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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828
Cyn is on Interstate 15, heading north, putting distance between her and what’s happened, still not quite believing anything is real. That includes the night before, after getting to Ironwood, the nice resort hotel she’d found for her and Joe after they’d flown the small intercity turbo into Barstow-Daggett Airport, gotten the two rentals, and then driven up to Ironwood to get ready for the next day’s meeting.
And each other, Cyn thinks, and for a moment the excitement of her affair with Joe stutters into her thoughts, but then the terror sweeps back. It’s as if there are multiple worlds, one as unreal as another, one striking against the other, strobing back and forth.
Joe is dead, Cyn thinks, but doing so means she must fight the part of her that keeps such thoughts distant. She shakes her head, fighting to keep what has happened in mind. She understands that she needs to figure it out, so she can know what she should do.
That meeting had been set for the morning, was to be at the executive’s house in Newport Springs, the one next to a golf course she had discovered was owned by the person with whom they would be meeting, as she had learned during a conversation with one of the man’s assistants as she finalized the meeting details. She can remember that particular exchange with such detail, this recollection overlaying the image of Joe in his car, overlaying the sheriff cursing at the blood splatter on his face.
She shakes her head yet again, and this yet again fails to push the images from her mind.
She wonders what the sheriff, or deputy, or whoever it was, what he thought he would do once he caught up with her at the golf course clubhouse where she and Joe were to meet the investor group to sign the divestment deal.
She imagines the sheriff walking into the meeting covered with Joe’s blood, what the reaction would be, and she feels herself on the verge of hysteria again, on the edge of crazy bursting, and she comes back just in time to step hard on the brakes, falling back from nearly rear-ending a Greyhound bus.
She tries to settle herself. She’s trying to figure out what the murders could have been, and why. Where it happened seems more than a coincidence, of that she feels sure.
The divestiture deal is the only thing that makes any sense.
They had occasionally run into pushback with other deals, but would someone actually kill? By the time a company or institution was ready to make the change, it was seen as a good thing, good PR anyway.
She’s convinced the two of them in the same car had been expected, and she wonders what the man had thought, and how long it had taken Joe to figure out something was screwy, wasn’t right.
A sob escapes her, her hands pushing at sudden tears as she pictures Joe then. Was he scared? Did he know? she wonders, her heart feeling like it’s tearing.
Why would anyone bother killing him?
Cyn tries to puzzle out an answer. But she can’t think of anything that makes any sense, and she’s puzzling over an explanation as another thundering wave of dread blossoms, and her sense of being pursued dominates once again, and then she thinks about the GPS, or whatever the fuck it is! that she now half-remembers rental cars might have, some sort of LoJack tracking, and she understands, clearly and entirely, she needs to not use the car, she needs to dump it and catch the bus, she needs to strip her phone. She’s behind the bus, following it, her flush of panic growing, her armpits tingling with new sweat pinpricks, a single course of perspiration rolling down her left side beneath her blouse.
She cranks the air-conditioning. She keeps her eye on the bus. She concentrates on breathing and keeping a steady distance between her and the bus.
She reaches into her bag for her phone with her right hand, hauls it out, and fieldstrips it to pop the battery, both hands at work on top of the steering wheel, eyes back and forth from the phone to the road, up and down, until the battery fumbles out.
In her mind she sees the phone tossed out, the battery too, bouncing along the pavement behind her speeding car, but that’s a clip from a movie, maybe from dozens of movies. No, she tells herself, placing the phone, disassembled, on the passenger seat.
She concentrates on the bus ahead.
This calms her, but then she’s thinking about her affair with Joe and feels a rush of embarrassment and shame as it dawns on her everyone will know she’d been fucking him, a married man, her boss. She tries to convince herself this is hardly important, this is irrelevant in comparison to Joe being killed, but she’s grown viciously angry with herself, falling into a discomforting cascade of mortification.
But there’s a species of surprise too.
She knows that she sometimes had worked very hard in past moments to examine how she would end up doing this sort of thing, her history with older men, the pull this has had for her.
Dr. Becker, for example, she tells herself, feeling anew that incident’s humiliation, the resignation of her advisor during her second year in college, and she repeats her old argument that it hadn’t been her.
Not exactly, she thinks, but her carelessness, she knows, had helped bring their relationship to light.
Well, if sucking him off in his office, letting him eat me, is a relationship, she thinks, seeing again the cramped small office thick with paperbacks on shelves and stacks of papers and his laptop and that afghan-covered recliner that had the tendency to push back up as his weight settled on the footrest, his chest counter-tilting the lighter mass of her arching back, her arms squeezing the armrests. She remembers laughing when that would happen. She remembers his smell, how the recliner worked well upright when she went down on him. She remembers the sense of comfort she’d felt in his excitement toward her. She remembers her sense of control.
Billy, he had told her to call him, something that seemed more incongruous a thing than his penis in her mouth.
What had she been thinking, she wonders, but this is a question she hasn’t been asking herself for too long, not since transferring to Ohio State after that semester. She had managed to get back into therapy there, a woman therapist who had helped her a lot.
Well, apparently not enough, Cyn thinks.
She’s been sleeping with her boss.
Had been, she thinks with a shudder.
It wasn’t a big deal, or so she had told herself when it started. She’d been horny, alone in a new city, and Joe was charming in his funny way, his excuses for dropping by, his inappropriate texts, the way he could bring his full attention to her or act strictly professionally, depending, and it had all seemed to her simple fun.
Cyn doesn’t want to be thinking about this, but fun isn’t it exactly, she knows, and she knows she let it all overwhelm her—the new job, and a big opportunity finally, and an all-new city, and her own expectations enormous, but tenuous too.
She had fallen into her old trap of looking for safety, comfort, and the sense of self as someone deserving attention.
Inappropriate, she now sees.
Demanding attention, she thinks.
She had been anxious, stressed, and vulnerable too, not to Joe’s predation but to that thing with which she had long struggled, that need she had assumed had been dealt with years before. She was wrong, and it makes her angry and self-hating, but she knows she needs to stop these feelings.
“Fuck!” she screams in the car, wanting to tear the steering wheel off, both hands’ knuckles popping white in her anguish.
She knows negativity is just another part of the trap, even as she can still feel how much she still wants the relief of his attention.
She tries to stay focused on the back of the bus.
Some people are going to blame Joe, she realizes, and she feels this will be wrong.
Of course, he could have resisted, she tells herself.
But if not Joe, there would be someone else, this is what she’s thinking, and that Joe was hardly like that, not a predator, and the friendly attention, the playful flirting, and then the divestiture trips. The affair started on the second trip, and some part of her feels fondly of him, but the feelings are more complex, anchored in an emptiness that is existential, anchored in an old wound.
And then the guilt pours into her, shame exploding, and she wants to squeeze shut her eyes, but she needs to follow the bus, but she keeps picking away at these thoughts, now thinking back to high school, another of her troubled times when she had been caught fucking her neighbor, the adult son living with his mother, the man older by a decade. Cyn can’t think of any reason why it should have happened, and there had been talk of charges against the man, and her mother and stepdad were furious, hearts broken, bewildered.
The shrink she’d been sent back to had talked about daddy issues, not that he ever used that term, but he had spoken of her hunger for protection or safety, and he had worked with her to come up with ways to think about these impulses. He had shown her a way of coping with her feelings and had offered her exercises that were flashbacks to those first sessions after she’d seen her own father shot dead.
She doesn’t like to think about those days, about the way she could be, and the panic and the racing fear that would overwhelm her, and the guilt too, the same guilt that threatens to engulf her now, guilt that Joe is dead, guilt that she had slipped back to old and unhealthy choices for her life.
Fucking a married man, Cyn faults herself.
You are an asshole, she tells herself.
She squints through her tears, eyes still affixed on the back of the bus.
She tries to undertake those steps she’d learned to self-calm, to center, to breathe, even as she fights through tumbling images from this morning and from her past and the confusion of spiking impulses toward self-annihilation.
She breathes and begins to calm herself.
And after a mile or two more, she wonders if the bus will ever stop. She wonders if she’ll be following it over some great distance, long enough for the car to be tracked, her getting pulled over, and some part of her realizes if she gets far enough, then she should go to the police, tell them what happened, but her bowels flair with an animal anxiety that keeps her thinking only of the bus, getting on the bus or getting caught—the only two choices.
She glances at the digital clock above her car’s radio, and her rational self sees that less than an hour and a half has passed since the mile marker.
Mile marker, she thinks, anger flaring in her realization she’s using this as code for Joe’s death.
Joe’s murder.
She is feeling more than halfway crazy.
She glances forward and sees signs for Mojave National Preserve, Hollow Hills Wilderness Area, and Highway 127, and a town or city called Baker. She sees the bus signaling and dropping into the off ramp, and she bursts into new sobs, pushing at the sudden tears with one hand while she turns the wheel to follow the bus that takes the sharp left at the end of the ramp onto the road under the Interstate. Cyn follows the bus onto Death Valley Highway/Route 127 and pulls into the 76 Gas Station and Country Store parking lot where the bus has stopped, and she is out of the car, big backpack in hand, wiping at her tears, her face drying into the hot desert sun.
Fifteen minutes later, from her seat on the nearly empty bus as it swings out of the parking lot, she sees across another parking lot a sign reading, “The World’s Tallest Thermometer,” and behind a big restaurant building, the top of the same said thermometer, tall, shining, and glaring red.