The Highway Kind Read online

  “Sean was the star of the tournament, he really was,” said Steve when he was able to speak again. “I mean, you know, they don’t give an MVP or anything like that, but that boy was the star. Always the star. And then on the way home...on the way home to Indiana...”

  Tears were wet in Steve’s eyes. I knew what was coming, right? It had to be a wreck. They’re driving home, it’s late, Steve’s eyes drift shut...or there’s a sudden storm, Midwestern floodwaters. I was waiting for Steve to tell me about it, about the sudden squall, about the slick of rain on the road, waiting to hear how he lost control...

  This was going somewhere bad, I knew that it was, I felt that it was, but there was no escape. There was just the road ahead of us, just us and the empty backseats: two captain’s chairs in the middle row, and then the third row behind that. For one crazy second I saw them back there, Sean in his headband and cleats, petulant Angie playing with a plastic pony, the twins strapped into their infant seats...

  The Getty Museum glowed white, a castle on the hill above us. We were coming up fast on the Skirball exit.

  “Anyway, so, so, Mr. Roegenberger, so we walk back to the car after a quick stop for dinner. A Subway attached to a gas station, just across the state line. It’s twilight. It’s not even dark. And here we find two men in the process of stealing the minivan. One of them was crouched, you know, crouched under the steering wheel with his wrench and his pliers, working on the wires. And the other one—he’s got the gun. He’s got it, it’s pointing at us. And I said, It’s okay. I said, You just go right ahead and take the vehicle. Because I’m no dummy, Mr. Roegenberger. I’m no fool.”

  He glanced at me then, and I nodded. “You’re no fool,” I said. “You’re no dummy.”

  “It’s just a car. But see—see—this man was on drugs, you see. You understand? Later on we would find out that he was under the influence of various substances. Bath salts. Have you heard of bath salts, Mr. Roegenberger? Apparently they can make a person behave in unpredictable ways. The other man, he was a professional car thief. But this guy...this man...his name was Vance. Later on we found out his name was Vance.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Vance.”

  “And he just—well—I don’t know. We’ll never know,” Steve whispered. “But he just started shooting and he shot and shot and shot.” Steve put his blinker on. He lurched out of the HOV lane, moving rightward. “And everybody died, you see? Just my luck, see? Everybody died. Everybody but me.”

  He was waiting for me to say something, but what was I supposed to say?

  “Well, that’s terrible, Steve,” I said lamely. “That’s just terrible.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Terrible.” We took the exit. We flew down the off-ramp, took a hard left up onto Laurel Canyon Drive. “And it’s all your fault.”

  And then we were going up.

  Poor Steve slowed the Odyssey just enough to allow for the tight turns and dead-man’s curves of Laurel Canyon Drive as it climbs up into the Hollywood Hills. My stomach bobbled and quivered inside me, a ball of liquid, as he whipped the two tons of minivan upward.

  “So, hey,” I said, keeping my voice as calm and casual as I could. “Steve? There is some kind of misunderstanding here or something. I did not steal your vehicle. That was not my fault, okay? I’m just a guy. I’m just some guy. What happened to you, that’s—well, like you said, Steve. It’s terrible. But this is not your vehicle.”

  “Well, of course it’s not my vehicle,” said Steve. “That Odyssey was impounded by the police. After the crime scene was processed. After all of it. I know this isn’t the same car. I’m not an idiot.”

  A long pause. Just driving, fast up the hill, too fast. Higher and higher. Up and up.

  He picked a turn to take off Laurel Canyon, one of the tight little one-lane side roads that wind up yet higher then narrow until they turn into the private driveways of millionaires. Halfway up that small road, he jerked the wheel hard so the car turned all the way to the right, and then he slammed on the brakes.

  “Steve?” I said. “Steve.”

  He turned off the car. Carefully, ridiculously, he depressed the rectangular button to turn on the hazards. We were perpendicular to the roadway, lengthwise to two lanes of traffic. The front end of the Odyssey was pushed up against the gates of whatever studio executive’s palazzo this was, and the butt end poked very slightly out over the edge of the steep face of the hill. If someone came flying around from the north, they’d smash directly into us. If, on the other hand, someone came up from the south, they’d send us spinning around and off the hill. In the one second it took me to process these particulars, to realize how much peril we were in here, Steve had pulled a small silver gun out of the pocket of his cheap-ass windbreaker. The gun was pointed directly at my face. His expression had not changed.

  “Steve...” I said. “Come on. I don’t know Vance. I didn’t kill your family. I live in California, Steve.”

  “But you do steal cars.”

  “I do not!”

  He thumbed back the hammer on the gun and said, “You organize the stealing of cars.”

  “Yes,” I said, pulling my body backward, away from the gun. Squirming inside my seat belt.

  “Okay. Yes.”

  “Tell me how it works, Mr. Roegenberger.”

  I hesitated; gulped for air.

  “Talk.”

  “We—we—get lists from the DMV. On Hope Street. I have a—there’s a guy there. I pay him. For existing VINs. Unclaimed VINs. Vehicle numbers.”

  “I know what VINs are.” Steve had undone his seat belt, inched his gun hand closer to me.

  “We clone the lists, and then we retag them onto different cars.”

  “Different cars? Different cars? Stolen cars. Stolen from where?”

  “From Oregon, Steve. From—I don’t know. Idaho. Washington State. Far, far, far from Indiana.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” said Steve. “That’s not the point.”

  I lunged for the door and Steve shot me in the hand. I screamed. I writhed in pain while the tip of my finger spouted blood, but all my writhing and screaming made the car rock a little beneath me, so I stopped, afraid of sending us over the edge. I whimpered. I clutched my hand.

  Steve spoke. With agonizing slowness, he spoke. “It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you, because there was someone like you in Indiana too. Someone that Vance and Vance’s friend were working with. I couldn’t figure out who that was. But you, you and your friends, you’re less careful, I guess.”

  Graham, I thought while my finger pulsed blood. Fucking Graham!

  “But it doesn’t matter. It’s not you, but it’s you. The world is full of you. My state, your state. Everywhere. The world is full of you. Scheming and taking. Grasping. Cheating. Pulling strings, taking shortcuts. And what is at the end of it? Far off at the other end, where you can never see? My family. My boy. My girls. My beautiful girls. Dead in the road.”

  I didn’t want to die. I thought I could hear an engine starting, close by, maybe at the top of the road. Any second a car would come tearing up or come roaring down.

  “What do you want, Steve? What do you want?”

  “I want my family back.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “I know.”

  He pushed the barrel of the gun into my temple. I gazed out into vast smoggy sprawling twilight Los Angeles and knew it would be the last thing I’d ever see. There was definitely a vehicle coming down the hill; I could hear it clearly now. A gardener, I bet. Done for the day. Gardening truck, flatbed. I could picture it. In another ten seconds it would be on top of us. It would cut the Odyssey in two or send it spiraling over the side of the hill, and it wouldn’t matter, not to me, because Steve was going to shoot me first.

  But I had to try. I had to keep trying—right? That’s what you do?

  “Listen, Steve, I’m sorry. I admit it. I’m bad. I see that now. I admit it. Is that what you want? For me to admit it?”

>   “Admit it? Why would I care if you admitted it?” He gave his head a little shake while he dug the gun tighter into my sweaty forehead. “No, no. I want you to die for it.”

  I closed my eyes and the city disappeared and I waited. But nothing happened. I tasted the cigarettes and Starlight mints on my breath. I heard the engine of the truck coming down the hill. I felt its rumble in my butt cheeks.

  I heard Steve crying. I cracked my eyes open, one at a time, and the gun was still pressed against my skull but Steve’s head was lowered and his cheeks were red and wet with tears. His shoulders shook. The gun slowly came down, dragging along my forehead, my cheek, my chin. He was no killer after all. He was just a man, a poor sad man—lawn-mower dad, widowed husband, middle-aged and alone and out of his mind with grief.

  And then I heard them and I turned and I saw Sean in the middle row in jersey and cleats, earbuds in, gazing out the window. Angie with her nose in a children’s novel, one lock of dirty-blond hair wound around her index finger. The twins in the back, mewling and yelping, the happy little shouts of infancy. The floor of the car was littered with snack crackers and granola crumbs, splattered with spilled juice, the discarded cellophane wrappers of cheese sticks like shed skins beneath the seats.

  Angie looked up and gave the small shy smile of a curious kid, and in the center of her forehead was a bullet hole. Sean had two through his chest, and the babies a half a dozen each, a spray of holes in their tiny bodies.

  “I am so sorry,” I whispered to those kids, to Angie and Sean and the babies. I had opened the shotgun door, and I was half in and half out, saying sorry like saying good-bye, and the children opened their mouths, maybe to forgive me and maybe not, but the horn of the garden truck was blaring by then and it was too late.

  POWER WAGON

  C. J. Box

  A SINGLE HEADLIGHT strobed through a copse of ten-foot willows on the other side of the overgrown horse pasture. Marissa unconsciously laced her fingers over her pregnant belly and said, “Brandon, there’s somebody out there.”

  “What?” Brandon said. He was at the head of an old kitchen table that had once fed a half dozen ranch hands breakfast and dinner. A thick ledger book was open in front of him and Brandon had moved a lamp from the family room next to the table so he could read.

  “I said, somebody is out there. A car or something. I saw a headlight.”

  “Just one?”

  “Just one.”

  Brandon placed his index finger on an entry in the ledger book so he wouldn’t lose his place. He looked up.

  “Don’t get freaked out. It’s probably a hunter or somebody who’s lost.”

  “What if they come to the house?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess we help them out.”

  “Maybe I should shut off the lights,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “They probably won’t even come here. They’re probably just passing through.”

  “But to where?” she asked.

  She had a point, he conceded. The old two-track beyond the willows was a private road, part of the ranch, and it led to a series of four vast mountain meadows and the foothills of the Wyoming range. Then it trailed off in the sagebrush.

  “I saw it again,” she said.

  He could tell she was scared even though there really wasn’t any reason to be, he thought. But saying “Calm down” or “Don’t worry” wouldn’t help the situation, he knew. If she was scared, she was scared. She wasn’t used to being so isolated—she’d grown up in Chicago and Seattle—and he couldn’t blame her.

  Brandon found a pencil on the table and starred the entry he was on to mark where he’d stopped and pushed back his chair. The feet of it scraped the old linoleum with a discordant note.

  He joined her at the window and put his hand on her shoulder. When he looked out, though, all he could see was utter darkness. He’d forgotten how dark it could be outside when the only ambient light was from stars and the moon. Unfortunately, storm clouds masked both.

  “Maybe he’s gone,” she said, “whoever it was.”

  A log snapped in the fireplace and in the silent house it sounded like a gunshot. Brandon felt Marissa jump at the sound.

  “You’re tense,” he said.

  “Of course I am,” she responded. There was anger in her voice. “We’re out here in the middle of nowhere without phone or Internet and somebody’s out there driving around. Trespassing. They probably don’t even know we’re here, so what are they doing?”

  He leaned forward until his nose was a few inches from the glass. He could see snowflakes on the other side. There was enough of a breeze that it was snowing horizontally. The uncut grass in the yard was spotted white, and the horse meadow had turned from dull yellow to gray in the starlight.

  Then a willow was illuminated and a lone headlight curled around it. The light lit up the horizontal snow as it ghosted through the brush and the bare cottonwood trees. Snowflakes looked like errant sparks in the beam. The light snow appeared as low-hanging smoke against the stand of willows.

  “He’s coming this way,” she said. She pressed into him.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Brandon said. “I’ll see what he wants and send him packing.”

  She looked up at him with scared eyes and rubbed her belly. He knew she did that when she was nervous. The baby was their first and she was unsure and overprotective about the pregnancy.

  During the day, while he’d pored over the records inside, she’d wandered through the house, the corrals, and the outbuildings and had come back and declared the place “officially creepy, like a mausoleum.” The only bright spot in her day, she said, was discovering a nest of day-old naked baby mice that she’d brought back to the house in a rusty metal box. She said she wanted to save them if she could figure out how.

  Brandon knew baby mice in the house was a bad idea, but he welcomed the distraction. Marissa was feeling maternal, even about mice.

  “Don’t forget,” he said, “I grew up in this house.”

  The old man hadn’t died at the ranch but at a senior center in Big Piney, population 552, which was eighteen miles away. He’d gone into town for lunch at the center because he never missed it when they served fish and chips and he died after returning to his table from the buffet. He’d slumped forward into his meal. The attendants had to wipe tartar sauce from his cheek before wheeling him into the room where they kept the defibrillator. But it was too late.

  Two days later, Brandon’s sister, Sally, called him in Denver at the accounting firm where he worked.

  “That’s impossible,” Brandon said when he heard the news. “He was too mean to die.”

  Sally told Brandon it wasn’t a nice thing to say even if it was true.

  “He left the ranch to us kids,” she said. “I’ve talked to Will and Trent and of course nobody wants it. But because you’re the accountant, we decided you should go up there and inventory everything in the house and outbuildings so we can do a big farm auction. Then we can talk about selling the ranch. Trent thinks McMiller might buy it.”

  Jake McMiller was the owner of the neighboring ranch and he’d always made it clear he wanted to expand his holdings. The old man had said, “Over my dead body will that son of a bitch get my place.”

  So...

  “Do I get a say in this or is it already decided?” Brandon had asked Sally.

  “It’s already decided.”

  “Nothing ever changes, does it?” Brandon asked.

  “I guess not,” she said, not without sympathy.

  Will and Trent were Brandon’s older brothers. They were fraternal twins. Both had left home the day they turned eighteen. Will was now a state employee for Wyoming in Cheyenne, and Trent owned a bar in Jackson Hole. Both were divorced and neither had been back to the ranch in over twenty-five years. Sally, the third oldest, had left as well, although she did come in from South Florida to visit the place every few years. After she’d been there, she
’d send out a group letter to her brothers confirming the same basic points:

  The old man was as mean and bitter as ever.

  He was still feuding with his neighbor Jake McMiller in court over water rights and road access.

  He was spending way too much time drinking and carousing in town with his hired man Dwayne Pingston, who was a well-known petty criminal.

  As far as the old man was concerned, he had no sons, and he still planned to will them the ranch in revenge for their leaving it.

  The brothers had been so traumatized by their childhood they rarely spoke to each other about it. Sally was the intermediary in all family business because when the brothers talked on the phone or were in the presence of each other, strong, dark feelings came back.

  Like the time the old man had left Will and Trent on top of a mountain in the snow because they weren’t cutting firewood into the right-size lengths. Or when the old man “slipped” and branded Trent on his left thigh with a red-hot iron.

  Or the nightmare night when Will, Trent, Sally, Brandon, and their mother huddled in the front yard in a blinding snowstorm while the old man berated them from the front porch with his rifle out, accusing one or all of them of drinking his Ancient Age bourbon. He knew it, he said, because he’d marked the level in the bottle the night before. He railed at them most of the night while sucking down three-quarters of a quart of Jim Beam he’d hidden in the garage. When he finally passed out, the family had to step over his body on the way back into the house. Brandon still remembered how terrified he was stepping over the old man’s legs. He was afraid the man would regain his wits at that moment and pull him down.

  The next day, Will and Trent turned eighteen and left before breakfast.

  When their mother started complaining of sharp abdominal pains, the old man refused to take her into town to see the doctor he considered a quack. She died two days later of what turned out to be a burst appendix.

  When the Department of Family Services people arrived on the ranch after that, the old man pointed at Sally and Brandon and said, “Take ’em. Get ’em out of my hair.”