I want out of this car!
"I saw her, coming after me..." he began.
Alicia took Andy"s face in her hands. "You"ve got a b.u.mp to the noggin," she said anxiously. "Shh! Shhh! Everything"s gonna be okay."
Red and blue swirling lights pulled up beside them and behind them. Men in uniforms swarmed the car, talking in soothing, encouraging tones.
The rearview mirror was banged back down and was covered with a spider web of cracks. Andy glanced in the gla.s.s. The b.l.o.o.d.y, butchered woman leered at him and winked her dead white eyes.
"Get me out!" Andy screamed, slapping at the mirror.
The Jaws of Life tore open the Nova door. Alicia and Andy were pulled into the sunlight. Police swarmed the area, keeping the huddled curious back up on the shoulder.
Someone strapped Andy onto a stretcher. A policeman came up to him before he went into the ambulance.
"Well, buddy," he said from behind his dark gla.s.ses. "I can see why you were running away from Nashville. Pretty nasty business you got mixed up in back there, huh? But we got you now."
Andy started to weep. "I was crazy," he said. "Okay? It was extreme duress! She was going to change the will, leave us out, leave Alicia out! Alicia needs the money! I don"t care about me, just her! And I didn"t really kill her mother, exactly, I just pushed her and she fell and hit her head!"
The policeman"s nose twitched. "Hmm," he said. "I"ll make note of that murder, too. But right now I"m talking about the young lady in your trunk."
"The who?"
"Mick Conners called us this morning. Reported his Nova stolen, his wife missing. You flip this car, we run the plates, and viola. How about that? Mrs. Conners, beat, cut, and dead in the trunk. You killed her with a machete"s what it looks like."
"Mick"s wife?"
"You"re one sick f.u.c.k," said the policeman.
No, wait, wait, Mick was always b.i.t.c.hing about his wife...!!
"Mick"s wife is dead in the trunk? That wasn"t me, it had to be Mick. I borrowed his car, it was bad timing...!"
"s.h.i.t yeah, bad timing." The police looked around to be sure no one was watching, and punched Andy soundly in the face. Andy felt his jaw, already loosened in the wreck, give way like a bag of marbles. His head flopped over, and amid flashes behind his eyes and the agony in his chin, he could see the woman they"d removed from the trunk. He caught a glimpse of her face before they zipped the body bag closed.
It was the woman he"d seen in the mirror, not Mama. He recognized the three deep cuts, the near-white eyes. Her mouth hung partially open and he could see where she"d bit her tongue nearly off at the time of her murder.
"You haunted the wrong person, you b.i.t.c.h!" Andy screamed as he was shoved into the ambulance next to Alicia. "You f.u.c.king, stupid b.i.t.c.h!"
Alicia began to cry. The ambulance door slammed shut.
The policeman rubbed his sore fist and went back about his business.
About Elizabeth Ma.s.sie.
Elizabeth Ma.s.sie is a two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of horror novels, historical novels, media tie-in novels, radio plays, short fiction, and chapters and units for American history textbooks. Her works include Sineater, Welcome Back to the Night, Homeplace, The Fear Report, Shadow Dreams, The Tudors: King Takes Queen, The Tudors: Thy Will Be Done, and many more. A former public school teacher, Beth presents creative writing workshops to students in elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and colleges.
Beth is also the creator of the Skeeryvilletown menagerie of bizarre cartoon characters, which are featured on clothing and other items at www.cafepress.com/Skeeryvilletown.
Her newest works are the psychological horror/humor novel DD Murphry, Secret Policeman (co-auth.o.r.ed with Alan M. Clark) and the comic book in which Julie Walker is The Phantom in the Race Against Death. Several of Beth"s novels are now available as e-books through Crossroad Press, including a new mainstream novel, Homegrown.
Elizabeth lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia with ill.u.s.trator Cortney Skinner.
Ronald Malfi.
I am a nervous wreck coming into Salinas Cove, my sweaty hands slipping on the steering wheel. I have come from Durango, down through Mesa Verde and across the Rio Grande toward Las Cruces, and the air is warmer. Even at twilight.
I peer through the windshield at the oncoming darkness.
It is a rundown motel outside the city. An illuminated sign promises its employees speak English. I pull into the parking lot and turn off the engine. It ticks down in the silence. There is less light out here, outside the city. Mine is the only car in the parking lot.
The girl who signs me in is dark-skinned, pretty. She definitely does not speak English. I scribble my signature on a clipboard and fork over my driver"s license. Behind the counter, a wall-mounted television set flickers with the black-and-white, static-marred image of Cary Grant.
And for a moment, I zone out. I hear the man with the ironworks teeth saying, You do not look like him. He says, Your brother-you do not look like him. Yet he extends his hand anyway.
The room is bleak, tasteless, the color of sawdust. The shower stall is filthy and ancient, and there is the distinct impression of a foot stamped in grime on the shower-mat. Sketches of hunting dogs and wind-blown cattails cling to the walls in spotty frames. The bed looks miniscule, like something from a child"s fairytale about a family of bears, and it is packaged in an uncomfortable-looking bedspread adorned with fleur-de-lis. The ghosts of cigarettes haunt the room. Yet none of this troubles me at the moment. I stand in the center of the room and look at the miniscule bed and am nearly knocked over by the sudden strength of my exhaustion.
Immediately, I strip. I go straight for the bed and do not turn down the comforter and do not turn out the lights, for fear c.o.c.kroaches will trampoline on my body in the dark. So I remain in bed, my hands behind my head, listing to my own heartbeat compete with the chug of someone"s shower through the wall. And despite my utter exhaustion, I cannot find sleep.
I am thinking of the man with the ironworks teeth, and how he extended to me a set of pitted bra.s.s keys. Keees, he p.r.o.nounced it. Keees, chico. And then I think of my brother, of Martin, and the way he looked after returning from the Cove, like some vital fluid had been siphoned from him. When he first saw me at the trailer park, he tried to smile, but his smile was all busted up, his lips split, his teeth jagged. His eyes were bulbous, swollen, amphibian in their protrusion. They did me real good, bro. Sure they did. Sure.
Somehow, I become hostage to a series of dreams. They all have the sepia-toned quality of old movies. Shapeless, hair-covered creatures shuffle along the periphery of a nightmare highway; each time I try to look at them, they break apart into glittering confetti.
At one point, I awake. I think I hear Martin talking somewhere in the distance. He speaks with the marble-mouth distort of a stroke victim. Because I cannot sleep, I rise and do calisthenics just beyond the foot of the bed in the half-gloom. I am too wired to sleep.
Before I know it, morning breaks through the half-shaded window across the room. I shower with the dedication of a death row inmate. Brushing my teeth with my finger, I try to think of old songs on the radio to hum, but I cannot think of anything.
With some detachment, I dress. And it is still early morning by the time I"m back in the car. I drive for some time without seeing anything, then finally pull over at a gas station to refill the tank. I purchase a cup of black coffee and a chocolate chip cookie nearly the size of a hubcap. The gas station is practically a ghost town; only a mange-ridden mutt eyes me from across the macadam. Back in the car, I drive for an hour and breeze by the twisted carca.s.ses of chupacabra along the side of the highway.
I glance out the window to my left and watch the mesas watch me. I"m surprised I haven"t seen any border patrol vehicles yet. This relaxes me a bit. I cross into Mexico with little difficulty, sticking to the route previously outlined for me by the man with the ironworks teeth.
I pull into a deserted parking lot outside a diner somewhere west of Ciudad Juarez. An ice cream truck sits slumped and tired-looking in the sun, mirage-like in a halo of dust. The sun seems to be at every horizon. I park alongside the ice cream truck and step quickly from the car to survey the vehicle. It could be an elephant. Or maybe a bank safe. Its color suggests it was once a pale blue, the color of a robin"s egg. But both the desert sun and the pa.s.sage of time have caused it to regress to a monochromatic gray, interrupted by large magnolia blossoms of rust and speckled with muddy chickenpox. Cryptic phraseology has been spray-painted along one flank. Reads, "Sho"nuf." Reads, "Denis Does Daily." Its windshield is grimy, but in one piece and the tires, all four of them, look new.
Inside, I sip a gla.s.s of tasteless soda while picking apart a sopapilla stuffed fat with beans that look like beetles. I wait. Soon, a young, scarecrow-faced man with a too-wide mouth and baggy dungarees materializes beside my table. He introduces himself as Diego. He seems friendly enough. He sits across from me and orders a 7-Up. To quell my nerves, he tells me about a helicopter ride into the Grand Canyon and how there is this entire Indian tribe living down there, just tucked away like a secret behind some waterfall, and I listen with mild interest. Then around noon, just when I think nothing is going to happen, I catch a glint of chrome on the horizon morph into a prehistoric Impala as it draws closer to the diner.
"That"s him," Diego says.
His name is Caranegra and his face is indeed almost black as tar. He does not smile-not like the man with the ironworks teeth, the man who gave me the keees, chico-and he tries hard to be stoic when we first meet. He wears a tattered Iron Maiden concert tee which I find somewhat comical and his knuckles are alternately covered with tattoos and intricate silver rings.
"I"m Gerald," I say and am not sure if I should shake this man"s hand or not. I opt for a slight nod and leave it at that.
Caranegra acknowledges both Diego and me with a grunt. "You are Martin"s brother?"
"Yes."
"You do not look like him."
"Yeah, that"s what the other guy said."
"Pinto? Who gave you the keys?"
"Yes. Pinto." I hadn"t known his name.
"You look nervous to me, boy," Caranegra says. And before I can answer, he says, "Your brother, he was not careful. That is why his face looks like it does. He has been doing this for a long time, muchacho, and he got careless. If you get careless, then the bad things can happen. If you do not get careless, muchacho, you will not have a face that looks like his."
"I won"t be doing this for very long," I say quickly. For whatever reason, I feel I need to make this clear. "I"m just working off what Martin owes."
"Why?"
"Because he"s my brother."
Caranegra leans back in his chair. I can smell marijuana about him like body odor. His face is heavy with lines and creases, like a map that has been folded too many times, and I cannot tell if I am looking at a genius or an imbecile. "Martin, your brother, was not a stupid man," he says. "He was a smart man. He just got careless. Did he ever tell you about his last crossing?"
"Some of it."
"Not all?"
"He told me enough. He just left some parts out."
"I would bet," says Caranegra, "those are the parts that make him look careless." And he smiles sourly.
"I have to p.i.s.s," Diego says and rises automatically from the table. "Can we hurry this along? I"ve got things."
Caranegra watches Diego cross the diner and, when he is out of earshot, says, "He is my sister"s boy. He is the good kid." Then he leans toward me over the table. Suddenly we are ancient friends and longtime conspirators. "How old are you?"
"Twenty."
"You look younger."
"I can show you my driver"s license."
Caranegra waves uninterested fingers at me. "This is the delicate work, muchacho. Do you understand?"
"You don"t have to worry about me."
"You have the map?"
I remove a roadmap from my rear pocket and splay it out across the table. With a fat red thumb, Caranegra presses down on a section just southwest of Guerrero. "Debajo Canyon. Up here, then up here, then-do you follow? Then up here." His eyes never leave mine. "But this is the delicate work, muchacho."
"You don"t have to worry."
Caranegra thumps his thick bronze fingers on the tabletop. Says, "Come with me."
Outside, he pats the side of the ice cream truck. "Pinto give you the route, no? The directions?"
"Yes."
"That is the best route. Pinto knows all the best routes. You stay on that route and you will have no worries."
"What"s in the truck?"
"Your brother was careless," Caranegra says. "Also, he started to ask many questions."
Diego saunters out into the broad sunshine, hitching up his too-big dungarees. He smiles when he sees us as if happy to see old friends.
"Diego will take you to Debajo Canyon to get the I.D.," Caranegra says. "From there, you will travel alone."
Awkwardly, I move to shake his hand.
Carangera just laughs. Says, "You do not look like him." Says, "Get lost now."
No more than a minute later, Diego and I are kicking up dust in the ice cream truck, leaving the ruddy-faced Caranegra standing in the parking lot of the diner, his ridiculous Iron Maiden tee-shirt flapping in the breeze. The truck drives horribly, and I can feel every b.u.mp and groove in the roadway. It gives off the distinct aroma of burning steering fluid and someone has spilled M&M"s into the radiator ducts; they rattle like ball bearings from one side of the dash to the other with each sharp turn.
Debajo Canyon is due south, near Guerrero, and we are closer to it now than I thought we were. Diego stares at the map and talks to himself and hums hair metal songs under his breath while drumming his fingers on his knees. Having driven all this way by myself, his presence is practically suffocating, despite the fact that we hardly speak to one another. Then, finally, Diego mentions Martin.
"Did he ever tell you about this?" he asks. "About the job?"
"A little."
"He ever say what he carried in the trucks?"
"I don"t know."
"Didn"t you ask?"
"Sure."
"Frankenface didn"t tell you?" And he seems pleased with himself for coming up with the name.
"I just a.s.sumed drugs," I said. "Or guns. Something like that."
"Do you know who did that to his face?"
"No. He never said."
"It was Pinto," Diego says. "Used his big fists."
For whatever reason, this upsets me.
"They sure banged him up pretty good," Diego continues. "Had a B.A.G."