Gone in a Flash (15 page)

The deluge had trickled down to a light sprinkle. As they walked, Bert said, ‘I like that story you told Mr Jones. You know, about the farm being in my family for years and all that. Truth is, I just rent the place. Somebody else works the fields. And me and my wife, well, she up and left me like twenty-something years ago. And I don’t have daughters. Got one son, and last I heard he was in prison up in Huntsville for manslaughter.’ He sighed. ‘Wish I’d had me a grandson, though. Carry on the name.’

‘What is your last name, Bert?’

He laughed. ‘Funny you should ask. It’s Smith.’

Bert led her off the driveway and through the thick brush that paralleled the dirt road she’d come down the night before with Mr Smith and Mr Jones. They made their way through that to the farm to market road, when they saw the old blue-and-rust pickup truck coming toward them. They hid in the wet bushes and watched it turn onto the now muddy road that led to the old farmhouse.

‘Should we make a run for it?’ Alicia asked.

‘Honey, you go. You’re young. No way I can make a
run
for anything,’ Bert said.

‘I’m not leaving you,’ Alicia whispered and settled down in the little hollow they’d formed in the weeds and grasses. A weeping willow shielded them from the dirt road and a small grove of oaks shielded them from the farm to market.

‘What if they come looking for us in the bushes?’ Bert asked.

Alicia looked around her, found a nice-sized stick, and hefted it. ‘Let ’em come,’ she said.

Bert laughed quietly. ‘That’s what I like about you, kid,’ he said. ‘You got balls.’

They were there for no more than twenty minutes when the blue truck came roaring back down the dirt road and turned on the farm to market road, heading back to Codderville.

‘Glad we waited,’ Alicia said.

‘Yeah, no kidding,’ Bert said and stood up, stretching his legs. ‘Hard to get up off the ground when you get to be my age.’

Alicia bounced up like a young colt. ‘I guess we should start walking,’ she said.

‘What the fuck? A goddam cop?’ Mr Brown hadn’t stopped yelling since they’d driven off from Sagebrush Trail, and kept slamming his fist repeatedly on the steering wheel. ‘You forget to mention the little bitch lives next door to a fucking cop?’

‘You missed the turn,’ Mr Smith said, his voice relatively quiet, at least in comparison to his companion’s.

Mr Brown’s right arm shot out sideways, his fist colliding solidly with Mr Smith’s jaw, throwing his head against the side window of the old truck. The window cracked. ‘Shut up!’ Mr Brown yelled.

Stunned, Mr Smith straightened up. ‘Jesus!’ he moaned, rubbing his jaw. ‘What’d you go and do that for?’

‘Because you’re an idiot! And I hate idiots!’ Mr Brown yelled.

Mr Smith wished Mr Jones had been in the truck with him so he could have shot him again. The thought alone seemed to relieve a lot of tension, and, truthfully, he was feeling quite tense. Maybe Mr Brown would shoot Mr Jones, and save him the job. If he hated idiots, he sure as hell would hate Mr Jones.

‘So now what?’ Mr Smith asked, feeling a bit woozy.

‘We go back tonight. Late. And we kill everybody! Including that bitch cop!’

Mr Smith nodded his head, which hurt like the devil. It was a plan, he thought, then felt a very sharp pain in his head, followed by his vision blurring as he slumped in his seat; the only thing keeping him upright was the seatbelt.

Without the ceremony of knocking, Luna burst in our back door, cell phone pressed to her ear. ‘I want an address and I want it now!’ she yelled into the phone. ‘Call me back and make it quick!’

She closed her phone and fell on the sofa.

‘What’s up?’ I asked.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

‘But I just did,’ I said.

‘When I turned onto Sagebrush there were two men walking toward your house. One of them was the short guy from the other day. When he saw me he turned tail and ran. I don’t know who the other guy was. It wasn’t the big one though, that’s for sure—’

Willis jumped up. ‘Why aren’t you chasing them? Jesus Christ, Luna—’

‘I saw the vehicle they were in. An old blue-and-rust Chevy pickup truck. I got the license number.’ She held out her cell phone. ‘I’m waiting on a call now.’

Willis sat down in his chair, slumped over, hands clasped between his legs. He looked dejected. I don’t suppose I looked much better. The three of us were quiet. The minutes felt like hours and I was ready to crawl out of my skin when Luna’s cell phone finally rang.

All three of us jumped to our feet. Luna opened her phone. ‘Hello?’ She motioned to me for pen and paper. I obliged. She began to write. ‘Got it!’ She stuffed the phone in her pocket and looked at us.

‘Get in my car,’ she said and, again, without ceremony, went back out the back door as flamboyantly as she’d come in and jumped in her car.

We followed her, Willis riding shotgun, me in the backseat behind Luna, still not sure where we were going. She put her flasher on top of her car, turned on her siren and we sped out of BCR, over the river to Codderville. She didn’t speak and Willis and I just stared straight ahead. A few minutes later, Willis finally asked, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Wait,’ was all she would say.

She got off the highway just south of downtown Codderville, and followed a farm to market road to the west for about five miles. By then we were in deep country, passing empty fields of corn and cotton that had been recently harvested. The heavy wind produced by the speed of the car blew clouds of cotton bolls in the air. Luna slammed on the breaks, coming to a complete stop.

In front of us was our daughter Alicia, holding the arm of an old man, as the two limped toward us.

I burst into tears as I exited the vehicle.

I grabbed my daughter and held her tight, almost as tightly as she held me. Luna had taken the arm of the old man and was leading him to her car. Willis was behind Alicia, one arm on her shoulders, the other holding his cell phone to his ear.

I heard him say, ‘We’ve got her. We’re going home.’

Mr Brown drove back to the farmhouse, noticing that Mr Smith was being pretty quiet the entire way back.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘we’re here.’

Mr Smith did not reply. ‘Hey, Smith! Wake the fuck up!’

Mr Smith did not move. Mr Brown shook him, and Mr Smith’s head rolled in Mr Brown’s direction. The right side of Mr Smith’s head had been bleeding. A lot. But it seemed to have stopped. Mr Brown knew that wasn’t necessarily a good sign. He felt for a pulse in Mr Smith’s neck. There wasn’t one.

‘Well, shit!’ he said, pushing Mr Smith’s body away from him. ‘Goddamit! This sucks!’

He got out of the truck in disgust and went in the back door of the old farmhouse. It wasn’t Mr Brown’s day.

‘What the fuck?’ Mr Brown yelled. Mr Jones was lying unconscious on the floor of the kitchen. He walked up to the still body and kicked it. Then kicked it again. Feeling some relief of anxiety by that action, he kicked him a couple of more times. Then he walked to the sink, grabbed a pot, filled it with water, and threw it on Mr Jones’s head.

Mr Jones sputtered, choked, and attempted to move, only to find himself taped up. He struggled against the tape that bound him, but anyone who knows duct tape knows that is for naught. Finally his eyes fell on Mr Brown, who was sitting in the ladder-back chair Mr Jones had been sitting in before he fell to the floor.

‘Hey,’ Mr Jones said.

‘Hey,’ Mr Brown said, fuming.

‘Can you get this tape off me, man?’ Mr Jones asked.

‘Maybe in a minute,’ Mr Brown said.

Mr Jones looked around the room as best he could from his position. ‘Where’s Mr Smith?’ he asked.

‘Funny you should ask,’ Mr Brown said. ‘He appears to be dead.’

‘Huh?’ Mr Jones said.

Mr Brown kicked Mr Jones in the stomach. ‘Idiots! Nothing but idiots!’

‘Stop that!’ Mr Jones said, attempting to move his body away from the reach of Mr Brown’s foot.

‘Where are the girl and the old man, Mr Jones? Or should I ask, where are their bodies?’ He lifted his head to look at the ceiling, then brought it back down to look at Mr Jones. ‘Aw, no, now, if they were dead, as I instructed, then who in the world knocked you out and taped you up, Mr Jones?’

‘Look, it wasn’t my fault— Did you kill Max – I mean, Mr Smith?’

‘No, I didn’t. He hit his head against the side window and I guess something inside his brain just went flewy,’ Mr Brown said, and then laughed. ‘Who would have thought a tough guy like Mr Smith would have such a fragile head?’

‘How come his head hit the window?’ Mr Jones asked.

‘Is that really the important question here?’ Mr Brown asked in return. ‘Isn’t the really important question here how did the girl and the old man get away? Oh, and here’s a good one: why aren’t they dead?’ Mr Brown stood up and walked up to Mr Jones, still helplessly taped up on the floor. ‘LIKE I TOLD YOU TO DO!’ Mr Brown screamed and kicked Mr Jones in the head.

Luckily for them both, and for Bert, Mr Jones did not have a fragile head. However, the steel tip on Mr Brown’s steel-toed boots caught Mr Jones at the lower base of his eyebrow, splitting it open and gushing blood. Mr Brown lifted his left jean pants leg and removed a hunting knife. Mr Jones flinched, but Mr Brown went for the tape, not parts of Mr Jones’s anatomy.

After Mr Jones was freed and standing, a paper towel from the kitchen counter sopping up the blood from his eye, Mr Brown said, ‘We’re leaving. Gonna steal another ride. Get in the truck.’

The two men walked out the back door of the old farmhouse and went to the pickup truck parked nearby. Mr Brown went to the driver’s side, while Mr Jones went to the shotgun side. He opened the door and Mr Smith’s head rolled toward him, his body still in place from the seatbelt.

‘Just unbuckle it and toss it on the ground,’ Mr Brown said.

Mr Jones was offended by Mr Brown’s use of the ‘it’ pronoun. If Mr Brown couldn’t see fit to call him Max or Mr Smith, at least he could have called him ‘him,’ for crying out loud. They might not have got on, but Mr Jones knew that Mr Smith had his own loved ones and would have needed the money too; he didn’t deserve to die. Mr Jones unbuckled the old-fashioned seatbelt and grabbed Mr Smith’s body under his arms, gently releasing him to the ground. ‘Bye, ol’ buddy,’ he said to the body. ‘I’m glad you didn’t kill me.’

We ended up having a confrontation with Luna, who heard Willis say we were headed home.

‘No,’ she said.

‘No what?’ Willis asked.

‘Just wait a damn minute!’ Luna said. ‘Alicia, where were you being kept and how did you get out?’

‘At my place,’ the old man said, pointing toward a dirt road maybe half a mile away.

‘We made a deal with Mr Jones—’ Alicia started.

‘Who’s Mr Jones?’ I asked.

‘He’s the tall one. He’s really nice,’ Alicia said. ‘He untied us and let us knock him out with a frying pan and then tie him up so we could get away and so Mr Brown won’t kill him.’

We all just looked at her. Alicia pointed in the same direction the old man had pointed in only moments before. ‘He might still be there. When the truck left again—’

‘The truck came back here?’ Luna demanded.

‘Yeah, there were two of ’em in it,’ the old man said. ‘When they left again, like, what, Alicia, twenty minutes?’

‘Yeah, Bert, that sounds right,’ Alicia answered.

‘Yeah, twenty minutes later there were still two of ’em in the truck. Or there coulda been three. My eyesight’s not so good anymore.’

Alicia laughed. ‘Bert, do you have anything that works anymore?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ he said in a sad voice. Alicia patted him on the back.

‘I think we should go check on Mr Jones,’ Alicia said. ‘I sure hope Mr Brown didn’t kill him.’

Luna looked at me, then Willis, then back at me. Willis and I shrugged. ‘Sure,’ she finally said. ‘Let’s go find Mr Jones.’

We all piled in Luna’s car and headed down the dirt road, directed by Bert. Bert suggested we pull up to the back of the house. When we did, we saw the body. Luna turned off the engine of the car, and we all sat there staring at the dead man.

‘Well, the good news is that ain’t Mr Jones,’ Bert said. ‘That’s Mr Smith. Mr Smith was a rotten SOB and pretty much needed killing, so everything’s copacetic.’

‘W
e need to get Alicia home,’ Willis said as we stared at the body.

‘No, she can’t go home,’ Luna said. She got on her cell phone and made a call. She told the person on the other end to send out a crime-scene tech and a squad car to take us back to the station. ‘Alicia needs to be debriefed. I’m sending y’all to BCR police station to talk with Chief Donaldson. He’s expecting you.’ She looked at Bert Smith sitting in the back seat of the car. ‘Mr Smith, do you need to go to the hospital first?’

None of us quite understood why Alicia and Bert both were shaking their heads. ‘Call me, Bert, ma’am. I don’t think I’m gonna let anybody call me Mr Smith again. And no, ma’am, I don’t need no doctor.’

Luna nodded her head. ‘OK, I’ll call you Bert if you don’t “ma’am” me again, deal?’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, then grinned at her.

‘Everybody in the car,’ Luna said. ‘There are plenty of seatbelts back there. I’m going to drive you to the point where the dirt road meets the farm to market. We’ll wait for the squad car there. No need to sit here staring at the dead guy.’

Willis was on his cell phone before Luna got the car started. ‘Meet us at the BCR police station,’ he said to his son and hung up.

I had Alicia in my arms in the back seat, stroking her hair. ‘I was so worried,’ I said.

‘I know, Mom.’

Willis turned around in his seat. ‘We both were,’ he said.

Alicia reached out for his outstretched hand. ‘I know you were, Dad. I know that.’

He squeezed her hand and I could see a tear in his eye. ‘Never forget it,’ he said. ‘Ever.’

‘Never ever,’ Alicia said and squeezed back.

We waited for less than fifteen minutes and heard the squad car coming miles off, sirens blazing away.

Once the patrol person got there, Luna said, ‘No siren going back. Speed limit, got that, Rookie?’