other traffic so far that night but that wouldn’t last forever. I decided to hike through the forest until I reached the fire trail where Gareth had said he’d park when he came back. I didn’t let myself think about what I’d do if he hadn’t turned up by the time I got there.
I was about to skirt the car and move away when Jeremy Tripp made a sound and the blood in my body turned to ice. The noise from his throat was wet and ragged, like a long, gulping breath through something too thick to swallow. For a moment I thought I might scream, but then my explanation-seeking mind kicked in and I told myself it was a death rattle, just the lungs letting go of the last of their air. Yet I knew I was wrong even before he sank back into his seat and turned his head and looked at me.
I don’t know what other kind of injuries he might have had, but Jeremy Tripp had hit the top edge of the windshield frame, that much was obvious. His forehead had a deep trough running horizontally across it. It was not just a split in the skin. The skull had actually been pushed back into itself in a furrow about an inch deep. Below the wound Jeremy Tripp’s eyebrows bulged grotesquely.
One of his eyes had burst but the other one held mine and blinked as his mouth twisted into a lopsided grin and he tried to speak.
“Johnny…”
The word came out slurred and malformed but it was unmistakable. He’d recognized me. I knew right then he wasn’t going to die as a result of this car wreck. He would live and he would tell people I was there and I would spend the rest of my life in jail and Stan would end up ruined in some state-run institution.
I stared at him for more than a minute as he grinned back at me and repeated my name. Then I dropped the backpack on the ground and took the length of pipe out of it.
His head had begun to droop forward again and was lolling toward his right shoulder. I pushed it back against the headrest and straightened it and when I had it set so that it would not move I lifted the pipe and lay it along the trench in his forehead. It fit snugly into the wound. I made a few slow practice passes with it. The windshield frame got in the way and it was difficult swinging from the left, so I had to turn his head toward me and then shift a little to the side to get a clear enough shot.
When I was ready I drew the pipe back one last time and took a breath. I’d planned to just breathe out and swing, to slam the pipe across his forehead, but my lungs would not release their air and my muscles would not perform the task my brain so desperately wanted to be finished with. I stood, like a batter frozen at the plate, fighting against myself to make this last dreadful commitment.
For a moment there was only the silent pounding of this struggle within me. Then, faintly, another sound started high up on the hill. At first I didn’t realize what it was, but it grew louder and I breathed out and turned my head. Through the trees, already a quarter of the way down the hill, the headlights of a car were moving toward me.
When it got to the bend its driver would only have to glace to his left and he would see the short corridor the Etype had ploughed through the forest, and at the end of that corridor the car itself. And if he saw that he’d stop and get out and find Jeremy Tripp alive and sometime after that Jeremy Tripp would tell everyone about me.
I turned back to the E-type and tightened my grip on the pipe. But still I hesitated, paralyzed by my fear of becoming a killer.
Then Gareth was there. I hadn’t heard him arrive but I saw him now, a few yards away on the other side of the car, raking his eyes across Jeremy Tripp, instantly taking in the fact that he wasn’t dead, knowing what had to be done.
The car on the road was seconds away. There was no time for Gareth to cross to my side of the Jaguar and relieve me of this hideous task.
“Do it, Johnny! Do it!”
His words severed whatever shred of decency it was that had been holding me in check and I brought the pipe across in a clean, flat arc as hard as I could. It slammed perfectly into Jeremy Tripp’s wound. His head bounced off the headrest and the arm hanging over the door flapped into the air. He made a loud sneezing noise and a spray of blood shot from his nostrils. Then he slumped forward against his seat belt and was still.
“Move! We have to go!”
Gareth waved urgently at me then ran back into the forest the way he’d come. I grabbed the backpack, skirted the car, and followed. A second later I almost fell over him. He was crouched behind a bush, peering intently toward the road. He pulled me down and put a finger to his lips and together we watched the headlights approach. They came down the last yards of the hill, slowing as they made the bend, then accelerating again as they passed where Jeremy Tripp’s Jaguar had entered the trees. The car did not stop. It kept on downhill, passing where we hid, moving on into the night until its light was gone. Whoever was driving it had not seen what had happened to Jeremy Tripp.
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.”
