I had heard the other car coming. I had heard it hit as it forced its way past the loose barricade I’d made of Jim’s car. But only now does the first glimmer of wonder over who might be driving it spark in my mind. Police? A Carlisle employee? Please, not a partner of Jim’s. I have some fight left in me, but not three grown men’s worth.
I regain my feet.
And Patrick gains his.
We run.
The driver guns the car, swerving toward us, but then it turns at a sharper angle to herd Patrick wide of my path.
Well beyond any guess I had in queue to entertain, Brian Menary runs down the driver’s window.
“Dee!”
“Don’t let him get away!” I point at Patrick ducking in behind the wheel of his own car. “Please. I need him! Go!”
Patrick wrenches his driver’s-side door shut. The engine catches and the whole car bucks as the transmission knocks into drive. Patrick shoots off down the track that leads deeper into Carlisle.
Brian follows.
I run behind them both, falling exponentially farther behind with every half second.
The dirt road churns up a spray of clay and dust-smoke. I tear through the haze as best I can and find that the road splinters, opening up into a rough wagon-wheel array of sheds and equipment with cleared, truckwide paths between them. I see Patrick’s car disappear, sliding into a turn behind one of the larger barns. Brian drifts in behind him. The clamor rings off the metal buildings, disorienting the sound trails, the only clues I have to track their race through the complex.
• • •
An engine howls close by and I swivel my head to the nearest alley. But Patrick doesn’t break from the nearest alley. He plows past a wall of stacked gutters and crates directly across from where I stand. Then he buries the pedal into the floorboards. The overtaxed machine bellows and heaves and rips fresh tracks through the weeds as it chews toward me over the raw ground.
I break left, but so does he. I lower my head and run past the math that’s laughing at me. I will never make the shelter of the nearest building in time.
Brian’s car shoots from the nearest lane and clips Patrick’s bumper, spinning him off my position. Patrick catches the circle almost on the opposite side and disappears between two long ranks of lumber bins. Brian turns his car around and vanishes down the same chute.
The nudge Brian had given to Jim’s car at the gate had been a hearty thump and a growl of denting steel panels. The tap to Pat’s bumper just now had been one quick, heart-jolting clang.
The crash that rings out ahead of me now is a protracted groan of crumpling bodywork and exploding glass. I sprint toward the echo.
Patrick had hurtled unheeding through the maze of sheds and pallets with Brian’s tires eating up the road behind him. They hadn’t got far from the hub when Patrick had tried a tricky right turn, sharp and too fast.
The movable platform at the top of the turn is slightly less than a barge on wheels. Its payload of concrete blocks and wooden slats is also bristling with a haul of long metal struts. Patrick has plowed the nose of his car up under the base, between the wheels. Smoke is billowing from under the crumpled hood. A bundle of rods has speared through the windshield.
The accident has sheared off most of Patrick’s jaw and troweled a spurting, red furrow from the side of his neck. A few of the rails must have been launched off their pile, and they struck wider, nailing him to his seat through his chest and shoulder. His life is raining down from every spear.
• • •
Brian is already tearing at the caved-in door of Patrick’s car.
“Brian, be careful!” I run to his side. “Oh, God. Oh, look at him. My God. It’s too late.”
“Oh, shit.” Brian grips the door handle and the bent door and shakes it with all his strength, but he thrashes with no payoff. Patrick’s car rocks mildly, mockingly, under Brian’s desperate pulling. But the door won’t let go.
“I’m so sorry. Dee, he cut that turn so hard. He couldn’t control it. What the hell was that? What is going on?” Brian looks at Patrick, but I look only to Brian and leave my husband in the peripheral vision, a red-and-white blur at the corner of my eye. So much howling red.
The meat state of him is a bland fact, a sudden, plain subtraction from the universe. No shrieking whirlwind marks the rip in the bubble of my little world. The supply yard is quiet now and golden, all the same as it was only a few minutes ago. The same, minus one. Birds are chattering on the wire overhead in the quickly cooling vanguard breeze of twilight. And my husband is gone, lifeless in seconds when he’d been seething with every human desperation only a handful of minutes ago, over the short, but vastly deep chasm of the time in between.
“We have to get some help,” Brian says.
“No one can help.” My numbed lips barely work. “You know that. You can see it, same as me. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
Brian ignores me and rocks the door into its bent frame again, yanking the door handle to force it to release the latch.
“Don’t touch him,” I scream, and startle up a flock of sparrows that had taken up the balcony seats for the show. Patrick is dead, immediately and permanently in the past tense. I am alive, but everything I was, or insisted that I was, has slipped away into the same past tense. So what am I, if not Patrick’s wife or Jim’s target?
That Patrick wasn’t wrong isn’t the same thing as his being right, but the shame still burns. He flayed the lie off me with all that he’d said, everything recorded for whoever will hear it. It will damn me right along with him. They’ll put the blame on him, he’ll be the bad guy. But they’ll still know about me, that I had never been straight with him, that I had never been straight with myself. What kind of person does that? And what does she deserve?
But I am alive. Breath and hope go together, baby girl.
I have to get out of this day.
“You can’t be here,” I say to Brian.
The horror rolls over me. My knees go soft. Brian catches me up.
“What is going on? I’m so sorry, Dee. I didn’t mean for him—”
“You don’t need to be sorry. Everything’s ruined. He did it to himself.”
“What just happened?”
“Why are you even here?”
“You called me!”
“But how did you get here so fast?”
“You have no idea where I was,” he says.
“But—” No fully formed question is there. Not a quick one at least. “You have to get out of here.” I shove him back toward his car.
“Dee, what the hell is happening?”
“I can’t, Brian. There’s no time.”
“You have to tell me at least this—what have I done?”
“There’s no time. They must have sent someone by now. They’ll be here any minute. Will you trust me?”
“I don’t know what that means.” He searches my face, working his stare deep into my eyes.
“Are you looking for my mother in there?”
“No. Not at all.” He decides something about me that I don’t have time to decode.
I’m surprised that anything can add to the tidal ache in me. He has to leave now. “Brian, can you get to 911 records?”
“Sure.”
“Do that, then. I called them. Just before you came. Find the call. Then you’ll see. I’m so sorry. Go, hurry.”
The first distant wail of sirens floats from far away through the dusty air.
“But, there’s a guy in that other car. . . . What are you going to do? Are you okay?”
“Brian, unless you want your early retirement blown all to hell and your whole life to be about this mess for the foreseeable future, just go. Go now. I’ve got this. I’ll talk to you soon. I’ll explain everything. It’s fine. I promise. You didn’t do anything wrong. Go!”
He does. I run back to Jim.
• • •
“Ma’am! Ma’am!” The emergency dispatcher calls to me from the open line as I jam my thumb against the speaker volume.
“I’m here!” I let the power of the last few minutes surge into my throat and carry my voice up into the manic ranges. Method acting, for sure. “He drove into some beams! Oh, God! His face. It’s Patrick. He’s killed himself.”
“Ma’am, emergency services are en route. And an ambulance. Stay where you—”
“The guy is here with me. The guy he hired to kill me. The hit man.”
Jim’s eyes blaze with terror and questions.
“Wha—” The dispatcher sounds as confused as Jim looks.
“I can hear the sirens. Thank you!”
“No! Ma’am, stay on the line. Keep this li—”
I disconnect the call and drop out of hot drama into ice-cold anger. I scrabble over Jim, yanking at his bindings. “They’re going to catch you. I’m going to tell them that you ran, but they’ll be right on you. I don’t think you’ve got even that snowball’s chance in hell, but if you’ve got one, it’s right now.” I pull the knotted socks from his mouth and lower my face into his, gritting my teeth over having to talk to him at all. “And you might remember that I’m the one that gave it to you, you son of a bitch.”
“What the hell is this? What are you doing?”
“You have no idea how much I’d rather shoot you in the face until you’re all the way stupid and ugly”—I snatch up the paintball pistol from the seat and toss it through the still open driver’s-side window, into the shrubs—“but I don’t feel like being arrested for kidnapping today. Patrick’s dead. So is your contract. No payday for you. You’ve got a head start of maybe two minutes. Merry fucking Christmas. I suggest you get your ass in gear.”
Jim rubs at the chafed corners of his mouth. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me, you asshole. You’d just better be glad I’m not my mother.”
I scramble out of the car. The other door opens and closes, then another. Then Jim’s car roars to life and runs over my long shadow as I sprint for the front gate, scripting my story with the wind dragging the sound of sirens over me.