see?”

  Andy paused, then shook his head. “I’ll tell you, sometimes I think Brad has his whole life already planned out, to the last detail, and he’s laughing at the rest of us, because we live day by day with no idea what’s coming next.”

  With that, I thanked the young man for his time. I was planning to see another of Brad’s friends, Ray Polley, the third man who had gone along on Brad’s ill-fated Florida trip. Andy gave me directions to Ray’s apartment.

  About twenty minutes later I had found the place. Over a month had passed since graduation, but Ray Polley wasn’t working. He was in his apartment near the Emory Campus, and he was having a beer when I arrived. It obviously wasn’t his first. When I knocked on the door, I received a slurred invitation to come on in. Ray was on the couch, watching TV with indifference. A battalion of brown beer bottles stood in close ranks on the coffee table before him, awaiting the order to stand down.

  Ray had already been at ease a while. He looked at me with a fuzzy expression and raised his beer bottle in salute.

  “Whassup, bro?”

  “I’m here to ask you a few questions about your friend Brad Caldwell.”

  “Have you heard something about him?” he asked. His eyes were a little glassy, but he was still fairly cognizant. Judging from the proliferation of alcohol-related posters, mirrors, and beer lights that adorned his apartment, Ray had probably done his fair share of drinking in the past few years, so it would take more than a few beers to get him soaring. The beer he was working on was just breakfast for your experienced drunk. Trust me, I know; I used to be one.

  My pilgrimage from the life of police officer to that of my current line of work is a dirty little story that I seldom tell. Put it this way: Once I had let someone down when they were counting on me, and a good officer lost her life. Some people blamed me, others didn’t. None blamed me so much as I blamed myself. I took to the bottle, and spent a couple of years in its blinding embrace.

  In the end I had left the force. Sometimes I missed my old life, with its myriad intricacies, and its sense of brotherhood. The feeling of belonging to the right side had also been important to me, in a world grown so ambivalent. I missed all of those things, usually when I wasn’t up to my neck in my own troubles, and could afford to wax romantic.

  I took a seat across from Ray. “I haven’t heard anything. I’m here to find some things out.”

  “Ah. Okay,” he said, sluggishly.

  “Can you tell me what happened the day you left Brad in Jacksonville?”

  He looked at me with two bleary eyes and smiled his weak, disarming smile. “Sure, bro. We left him in a parking lot.”

  “I mean before that. Did he give you any details about the girl he was going to see?”

  “What girl?”

  I thought that maybe Ray was drunker than I had initially suspected. “Brad told you and Andy that he was going to meet a girl there–”

  “I know that, man. But there wasn’t any girl.”

  “What? That’s not what I was given to understand.”

  “Probably so, but get this. That story that Brad told Andy? I think it’s a load of crap, man. Brad told Andy that he was doing this—running away with a girl, because he knew that Andy would sympathize, and give him less trouble. See, I know Brad. Brad’s a step ahead of most people. Andy’s getting married, so Brad told him a story he’d go for. He had to, otherwise, Andy would have fought him tooth and nail, and probably never left him there in Jacksonville.”

  I revised once again my opinion of Ray’s relative sobriety. “If that’s what you thought, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

  Andy lifted his beer and saluted me again, half-heartedly.

  “Oh, I told them, man. I told them. But, look at Andy, and then look at me. Andy’s a success, a go-getter. You think anybody paid me any attention?”

  I sat back and thought about that. So now there were two versions of the same event, and if Ray was right, there was a third version—the real story with all of its unknown details. That version was known only to young Brad Caldwell, wherever in the world he was at that moment.

  Chapter 4

  I left Birmingham early the next morning. I made it to Jacksonville, Florida by early afternoon. It was a fine day for a drive. The panorama of the South changing from verdant wooded hills to flat vast fields watched over by circling hawks and vigilant crows, and finally to swampland and coastline, home to great blue cranes and wheeling seabirds.

  I pulled into Jacksonville, Florida, off Highway 10. On the car stereo, a man who called himself Keb’ Mo was singing I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry. The music filled the parking lot parking lot of the Jacksonville Value Center, which consisted of a giant square of yellow-ruled, black pavement; a supermarket; a drug store; a Chinese restaurant; a nail shop; and several other businesses connected together into a giant L shape, sharing a generic brick façade.

  The strip mall took up two adjoining sides of the square. Truant shopping buggies were scattered around the parking lot, while clusters of their more responsible cousins had been collected around two designated cart recollection areas. There was an airport somewhere close by; low-flying planes passed overhead, filling the parking lot with the jet noise.

  Here was the place that Brad Caldwell had last been seen alive by his friends. According to Andy Blades and Ray Polley, they had dropped him off in front of the Saving King supermarket, the strip mall’s dominant business. He’d told them that was where he and his nameless girlfriend had agreed to meet.

  The supermarket’s security video, which the police had already been over very thoroughly, and I seen myself, had shown everything, just as Brad’s two friends had reported. They had dropped him off, and he had come inside. He had waited approximately forty-five seconds, and then he had exited the store again, turned to the right, and disappeared from history.

  After the Caldwells had finally reported Brad’s disappearance, the Jacksonville Police had put out a BOLO on Brad, which indicated that he might be traveling with an unknown female. I thought Andy Blades was a nice young fellow, but I thought that Ray Polley, despite his party-dude lifestyle, had a deeper insight into his friend Brad’s psyche. I agreed with Ray that there probably was no girl waiting for Brad; I doubted there ever had been. It made sense that he would want
his friends to think there was another person involved who would look out for him, but there was another dimension to the story that gave it deeper resonance.

  I suspected that the meticulous Brad had planned his disappearance, and that he reasoned that if the police thought that a young man had met a young woman and they had run away together, well, it wouldn’t be the first time. The police had a lot of things to devote their resources to, and looking for two young adults who wanted some time alone together wasn’t going to be pushed to the top of anyone’s to-do list. The authorities had plenty of missing minors and endangered adults cases on their hands.

  But to what end had he disappeared? What was the reason behind this grand charade?

  It stood to reason that if Brad was going to disappear of his own free will, he knew that his parents would hire someone to come looking for him. He’d want to leave a red herring to throw the searchers off. No, I thought that the right-hand turn out of the supermarket door was just as much a ruse as the story about the girl. Brad, by all accounts, was smart and meticulous, a guy who planned ahead, who didn’t miss a trick. That meant there was a connection here, somewhere not too far from where I was standing. Brad wanted everyone to think he’d gone to the right, and had gone to pains to have himself filmed doing just that. So I looked to the left.

  To the left, if one walked all the way across the supermarket parking lot, was the highway, and if one followed that, which I did, was a country road, which, after a moment’s hesitation, I decided to walk down. That was very the first road that I’d follow Brad Caldwell down, though many more were to follow.

  The road ran down the street past a Domino’s Pizza, a Kinko’s Printing, and a Shoney’s Restaurant. Beyond those establishments the road rose and ran uphill into a four-way intersection that was somewhat busy, and flanked by used car lots.

  Grasshoppers fluttered away in green-yellow arcs at my approach. The black top bubbled in the sun, spring flowing into summer now. The acrid smell of road tar filled my nose. There was blue sky and fluffy white clouds and bright sunshine, a glorious day back in Birmingham but perhaps just an average day here in northern Florida.

  Still following whatever strange homing beacon that guided me, I walked up the road and to the intersection. Across from Shoney’s, on one side of the intersection was a Chrysler dealership. On the other, “Big Hearted Al’s” Used Cars, a big painted sign informed me. There was an old man in a rocking chair, sitting under an awning over there.

  In front of the dealership, under a large awning, sat an old black man in a folding chair. This wasn’t an area designed for pedestrians. There were no sidewalks, but many feet had worn a path in the high grass on the narrow shoulder of the road. The down slope was filled with beer and soda cans and fast food wrappers, and the tiny cubes of shattered safety glass that were the detritus of a thousand fender-benders from over the years.

  I stood there on the shoulder of the highway and looked across. Motorists passed me in thick profusion, seldom more than one in a car, and gave me indifferent or openly hostile glances, as if by being a pedestrian I had committed some infraction. I waited for a pause in the traffic and dashed across to Big-Hearted Al’s Used Cars. I walked straight up to the old man in the chair.

  “How are you today?” The old man called to me while I was still fifty feet away.

  I smiled and reached into my pocket as I drew up to him, and held up a picture of Brad Caldwell.

  “Have you seen this young man, sir?”

  He looked at the picture and his eyes widened slightly, perhaps in recognition. “He in some kind of trouble?” the old man said instantly, with no discernible expression on his face.

  “He’s not in any trouble that I know of, but he’s missing. His name is Brad Caldwell. His parents hired me to find him and make sure that he’s all right.”

  “I don’t want to get involved in no trouble.”

  I nodded and looked up into that perfect Florida sky and smiled. No one ever does. “There won’t be any trouble for you. I just need to find out where he is and make sure that he’s safe.”

  “He sure seemed okay to me.”

  Bingo. “So you have seen him?”

  “Sure as I’m looking at you. He came by here, several weeks ago, now. It was hot as a wet dog, that day, and he walked up here, same as you. Young white boy. Came from the same direction as you, even, walkin’ up that there hill like he was on a mission.”

  So, I had second-guessed Brad Caldwell correctly so far. But now it was going to get a little more difficult.

  Big-Hearted Al went on with his story. “He seemed like a nice young man, so we got to talking. I let him go inside and get a drink from the water fountain. Like I say, it was pretty hot. I sit out here a lot, under my shade here, and I can tell you, white people don’t come up this road a-walking. You don’t see a whole lot of folks walking on hot days, but never no white folks. I didn’t think nothing to see you come walking up, because black folks walk through here, from time to time. This is a black neighborhood. But I could tell he didn’t come from around here, so I got curious, you know? So I asked him if he needed a drink of water. He said he sure did, so I let him duck inside to the water fountain.” He looked me up and down, and looked vaguely embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry. You thirsty?”

  “I’m fine at the moment. Al, can you tell me which way that Brad went after that?”

  The old man smiled. “I sure can.”

  Al got out of his chair with surprising dexterity for someone of his years and went inside. He came back after a few minutes, and held out a half-sheet of yellow paper for me to see. It was the dealer’s copy of a sales receipt, to one Bradley Caldwell, for the sale of a used Subaru hatchback, grey in color. Big-Hearted Al had sold Brad a car. I found it odd that someone wanting to vanish would leave this paper trail behind. Brad might be meticulous by nature, but this was an amateur mistake for someone who wanted to disappear.

  I looked at Al. “Would you ever sell someone a car without an I.D?”

  “Can’t do that no more,” he replied, his face serious. “If they pay cash, I have to see some I.D. I don’t want to handle no drug money and have any trouble come back on me.”

  “You didn’t find it odd that someone would walk in here and buy a car with cash?”

  “A sale is a sale, if I can see some I.D, mister. Besides, I just hate to see folks a-walking.” Old Al smiled at me. I bet he did, at that. I asked him if he knew anything else.

  Big-Hearted Al knew just one more thing. Brad had gone west. That’s all that Big-Hearted Al could tell me, aside from the interesting fact that young Brad had paid his $650 dollars in cash from a backpack and had been last seen taking the onramp towards New Orleans on I-20. The old man had sat there in his rocking chair after making his sale, and watched Brad drive down the road to the Chevron, where he presumably filled up his newly acquired automobile, made whatever other purchases he was going to make, and took to Interstate Highway 10 via the westbound entry ramp. Hence, Al concluded, the young man was headed west. How far west was anyone’s guess.

  I walked back down the road to the strip mall, and collected my own automobile before Al could convince me that I needed to buy one of his, and I drove, retracing the path I’d just walked, following Brad Caldwell on the start of his mysterious odyssey. I threw Big-Hearted Al a wave as I turned through the intersection and drove down to the same Chevron where he’d seen Brad fill up. I started the nozzle in my own tank, perhaps the same one Brad had used that day, and walked inside.

  I walked up to the counter and showed the picture to the woman behind the register. She remembered Brad. He’d bought some gas, a lot of road food, and, oh, yes, a big bag of candy. He said what he needed was fuel, for the car and for himself, because he had a long way to go.

  She couldn’t help me any more than that.

  Chapter 5

  The car that Brad had bought had come with a tag from the previous owner, which I doubted that Brad had b
othered to change. A guy buys a cheap car to get out of town with, my guess was, he wasn’t planning on hanging on to the vehicle, once he got to wherever it was he was going. I’m sure he had cursed himself for failing to secure a fake I.D, so as not to leave a paper trail with Big-Hearted Al, but since no one had a clue where he was headed, maybe that hadn’t bothered him too much, after all.

  On the off chance Brad had gotten a speeding ticket or run into some other misadventure with law enforcement, I called an old friend in the Birmingham Police Department and got him to run the tag for me. Whatever Brad had been up to, he hadn’t gotten into any trouble on the road. The search came up negative.

  * * *

  When I got to my office, the day was dying, and the stairwell of the Brooks Building was lit by the soft light of the waning sun. The Brooks Building is an old Brownstone that lords over Brooks Plaza, just off Third Avenue North and 20th Street. Both the building and the plaza were mostly deserted for years, until recently, when the North Side started undergoing a kind of renaissance. A lot of upscale businesses started moving in, turning around a part of town known, up until then, for street crime and lurid scenes of destitution and violence. Affluent businesses were buying up and renovating all the old relics. Think of it as Urban Renewal from the private sector. These days, you could walk down the street after nightfall without getting panhandled, mugged or even propositioned.

  There was a young woman waiting in the lobby as I stepped in. She was sitting in a lobby chair, holding a backpack in her lap. She was pale, and her hair was dyed jet black, though her light brown roots had started to show, and there was a silver ring in her bottom lip. She was wearing torn black fishnet stockings and a short black dress under a transparent plastic raincoat. Over her shoulder was a backpack. She looked like she might have just come from a high school classroom, where she had sat, texting her way through a lecture on The Middle Ages or Applied Calculus. She fixed me with intensely bright blue eyes as I walked in. She got to her feet and headed towards me.