“What excuse did you give Pappy?” Cal asked as he watched the junkyard's vehicle compactor finish turning David's Ford into scrap metal.
“The engine's about to sling a rod.” David turned away from the Ford. He leaned against the bed of the older model Toyota Tacoma that Pappy had given him the title to earlier that morning. “For the record, the engine is about to sling a rod. Did you hear it knocking?”
“I could barely hear it over the whining of the transmission,” Cal replied dryly. “Sounded like you'd lost a couple of gears.”
“I had to drive it down here in second.”
“You did a hell of a number on it,” Cal said.
“Had to make sure there was nothing for anyone to want to salvage. Made sure it would go straight to the crusher.” David shrugged his narrow shoulders and then sighed. “At any rate, we've done it. Truck is gone forever.”
Cal looked back at the crushed Ford and then nodded. “We should go.”
David opened the driver's side door of the Toyota and climbed into the cab. Cal slid into the passenger's seat.
“I always wanted this truck,” David said absently as he cranked the engine, shifted the truck into first gear and drove out of the junkyard.
“And now you own it,” Cal said. He took a deep breath. “David, do you really think we've done the right thing?”
David hesitated and then shook his own head. “Hell no, I don't think we did the right thing. I think we're fucking cowards. All four of us.”
“You know she was just a kid, right?” Cal asked.
“I saw the missing persons posters her family has put up around town,” David said through a locked jaw. “Her name was Casey Black. She was 13 years old, five foot two inches tall and weighed roughly a hundred and thirty seven pounds. Brown hair and brown eyes. No tattoos or birthmarks. Pierced ears. She was an eight-grader at Possum Creek Middle School.”
“You memorized the flier,” Cal commented grimly.
“More like its burned into my skull,” David admitted. “I'm having nightmares again.”
“I know,” Cal said. “Momma slept in your room with you last night.”
“I noticed,” David said as a slight blush crept up his tanned cheeks. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “She wasn't in there when I went to sleep, but she woke me up before the nightmare even got good and started. We talked for a little while and then I fell back to sleep. She was curled up in my recliner with her e-reader when I woke up.”
“She's worried about you,” Cal pointed out.
David was silent for a long moment and then he shrugged. “What do you want me to say, Cal?”
“I wasn't asking you to say-.”
“I can hold everything together when I'm awake, but all the bad shit I've seen comes out in my dreams. I've always had nightmares. You know that.”
“You'd stopped having nightmares,” Cal said. “You hadn't had one in a long time until-.”
“Until we killed Casey?” David filled in the words Cal didn't want to say. “We killed a kid and hid her body and now I'm having nightmares again. No fucking surprise there, Cal.”
“David, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to piss you off.”
“You're not pissing me off, Cal.” David shifted his grip on the steering wheel. His shoulders practically radiated with tension. “I'm just...”
“You're just what?” Cal asked.
“I'm seeing Casey in my nightmares,” David said. “Its making me wonder if maybe the blonde woman was real too?”
“You mean-.”
“The blonde lady from my nightmares. You know I've always had the same nightmare. A blonde woman with her face smashed up, laying right next to the front door of Dad's trailer. What if she was real, Cal? What if she's as real as Casey?”
“Shit, David.”
David took his foot off the gas pedal and knocked the gear-shift into neutral. He eased the Toyota into the grassy ditch on the side of the road. “I'm fucking scared.”
“You can't let yourself worry like this. I don't know anything about the woman you've been seeing in your dreams except what you've told me over the years. I don't think she's real David, but even if she was, there's nothing we can do about it now.” Cal leaned back against the seat of the truck. “As far as the thing with Casey goes, we did what we had to do,”
“We saved our own asses,” David corrected. “And not because we had to. We did it because we wanted to. Addison offered to take the blame for everything. He would have done it.”
“He'd be in jail,” Cal pointed out.
“He'd be in jail and the girl Ian hit, Casey, would be home.”
“She's dead. She wasn't going home,” Cal said.
“She wouldn't be missing.”
“She'd be buried in the county cemetery,” Cal clarified. “She'd be buried in the county cemetery and Addison would be in jail. Nothing good would have come from Addison taking the fall for Ian and going to jail.”
“Nothing good is going to come of hiding that girl's body in the swamp either,” David practically spat the words at Cal. “We fucked up.”
“Maybe we did,” Cal admitted. “But we can't exactly walk up to Sheriff Chasson and confess now. We'd be in more trouble than we would have if we'd called him the moment we realized there was a dead girl under Ian's truck.”
“Pappy told me Frank's not even looking for her.”
“You talked to Pappy about the dead girl?” Cal didn't even try to hide his surprise. Or his disapproval.
“No. Give me some credit for having some sense. We were at the courthouse transferring the title to this truck into my name when her grandmother came in and asked the clerk if she could put a couple of those missing persons fliers up in the courthouse. After we left, he told me Frank said the girl ran away. Apparently she has a long history of running away from home. Sheriff's department has brought her home a few times before, so Frank says he's not wasting his man power worrying about her.”
“I guess that's a relief,” Cal said mildly.
“Pappy told me that Casey Black comes from a bad family,” David rolled the words off his tongue with more than a slight hint of irony. “He said Frank says she lived down in the trailer park with all the meth heads and sex offenders. He's not worried about finding out what happened to her because she's a nobody in this town. He thinks she's going to come back on her own.”
“She's not coming back,” Cal said.
“Promise me no one will ever find her body?” David stared hard at the steering wheel in his hands.
“No one will ever find her body,” Cal promised.