And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(75)

Carl cracked his window and pushed his cigarette butt out with his thumb. “You were gonna paint the car but I’m guessing you didn’t do your part either.”

“Nope. We were supposed to do this tomorrow night. No time to paint the car.”

“That’s fucking great.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s Sunday night. I didn’t see a single car on the way to your place. We still haven’t seen one.”

Carl drank from the Coke bottle between his legs and got another cigarette burning. “I almost bailed on this whole fucking shit show, sitting around, waiting for midnight to come. I’m getting pulled too deep into your bullshit. Blackmailing me to take out the Gherlick kid was pretty low,” he said.

Emmett said nothing. They’d known each other too long to be surprised at anything the other did. There was no loyalty between them. Every interaction they’d ever engaged in was a matter of carefully weighing the outcome and trying to break even or be the one who came out slightly on top.

“But then I changed my mind,” Carl said. “You know why?”

Silence from Emmett.

“Because after tonight that girl belongs to me. We’re gonna ditch her boyfriend’s car, I’m gonna get a good night’s sleep, and then tomorrow I’m coming back to your house to get what’s mine. She and I are gonna have so much fun together.”

Emmett forced himself not to look at Carl or say anything in response. He heard Carl chuckling to himself.

“So much fun,” Carl said into the bottle and took a drink and laughed some more.

***

Back at Emmett’s, Carl backed the wrecker up to the garage door and killed all the lights except for the running lights.

“You need me to get out?” Emmett asked.

“Keep your fat ass where it is,” Carl said, putting on his gloves. “It’ll take you longer to get back in the cab than it will for me to hook up the goddamn car.”

Emmett stayed in his seat and smoked his cigarette. He took off the yellow hat and let the top of his sweaty head breathe. There were no lights on at Ruth’s. He realized too late that moving the car in the middle of the night was more suspicious than doing it in broad daylight. If Ruth woke up and looked outside, she’d have a dozen questions. In the driver’s side mirror Emmett saw Carl lit by the red taillights as he lifted the garage door and used the levers at the back of the truck to lower the wheel lift and extend the wrecker boom.

Turning his head the other way, Emmett looked at his house and thought of the girl asleep inside, like an egg in a nest. He remembered the smell of her island shampoo and imagined the library book open like a tent where she’d put it down before nodding off. He was getting more concerned about her wounds. The lead bird shot needed to come out of her. He remembered going to the hospital years ago after a grinding wheel had flung a metal splinter deep into his leg. The doctor had given him a shot to numb the area, opened the wound with a scalpel, then pulled the sliver out using a pair of forceps with a long slender tip. Maybe he could get a pair of those at the drugstore to extract the lead in the girl’s hand and leg.

Tomorrow he’d put a padlock on the cage door to keep Carl out if he had to. Her current wounds would be the least of her troubles if he couldn’t keep Carl away from her.

The girl’s voice was loud and clear in his head.

You have to have a plan to stop him, Emmett.

Carl got in the truck, backed up a couple of feet, got out again. Emmett heard the rattle of chains as the tow sling was hooked under the back end of the boy’s car. Still no lights at Ruth’s. A minute later the hydraulics whined as Carl used the levers to lift the car’s front wheels off the ground. Emmett imagined the boy’s body rolling inside the car’s trunk.

Emmett rolled down his window and dropped his cigarette butt. Carl got back in, put the truck into gear. “You better hope we don’t pass anyone between here and my place or we’re both fucked.”

“Just drive this sonofabitch,” Emmett said.

In his head, he checked another box on his list.

Load the car.

***

Five miles into the fifteen-mile trip back, Carl spotted headlights in the rearview mirror. “Motherfucker,” he said.

Emmett turned as best he could to look out the back window but said nothing.

The wrecker’s engine revved louder as Carl stepped on the gas and pushed it up to sixty-five. Ahead of them was nothing but empty road. No lights anywhere. Just scrub trees and every once in a while the flash of a white NO TRESPASSING sign or blue driveway reflectors.

Behind them the car was getting closer.

“This guy is gonna run right up on our ass and see a maroon Grand Am hitched to us.”

“Then drive faster or turn off the sonofabitching road.”

“There ain’t nowhere to turn that gets us to where we’re going without adding another ten miles to our trip.”

They were going seventy miles an hour, seventy-five on a two-lane blacktop road. Towing the car was nothing for the F-450 but everything was less stable the faster they went. Eighty. The boy’s car was a shimmying rudder that wanted to steer the truck. The road curved and the headlights behind them disappeared for almost ten seconds but came back and seemed even closer now. Someone in as big a hurry to get where they were going as he and Carl, but in a fast car and not towing anything.