Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

“Okay, the fire.”

“And he’s right?”

I didn’t want to tell Gareth any more than I had to, but I needed his help to do something I wasn’t capable of doing alone. “Stan made an error of judgment.”

“There you go, wasn’t too hard. Now we can move forward. How do you know he’s her brother?”

“I heard it from one of our clients. And later he told me himself.”

“You talked to him?”

“I was trying to get him to leave us alone.”

“Johnny, it’s just you and Marla on that tape. Why does he think I made it?”

I’d known I was going to have to cover this unfortunate detail and I tried now to make it sound as matter of fact and unavoidable as possible.

“I told him. It was all I had, man. He was destroying our business. I mean, you set up the video, it didn’t have anything to do with us. If anyone should have been taking the heat it was you.”

“Ah…” Gareth smiled tightly to himself. “That explains something. I had Bill on the phone yesterday screaming all kinds of insanity. I do believe he mentioned the video. I denied all knowledge, of course. Not very nice using me like that, Johnboy.”

“Like I said, it was all I had. Anyway, it didn’t work. Tripp just added you to the list and kept right on attacking us. Now, because of the fire, he’s demanding that I give him Empty Mile. If I don’t he’s going to send Stan to prison.”

I watched Gareth carefully as I said this. His face went hard and he shook his head violently. “Your land? No fucking way. That is not happening.”

I shook my own head and sighed. “I don’t see much of a way around it.”

“Yes you do, Johnny. That’s why we’re here. You want me to kill him for you.”

“You said before that you wanted to do it.”

“What I said was that we should do it. Together.”

“I don’t have it in me.”

“But you think I do.”

I shrugged. Gareth looked at me for a long time without speaking, tapping his forefinger on the table beside his coffee cup.

“Okay, I’ll do it, but you have to help. I’ll take care of the nasty stuff, don’t worry. But you have to be there.”

“Okay.”

“And I want a third of Empty Mile. I told you I was interested in it and it seems like fair payment for what you want done. Especially as Tripp wants all of it.”

The thought of being connected to Gareth through the land made my blood run cold, but we were going to be connected anyway if we killed Jeremy Tripp, so I said yes. I didn’t really have a choice.

“Okay, a third.”

“And we’re talking a full one-third share, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Water rights, a share in the timber if we cut any trees down, mineral rights… that sort of thing.”

“If you want.”

“Cool. We’re going to be partners, Johnny!”

“Tripp is only going to hold off a day or two before he goes to the police on the fire thing.”

“That won’t be a problem. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.”

“It’ll take me a week or so to get the ownership papers for the land changed.”

“We’ve got a deal, dude. I trust you. Shake my hand and it’s done. Just do the papers when you can.”

He held out his hand and as I shook it I felt like I was being pulled into a long dark tunnel from which there was no exit except some dreadful future where everything was dangerous and irrevocably changed from the way it was now.

“This partnership could really benefit you, Johnny. If we ever need to put any money into the place I could leverage the cabins.”

A little while later Gareth left, saying he’d call me the next day when things were set. I deliberately didn’t ask him how he planned to do it. I didn’t want to know any sooner than I had to.

I sat by myself in the Black Cat for another half hour, thinking about how easy it was for humans to do things that changed them forever. One decision. One action. That was all it took. I was poised between two versions of myself-innocent and killer. In moving from one to the other I knew I would lose part of who I was, and I wondered, that afternoon, if there would be enough of me left to recognize when it was all over.

Back at the cabin, when I told Marla things were in motion, she seemed to accept it until I came to the part about the price Gareth had exacted.

“Are you fucking joking?”

“What was I going to say? I can’t do it by myself. And he wants to do it. It’s only a third, we’ll still have the rest.”

“It means he’ll be here all the time. Don’t you understand that? It gives him an excuse. Are you blind? Have you just kind of missed that I can’t stand him anywhere near me? He hates you, Johnny. And he hates me. And he’s not going to waste a fucking minute of this.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

Marla looked at me and shook her head. For a moment her mouth worked, but whatever it was she wanted to say was strangled by her despair and in the end all she could do was lift her eyes to the ceiling and shriek.

The morning of the next day started with Gareth calling and asking about the garden at the back of Jeremy Tripp’s house.

“Can other houses see into it?”

“No, it’s cut straight into the forest.”

“Does it have a fence?”

“No.”

Gareth seemed pleased with this and told me to keep my phone on me and to be ready to go sometime in the afternoon. He called again around three and told me to get over to Old Town as fast as I could. I met him on the main street there. He was parked a hundred yards back from Oakridge’s only movie theater. I pulled up behind him and got into his Jeep. As I slid into the seat he reached across and I was forced to clasp hands with him.

“You ready, Johnboy? This is where the tough get going.”

“I guess.”

“I’ve been following him around all day. He’s been in town with Vivian getting more signatures for his fucking petition.” Gareth nodded down the street at the theater. “Now they’re watching a movie. They just went in-that gives us a couple of hours.”

“To do what?”

“They’re using Vivian’s van-she’s been driving, like the good little pig she is. Which means Tripp’s car is back at his place.”

Gareth took his cell phone out and turned it off.

“Yours too, dude. Don’t want to be traced.”

He started the Jeep and made a U-turn and we drove north out of Old Town, out of Oakridge, and into the belt of forest that separated the Slopes from the town. It was BLM land here and there were no houses among the trees. The only traffic that used the road was either tourists or people who lived in, or worked for, the big houses higher up. But it was late in the year now and there were few tourists visiting Oakridge and we didn’t see a single other car.

We didn’t speak until Gareth pulled the Jeep off the road, into a fire trail a half mile short of where the houses of the Slopes began. The land here was steep and as the car made the turn I looked back over my shoulder, down the stretch of road we’d just traveled up, and saw a long narrow straight that made a right-hand turn at the bottom so tight it looked like the road dead-ended in a solid wall of trees. We bounced along the trail for several hundred yards then Gareth stopped the Jeep and got out. He took a backpack from the backseat and slung it over his shoulder.

“End of the line, Johnny. We have to walk from here, I don’t want anyone seeing the car.”

“Through the forest?”

“Yeah. Tripp’s on Eyrie. That’s off the road we just came up, another half mile or so. And his place is about five hundred yards along it. So all we have to do is head uphill from here and we should hit his backyard.”