Matthew Stokoe - Empty Mile

Gareth grinned and put his hand up for a high-five. When I didn’t respond he took the backpack from me, got a plastic garbage bag out of it, and held it open for me to drop the pipe into. He carefully rolled it up and returned it to the backpack. We waited another minute to make sure the car wasn’t coming back, then we got up and walked as quickly as we could along the edge of the forest, far enough in from the road not to be seen, but close enough to use it as a guide to the fire trail where Gareth had parked.

We didn’t speak until we were in the Jeep driving toward Back Town.

“Where were you?”

“It wasn’t my fault, Johnny. I called him, I told him not to come for an hour. I can’t help it if he got straight into his fucking car. Anyhow, it worked out okay.”

“Except I had to do what you were supposed to.”

“And you fucking held up good, man.”

He gave me a solid, sincere look-there was even a trace of sympathy in it-but I couldn’t help wondering just how long he’d been standing there on the other side of Jeremy Tripp’s car before I noticed him. Or exactly what time he’d told Jeremy Tripp to get to the bogus meeting.

Back in Old Town Gareth parked behind my pickup. As I started to get out of the Jeep he stopped me.

“Johnny, we got a result tonight. He’s not going to be fucking either of us up ever again and no one’s going to think it was anything but an accident. Did you see the front of the car? There won’t be enough of the brake lines left to examine properly even if anyone gets suspicious. He crashed, he banged his head, and he died. Don’t think anything else, even to yourself. In a month or two it’ll be like it never happened. Game plan now, dude, is we don’t contact each other for the next two weeks, just to be on the safe side, okay? After that it’s you, me, and Empty Mile, baby.”

It wasn’t until I was out of the Jeep that I remembered the backpack lying on the backseat. I felt my stomach twist inside me, but it was too late. Gareth had already pulled the door closed and locked it. I wrenched at the handle and hammered on the roof. Inside the car Gareth smiled and wound the window down an inch.

“You don’t need to worry about a thing, Johnny. I’ll take care of that stuff.”

“I want the pipe.”

He made an expression like he couldn’t hear me and pulled away from the curb. “Be cool, dude.”

I watched him U-turn and drive along the street. Then I got into my pickup and sat without moving for a long time, cursing myself. My fingerprints and Jeremy Tripp’s blood. I couldn’t have given Gareth a bigger threat to hold over me if I’d tried.

Marla was awake in bed when I got home, she sat with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest, as though preparing to receive some dreadful assault. I’d picked up a bottle of bourbon on my way through the kitchen and I sat next to her and drank and closed my eyes and then opened them again when I could no longer stand what I saw there.

For a long time Marla clung mutely to me and I felt how frightened she was that Jeremy Tripp’s murder would reach into our future and destroy what little hope we had left for a normal life together. If we could have stayed silent forever, never speaking, never admitting or acknowledging what I had done, we would have-but horror demands its say and so, around mouthfuls of the coarse, burning whiskey, I told her about the night.

I told her how Jeremy Tripp had died and how Gareth now had a piece of pipe with my fingerprints on it. And as I spoke, as the bloody events were plucked from the fog of terror and made solid with words, a realization which had seeded within me the moment Gareth lay down against Jeremy Tripp’s car, but which I had been too fear-struck to assimilate at the time, began to surface.

“My father’s crash.”

“What?” Marla, bound by thoughts of murder, was thrown by the change of subject.

“My father’s crash was caused by a faulty brake line.”

“So?”

“A corroded brake line.”

“And Gareth put acid on Tripp’s brakes.”

“Exactly.”

“But Ray’s car was just old, there wasn’t any acid on it. At least, you never said.”

“They thought it was a faulty part. No one was looking for anything like that. Why would they? But two crashes? Two corroded brake lines? It’s too similar not to be connected, don’t you think?”

“But Ray didn’t die. The crash didn’t even hurt him. Stop it, Johnny. You’ve got to hold on to yourself. Tonight was enough. It’s enough to deal with. Drink. Stop thinking.”

Though Marla held me tightly to her, I was cold. Too cold to ever get warm again. What Gareth had said about the killing eventually being like it never happened would be true for him, I knew, but not for me. There was no hope of ever forgetting the weight of the pipe in my hands, the heft of it as it traveled through the air, the dull impact of it against Jeremy Tripp’s skull. These things would never leave me.

Some sort of shivering physical reaction set in and I knew I had to bury it or be overwhelmed by it. So I drank faster, filling my glass by the harsh light of the overhead bulb, a light that seemed to flay everything it touched. I had one, then another, and another. It took a long time for the alcohol to take hold and when it did, when its warm tide finally started to blur the edges of thought, my tired mind drifted not to a blank oblivion, but to images of another road, of another car hurtling down a different hill. My father and I escaping unhurt, laughing. And later, as I finally fell asleep, a mechanic, holding out a corroded piece of brake line for inspection…

For the next two weeks I bought every newspaper I could get my hands on-the Oakridge Banner , the local Burton paper, even the day-old San Francisco Chronicle one of the shops in Oakridge sold. The Banner carried a piece on Jeremy Tripp’s death in one edition, the Burton paper had two articles over the course of the first week outlining the crash and later identifying the victim, but nothing afterwards. Neither of the papers called it anything but an accident-just another fatality on a difficult country road. The San Francisco Chronicle , of course, didn’t mention it at all.

No police came to Empty Mile to question or arrest me. No rumors of foul play were raised on the local radio station, no one in town muttered that there was something odd about the crash. But I was so scared of being caught that I couldn’t stop myself from grasping after a more concrete reassurance.

I figured that if the police had made anyone aware there was something suspicious about his death it would be his lover, Vivian. So, on the Monday of the second week after the crash I drove into Oakridge and saw her at the Plantagion warehouse on the pretext of needing to borrow a few sacks of potting mix for Plantasaurus.

They’d cleaned up the warehouse after Stan’s fire but there was still a damp burnt smell in the air and here and there, high up on the walls, I could see smears of soot they’d missed. Vivian was sitting behind the desk in the reception area and she looked bored. We made conversation and she told me she was finishing as manager at the end of the week. One of the installation guys was going to take over and run the business until whoever inherited the estate decided otherwise.

“I was really only doing Jeremy a favor. Without him I have no reason to be here. I need my energy for other things.”

“I read about the accident. What happened?”

She shrugged. “The usual story. He was driving too fast and lost control. Smashed his head to smithereens on the windshield. It would have been quick, at least.”