Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

Gareth took a compass from his pocket, checked the direction, and stepped off the trail into the trees. The forest here felt threatening. It was a place men did not usually come and it seemed to me that our presence violated the way things were supposed to be.

Whatever Gareth had in his backpack made a metallic clinking, and that and the forest and what we were going to do started to work on me. I began to picture one horrific bludgeoning scene after another.

Gareth must have seen the fear on my face.

“Relax, dude, we’re not going to chop him into pieces or anything. All we’re going to do is make a little alteration to that fancy car of his and then he’s going to have an accident.” Gareth held up his hands. “Totally hands-off.”

We continued our way through the forest. The ground was steep and covered with a thick carpet of dry brown pine needles that slipped under our feet. We made slow progress. I kept my eyes on the ground as much as I could and tried to convince myself that killing someone by engineering an accident wasn’t quite as bad as stabbing the life out of them.

It took us half an hour to get level with the properties on the downhill side of Eyrie Street. Gareth’s navigation was slightly off and because we couldn’t see more than twenty yards on either side of us we unknowingly walked through a corridor of forest between two properties and almost blundered out onto the road. From there, though, we got our bearings and it only took us another couple of minutes to backtrack and find the rear border of Jeremy Tripp’s garden.

We stood hidden at the edge of the trees looking out at the bright expanse of lawn. The archery target was there, and on a table on the deck the pages of a magazine lifted lazily as a light breeze caught them. The house was still and quiet.

Gareth nodded toward the carport at the side of the house. The top on Jeremy Tripp’s V12 E-type Jaguar roadster was down and the heavy chrome frame along the upper edge of its windshield caught a stray shaft of sun and made a single bright highlight in the shade.

“That’s going to make things easier, I thought we’d have to break into a garage. We better hurry up, though. If they come back right after the movie we only have an hour or so.”

We stepped out into the light of the garden and although neither it nor the house was overlooked by any of the neighboring properties I felt immediately that we were on show to the world. We walked quickly along the left edge of the garden and into the carport. The open structure was shielded from view on one side by the forest, and on the other by the house. The hedge out front covered us from the road.

Gareth took a flashlight from his backpack, then lay down on the concrete floor so that, by angling his head, he could see behind one of the car’s chrome-wire front wheels. He pulled his head back and sat up.

“Good.”

He took a fine metal file out of the pack and leaned back under the car. For the next couple of minutes he filed gently at something on the other side of the wheel. He stopped regularly and checked his work with the flashlight. When he was satisfied he reached out toward me with one hand.

“There’s a bottle in there. Be careful with it.”

I opened the backpack. Inside was a small collection of loose tools, a pair of industrial rubber gloves, a three-foot length of steel pipe about an inch in diameter, a wad of something that looked like cotton wool, and a small bottle covered with bubble wrap. The bottle had a ground-glass stopper like the sort old-fashioned drugstores display in their windows and it was half full of a colorless liquid. I pulled the bubble wrap off it and handed it to Gareth.

“What is it?”

“Nitric acid. Give me the gloves and that wool stuff.”

I passed over what he wanted and as he pulled on the gloves he outlined what he was going to do.

“The brake lines carry brake fluid from a master cylinder to the brakes on each wheel. When you put your foot on the brake pedal it increases the pressure on the fluid and this transfers to sets of calipers which squeeze the brake pads against the discs and slow the car. Of course, if there’s a hole in the brake lines then brake fluid squirts out when you put the brakes on and your brakes, they don’t work so good no more. We could just cut the brake line, but that would look a tad suspicious. What I want to do is make them just thin enough so that when he brakes hard they rupture. The acid removes the file marks and eats through more of the metal. You do it right, it looks just like a faulty part. It’s pretty hard to judge with this stuff, though, but if I use too much his brakes will still be fucked and we’ll just have to hope he doesn’t notice the leak till it’s too late.”

Gareth pulled a piece of the cotton-like material off the main wad and held it up to me.

“Glass wool. They use it in fish tank filters. It’s the only thing you can use as a sponge with acid.”

He twisted the stopper out of the bottle and carefully wet the glass wool with several drops of acid. Then he lay down and reached behind the wheel again. I lay head-on to the front of the car and watched as he stroked an angled metal pipe about a quarter-inch diameter with the acid. Thin white fumes hazed the outline of the pipe after each pass.

When he’d finished with that wheel, Gareth did the same to the one on the other side. Then he went back and checked the first.

“Okay, I guess. Take a look.”

He moved away and I took his place. The brake line was still intact but it now appeared to be sweating beads of reddish-brown liquid along three or four inches of its length.

Gareth stuffed the used glass wool into the acid bottle, stoppered it again, and returned everything to the backpack.

“It’ll go for sure the first time he hits the brakes.”

“What about the back ones?”

“This car’s got what’s called split diagonals-one circuit feeds the left front and right rear brakes, the other does vice versa. You put a hole anywhere in the circuit and both ends are fucked. And even if he slams the rears on with the emergency it’s only going to help us. The car will either spin or flip.”

“You don’t think anyone will figure it out?”

“Depends how suspicious they are, how deeply they investigate, whether or not the car gets fucked up enough to hide certain things. It’s thirty-five years old. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that something on it could fail. Those brake lines are just going to look like they were corroded. Even if someone does suspect something, why would they connect it to us? We’re just a couple of small-town slobs, and you’re the nice guy looking after his challenged brother. As far as anyone knows we had peripheral contact with Tripp at most.”

Gareth started away from the carport.

“What do we do now?”

“Wait for them to come home.”

We went into the corridor of forest at the side of the garden and cut right toward the road. Staying so close to the scene of our crime seemed to me to be a monumentally stupid thing to do. I tugged at Gareth’s sleeve.

“Wouldn’t it be better to get out of here?”

“We can’t just leave things for whenever that prick feels like going for a drive again. We have to know when he gets home and we have to know when Vivian’s not with him anymore. So, we’re going to stay hidden in these trees and watch the road and Vivian’s house. When she’s safely back at her own place we’ll trigger Jerry-boy into taking the Jag for a latenight spin.”

“How?”

“I’ll make a phone call. Only problem will be if he takes Vivian back to his place for a bit of sausage action.”

We crouched in the trees a few yards back from the edge of the road. We were hidden from view but we could see a stretch of tarmac and the front of Vivian’s house. Jeremy Tripp and Vivian must have stayed in town for dinner after their movie because they didn’t come home for close to three hours. I was cold and I had my eyes closed in an uncomfortable doze when we heard the sound of a car, faint at first, then louder as it moved up the long slope toward the intersection with Eyrie. It had started to get dark by then and when the car made the turn, the road in front of us was suddenly washed in the yellow-white of headlights.