Dark Duet

by Eric Beetner

  Jacy backed slowly toward the Honda.

  “We didn’t see a thing,” Nash said. He bent his knees and set the bag down on the parking lot concrete. “We’re just gonna be on our way.”

  “The fuck you didn’t see a thing,” the man said. The gun came up higher in his hand, his arm outstretched to the point Nash thought it looked painful. The barrel wavered and would send a bullet in a direction no one could guess if the man found the notion to shoot. “You saw me,” he said.

  “It’s dark, mister. Real dark. We didn’t see shit.” Nash took a tentative step backward. He heard the passenger door creak on worn out hinges and he knew Jacy had reached the car. He felt the keys rub against his thigh, pressed against the forgotten hundred-dollar bill in his front pocket.

  The gunman’s feet shuffled in place, the addict’s tap dance. Nash calculated the distance between his car behind him and the gunman ahead. Which was the better bet? He felt doubtful the man would let him drive away. And with the jitters and nervous sweat he could smell coming off the guy even from twenty feet away, Nash knew he had a chance at disarming him. But then what?

  Nash hadn’t been in a fight since the day he left Bishop, when they used to be a weekly occurrence. His skills were surely rusty. But this was exactly his kind of fight. Not one he started, but one he knew he could finish.

  The man wiped a runny nose with the back of his free hand. “Why’d you have to come here, man?”

  A question Nash was asking himself. “You let us go and we were never here. Okay?”

  The man thought about it, his body twitching as the synapses fired trying to decide Nash’s fate. He chewed a dirty fingernail; the tap dance reached a Gene Kelly climax.

  Nash tried banking on the gunman’s sensory overload. “I’m just gonna—”

  A bullet bit the pavement by Nash’s right foot. Nash bolted away, drawing fire away from the car and Jacy. As he rabbited across the parking spaces, he aimed for the shadow of the octagon. Another shot kicked up dry dirt in neglected flower beds. Nash crouched as he ran, slowing him a little but making him a smaller target.

  He found the center of the building, an open-air pass-way with a men’s room on one side, a women’s room on the other, and his original goal of two soft drink machines in between. He bypassed the Coke and ran for the far side of the building, into the blackness of the prairie at night.

  Nash paused at the far end of the corridor to listen and make sure the man had followed him. If he’d decided to skip going after Nash and attack Jacy instead, Nash would go back for her. But he heard uneven footsteps, like a giant toddler was chasing him.

  Nash ran into the darkness. His eyes were slow to adjust from the daylight-simulating lamps of the parking lot. His calves scraped against dead and half-dead plants of indeterminate size. He paused, hands on knees and sucking air, his own wheezing breath the only movement in the still night. On the horizon he saw a cluster of white lights like a constellation fallen to earth. The tops of grain silos, easily two-thirds of a mile away. Too far to run in the hopes of a phone or some help, and to leave the rest area would mean leaving Jacy behind and to Nash, that defeated the whole purpose of coming back to get her out.

  Nash watched as the gunman appeared at the end of the pass way, a dark shape against the rectangle of light. He stopped and looked, arms outstretched and grasping at any clue as to which way to continue the chase. Nash figured if he could lure him out into the dark, then loop around back to the parking lot, he could be gone with Jacy before the man realized what had happened. And even if he decided to give chase, that cube truck was no match for a hatchback.

  Nash bent down and felt the ground, his eyes seeing vague shapes now. He found a palm-sized rock and hurled it to his left. The gunman spun at the sound and fired, then followed his shot into the dark.

  Nash ran the opposite way around the far side of the octagon, back to Jacy.

  As he reached the harsh line separating light from dark under the overhead lamps, a pair of headlights crested a rise in the southbound lanes. Nash reached his car.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Jacy said. “What the fuck was that?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re getting out of here.”

  The lights turned into the rest area. Nash saw the silhouette of the car in the harsh overhead light. The telltale bump on the roof. A state cop.

  Red and blue lit up the rest area, moving the shadows of scrub bushes across the grassless ground in a repeating waltz. Nash exhaled and stepped out of the Honda again.

  The gunman came around the far side of the building. Nash froze, but when the man saw the state policeman’s car, he pocketed the gun. When the trooper put the car in park and opened the door, the gunman surprised Nash by putting on a performance of the breathless victim.

  “Officer, this man killed my partner. He tried to hijack our truck. He killed him.”

  He pointed at the dead body on the ground. The trooper held one hand on his revolver and noticed the crumpled body, then drew his weapon as he turned to Nash.

  “Hands behind your head!”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong,” Nash said.

  “Hands up, now!”

  The trooper marched for Nash, gun leading the way in a two-handed grip.

  “It was him,” Nash said as he complied with the request to put his hands behind his head.

  He saw the trooper’s eye go to his leg, the smear of blood there. The angry snout of his gun came forward steady as a locomotive. Nash’s next plea caught in his throat. The trooper reached him and brought one hand away from the gun to lift a pair of flex cuffs from his belt. The gun remained steady.

  “I didn’t do this,” Nash said, weakly, as the trooper spun him and slid the plastic cuffs over his wrists and pulled in the slack. When he looked over Nash’s shoulder, he saw Jacy in the car. The trooper’s gun came back up in two hands.

  “Out of the car. Now!”

  Jacy stood up out of the car, tears already falling.

  “She did it, too,” the skeletal man said. “She was there the whole time.”

  The trooper slid cuffs on Jacy as well and pushed her toward his cruiser. As he passed Nash he shouted, “On your knees.” Nash obeyed, waiting for his time to tell the truth of it.

  Jacy was stuffed into the back seat of the patrol car, then the trooper turned to the gunman.

  “You, over here. Stay where I can see you.”

  Nash watched the gunman take a few stutter steps toward the cruiser. The trooper walked to Nash, dug in his back pocket and removed his wallet, then went to the car and found Jacy’s purse.

  The gunman shifted on his feet, his complexion pulsing red, then blue in the lights of the patrol car. “Officer, I—”

  “I’ll get to you. Stay where you are.”

  The trooper got on his radio. “One-one-three requesting backup at rest area eighty-four. Man down and suspects in custody. Request checks on—”

  Nash heard his name go out over the police radio. Then the trooper dug into Jacy’s purse, brought out her ID and read her name into the handset. Nash sank inside. Brian may be asleep back in town, but someone at the precinct would hear that call of a dead body, then his stepdaughter’s name and call to wake him. Their escape was over.

  “And you,” the trooper shouted across the gunman. “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t think that’s important right now.” He stepped away from the car, moving across the white lines of parking spaces toward Nash, toward the Honda and the trooper.

  “Don’t give me any shit. What’s your name, fella?”

  “Don’t you see? He killed the guy, not me.”

  “Bullshit,” Nash said. “He’s lying.”

  “Oh, yeah?” the trooper said as he lifted Jacy’s gun from her purse.

  Nash felt the heat of the bullet in flight as it sailed past him and landed in the trooper’s shoulder. Nash looked up to see the gunm
an and his wavering pistol out in front of him again.

  The trooper dropped Jacy’s purse back onto the seat and reached for his sidearm. Another shot hit its mark as the gunman stepped ever closer to the state cop. Whether dumb luck, or a newfound marksmanship, both shots landed outside the perimeter of the Kevlar vest the trooper wore.

  Nash flopped from his knees to his stomach and started to roll away, out of the line of fire.

  The third shot landed in the trooper’s neck. He fell back, clutching with one hand at the spurting neck wound. The trooper lifted his gun and fired at the advancing skeletal man, missing wide right. The gunman raised his cheap, probably stolen gun and pulled the trigger again. Empty.

  He closed the gap and put a foot down on the trooper’s gun hand, pinning him to the asphalt. The trooper coughed and a spray of blood came with it. The meat of his neck was open, showing the path of the bullet.

  The gunman bent down and twisted the trooper’s own gun from his hand. He turned it, put it between the trooper’s widening eyes, and fired.

  Nash rolled himself up and over the curb, spinning into the dusty planter area, then crawled to his knees and moved off into the darkness, hiding again from the killer.

  The gunman looked down at where the trooper’s eyes should have been and found only a single, red cyclops eye of exposed bone and torn flesh. Jolted from his survival instinct march across the parking lot, he seemed to feel the electric burst of what he’d done.

  The gunman scanned the black night around him, his eyes unfocused as Nash watched him from the shadows. Nash knew he wouldn’t be able to run as fast with the cuffs on. He waited for the killer to make the first move.

  “I don’t got time to chase you down again, fucker,” the gunman said. “Just come on out and let’s get this over with.”

  A sound spun the man’s head to the right and he fired a shot into the black. The crackle of the trooper’s radio filled the space behind the gunshot echo. Backup was on its way.

  “Shit,” the gunman said to himself. His eyes flitted across the empty horizon, seeing nothing. Nash wondered how long until the cops showed up and if he could hide out until they did.

  Another burst of radio chatter seemed to run like an electric shock up from the gunman’s feet. He turned and ran for the cruiser, taking the trooper’s gun with him. Nash watched from behind a dead bush as the killer slid behind the wheel, gunned the engine, and pulled out, lights still flashing.

  As the car swung back to face the highway, Nash caught sight of Jacy’s screaming face in the back window of the patrol car.

  CHAPTER 3

  The meth-addled gunman pushed the police cruiser over seventy and swore at the windshield and the black night outside.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit.”

  His plan had fallen apart, a throat cut for nothing, and the car wouldn’t seem to go fast enough. The needle passed ninety, but he felt like he was driving through molasses.

  “You better fucking let me go, asshole,” Jacy said from the back seat. Her hips bruised on the hard fiberglass seats. No door handles to make an escape. The metal cage in front of her eyes made her feel like an animal while at the same time making the crazed shooter driving seem like his own species of dangerous carnivore.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he said. “I gotta think.”

  “You can’t think. Why the fuck do you think we’re in this mess?”

  “Shut up!” He backhanded the metal grate between them and pulled back his hand with a hiss of pain. The speedometer nearing triple digits, he tried one handing open the shotgun rack next to him, but a lock held it in place. The car keys had been in the ignition, but he hadn’t thought to search the cop for any other keys. So no shotgun, not that he knew what he’d do with it anyhow.

  A rodent of some sort blinked in the headlights an instant before it was crushed. The car made a small lift on the right side, but otherwise powered on over the slow rises in the two-lane highway, one headlight tinted slightly pink with the animal’s blood.

  Jacy curled her back and tried to settle into a comfortable position on the seat. Any way she sat, her hands were awkwardly pinned against her back.

  The gunman punched the roof three times, punctuating each one with a, “Fuck.”

  Jacy tried a different tactic. She needed to calm him down.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.” His plans extended only as far as the lights could reach on the blacktop in front of him. Ahead of that—only darkness.

  “You let me go and you can have your money back.”

  His foot came off the gas. “What?” He tried to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Your money. It’s in my car back there. You bring me back and you can have it all.”

  Jacy slid off the hard seat and slammed into the metal backing of the seat in front of her as he smashed the brakes to the floor. She hit the backseat carpet, smelling faintly of vomit and piss from years of abuse by drunk drivers in custody, and couldn’t be sure if the dizziness she felt was due to the whack of her forehead on the seat back or the fishtailing of the police car.

  Nash felt his own warm blood mix with the blood already on the knife. He’d remembered the murder weapon as he aimlessly searched for a way out of the cuffs binding his wrists. Bending down to retrieve it from the pool of gore surrounding the dead man, he fought paranoid thoughts of blood-borne diseases the murdered man may have been carrying and tried to concentrate on the sawing motions as he cut away the flex cuffs.

  The cuffs released their grip and he brought his hand around in front of him and examined his self-inflicted wounds. Knicks and scrapes, nothing suicidal. He stood and sprinted to his Honda. He picked up Jacy’s purse from the ground and tossed it inside, then tore away in the direction he saw the police cruiser go.

  He forgot what it was like to feel drowsy behind the wheel as he sped down the desolate highway, twin curtains of black on either side. He nervously chewed his lip and tried to scan the road far ahead when he could, searching for signs of the car. He wondered if the call had gotten to Brian yet.

  He rounded a bend and on the horizon dancing colors alternated blue and red. He drove for the light and found a one car roadblock. The cruiser angled across both lanes of road, doors open and no one inside.

  Nash braked hard and got out, his feet touching down on the double yellow line. He listened. Nothing but a slow wind moving through to better places. A fine methane tang of cow in the air, some live and some fertilizer.

  Jacy came out from behind the cruiser, pinned closely to the chest of the gunman who had the state trooper’s gun pressed to her temple. Nash saw a thin line of blood already running down from her scalp. His hands went up again like a reflex.

  “I want the money,” the gunman said, all uncertain threats and desperate wishing.

  “I haven’t got it,” Nash said.

  “You do too,” Jacy said. “I put it in the car when you ran off.”

  “Get it and she might live,” said the skeletal man.

  Nash turned to the Honda and peered in the back seat. The crumpled canvas bag sat there.

  “I got it. I got it,” he said. Please don’t shoot was implied. But Nash knew once the crazy man had the money—money he’d already killed for—there would be nothing stopping him from shooting Jacy and Nash. He thought of trying his same method twice—taking the bag of cash and sprinting off into the unplowed fields on the side of the road. Then he spotted Jacy’s purse.

  Nash ducked into the car, put one hand on the handle of the canvas bag and plunged the other into Jacy’s purse again, mirroring his earlier hunt for a smoke. His hand searched for her defense-against-Brian gun, but found nothing. He risked a glance down and saw the gun, dropped outside her purse by the cop when he got shot. Nash scooped up the gun and pulled back out of the car with the bag visible and the gun held behind him.

  Nash had shot before, but he was n
o marksman. The way Jacy was being employed as a human shield at the moment, any shot he got off would have a lottery ticket chance of hitting the gunman, and a coin flip chance of hitting her. He walked forward and watched for his opening.

  “Here you go. It’s all yours,” Nash said.

  “Toss it over,” the gunman said.

  “Let her go.”

  “After I get the money.”

  “No.”

  The man pulled tighter on Jacy, pushed the gun harder into the bone of her skull.

  “Jesus Christ, Nash,” she said.

  “Put the fucking money—”

  Nash cut him off. When he bounced at bars, he learned you never let the drunk dictate the terms. Same went for a wiry dirtbag off his daily bump. Soft serve didn’t work with guys like him. They needed the hard stuff.

  “Here’s how it’s gonna go. You let her go and send her over. We get in our car and I drop the bag out the window as I get the fuck away from here and never see you again.”

  The man’s pinprick pupils shuddered back and forth in his wide-open eyes.

  “How about I shoot you both and take what’s mine?”

  “If it was yours, I don’t think you’d have had to cut anyone’s throat to get it,” Nash said. Then, ignoring the lucky shots he’d landed in the trooper, he tried to sap some of the man’s confidence. “And we’ve already proven you can’t hit the acre of land you’re standing on with a gun. So let’s do it my way and we all walk away from this alive and well. And you a hell of a lot richer than us.”

  “No, no, no, no. Fuck that,” he said, “Fuck you.”

  Jacy’s tears glistened in the cruiser’s light show. “Nash, just give him the bag.”

  An engine sound reached Nash’s ears before the headlights showed over the nearest rise. A truck, moving north.

  “Time to make up your mind,” Nash said. Fuck if he was going to make it out of this place once only to get planted on the side of the road on his way out of town a second time. The ground of this whole damn state sat under an inch-thick layer of last year’s cow shit and damned if that would be his final resting place.