Dark Duet

by Eric Beetner

  Trip worked at the Smart Mart until a week ago. A counter jockey at one of the three Smart Mart locations in Bishop. Catering to every flavor of diabetic sugar-shock junk food, bare essentials people were always running out of—from milk to tampons to condoms—and some of the shittiest microwave-ready food on the market, the Smart Mart was a store of last resort. Unless you were drunk, high, late for something, stupid, poor, or all of the above. So in Bishop anyway, Smart Mart did a robust business.

  Trip lifted away the drop ceiling tile and peeked his head into the darkened store.

  “Yep. All clear.”

  As Trip dropped his legs through the opening, Garret got cold feet. “This is crazy, dude.”

  “Don’t puss out on me now. I’m telling you, there’s no way we’ll get caught.”

  Kyle inched closer to the hole behind Trip. “The beer’s fair game, right?”

  “Whatever you want, man. Beer, soda, chips, Slim Jims. Put your mouth right on the Freezee machine and suck away.”

  Trip vanished from sight and Garret heard the thwack of his Converse on the linoleum floor. Kyle followed him with a laugh as he let go. Garret was wound with nervous energy. He didn’t think Trip was serious when he suggested coming around to his former workplace and sneaking in to raid the snack goods and beer cooler. Even when he worked there, he didn’t have keys to the store or anything. All three of them were only seventeen. Not even junior manager material.

  Trip had been the first of the three friends to get anything besides a summer job. He’d been at fifteen hours a week for almost five months until he quit, mid-shift, last week because, as he put it, “Those dudes are assholes, man.”

  The assholes in question were the owners. Brothers, Rafael and Troy. No one had a handle on their specific brand of swarthy ethnic blend, but they ruled over all three locations of Smart Mart like they were goddamn sultans or something. They enforced a dress code, docked pay for any tardiness, wouldn’t let the employees fill a cup from the soda fountain for less than full price. Trip was right—they were assholes. And these assholes had a brick store one right turn off Central that was full of beer and snack foods.

  Garret hit the floor and rolled. The bottoms of his feet stung, but he kept it from the other two. He’d been accused of being a pussy once already tonight. Trip didn’t need more ammunition.

  Kyle had made it to the back of the store, the door to the beer cooler fogging over as he held it open while making his decision. He came out with a Coors.

  “Anybody else want one?”

  Trip raised his hand. “Beer me.” Kyle tossed the Coors in his hand and reached for another. Trip let a bag of corn chips fall as he caught the beer in flight. He cracked the top, let it foam over, then slurped half of it down in one gulp.

  Garret was a reluctant drinker. He’d done it, but never to the excess of his classmates. Trip’s lacrosse team buddies were notorious for the amount of hard liquor they could put away. With those guys, if you didn’t drink until you passed out, you’re doing it wrong. One in a long list of why Garret didn’t hang out with them. Trip had been grandfathered in to his tiny social circle with Kyle. Friends since the fifth grade. He was a friend first, lacrosse player second.

  Kyle shared Garret’s distaste for jocks, but not his distaste for alcohol. He was a beer man. Always talked about opening his own microbrew right here in Bishop. He was the only seventeen-year-old in town who knew the difference between a stout and a lager.

  Garret stomached beer, rarely drank hard liquor, and always sipped like a gentleman, though they accused him of imbibing like a lady. An old lady. In a convent or one of those religious sects where they live like it’s the eighteen hundreds. He’d been buzzed, drunk even, but never wasted in the same sense of all the other kids in the junior class. The stories that started with, “This one time I was so wasted…”

  “Anything you want, man.” Trip smiled at Garret, spreading his arms wide like he was offering his friend the world on a platter, not a free selection of road trip food.

  Kyle stepped next Garret and held out a beer. “Want one?”

  “I’m driving,” Garret said with a polite wave at the beer. Kyle shrugged and finished the open can in his hand then cracked the new can and took a sip.

  Garret couldn’t relax. A pair of headlights swept the room. He froze and tried to hide behind a rack of chips.

  “Chill out, man,” Trip said. “No one can see us.” He pointed to the sparse traffic outside. “They’re way up on Central. Don’t worry about it.”

  Garret looked back to the ceiling where they dropped in. “How do we get back out?”

  Trip followed his eyes, then laughed. “We just move one of these racks over and climb out. Or get the ladder. That’s what I did when I was working here.”

  “Why did they make you go up there anyway?” Kyle asked.

  “Because they’re both lazy fucks and never wanted to do anything themselves. They keep shit up there on the roof. Like, old containers and shit. Whenever they needed something down, they’d make me do it. Didn’t want to dirty up their fancy suits or something.” Trip took a bitter swig of his beer, sour with the taste of remembering the brothers. “I probably had to go up there, like, a dozen times or something.”

  Garret’s eye wandered and he froze again. “Fuck. Trip, that’s a security camera.” Garret hid his face and felt his heart rate double.

  Trip laughed again. “Jesus, fucking relax. The cheap bastards don’t keep them on during the night. Wastes the tape. The only one they keep on after they close is the one over the register. They figure if anyone is breaking in, it’s to rob the till, so they shut off all the other ones looking this way.” To prove his point, Trip raised two middle fingers at the half globe hanging from the ceiling.

  “You gotta chill, Garret,” Kyle said. “You don’t want a beer, at least get a Freezee or something.”

  “Get the blue,” Trip said. “Blue’s best.”

  Garret preferred the red. They had flavors, but the sugar ice the machines dispensed never tasted like what they said. It tasted much more like the color red than cherry. And there is no food in the world the color of the blue, least of all a raspberry.

  Garret pulled a large Freezee cup from the dispenser, worrying about fingerprints but saying nothing to the guys. He’d worn out his scared act. Very soon the tone would turn mocking and after the beer hit their brains, things would get merciless.

  Another pair of headlights swept the ceiling. Garret knew better than to say anything to Trip, but he looked anyway. Paranoid, maybe. But when he glanced through the glass front doors, he saw a car pulling to a stop in front of the Smart Mart. He dropped his half-filled Freezee cup and scurried down the aisle to where Trip and Kyle were into their third beers.

  “Someone’s here.”

  “Holy shit, dude,” Trip said. “Don’t make me regret bringing you along tonight. Seriously.”

  “No, Trip, a car just pulled up outside. Right in front.”

  The sound of a car door slamming shut confirmed Garret’s story. Trip and Kyle stiffened and went on alert like prey smelling a nearby predator. All three boys ducked low. Trip moved to the end of the aisle and peered around a display of tortilla chips and six kinds of salsa.

  “Shit.”

  “What?” Kyle asked.

  “It’s them.” Trip was moving down the aisle away from the front door.

  “Them who?” Kyle followed with Garret close behind.

  “Rafael and Troy. The owners.”

  Fear settled over Kyle just as the alcohol took effect. His movements got looser, more frantic. He didn’t know where to look. “We’re fucked. We’re fucked.”

  “Shut up and stay down.”

  All three crouched at the end of the candy bar aisle, their backs to the beer fridge, the glass window still fogged over from their five-finger shopping spree.

  Keys rattled in the front doors. They could hear the brother
’s voices, arguing. Slipping into their undefinable accent. One door kicked in and Garret thought the glass would break. The brothers shuffled in, the two working together to carry something heavy and awkward between them.

  Garret knew from visiting Trip that it was Rafael who entered first. He was taller, built more solid. He worked out, used a tanning bed, and never buttoned the top two, sometimes three buttons on his shirts. A gold pinky ring with an R etched in fancy script never left his finger.

  Troy was the younger brother. Smaller, weaker—and he acted like it. He didn’t seem to have a baby brother chip on his shoulder. He knew his role and he played it. Trip said he used to tell long, overly detailed stories about his conquests of women. According to him, he’d bedded over half the women in Bishop.

  Kyle bit his palm to keep from letting the panic leak out in a whimper. Trip tapped a hand against his forehead trying to think of a way out. Garret clenched his jaw and imagined forward to when they were brought down to the police station and what he’d say to his dad. His dad the cop.

  “Put it down,” Rafael said in between gasping breaths. “Put him the fuck down.”

  Him? Garret chanced a peek. A heavy object hit the floor between the two brothers. Both men stood to catch their breath. Garret moved his eyes down off the men and to the object. He saw a shoe, an open hand, a head. And a blank stare eyeing him from behind a clear plastic dry cleaning bag. Streaks of red swirled the inside of the bag. Blood.

  He tapped Trip on the shoulder and pointed. Trip leaned out to get one eye on the action. The one eye grew wide when he saw the same thing Garret did. A dead body.

  “This is stupid,” Troy said. “We should dump him and be done with it.”

  “And when people come looking for him? What then?”

  “I don’t know. He’ll be long gone by then.”

  “No, no, no.” Rafael exercised his influence over his little brother. Not asking his opinion, but explaining the plan. “Somebody finds him and we covered it up. He dies trying to rob our store, we’re in the clear.”

  “You’re asking for some pretty dumb cops if you think we can make this look legit.”

  “You’ve met the cops around here, right?”

  Garret tried not to be insulted on behalf of his father. Overhead the open ceiling tile gaped a black square one aisle over from where the brothers stood. Both were too preoccupied to notice the trail of empty beer cans and open Doritos bags in the aisle. But there was no way the three boys could get to that ceiling opening without being seen. And all three of them knew it.

  Garret whispered. “What do we do?”

  Trip shook his head.

  Kyle finally saw the body. Trip had to hold him down. He rocked back and forth, breaking skin where he bit into his hand. This wasn’t good. If one panicked, they all got found. And a stupid mistake, a youthful indiscretion, had gone deadly. Now they weren’t only vandals—they were witnesses.

  “So how do we do this?” Troy asked.

  Rafael moved to the front counter. “First we get him behind here, by the register. Well, first you disable the camera. Make it seem like he did it. Then nothing’s on tape. We get him back there, prop him and shoot him and then say we caught him robbing the place.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It doesn’t need to be anything more. We’re business owners defending our business. This is America. We got a right to protect what’s ours.”

  “But he’s unarmed. He should be armed. I’ll get the .38 from the safe.”

  “Okay, good idea.”

  Garret heard footsteps coming down the first aisle. A foot, Troy’s he assumed, kicked the dropped Freezee cup. “Amber forgot to clean up again,” Troy said.

  “We don’t have to worry about that right now, do we?”

  The footsteps continued walking toward where the boys hid. Garret looked at Trip who shook his head, mouthing the words, “I don’t know.” Kyle looked poised to run. Garret could see the door at the end of the row of refrigerator doors that read Office. Troy would walk right past them. Even as quiet and tucked in a corner as they were, he’d have to be blind not to see them.

  Garret thought back to the moment earlier in the evening when Trip made the suggestion to come here. He didn’t want to. It was a crime, whether the owners were assholes or not. But he went along. Same as he drank beers at a party or snuck in the back door of the movie theater that one time. He gave in to the pressure. He caved.

  His dad would say this was a teachable moment. Garret knew he was about to get a hell of a lesson.

  Troy’s leg came into view of the three cowering teenagers. Trip shot out and tackled his former boss around the knees.

  “Go, get out of here,” he called.

  Kyle was up first, his sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. Troy went down onto an end cap of cocktail mixers and ginger ale. Trip fell to the floor with him, taking down three racks of club soda, vermouth, and maraschino cherries. He pushed off Troy immediately and bolted for the door.

  “What the fuck?” Rafael was on top of the counter, reaching up to disable to surveillance camera overhead.

  Garret stood and sprinted next to Trip down the aisle. Little whimpers of fear escaped as he ran.

  Kyle kept his eyes on the door. The pool of red Freezee spread out before him like blood on the floor. He hit it as he was beginning his turn toward the doors and his feet skidded on the ice. Kyle went down, his momentum propelling him forward until he hit hip-first on top of the dead body.

  A deep, Kurt Cobain-style yell growled up from inside him.

  Rafael was down now, reaching under the counter. “Hey. Freeze motherfuckers.”

  Trip and Garret pounded through the frozen red mess and each reached down to put a hand on Kyle and lift him up.

  Troy was up on one knee, clutching his right arm where a broken bottle had sliced through his skin just below the elbow. “Stop them.”

  A gunshot lit the store with the muzzle flash. Garret saw the scene in front of him lit like a crime scene photographer had showed up. The dead man, his desperate friends, the furious man behind the counter with a gun. He reached out for whatever was nearest and landed on a stack of People magazines. He gripped as many as he could in one fist and tossed them toward Rafael where they spread out in the air like scared birds.

  Trip pushed Kyle forward at the door and launched himself the same direction. His foot stepped on the open palm of the dead man and his ankle twisted. He rode a one-foot hop the rest of the way to the door.

  Garret sprinted under cover of the magazine blind. The three boys burst into the night and this time the door did crack, a spider web of glass bursting across the lower pane. Another shot pinged off the metal frame. Behind him, as Garret ran for the safety of Central Avenue, he could hear the faint sound of a tiny bell over the door and he caught sight of a sign as they moved through the doorway. Thank You. Come Again.

  CHAPTER 2

  Garret drove, even though it was Trip’s car.

  “They saw me. They saw me, man. I know it.” Trip held his ankle as he rambled from the passenger seat. Kyle huddled low in the back.

  “What the fuck was that?” Garret said. “That was a dead guy, right?”

  Kyle’s voice broke like he was going through a second puberty. “I fucking fell right on it.”

  “Who are these guys?” Garret asked.

  “I don’t know, man.” Trip said. “I told you they were shady.”

  “No, you said they were dicks who wouldn’t let you read the Playboys even when there were no customers. You didn’t say they kill people.”

  Garret slowed the car, checking the rearview first. Getting pulled over would not be a good end to an already monumentally shitty evening.

  “Look,” Trip said, “I don’t know what the hell that was all about. But I’m telling you, they saw my face. They know me, man. They know what we saw.”

  Garret shook his head. “It was so dark in
there.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “So what if they did see you? What are they gonna do—call the cops on us for breaking in? We saw them carrying a dead body. And heard how they were gonna make it look like a robbery. We shouldn’t be afraid of them, they should be afraid of us.”

  The fear was palpable in Kyle’s voice. “So you think we should go to the cops?”

  “No. I don’t,” Garret said. He turned over his shoulder to look at Kyle. “We were committing a crime when we saw what we saw. Did you forget that?”

  “Wouldn’t your dad understand?”

  “Fuck, no.” Garret almost laughed at the thought. His dad, the new sheriff, a man with an almost unbreakable sense of right and wrong.

  “So what do we do?”

  “Nothing. They don’t want it out, what we’ve seen, and we don’t want it out. We stay quiet and so will they.”

  Trip rubbed his ankle more. “But a guy’s dead.”

  “And he’ll still be dead no matter what we say.”

  It was Garret’s turn to wield a little peer pressure, to tilt the world his direction for a change. One of non-confrontation. Of avoidance. The life of a wallflower, a bench sitter, and proud of it. You never see the dead bodies from the sidelines or the shadows. If they’d only listened to him earlier, they’d all be sitting around watching The Thing again with a Big Trouble in Little China chaser.

  “Fuck, man, my ankle hurts.” Trip shut his eyes and leaned back in his seat.

  Garret stared at the road ahead, leading home. To safety. “Yeah,” he said. “Better than a bullet in the back.”

  Rafael finished taping the gauze on his brother’s arm, washed it with some alcohol from the home care aisle. Troy winced and stifled a yell in the back of his throat. When the wave of pain crested, he went back to the I-told-you-so speech to his big brother.

  “We should have dumped him.”

  “Shut up with that.” Rafael threw down the gauze and the roll of tape. “What are the goddamn chances, huh? Someone really breaking in here.”