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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 remains behind the rock of the massive cut-through, the rock that blocks her view of the road farther up and the vehicles off the shoulder.

She keeps getting lost in the echoes of what she’s seen, and she’s trying to fight against the ever-rising static in her mind.

She forces herself to understand she isn’t eight years old, she isn’t slumped against the far wall of that childhood living room, but she keeps finding herself thinking of the odd shape of her father bleeding, her father slipped down on the hall floor, and of the police lights and the ambulance lights strobing through the windows and the still-open front door—of the cops crowding the living room, stepping in and out of the front door, her mother keening.

She can’t remember what came next. She has never had a memory of this, but someone had surely come and taken her away.

She’s trying to stir herself. She thinks about creeping back to her car down the county highway beyond the curve, but the idea that the man—policeman, or sheriff, or deputy—might see her freezes that idea with panic.

The man who killed Joe.

She knows the occupant in the car isn’t Joe anymore but something else now. The blood and other matter sprayed against the rear windshield makes that clear enough. Sweat creeps over her, and she’s having trouble breathing.

She’s wishing with a growing roar that she never saw Joe’s car, or the other one, the white one with flashing lights, or the uniformed man, stark images along with what seems a thousand other high-contrast concurrent impressions, including her sense of the man’s surprise and anger at the blood.

Cyn sits up, her back now no longer pressed against the massive and looming rock, her eyes no longer shut against the morning sun. The rock behind her is already warming, the sun already hot, and in the next moment she closes her eyes again and almost surrenders to sleep, but she fights this feeling because she knows on the other side of the massive rock is the shoulder of Route 247, the small county highway in the middle of the desert where Joe is dead.

She’s getting lost in furtive waves of half-thought notions and cascading grasps for explanations that pulse in and out of her feelings, and then she knows with a wave of certainty that if she hadn’t taken her own rental and had instead gone with Joe, she would be dead too.

Her body feels cold, even against the growing hot face of the sun-bright rock.

She pulls in the dry air of the scrub desert in a long stuttering breath, and it’s as if she’s in an odd well of gravity, a mix of bright light and shadow of past and present, and she’s trying to bring herself back.

She’s trying to form an idea about what to do.

She’s trying not to think of Joe alone in the car, or of the blood on the back glass, part bright and part dark in early morning sun and shadow. Her eyes are squeezed shut but she sees it all, the bright flashing cop lights ghost coloring the rock cut on the opposing side of the curve of the road, the cop lights coloring the man as he leaned into Joe’s car, and the moment too that burst red against the car’s rear glass.

But now she finds herself getting up, and with animal caution she peers back around toward the two vehicles, peeking past the huge cut rock, looking up at Joe’s rental and the policeman standing, except the man isn’t a policeman, the uniform is nothing like a city cop, but a sheriff, or a deputy, and the man is walking back to the white patrol SUV that has a circle of gold on the door and lettering and a central image she can’t make out, but the lettering reads San Bernardino County. She slides back around, back down, sitting on the ground, certain of her danger and her need to remain unseen, quiet.

Her eyes shut.

She sees her father smile at her above his blooming blood.

Dad, she thinks.

Her eyes fly open and she looks around, sees the scrub extending forever, without end, the scruff of dusty brown plants and the dirt, sand, the curved-back giant rocks and every small pebble, a bird, tiny, high up, a lone cloud, a contrail even higher.

Get a fucking grip, she tells herself.

And she whispers, “Okay, okay, okay,” over and over. She’s fighting for control of her panicked and jumping thoughts.

In her linen jacket pocket is her phone. It’s vibrating, muffled.

Fuck! she silently screams and even that feels out loud, and her heart leaps up into her throat. Even this seems too loud, her blood beating noisier than the vibrating phone she tries to bury with her body.

Her phone goes silent.

Her phone chirps of text notification.

She listens, new panic rising, but she hears nothing but the hint of the man speaking into his phone, those several dozens of feet up beyond the rock, and she rises shakily and chances another glance.

Deputy, sheriff? she wonders, seeing him back to his vehicle, his lower torso hidden behind that vehicle’s front end, his phone up to his ear. He’s half turned away from her.

Cyn slips back.

She pulls the phone out and sees she’s just received a text from Joe.

Hey, where r u? Imwaiting

She wonders at it vacantly, and then she hears the man say something, but she can’t make it out exactly, but she catches some of what he’s saying, he seems to be talking loudly enough on his phone, but her hearing is off, her ears still overflowing with surging runs of pounding blood.

And then she knows with a moment of clarity those earlier texts this morning weren’t from Joe but somehow from the man.

She knows what she must do.

She texts, thumbs moving with strange calm, At meeting.

She adds, Thought you were going early. Where R U?

She hears a distant ringtone play and peeks around the rock edge in time to see the man pulling out a different phone. The first phone is still held up to his ear, he’s still talking, and then the man goes still as he looks at this second phone.

Cyn pulls back and sits against the hard rock, concentrating on what she can hear. Her eyes pop open when the man starts cursing, his fury carrying past the massive rock still between them. Then a car door slams shut and the vehicle starts off away, kicking up enough gravel for Cyn to hear it ping off Joe’s car.

Cyn remains sitting, a brief staticky relief rushing over her.

And then she’s back, brought back by her body needing something.

I need to shit, she tells herself, surprised.

She’s up, she feels the pressure, but her whole body is also about as clamped up as possible. She’s moving with quick clumsy steps, stumbling on the tiny rocks underfoot, her steps giddy with reprieve.

She’s trying to quiet herself.

She’s suddenly powerfully thirsty.

She realizes the sun is hot.

She can feel the sweat blossoming beneath her arms already going dry. She thinks about the bottles of water back in her car, back down the road a bit, around the curve, and this makes her think about Joe’s car on the other side of the rock, half-leaning off the shoulder.

Joe is dead, she tells herself, one part of her, but this is met with a silence from a hot and fearful depth that’s swallowing what she’s just again admitted.

Her body, her abdomen seems to be twisting, a pulsing twist back and forth. Her body feels like it’s loosening gravity, she’s starting to float, a wail rising up inside her in preverbal sounds.

A quieter part of her tries to take stock.

She knows her car is parked, pulled over on the shoulder some way behind her, and still half-crouched she can see through some scrub just a glimpse of the car, back at the start of the slow long curve that’s kept the car out of sight from the roadside ahead.

Weeds, but dry, crinkly—she thinks, fixating on the scrub and landscape she doesn’t know. Not in Kansas anymore, she tells herself. Fuck you, she tells herself.

Her bowels cramp. She moves to hold herself against a midsized rock, clumsily pulls down her panties, her left hand now holding up her skirt, her right hand steadying against the slope of the rock she’s squatting next to.

Her right hand, her left hand, arms trembling. Cyn is trembling.

Breathe, she tells herself, trying for a calm voice within, and then she tries this voice out loud.

“Breathe,” she says, but this isn’t a calm voice, it’s shaky and hoarse and a whisper.

And then she’s throwing herself forward, both arms out, her hands planting as widely as possible, but some drops of vomit splash on them. She can feel it even as she heaves, spitting, but when she looks, she sees only one or two drops on one sleeve of the dress jacket, the off-white one, the fashion brand she cares less than nothing about except that Joe bought it for her, a welcome gift when she’d started the new job.

Before we started fucking.

“Shit,” she says. So that I look right for the meetings, she tells herself. She’s standing up.

I guess I had to puke, she tells herself, some strange calmness in this thought.

She stands up, tugging at her underwear as her skirt flops down.

She glances down her front, smoothing the fabric.

Who wears a dress jacket to the desert? she finds herself asking, or maybe it’s just another random thought, these seem to be coming and going—all sorts of things.

So that’s what a continental breakfast looks like, she thinks, looking at the ground darkening brown with the wet vomit.

She’s feeling calmer.

She stands up and concentrates on pulling the skirt straight.

She looks around, glances back down at her throw up, and she pictures the impressive breakfast spread put out by the out-of-the-way desert resort, coming in the afternoon before the meeting this morning.

This image makes her laugh, but it’s a strangled sob that comes out.

She’s having furious on-and-off conversations with herself for what seems like hours, days.

Her dress jacket’s pockets are tight, and it’s a struggle to get the phone back out. She feels like she can’t do it, her arm an independent clumsy creature, and then the phone is in front of her, a surprise.

It hasn’t been very long at all.

She sees she’s been here only a few minutes.

I thought I had to shit but I really had to puke, she finds herself repeating as she moves away from her vomit and sets herself back down gingerly, settling down like an ancient woman, like a dying person might. She slowly leans back, but her eyes fly open.

She doesn’t like what she sees when she shuts her eyes. The blood, the man with Joe, the pop that keeps repeating in her mind like a bad spot on a scratched-up CD, the clipped pinging sound of it all, a loud and running rip.

She’s got to go.

She’s trying to piece together everything, and the pieces are trying to fit. After a moment, she says out loud, “Number one, my phone.” She picks it up from where she’d laid it on the dirt beside her.

She’d gotten those messages on her phone, those messages.

That’s important, she thinks.

She reads the most recent message.

“Number two,” Cyn says in a whisper. “Dead.”

She knows this. She sure as hell isn’t going to go out to the road, to Joe’s car, to check.

Because he is dead, she thinks. And dead men can’t send texts.

She picks up her phone again and scrolls through the texts.

Com on don’t be mad, is the first one, supposedly from this morning, less than thirty minutes back.

My life is done U ruined it, she had replied, although she hadn’t texted this, except this was now on her phone as Sent. But she had been too puzzled by the Mile 27 meet-up text, the only one she’d really seen while driving.

She hadn’t replied to any of the texts.

She had not really read them until now, not really. She’d been in a rush, the new printouts done, and she was in her rental heading out to meet Joe and the investor executive.

She knows Joe was excited for the big meeting, had left earlier. Up and at ’em, he’d actually said through the door of her room, his knock knocking her awake.

He’d sounded excited through the adjoining door. He was already yelling through the door about some changes they’d have to make with the contracts.

She’d known he was excited, the meeting likely to be a big win for them, a first for getting this kind of investment group to pledge fossil fuel divestment, turning away a big pipeline project for one thing. The changes to the contracts she saw as she’d made the changes, were more specific language about the pipeline.

She’d been glad for the trip, a chance to be with Joe without the eyes that might be watching, without worry his wife might drop by the office with the kids, and she’d been giddy with the idea of relaxing away from the signs and hints she always had to watch. But she also had been excited about the trip because she was going to Joshua Tree after she was done at the meeting.

On her own. It had been too long since she’d done that sort of thing.

Cyn sees all her plans, the time with Joe, the camping, the time alone, the hiking, all emerging and fading, just parts of her distractions and drifting thoughts.

But she’s trying to settle herself, gather herself.

Joe had texted about Mile Marker 27. He certainly wasn’t likely to pull over and text her weird messages. Maybe an On your way? query, possibly. Maybe Don’t forget the new printouts, although that too was unlike him. He knew she was competent.

It certainly wasn’t like him to text to ask if she’d taken his pistol, which she sees as she scrolls the text thread upward.

Why did u take gun?

Which he doesn’t even have one, she tells herself, but a wave of what’s happened washes over her again, her underarms prickling a new wave of sweat, and she swallows hard against the hint of nausea.

Which he didn’t have, she corrects herself.

Never had had, as far as she knows, not when he was alive, not when dead. She tries to push the new wave of panic back down.

She knows she hadn’t written the next text either. Need to tell you something, a reply from her phone that she reads as part of the text thread, the time of the text recorded as two hours ago, but she’d had her phone with her as she finished up with the contracts.

And Joe’s reply, coming much more recently, wasn’t Joe, not like him, not the way he talked, or texted.

Meet me at mile marker 27. I’ll wait hurry.

She had already been underway, had stopped as soon as she came to the mile marker, puzzled Joe wasn’t yet there. She had pulled over and gotten out to stretch her legs and look at the view.

She looks at the phone’s time and sees the message was sent less than twenty minutes ago. Not even.

Joe was alive, she realizes.

She holds her phone loose in her hand and a flushing panic rises up again, sweeping over her entire body. Despite her efforts not to, she wonders about Joe’s last minutes. What had he thought, what had he been feeling?

She’s got to go.

Cyn gets up and begins moving back toward her car. She stays off the road to keep behind the rock mass that had hidden her original approach. She starts retracing her shortcut that cuts the curve of the road.

She won’t look back.

In her mind she fiercely keeps the mass of rock as the only thing behind her.