by Eric Beetner
Rafael screwed on his best grin. “A fatal one.”
Rudy didn’t know what to say. Troy hadn’t spoken a word since Rudy answered the door.
Rafael pointed to the kitchen. “You got a beer, Rudy? Come on with me and let’s get a beer.”
They left Troy behind and Rudy pulled two cans of cheap brew out of the fridge and handed one to Rafael who left it unopened. He dropped his voice low, showing Rudy his confidence in the new discussion.
“Look, the fact is, we need someone to go away. For good. We’d do it ourselves, but it turns out my brother just doesn’t have the stomach for it.”
“You’ve already done it before?”
Rafael put one foot up on a cheap chrome chair, leaned on his bent knee. “When it needs doing, it gets done.”
Rudy opened and slurped at his beer. After a choking swallow he said, “One of your…clients?”
Rafael dropped his leg and waved away the question, but allowed himself to answer subtly. “It’s not important whether anyone has or hasn’t heard from Willy or not,” referring to the dead body now cooling in the city dump under yesterday’s garbage. “What I want to know is, will you do this thing for us in exchange for a total cancellation of all debts you owe us?”
“The whole vig?”
“Free and clear.”
Rudy drew deep from his beer, let out a belch. “Who is it?”
Garret sat in his room and kept repeating to himself the phrase he couldn’t quite say to his father. Trip didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. And Garret knew who did it.
He kept seeing openings, ways to tell his father the truth, but somehow the moment always passed by and the deeper they drove past it, the harder it was to go back. The whole thing was like that damn train tunnel. You step into the opening and you can look back, you can always get out. Then you go deeper and the light fades and you’re walking in shadow. Eventually you turn the corner and the light disappears completely. From then on, the only way out is to keep on going until you reach the other side. It was a game every kid played as a freshman. A test of wills and most failed.
Garret never made it past the shadows, but now he found himself engulfed in darkness.
His cell phone vibrated on the nightstand. A text from Kyle.
—Holy shit!!!
Garret thumbed a response—I know.
—F’d up, man.
—You buy it?
—???
—You think he did it?
Garret waited for a response. His phone dimmed and went to sleep mode before Kyle wrote back.
—No.
—Me either.
—What do we do?
—Don’t know. Something.
—Come over.
—5 min.
Garret pocketed the phone and grabbed his jacket. Downstairs his parents were sitting in different rooms again. Dad sat on the couch with a beer watching a show about rednecks who caught alligators in Florida or Louisiana someplace. Mom was at her computer she had set up in what used to be the breakfast nook of the kitchen, back when they ate as a family.
“Dad?”
Sutherland looked up. “Yeah, kid?”
“Can I drive over and see Kyle? He just found out.”
Sutherland checked his watch. It was late for a school night, but Garret was counting on extenuating circumstances. “Sure. Be home by ten though, okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks, Dad.” Garret turned to see his mom in the doorway. She gave him a head tilting smile of sympathy.
“You okay, Garret?”
“Yeah, Mom. Just going to go see Kyle. Talk about stuff, y’know?”
“You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
“I know, Mom.”
She squeezed his arm as he moved past her.
Sutherland wished like hell he could have offered his son a beer. Maybe seventeen was old enough under the present conditions. A teen suicide hit town about every four years. They had a good run in the nineties with a seven-year break. But kids will be kids.
The TV still on mute, Sutherland turned to see his wife watch until Garret was out the door. She turned and they looked at each other in the silence. Both could have said something. Said a lot, in fact. But neither did. She turned and walked back to the kitchen, arms crossed and slippered feet silent on the tile. He watched her leave and turned his face back to the flickering glow of the TV set and drew another pull on his beer.
CHAPTER 6
The car followed Garret like a bad omen, but he was too caught up in his own dark thoughts to notice. Garret was a studious driver. Kyle and Trip used to tease him that he drove like someone’s grandma, but Garret took pride that Mr. Lubbs, the driving instructor at school, said Garret was about the only boy he’d had in ten years who gave operating a motor vehicle the respect it deserved.
He pulled to a stop sign, counted three in his head, then pulled away. The car behind him, the one that had been behind him for some time, roared its engine and swerved wide around him. Garret was used to such displays. Drivers who got impatient or frustrated by his letter-of-the-law driving skills often made their point in burnt rubber.
Garret risked taking his eyes off the road—a no-no on par with not checking your mirrors when merging—to get a look at the jerk who was so hot to get somewhere fast. He wondered if this asshole had a good friend die today.
He found the driver of the other car staring back at him, a wild, nervous stare. The man licked sweat off his upper lip before jerking the wheel and firing his car toward Garret. Garret stiffened his ten and two grip on the steering wheel and braked hard. The tip of Garret’s bumper slid along the door panels of his attacker with a high shriek of metal on metal before his car gripped enough pavement to slow. Ahead of him taillights glowed red as it slowed to match him.
That was on purpose. The guy was trying to run him off the road. He pictured the brief view of the nervous driver. It wasn’t either of the brothers. But somehow Garret knew it had to do with them. Trip had gotten his and now it was Garret’s turn.
Garret spun a brief thought: time to commit some moving violations. He cut the wheel hard right and put his foot farther to the floor than he ever had, aiming for a side street. Quiet suburbia was rattled by the rumble of two engines ignoring the posted thirty-five limit.
The car with the sweaty man followed, a frantic veering swept headlights across Garret’s rearview. He wondered if maybe the man was drunk, but, no, he was clearly on the attack—and Garret thought he knew why. For once in his short driving life he didn’t bother to check the speedometer. Garret hugged the center line as he whipped through the side streets. The neighborhood wasn’t laid out in a grid, it meandered through the thin woods as if they laid pavement down along the bed of a dry creek. Intersections came out of nowhere.
Garret stood on the brakes when he saw the stop sign. Instinct. He heard the car behind him squeal tires too. He checked the rearview anticipating an impact, then thought to himself, Why am I stopping?
He kicked the gas pedal again and accelerated through the intersection, pulling a sharp left as he went. The car fell in behind him, a deeper, more powerful growl to its engine. Garret cut right, then another right. The headlights ahead of him barely lit enough road to plan his next move at this speed. He chanced a look behind him and saw the man angrily pounding his steering wheel, screeching obscenities that Garret couldn’t hear.
Garret’s heart pounded same as if he had a gun at his back.
Ahead he finally saw other cars, a busier street. He aimed his car like a battering ram at the stop light ahead. It glowed green for a moment, then switched to yellow. Garret had to fight instinct not to slow down.
A bump from the car behind him urged him forward. His car wavered and the tires chirped as he struggled to maintain control, but Garret pressed on—even when the light turned to red.
Waiting cars began to move. The slow crawl from stopped to rolling gave
him just enough time to cross the intersection. The dip where the two roads met bottomed out his car and he held on with white knuckles as the jolt knocked his teeth together. A quartet of angry horns blasted him as he flew past. With his eyes forward on the next curve in the road, Garret heard the crash behind him.
Lifting his foot off the gas, he spun his head in time to see the car whirling in a three-sixty through the middle of the intersection, the back bumper and trunk dented and gnarled. The driver swung the wheel back to the left and the car veered at angle through the intersection and the beams of his headlights straddled a power line pole. The lights went dead as the car rammed the pole, the back tires lifting off the ground as the car’s momentum came to a sudden halt.
A driver who only moments before had been leaning on his horn to chastise Garret was out and running to the damaged vehicle. Garret watched through his mirrors as the man yanked open the door and Rudy Knoll fell to the road, as crumpled and unfixable as the car itself.
Garret didn’t revel in the moment. He powered on and didn’t slow to the speed limit until he reached Kyle’s house.
When he parked, he took a moment to catch his breath and to loosen his vice grip on the steering wheel. He hated to admit it, but breaking the law helped him escape. A grim realization settled over him. Sometimes you had to break the rules to survive.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Garret didn’t like the way Kyle looked at him from the open door to his house, even though he knew his eyes were wild and his face sweat-slicked.
“Just let me in. We got trouble.”
In the confines of Kyle’s room, Garret explained his encounter with the car. Garret watched as Kyle reverted back to the panic mode Garret had seen the night at the Smart Mart.
“Don’t freak out. That’s not gonna help us.”
“Well, what then?”
“I had an idea.” Garret swallowed the knot in his throat, readying himself to say the words he’d thought up while collecting himself at the curb out front. “They’re coming for us, right?”
“Fucking A right they are. Jesus Christ.”
“So we get them first.”
Silence closed in on the room. Kyle held his breath for a moment. Garret let the words work through his friend’s confused brain. “We do?”
“They killed Trip, right?”
“No way he hung himself, man. No way.”
“Right. And if we sit around and do nothing, they’re gonna kill us.”
Kyle shuddered away the thought, but it still clung to them both.
“My dad thinks it’s a suicide,” Garret said. “If we got to him and try to explain all this, it might be too late for us. Besides, what if they get away with it, which it looks like they’re going to.”
“Yeah, but—”
“We get them, or they get us.”
Kyle slumped back into his bed. He punched the pillow, looked up at Garret, and nodded.
CHAPTER 7
Tracy looked at the ugly scrape on the side of her car.
“Well, at least no one was hurt,” she said.
Garret, standing next to her in the car port, tried to keep his I’m-not-lying voice on. “I told you it happened in a parking lot. I came out after the movie and it was like that.”
“Maybe you and Kyle shouldn’t be going to movies that start at ten-thirty at night. I swear your father and I are too lenient with you on curfew.”
“Sorry, Mom.” Time to bring out the sympathy card. “It’s just that with Trip and everything…”
Tracy put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “I know, I know.” She took a sip from her coffee mug and Garret used the moment to slip away from his mother’s hand. “Did you ever go see your counselor at school?”
“Mr. O’Keefe called me and Kyle both in, but we told him we don’t need to talk about anything.”
“Garret,” she said. “It’s good to talk.”
“We talk to each other, Mom. Besides, Mr. O’Keefe doesn’t know anything about Trip.”
“He’s trying to help. It’s his job.”
“I know. I’ll be fine. Honest.”
“Okay.” His mom blew out a breath of air, changing the subject. “What you’ll be is late if we don’t get going. Get your backpack. And take this in and put it in the sink.” She handed him her coffee mug and took another look at the scrape on the car as she got in.
Sutherland wanted the coroner to shut the hell up so he could get out of there.
“So his blood alcohol was over limit by a smidge, what blood he had left in him,” the coroner said. “He hemorrhaged pretty good and bled out most of his supply by the time I got there.”
Sutherland tried to wrap it up. “So, DOA due to trauma sustained when he DUI’d his car into a pole. Got it.”
“My report will be a little more thorough.”
“I look forward to reading it,” Sutherland said. He knew he wasn’t making any new friends with the county coroner’s office, but he dealt with them so seldom throughout the year, he didn’t much care. Twice in one week was unheard of, but some asshole drunk driving into a pole in what sounded, from witnesses, like maybe a drag race thing gone bad, yeah those were no shock to anyone.
Sutherland made it straight to the morgue after he dropped Garret at school, but now he was itching to get back and get on Tracy’s trail again. One lunch with a handsome guy was no fun but wasn’t an affair. He needed more. He was a man of evidence, though his presumption of her innocence until proven guilty hung on a thin thread. Really, he knew he was looking for confirmation of what he already believed to be true.
One thing was for sure, his unfaithful wife wasn’t hanging around a morgue. Sutherland stepped out of the cool confines of the coroner’s office and made his way to the cruiser.
Garret and Kyle met on the steps of school, watched until Garret’s mom drove away, then walked the opposite direction. Since seeing the brothers’ car creeping around school the previous day, neither one felt safe sitting for hours in the one place the brother knew where to find them. So it became a ditch day, and a planning day.
“I can get a gun,” Garret said. They both let that hang between them for a moment. “My dad’s got tons. I’ll snag one tonight.”
“And then what?”
“We go to the Smart Mart. They close at ten, but remember when Trip worked closing a few times. There’s always someone there for, like, fifteen minutes after to balance the cash drawer and shit like that.”
“How do we know it’ll be them?”
“We don’t, but we know they’re down an employee. And Trip said one of them always comes by to check the numbers. Paranoid about someone skimming off the top, I guess.”
“Yeah, they should talk.”
“Pick me up around ten.”
“Okay.”
Troy came into the home office at Rafael’s mini mansion. The house was an anomaly in the tree lined suburban streets—a Mediterranean-style, two-story house with pillars and statues out front. It was gaudy and cheap looking in its excess. Each room was decorated in a haphazard style mostly lifted from pages of catalogs Rafael would tear out, bring to a furniture store, and say, “I want this.” The result was a bachelor pad of outdated faux wealth, purchased with real money. Cash earned off the sweat of hard-up suckers who borrowed small and paid back huge, or suffered the consequences.
Troy dispensed with greetings for his brother. “Rudy’s dead. That’s why we haven’t heard anything.”
Rafael lifted his hand off his computer mouse. “What? The kid did it?”
“Wrapped his car around a tree.”
Rafael shook his head. “Made it look like an accident at least.”
Troy had no patience for his brother. “I told you it was a stupid idea.”
“Y’know what?” Rafael stood. “Why don’t you take all your thoughts on my stupid ideas and write them all down, save them up so you don’t have to const
antly remind me of my fuck ups? At the same time, mind you, you don’t have a single fucking idea ever.”
“I said to dump Willy the night it happened.”
“Well, then give me another brilliant idea like that one. We need something. We’re only half finished. We can’t leave this undone.”
Arguing with his big brother felt like talking to the old man again. The house had the same empty feel to it, too. Full of stuff but void of personality.
“No one has gone to the cops. No one has mentioned Willy being gone. I don’t think there’s as much to worry about as you do.”
“Then let me worry about it by myself. You go make the collections for today and I’ll work on fixing this problem, and if you don’t think it’s a problem, then I’ve got two problems to deal with.”
CHAPTER 8
Mom and Dad were fighting again. They never yelled, no plates were ever smashed in the sink, but the needling, the sour, vindictive tones, the thick sarcasm was a regular occurrence lately. Tonight, for once, Garret could use it to his advantage.
While the cold war raged in the kitchen, Garret crept into his dad’s office. The room was supposed to be a nursery for Garret’s baby brother, but that was before the miscarriage. And that happened twelve years ago. The ghost of the boy haunted this unfinished room ever since. But Dad stuffed the room with books, photos of fishing trips, and framed accolades from his time on the police force. And he also housed his gun cabinet in there.
Hank Sutherland wasn’t one for a gun safe. If anyone ever made the fool mistake to break into his house, he didn’t want to be fumbling with a combination. Besides, guns were his business.
The redwood and etched glass cabinet stood well over Garret’s head. A row of six rifles stood at attention—two vintage Remingtons and his newer deer rifles. Below them was a row of handguns to make an NRA member proud. He had revolvers, semi-autos, a snubnose, and the one Garret referred to as Dad’s “big ass gun.”
