Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

Vivian’s van pulled into her driveway. The security lights at the front of the house popped on. The van idled for a moment, then the engine shut off and the headlights went dark. Jeremy Tripp and Vivian got out and stood talking for a couple of minutes. At the end of this he took her hand and made a show of trying to pull her down the driveway. Vivian laughed and shook her head and waved him off. After a little more talk they embraced and kissed, then Tripp walked diagonally across the road toward his house and out of our line of sight. Vivian went into her own house and Gareth muttered under his breath: “Goodnight, bitch.”

I went to stand up but he held me down and whispered, “I want to make sure he doesn’t come back.”

We waited another five minutes but there was no further movement on the road, so we moved back through the forest and started down toward Gareth’s Jeep. The journey was more difficult in the dark and both of us slipped and fell more than once on the pine needles. We couldn’t risk using the flashlight. Luckily, the fire trail cut right across that part of the mountain and all we had to do was keep stumbling downhill till we hit it. We veered off course quite a way and when we finally came out of the forest we were a couple of hundred yards further along the trail than where we’d left the Jeep.

There was no moon but there were stars and the dry flattened grass of the trail was silver as we walked back along it not talking and rubbing at the scratches the forest had left on our arms.

When we got to the car we climbed inside and closed the doors. I was exhausted and it seemed to me that we had done more than enough for this thing to be over with.

Gareth looked at me as he started the Jeep. “That was the easy part. It’s going to get nastier now, Johnny. You’re not going to fuck up, are you?”

I shook my head, though truthfully I was now so scared I felt outside my body, felt that I observed and acted, but had no ability whatsoever to influence events around me.

“Good.”

We drove slowly back along the fire trail to the road with our lights out. Just before we emerged Gareth stopped and rolled his window down and listened for other cars. When he was satisfied there was no other traffic he pulled out and we rolled down the long straight slope of tarmac with the engine in neutral to make as little noise as possible.

Half a mile on, Gareth slowed to a crawl as we reached the part of the road where it made a sharp bend to the right. I assumed he was just being cautious in case there was oncoming traffic that we couldn’t yet see. But rather than rounding the bend and kicking the car into drive, Gareth stopped completely.

The Jeep was still fully on the tarmac, blocking the right lane, and I glanced nervously back up the road, wondering if this was where fate had decreed we should be caught.

Gareth dropped the backpack in my lap. “This is where you get out.”

“What!”

“Hurry up before someone comes.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

The world slipped sideways and for a moment I felt I had become the night’s victim, that Gareth was now finally taking revenge on me for having stolen Marla from him.

He put his hand on my knee. “Dude, get a grip. We have to get Tripp to drive down the hill. When he tries to take this corner his brakes will fail and he’ll go straight into the trees. Bingo, one dead asshole. But it has to happen tonight. And it has to happen where we want it to happen. It’s no good if he just drives his car to Vivian’s or something, he’ll know the brakes are fucked up and he’ll get them fixed. So I’m going to Back Town to call him from a pay phone, anonymously, and tell him to come meet me. It’s a ten-to fifteen-minute drive. I’ll tell him not to come for forty-five minutes, so I will definitely be back here before he comes down the hill. But just in case, you have to be here to make sure everything works.”

“Why don’t you call him on your cell?”

“Phone records, dumb-ass.”

“What are you going to say to him?”

Gareth smiled a little. “I’m going to tell him I have evidence that Patricia Prentice’s death wasn’t a suicide.”

“Do you?”

“How would I have something like that, you idiot? Come on, get out. We get seen here, we’re fucked.”

He gave me a shove and I opened the door and got out. “What do I need the backpack for?”

“I don’t want it in the car if I get stopped by a cop. Just hide in the trees there and stay out of sight till I get back. There’s another fire trail about twenty yards past the bend. I’ll park there and walk up. Look out for me.”

He put the car in gear and drove away before I could say anything else, and I was left alone in the sudden silence of the night. Gareth’s explanation for what he was doing sounded plausible, but just the same I felt terribly vulnerable and very, very lonely.

I ran across the tarmac and into the trees. The starshine fell away almost immediately and I only had to go a few yards to find a place where I was invisible from the road but could still see its long silvered sweep running uphill.

I didn’t want to sit down. The situation was so grave, so electric with deadly potential, that making myself comfortable seemed wrong. For long minutes I stood motionless, one hand pressed against the trunk of a tree, straining my eyes against the road, listening as hard as I could for the sound of a car coming down from the Slopes. And all the time praying that I would never see or hear it, that Jeremy Tripp’s car would never leave its carport.

He had to die. I knew that. Stan and Marla and I would never be safe if he didn’t. But in that dark, lonely time at the edge of the forest all I wanted was for this plan never to have been hatched, for me never to have approached Gareth, and for him never to have accepted.

Twenty minutes passed and I was still alone. I sank into a crouch. I had the backpack between my knees, the piece of pipe it held stuck up through its opening. By Gareth’s projected schedule there was still plenty of time for him to get back before anything happened but I was so frightened I had already convinced myself that he wouldn’t.

And he didn’t. I’d been crouching for five minutes when I heard the throb of a large engine being pushed hard. I wanted it to come from my left, for it to be Gareth racing uphill to park on the fire trail and take over from me. I tried to fool my hearing, but it was no use. Though I couldn’t see it yet, the car was unmistakably further up the mountain, coming down.

I stood and leaned out around my tree. For a moment the road was as dark and empty as it had been since I got there, but then, far back at the top of the slope, the trees on either side bloomed yellow. For a moment there was nothing else, just the light against the trees, as though it were caught there and could not come any further, as though the howling engine noise pressed against it, squeezing it against the night, thickening it with some horrible pressure.

And then the light burst and the car was there on the hill, rocketing down the long strip of tarmac. At first the distance made it impossible to see anything behind the hard bright fan of the headlights, but I knew it was the E-type by the sound of the engine. And because there wasn’t anyone else it could be.

Jeremy Tripp was driving fast and it was only a matter of seconds before I could see the faint gleam of bodywork and chrome behind the headlights. And then the outline of the car itself. And then the star-mirrored glass of the windshield in its metal frame.

I stood frozen, watching through the trees as the car’s rear wheels locked and smoked against the asphalt. Its front wheels, though, kept turning and the back of the car slid out to the left until the whole vehicle was drifting diagonally across the road, across the beginning of the bend, going far too fast to ever have any hope of escaping the forest.