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“I thought it was you fucking with us,” Jeb said warily, still expecting it to be a joke.
Spike was standing on the boardwalk with his back to his two gangly cohorts, looking out at the dark, weed-clogged pond soaking up the failing violet clouds. He wished he had been. “It wasn’t me.” He tried not to let them detect the alarm in his voice.
He knew Jeb and Benny had those dumb half-smiling, half-flinching expressions on their faces and were waiting for him to turn and tell them he’d suckered them. He’d played these games before. But Spike remained motionless.
He didn’t want them to see that somebody else had the control, and if he turned around he knew they would. “Which one of you talked?” Stay in authority, he told himself. But he knew that neither of them would have let anything slip. Even they weren’t that fucking stupid. He could almost hear their mortified exchange of glances and head-shaking.
“Not me.”
“Or me.” Benny trampled over Jeb’s denial.
Had Benny been a little too eager? No, they knew they’d all be sent down if they breathed a word of what they’d been doing. However the three of them had been exposed, one fact was certain. “They know everything.”
“Do you think they’ll go to the police?” Benny’s tone was flat. He knew it wasn’t a joke now.
“I don’t know.” Spike turned and their alarm intensified because, he knew, he looked as scared as them. They were all the wrong side of their eighteenth birthdays. Prison gang-rape beckoned. “We’ve got to stay cool.” But he didn’t believe that. He was just quoting something he’d seen in a movie. Jeb and Benny were shitting in their pants, and he was just about to join them.
Spike wanted to run home but knew there would be no protection there. This was hardcore and his father wasn’t going to be able to smooth it over, regardless of his contacts. Somebody had intruded on the triangle and the consequences of that hadn’t even begun to sink in. Spike opened the message on his phone again.
I see the three of you have been nailing the local girls. How is Tiffany DiMarco and what would you do to keep this between us?
It had been sent to all of their cells. The number had unsurprisingly been withheld.
“Who has all our numbers?”
Jeb and Benny didn’t meet his eye. They’d been expecting to find reassurance there, but now they knew he was as petrified as them. They shuffled their feet and looked at their phones.
But Spike knew that the handsets they used to communicate their dark mischief to each other contained only theirs. Each of them kept this second phone locked when they weren’t in touch with each other. The contents were too sensitive to include anyone else. Two were switched off while the other stalked and only switched on the next day to receive the images. How could they know about Tiffany DiMarco? She couldn’t have told anybody. She was still critical in Kalispell Regional.
“Fuck!” Spike doubled over to shout it at the pond. The word echoed back, and the three of them silently studied the crescent of great pines on the other side, as if expecting to glimpse somebody within them.
*
When Beth checked her messages, she wasn’t surprised that bloodlegend hadn’t replied to her query about the clip. She returned to the band’s Facebook page and clicked through to the other members. Rather than wait for one response, she planned to request friendship from all of them and try to increase her odds of contacting somebody that way.
She hit the request buttons for Funnelweb, Mark and Trip. They didn’t appear to be regular users, though. She found herself on Skylar’s page. She’d logged in yesterday and had 434 friends. She was her best bet, but how would she react to a faceless stranger wanting to friend her out of the blue? She was about to hit the request button when she looked down at Skylar’s recent interactions:
Traumatized. RIP Trip
Several of her friends had responded with abbreviated commiserations:
STBY R U OK?
Saw it on the TV news. U must be in total shock.
Beth noticed the exchange had happened only seven hours earlier. She scrolled down to her previous comment.
An ex of mine has been murdered! Trip Stillman former rhythm guitarist of Blood Legend found dead by his folks!
There were more responses to this:
OMFG You were only dating him last summer!
Beth was chilled by the message. Instead of requesting friendship, she opened a Google page and entered:
Trip Stillman murder
She got two news results and clicked on the first, which was a website for the Billings Gazette.
New Billings resident, Trip Stillman, was discovered unconscious at his home by his mother and father early this morning following a violent assault by an unknown assailant. He was rushed to West Corner County Hospital but died soon after being admitted.
New Billings? As far as Beth knew, the handful of students on the coach had been from a college in a place called Kalispell in Montana.
A homicide investigation has now been launched by the Billings Police Department. They are now questioning neighbors and asking for eyewitnesses.
Beth decided to watch the remaining crash clips one after the other. She’d initially planned to watch one a day but figured sitting through all of them was the best way to get the ordeal over and done with. She braced herself against the back of Jody’s armchair, touched the screen and felt the pulse pound in her reconstructed jaw.
The second clip had been uploaded by “dustboy” and was shot safely and steadily to the right of her attack on the crowd, then shakily thrust forward as police and paramedics subdued her. She could see the spittle on her chin as she sagged in their grip.
As the four of them turned and headed to the ambulance, they staggered in the rippling draught from the overhead helicopter. The police officers and paramedic didn’t even glance back towards the camera. What could they have done to stop the recording? They were probably used to performing to rows of phones at every populated crash scene they attended.
But Beth couldn’t deny she’d been guilty in the past. If she encountered an accident roadblock, she couldn’t stop herself glimpsing the wreckage when the police allowed her vehicle to pass. What was she looking for in that momentary glance? Was she hoping to see the people involved sitting safely on the roadside, or something more horrific that would make her feel grateful it hadn’t been her turn that day?
Was recording it any worse than wanting to look? But to her mind, it was inexcusable that the spectators had not only shot it for their consumption, but with the express intention of sharing and turning it into entertainment currency.
What was going through their heads when they were capturing it? Watching from their position was like standing in their shoes. Very few of them made any comment throughout. None that was coherent, anyway. It was as if they were in awe of what they were recording. Or were they holding their breath in the hope of appropriating something they couldn’t normally download? She could almost interpret their mood, suspense as well as boredom. If not enough was happening in front of them, they shifted from foot to foot and cast their phones about the site to try and catch something worthy of their battery power.
She saw Cigarillo Man talking to the police in the third clip that had been uploaded by “Spike666”. The camera had found the coach on the grass verge and he was standing outside, answering questions. He tried to light up again but the officer cautioned him not to. She’d been right. He was the driver, Ferrand Paquet. She could see he was wearing a pair of jeans and some brown leather loafers. She mentally crossed him off the list.
As she watched the fourth, uploaded by “smilingassassin”, she realised she’d become strangely detached, as if reducing what had happened to a tablet screen had somehow compressed her emotions as well. She examined the stats for it. Beth was viewer 7, 133, 448. All those people had seen this moment from her life long before she had, the bulk of them probably when she’d still been lying in the hospital. Her eyes were drawn to the last comment.
Boring. No guts.
But this clip did contain something the others didn’t. No glimpse of any suspicious spectators but something significant while it lingered on the scene after she’d been restrained. She pulled the slider back and watched again.
The black female paramedic was gripping Luc’s hand and staring intently down at him. Luc had his head lifted slightly and said something to her. She put her ear to his mouth.
Beth watched her own dark silhouette pass in front of the lens as she was led away. She barely resisted the reflex to crane around herself.
They came into view again. When Luc finished speaking, the paramedic straightened and stood motionless, whatever he’d said sinking into her abstracted features. It was only her fellow paramedic that snapped her out of it when he returned and asked for help to raise Luc’s trolley.
