by Eric Beetner
“How much do you think they saw?”
Rafael looked at his brother like he was an idiot. “Enough.”
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know yet. But I swear I saw that one kid before.”
Troy stood up, looked out over the strewn merchandise from the boys’ mad escape, then settled his gaze on the body like an unanswered question in the middle of their store. He said, “Can we at least dump this guy now?”
“I guess we should. The plan is fucked.” Rafael stood surveying the scene, chewing his lip as he took in their level of fucked-ness.
Troy let his fragile emotions creep into his voice. “This whole thing is fucked. How did it get so bad, Rafael?”
Rafael pointed an accusatory finger at the corpse. “He didn’t pay up.”
“Lots of guys don’t pay up and we never killed any of them.”
Rafael turned away, waved a dismissive hand at his brother. “It was an accident. How many times I gotta tell you?”
“Well, you make an accident and you clean it up, right?” Troy brushed his hands together in a gesture of finality, washing his hands of the whole mess.
“Okay, I guess I’ll think of a way to clean it up. Always the big brother, huh? Nothing’s ever your fault.”
Troy lowered his voice, not liking the way the words sounded out loud. “I didn’t kill him, you did.”
Rafael held a steady gaze with his baby brother. “We did, Troy. That’s what any cop would say. You were there. We went together to collect money he owed us. That’s part of being brothers—when I get blood on my hands, so do you.”
Troy exhaled. He knew his brother was right. “So what do we do?”
“Get him out of here. Clean up. Act like nothing happened.”
“And the three kids?”
“If they’re out there, they’re a risk. We’ve avoided the cops for twelve years, I don’t want our first encounter to be a murder rap.”
Troy cradled his arm, the Advil not kicking in yet. “But they are out there.”
“I know.” Rafael chewed his lip, deep in thought about how to find the boys. He watched the height markings by the front door, a tool to help the cops if they ever got held up. When the thief leaves, you catch their height and give it to the cops. Saves you from guessing. Rafael didn’t see a single one pass cleanly through the door. They could have been eight feet, could have been dwarfs. The one was ducking as he went, the other one seemed to have a limp. Then there was the one who tripped over the body and—
Rafael jolted like someone slapped him. He slapped a thick hand on his knee. “I know who the kid was.”
CHAPTER 3
Garret couldn’t concentrate. His chemistry teacher droned on but was drowned out by the echo of gunshots in Garret’s ears. The chalkboard looked far away and blurry behind visions of the dead body on the floor of the Smart Mart.
Only the day before in this same classroom he’d spent the majority of class wondering what Kristy Toriello’s tits looked like. Did she wear a padded bra or was that all her? Would they stand firm or would they sag a little? Big saucer nipples or tiny nuggets?
Stupid idiot. Now he had real things to chew over, real problems. He hadn’t looked Kristy’s way all day.
His biggest concern: was not telling his dad the right thing to do? He began to doubt his first instinct of cowering away from the issue. Maybe this was not the time to sit out the dance. But how would he explain what they were doing in the store to his dad, the sheriff?
Yeah, real problems.
And if these other kids knew. Most stayed in last night, watched some TV, played Xbox.
“What’d you do Garret?”
“Oh, nothin’. Just broke into a store and stole some shit. Oh yeah, then we saw a dead body and got shot at and ran like hell from a pair of killers. Y’know, normal stuff.”
A flash of reflected light came through the window and glinted over the drop ceiling tiles in the chem lab. The same ceiling as the Smart Mart. The light reminded him of seeing the car approach, the first clutch of panic.
He turned to look out the window and saw the car. Sunlight had bounced off the windshield and cast the mirror-like reflection into the room. Probably happened a dozen times a day from the street outside, but Garret never noticed it before. He watched the car, his chemistry teacher’s voice a faraway hum.
The car slowed. It stopped, a chain-link fence between the schoolyard and the street. Second period so no one was outside. The science wing of the high school was on the opposite side of the athletic fields so there was only a thin strip of grass between the building and the street. Garret could see the car clearly. Could see the man with his arm propped in the open window of the passenger seat. His arm was wrapped in a cast or maybe a bandage. The grille of the car looked familiar, so did the tuft of dark hair on the man with the wounded arm. His face was blocked though. Garret could see a nose and dark sunglasses.
But that arm. The car. Flashes of their mad dash escape came back to him. The car was the same, he was pretty sure. Seeing it in the day was very different, but the square headlights, the dark color.
And Trip had tackled the one brother into a rack of glass bottles. Garret hadn’t stayed around long enough to see the results, but it more than likely cut the man.
The bell rang. Kids all around him started closing books, checking cell phones, restarting conversations put on hold at the beginning of class. Garret looked down and noticed the pen in his hand had bent almost forty-five degrees where he was clutching it in a fist.
He looked back outside. The car remained, but the men inside it were gone.
“I’m telling you it was them.” Garret sat on the bleachers with Trip as they watched lacrosse practice. Coach had given Trip a bandage to wrap tight around his ankle and a cold pack that went unused.
“You saw them? Both of them?”
“I think so.”
“Wait, you think so?” Trip was tapping his foot, drumming his fingers on his leg.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“A second ago you definitely saw them.”
“I don’t know. I’ve had the whole thing on my brain all day long. I’m pretty sure I saw them is all.”
Trip threw down the cold pack. It made a hollow bang on the bleacher seat. Kyle, silent until now, jumped like a rifle shot went off. “Shit, dude. I gotta go home. My head is freakin’ killing me.”
“Yeah,” Trip said. “Mine too, all day.”
“We shoulda stayed home today.”
“No,” Garret said. “We have to act normal. Everything is fine.”
“Y’know what, Garret?” Kyle said. “Just because you act normal, doesn’t mean it is. And this doing nothing bullshit is driving me up the fucking wall.” He stood and slung his backpack over a shoulder and stomped down the bleachers, the noise causing head turns in the cheerleading practice near the end zone of the field.
Trip watched him go. “He’s kinda right, man. It feels like we ought to do something, y’know?”
“Like what?”
“That’s where you got me beat. I don’t know. I do not fucking know.” Trip stared out at his teammates executing a play. Two players crashed into each other going for the ball. Coach whistled the play dead while everyone gathered around to show a little concern and a lot of mocking laughter to the boys with the wind knocked out of them.
Garret looked beyond the cheerleaders, something he would never have done on a normal day. In life before last night, his vision would have never made it past the image of twelve athletic young girls in matching short skirts doing high kicks. But today his perspective had changed.
“There,” he said. Trip followed where Garret was pointing. “That’s them. They’re back.”
Beyond the goalposts and past the curve of the oval track ringing the field, a car cruised by slowly. Trip squinted to see it. “Are you sure?”
“I think so.” Garret had s
tarted to doubt his own eyes. The unfading memory of last night clouded everything he saw.
“I don’t know, man.”
“But it could be.”
“Could be I guess.”
They watched as the car rolled by, almost in idle. It reached the end of the block and then sped away after the stop sign, kicking up a small swirl of dust as it went.
Was this life from now on? Seeing phantoms at every turn?
“I don’t know, Trip,” Garret said. “Just be careful I guess.”
“Yeah.” Trip watched the car fade away. “You too.”
CHAPTER 4
Hank Sutherland kept the sheriff’s car behind a rusty pickup and used the binoculars. He set the lenses on the doorframe and turned his body in the driver’s seat to get a decent look. He’d tried hand holding the spyglasses at first, but the distance was so great and his hands so shaky, he couldn’t see squat.
It’s not every day you catch your wife cheating on you.
The suspicion had grown in recent weeks, along with the arguments at home. He cleared his schedule so he knew he would have today to do nothing but track her movements. He’d been so involved in his preparations he hadn’t noticed his son, Garret’s, mood change the past two days. But then again he was a seventeen-year-old kid. What two or three-day stretch wasn’t marked by wild up and down swings? If anything, he should have been tipped off by how quiet Garret had been since he came back from hanging out with his two best friends two nights ago. But who the hell knows, maybe they had a falling out over a girl or something. Hank had bigger fish to fry.
So this morning he offered to drop Garret off at school and told his wife, Tracy, that he’d be down at the courthouse all day long on a case. He wanted her to feel free and easy to do whatever it was she’d been getting up to lately.
Sutherland’s mind spun on the drive to school so he didn’t notice that Garret never spoke a word, that the kid looked like he’d been up all night shotgunning Red Bulls. He kicked the boy out at the curb and went to work.
Now here he was, across the street and up half a block from a diner he and Tracy had been to several times before. Only the man sitting across from Tracy now was not her husband.
It wasn’t exactly catching them going into a motel that rents by the hour, but this was the first time Sutherland saw his wife in the company of another man. And the way she laughed, the way she brushed her hand over his, the way she did her hair in the middle of the daytime—he knew two and two added up to four.
He’d tear his eyes away from the binoculars, then feel savagely compelled to look again, like holding his hand over a flame until he couldn’t stand the pain, then going back for more once it began to cool.
Now Sutherland faced the question of what to do about it? Did this mean divorce, or counseling? Would he confront her with it in an angry tone or would he ask her what he did to drive her away?
God damn you, Tracy, how could you do this to me?
His radio crackled. “Chief?”
It was Cliff, his deputy. His partner until the messiness that led to Sutherland being appointed sheriff. Cliff was more than happy to usher Sutherland into his new role. Stopped calling him Hank and switched to Chief like he’d been waiting for permission.
Sutherland had to tear his eyes away from Tracy and the man getting refills on their coffee. Looked like they planned to stay a while.
“Yeah, Cliff?”
“I know you said you were busy all day, but we got us a case down here.”
Sutherland squinted across the distance but couldn’t see in the window of the diner. He tried to brush off Cliff. “Unless you got a dead body, I’m really gonna be tied up all day, Cliff.”
“Well, see, that’s it, Chief. We got us another one.”
Finally his attention was pulled away from the diner. The shooting out at the Smart Mart two nights before had been the first fatality in Bishop since the trouble a full year and two months ago. And now two in two days? It was a regular killing spree.
“We do?”
“Yes, Chief. Down at the tunnels.”
The railroad tunnels. Favorite hangout of Bishop teens and troublemakers since 1984 when the railroad stopped running through. Sutherland himself had spent a few sin-filled nights there back when the boom boxes played cassette tapes and the beer cost five bucks a case.
He didn’t key his handset when he said, “Shit.” But he keyed it for, “I’ll be right there.”
He dropped the car into drive, not turning on the sirens like he normally would, to make sure Tracy never knew he was there. It pained him to know that after the diner, she and her boy toy, a man who looked easily a decade younger than her, were off to some more adult version of the tunnel themselves. He bet they’d do more than ham fisted fumbling with bra straps and drags off stolen cigarettes.
Sutherland keyed his radio again. “Hey, Cliff, do me a solid. I need you to put out a pickup order on a license plate.” As he cruised past the car, he saw his wife’s paramour get out of, he read off the numbers to his deputy. “Have O’Neill pick him up. Expired tags. And have him give the car a real good once over. Got a tip he might be dealing drugs out of that car. Tell O’Neill to take his time.”
He chuckled slightly as he drove toward the tunnel.
The body swung from a noose over the mouth of the tunnel, its shadow making a sun dial of the entrance. The noontime sun baked the slump-shouldered figure and the way it hung still, only a slight turn to the left or right, made it obvious how little breeze there was.
Sutherland stepped from his cruiser, left the unwieldy sheriff’s hat on the passenger seat, and waved to Cliff who stood down on the tracks. He watched the body hang and the way the tongue poked out from between the lips, the veil of flies already crowding the face. Sutherland nearly tripped on his way down the sharp slope on the embankment, the well-worn path through the weeds was tamped down to a smooth polish of dirt and the occasional rock. Plus, he wasn’t watching his footing. His eyes were glued to the suicide above. The sneakers, torn jeans, the rope bracelet, all familiar. All belonging to his son’s best friend, Trip.
“Well, shit,” Sutherland said.
CHAPTER 5
“Can’t blame him,” Kyle said. “I almost skipped today too. I probably should have.”
Garret tossed aside the blades of grass he’d been twirling in his hand. “I guess so. It’s just anything out of the ordinary right now…y’know?”
“Yeah. I get it.”
Getting up that morning, Garret had almost convinced himself things were starting to return to normal. They’d made it a whole day after the incident without any trouble. Here it was, two days after and it was like the Smart Mart never happened. The only one thinking about that night, it seemed, was Garret. He thought about everything in the car on the way to school and by the time he got there had almost climbed out of the pit of depression he’d been in. Then Trip wasn’t at school and he sank back in.
The crowd of kids making their way out of school turned and stared when the sheriff’s car pulled to a stop in front of the flagpole. Garret winced that it was his dad picking him up and not his mother. Having a cop for a dad made a lot of kids leery of Garret, like he was some 21 Jump Street undercover cop or something.
He stood, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and waved to Kyle. “Later.”
“Yeah, later.”
Garret rushed to the car so his dad wouldn’t get cute and honk or, his other favorite game, whoop the siren. Dad would laugh and Garret would blush as the other kids always grinned at the fact that Garret had to ride in the back seat due to the amount of equipment and files the sheriff always kept riding shotgun.
Today his dad threw open the passenger door and invited Garret into a clean seat.
“Come on, champ.”
Garret hesitated in his step, like a deer in the woods sensing a hunter’s scent on the wind. He unslung his backpack and sat next to his father
.
“We gotta have a talk,” his dad said.
Rafael knocked while Troy cowered in the corner of the porch.
“Will you get up here like a man and back me up?” Rafael said.
“I’m not really down with this idea.”
“So you’ve said. I told you last night, if you want to handle them all ourselves, we can. But from the way you’ve been acting, I got the idea taking care of witnesses wasn’t going to become your new favorite pastime.”
Troy confronted his brother with a harsh, hissing whisper. “Oh, excuse me if fucking killing people isn’t my favorite thing to do.”
“Well, you know the alternative.”
“That’s if they come forward.”
“You want to wait it out? ’Cause if they do, it’s already game over.”
The door opened and Rudy Knoll stood there in a dirty T-shirt and boxer shorts. He flinched when he saw the brothers and his scruffy face twitched in a spasm.
“Shit, boys, I got another week.”
Rafael held out calming hands. “It’s all right, Rudy. We’re not here to collect. In fact, we have an offer for you. Mind if we step in?”
Rudy eyed them skeptically. Troy looked like he was about to run while Rafael’s pasted-on grin did nothing to reassure Rudy the two brothers who he’d taken a small loan off of weren’t trying to trick him. Rafael and Troy weren’t above breaking fingers, noses, kneecaps. It’s how they kept their many loan clients from defaulting unless it absolutely couldn’t be avoided.
Reluctantly, Rudy stepped aside.
“It’s like this, Rudy,” Rafael refused to sit in the dingy apartment. Whatever Rudy had done with the fifteen grand the brothers loaned him, it surely wasn’t spent on home improvements. “We’re here to offer a way out of your debt. To work it off, so to speak.”
Rudy squinted at him. “What do I gotta do?”
“Simple, really. You need to make sure someone has an accident.”
“What kind of accident?”
