FIVE
At nearly three in the morning, once he was sure that his mom was asleep, Joshua left his bedroom. He crept down the hallway and walked out into the cold, still night. In the backyard, he grabbed the bag of clothes he’d stored underneath the deck Thursday night.
It was time to get rid of them. He couldn’t keep them here at the house, and the ground was too frozen to bury them. He’d have to find a river to throw them into. All the nearby, smaller rivers were frozen over, but he hoped the Cedar River wasn’t. It was a larger river that cut through Cedar Rapids and the surrounding rural areas. If he drove out far enough, he could toss the clothes in the river without anyone spotting him. The river was big enough and deep enough that they’d never be found.
Before leaving, he set the bag on the ground and opened it. A smoky smell wafted up. He took a final look inside to make sure there was nothing he’d overlooked.
One by one, he lifted the items out.
His jeans, charred and blackened. He checked the pockets. Nothing inside.
His half-melted shoes.
His socks.
His coat. The expensive coat he’d gotten for Christmas. It was made of heavy-duty Gore-Tex and the flames had done little damage to it. A few sections were burned but the coat was mostly intact. He searched the coat’s pockets and found a glove.
He froze.
A glove. One glove. He looked through the pockets again, but there wasn’t another one. He looked back in the bag. Nothing was left inside.
His hurried into the garage and threw open his car door. Looked under the seats, in the backseat, even in the glove compartment. No glove.
He sneaked back inside, moving quickly, quietly. He looked everywhere in his room, in the bathroom, in the living room.
No glove anywhere.
The second glove was missing.
He grabbed his phone and pulled up the number from earlier.
Still awake? he texted.
The response came almost instantly: Yeah. Can’t sleep.
I can’t find one of my gloves. Did you grab it last night?
What? No.
Joshua thought back to the frantic moments after the accident and everything else that happened. He vaguely remembered throwing the gloves into his coat pocket. One of them must have fallen out at some point. That was the only explanation he could think of. They’d searched the scene before leaving and found nothing, but they must’ve somehow overlooked the glove.
His phone chimed again. What’s going on? Starting to get worried here.
Joshua stared at the screen. He could fix this. There’d been nothing on the news about the body yet. It hadn’t been found. If the glove was out there, he could grab it, get rid of it, and everything would be fine. No—not fine. Not fine at all. But it would be a bullet dodged. A potential disaster averted.
It’s nothing, Joshua texted back. False alarm. Going to bed now.
He put his phone in his pocket and went back outside. He threw the bloody clothes back into the garbage bag and hid it under the deck in the same spot as earlier.
He walked into the garage and hit the button for the automatic garage opener. It clattered open. He was worried the noise would wake his mom, but it didn’t. Thank God for that—he was far too shell-shocked to come up with a rational explanation for why he had a sudden desire to leave the house at three in the morning.
He got in his car, pulled onto the gravel road, and headed toward Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area.
Joshua stared out past his car’s cracked windshield, his headlights cutting through the darkness of the night and illuminating the gravel road in front of him. The houses appeared less and less frequently as he drove farther into the deep maze of the country—a house every half mile, then every mile. None had lights on; many had been abandoned for years. He reached Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area and turned onto one of the paths that led through the forest. This was the true boonies. Acre after acre of endless woods, bushes, trees.
He drove on. The forest swallowed him. Large trees bordered his path on both sides, rising into the starry night sky. There was little organization to the paths that cut through the forest. Roads that went this way and that. Some that abruptly stopped. Trees and bare, frozen ground everywhere. It all looked so identical. No buildings, no landmarks, nothing distinguishing.
He turned onto a dirt path. Drove for a while. Ran into a dead end. Turned around.
More driving. Another path. Another dead end.
It didn’t take long to realize he had no idea where he was going. He thought he remembered how to get to the site of the accident, but everything looked so similar.
Up one road, down another. He looked at the dashboard clock and realized it had been nearly an hour since he left the house.
He started to imagine the worst-case scenario. Someone had already found the body. An investigation was currently happening. Or maybe the person hadn’t been dead, only unconscious. He’d walked away from the scene and reported everything to the police. But no, the person he’d hit was definitely dead. No doubt about it.
He drove on, eyes scanning the road, the surrounding land, so nervous and scared he was practically shaking. He felt like—
There it was.
The body.
He slammed on the brakes and his car skidded to a stop. A huddled dark mass was in the ditch a few feet off the road. The black coat and dark pants made the body blend in with the shadows. Had he been driving a little faster, he probably would’ve passed right by.
He killed the engine and stepped outside, taking in a deep breath of the frigid night air.
He had to find the glove and get out of here.
It was time to hurry.
He hit the button to pop the trunk and walked over. He rummaged through the trunk contents—a blanket, some jumper cables, his golf clubs—until he found what he was looking for. A small cardboard box with EMERGENCY written on the outside.
Inside were a couple of granola bars, a flashlight, some tools. He grabbed the flashlight and turned it on. He could see the body in his peripheral vision, only a few feet away from his car. He was nearly standing right on top of it. He kept his head turned, refusing to look directly at the body. He didn’t know if he could handle seeing it up close.
He scanned the ground with the flashlight beam, sweeping it back and forth as he slowly walked away from the car and the body, the beam passing over pine needles, frozen dirt, patches of dead grass, trees with thick trunks and skeletal branches.
No glove.
He slowly walked farther and farther away from the car, moving the flashlight back and forth like a searchlight.
Still, no glove.
The cold air stung his lungs. Plumes of fog every time he exhaled. His heart started beating faster, faster.
He walked for a minute and stopped. The night of the accident, they hadn’t gone this far away from the body; the glove wouldn’t be all the way out here. He walked back toward the body, sweeping the flashlight across the ground as he continued searching.
Amber trudged through the forest, following Ross. More accurately, following the beam from Ross’s flashlight. They’d found it in a pouch on the backpack a few hours ago and thank God for that—without the flashlight, the darkness would have been impossible to navigate.
She walked on. Everything hurt. Her stomach, from hunger. Her legs and feet, from the endless walking. Her chest, from breathing lungful after lungful of cold air.
It felt like they’d been wandering around the forest forever. The disposable phone she’d bought at the gas station earlier turned out to be junk—the reception was spotty and the battery died after barely twenty minutes of trying to find a signal—which made it impossible to tell which direction they were heading. They’d simply started trekking around after leaving the car in the woods. They’d now been wandering for so long, she was certain they must be walking in circles. Everything looked so similar. Just trees and grass. They’d found a few worn roads they walked on for a while, but none had led anywhere.
It was so dark that she could just barely see Ross, fifteen feet in front of her, the backpack slung over his shoulder.
“Would you hurry the hell up?” he said.
“I’m trying.”
Ross walked in the sped-up, jerky way he always walked when he was riding high from drugs. He’d taken at least three or four pills over the past few hours, his mood fluctuating between loudly grumbling and complaining and a silent, sulking anger. She listened to him, not saying much. When Ross got like this, it was best to remain quiet. Didn’t take much to set him off.
Everything seemed close to hopeless now, but she still believed that somehow, someway, it would all work out. They’d come too far and been through too much to give up now. As they trudged through the forest, she thought back to all the events that had led up to this point.
After Ross was locked up in jail, she left Tennessee and moved to Nebraska to escape everything. She tried to start over and had the worst year of her life. She was sad. Lonely. Depressed. Bored. She found a job at a tire factory and threw herself into it, working fifty, sixty hours a week to distract herself from the boredom.
Almost a year after he’d been arrested, Ross showed up on her doorstep. The first thing he did when he was released, he said, was track her down. He begged her to take him back. Promised that he was a changed man. Insisted that he was through with the wild and crazy nights, through with travel and the music scene, and that he only wanted to be with her.
She had missed him so much, more and more with every lonely month that passed, that she told Ross she’d give him another chance. Ross moved in, and for a while, life in Nebraska was good. They both turned thirty. Ross started working a construction job and their lives became shockingly normal and routine—instead of endless tours around Tennessee and partying all night afterward, they worked nine-to-five jobs and spent every evening together. They moved into a nicer apartment. Started having money for groceries, setting aside a little for the future. At one juncture, their lives reached a point of such normality that they started spending their Saturdays focusing on different weekend projects—painting the bathroom, laying down new living room carpet, finding cheap furniture on Craigslist.
Then Shane showed up. He’d gotten in a few fights in jail and hadn’t been released early for good behavior like Ross had. He tracked Ross down and came to him when he was released. Claimed he needed a place to stay. Had nowhere to go.
The last thing she wanted was him reentering their lives when things were better than they’d ever been, but Ross insisted. He said that he had to help Shane get back on his feet, couldn’t turn his back on his brother.
Shane started sleeping on their couch, and soon, he and Ross fell back into their previous lives. Late nights. Shady characters. Ross lost his job. He and Shane started disappearing for hours at a time.
She asked Ross to leave Shane, and the response came back same as before: family. He couldn’t turn his back on family. It was like he was blind to the fact that Shane was dragging him down—that, or he just didn’t care. It was that old inability to stand up to Shane. Like he was scared of him.
At some point, Ross started using amphetamines like Shane. He became more irritable. Snapping at her more often. Staying up for entire days at a time, then crashing. It was like he was transforming into someone totally different, someone out of control.
The nights became later; the people Ross and Shane hung out with were shadier. Drugs became an everyday habit. Before long, they weren’t even hiding their drug use. It was more than pills. Sometimes they would inhale household cleaning products and huff spray paint for a quick high. Other times, they would smash pills and snort the powder while she was a few feet away.
Time and time again, she thought about leaving Ross, but she always stuck by him. She believed in him, because she knew that, deep down, there was a good person inside Ross. Somewhere in there was the person he had been right after he was released from jail, before Shane showed up. The one she’d spent every weekend with, doing household projects and snuggling on the couch. The person who occasionally sang to her at night. The person who had a softer side. Shane was evil, a nasty person who’d always been that way, but Ross was different. The drugs transformed him and made him lose control, but there was more to him than that. He was worth fighting for.
If she could somehow get him away from Shane, she could save him. She just had to make her move before the late nights and drugs and whatever else they were involved in ruined Ross’s life for good. Around that time, Shane came to them with a plan. He got a tip-off about a bank in a small town named Hastings, Nebraska. Some sort of area shipping facility. A major payday. He needed a third person for the job and asked Amber. Hold the security guard at bay and drive him and Ross away—that’s all she’d have to do.
Shane had seen it as an opportunity to pull off something big, but Amber had seen it as something entirely different. She’d seen it as an opportunity to purge Shane from their lives and have enough money to start anew. The money was key; they were completely wiped out. Had nowhere near what they needed to begin a new life. The money she’d saved when Ross had been in jail had disappeared.
She sat down with Ross one night when Shane was gone and told him about her idea to ditch Shane after robbing the bank. She put her foot down: her or Shane, she said; he had to choose one or the other. Either he agreed to double-cross Shane and disappear with her, or she would leave him for good. This was their chance, probably would be the only chance they’d get, to escape Shane and have the money to start over, anywhere they wanted. Either they take that chance, or their relationship was over. She refused to stand by his side as he threw his life down the drain with Shane.
Ross chose her. She knew it hadn’t been easy for him to decide to double-cross his brother. As bossy and brash as Shane was, Ross genuinely loved him. Looked up to him. But it seemed like he’d finally seen the writing on the wall, that he’d end up back in jail if he continued on the same path with Shane.
She and Ross put together a plan and executed it to perfection on the morning of the bank robbery. They had the money. They’d left Shane behind. And now, here they were. If they could somehow get out of this forest and get back on the road, maybe everything could work out.
They walked on.