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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
Chapter 1: Of Cops and Rocks
Cynthia Wainwright is loving the view.
She’s looking out at a landscape foreign to her since she’s not been in the Mojave before, although now that she thinks on this for a moment, she knows she’s seen desert, but about a decade back, on one of those interminable driving vacations her mom and stepdad had shanghaied her and the twins into, destination Grand Canyon.
This is a different landscape she’s admiring, standing outside her rental car, parked right at Mile Marker 27, just as Joe, her boss, asked her to do in the text, a text that strikes her as odd, and odder still are the two others he sent this morning, which she just now reads, but they’re weird.
Maybe a joke?
She’s not going to worry about it. She’s just too excited. She loves her job, her first fully-grown-up job, and she can’t think of a better place to help solve the climate crisis, and today’s upcoming meeting is the biggest such deal, at least that she has something to do with.
Joe has gone on ahead, not wanting to give anyone any excuse, even, as he had told her before getting into his car and heading out an hour ago, if it means he’ll end up drinking far too many cups of coffee with the Chairmen of the investment group. This is big, he’s kept on saying.
She’s excited.
She was disappointed she wasn’t riding with him. She likes it when they have time alone.
But even if she hadn’t needed to make the changes they and the team at Carbon’s End discussed this morning, she still wouldn’t have taken her own rental, because Joe was heading back to the airport in Bastow and she was heading for a few days of hiking about Joshua Tree. She did also run late, with all the final touches and changes and it wasn’t a big business center, nor the printer all the fast. Faster enough, though, and she’s on her way, the amended sheafs of contracts in hand, until she’d received the text.
It’s strange to her that he would stop to text on his way to their meeting this morning.
Meet me at mile marker 27.
Had his car broken down? she’d wondered. But now, as she glances again at the two messages that arrived before this text, she wonders, just curious, if Joe might be role-playing.
Maybe a quick fuck? it occurs to her, but his excitement this morning was for the meeting and their shared expectation this would be a big win for them. And no time for sex either, anyway. He should be mostly there.
She looks at her phone, confirming her estimation.
And that isn’t like him, anyway, she thinks. He’s forty years of age, almost a decade-and-a-half her senior, and he’s married with another kid on the way, and the relationship between them is a simple thing, just sexual, really, just fun and comforting company. Although the thought crosses her mind there’s something else at play in her relationship, but she stops herself thinking anything about her old history with older men.
She simply wants to appreciate the vista before her.
She simply wants to let herself acknowledge that she’s feeling good, excited, even proud of herself.
And besides, she enjoys his company, their work at Carbon’s End putting them together all the time, including on trips like the one they’re on now, pushing fossil fuel divestiture, but she’s more interested in reveling in the view of the large rock formations scattered across the open land, the formations and scrub lit by the low rising sun that casts long shadows this early in the morning.
She can’t entirely dismiss thinking about the meeting she’s heading to, and how the meeting with the investor group this morning was scheduled for an early hour. The resort where she and Joe are staying is an hour away, and she hadn’t pushed back against the early meeting time, seeing in this an opportunity for her and Joe to fly out the day before and spend some time together. That had been her thinking, and Joe, of course, had very much liked the thought.
She smiles, thinking of Joe, his grin, looking at her undress.
She takes pleasure in his wanting her, in his chatter about how he loves her look, her shoulder-length hair, her green-gray eyes, her modest breasts, her hips, her toes, her height, and the way their two bodies fit together.
For an older man, he’s boyish in some ways, even a bit goofy, really.
But the relationship is simple, and Cyn likes simple. She knows she has a hunger, a drive, for being wanted, but she’s never cared for the stress of a relationship and has never been drawn to the working of being one within a couple, to build a life together.
She just wants to be wanted, needs to have this type of attention, needs that deep comfort she can feel even if, maybe, there’s something off, but she is practiced at ignoring that.
But if he’s trying to role play, that seems like a bad sign to her, a troubling complication.
She’s been driving her own rental to the meeting, so the text she got from Joe not more than ten minutes earlier is puzzling.
Her text notification had read Meet me at mile marker 27, and then her eyes went back to the road in time to catch the glimpse of Mile Marker 24 passing behind her.
Well, here she is, wondering about Joe not being here and about the stranger texts she’s just read scrolling up from Joe’s last text, texts she hadn’t seen. She hadn’t heard any notification alerts for these as she’d been driving.
She shrugs, unsettled a bit by these texts. Her best guess is these texts are some sort of joke, but still, these texts don’t seem at all like Joe.
But mostly she’s enjoying the early morning light and how the long rock formations across this flat landscape seem to her as schools of half-submerged serpents, the backs frozen mid- swim through the scrubland and sand. She’s also thinking about how much she’s looking forward to her time alone, taking a few days after business is concluded.
But then her peripheral vision catches ghost-pale strobing colors up toward the curve of the road a hundred feet or so, off the cut rock face on the opposite side of the road. The blinks of light are almost lost amid the low, bright morning sun, and it takes her a moment to resolve the washed-out reflecting light is a police or ambulance. Her heart spikes with concern, and she begins to fast-walk a short cut to where the road ahead curves and disappears behind the cut-through long rock formation. She fears there’s been an accident and hurries from where she parked, moving toward the source of light.
She walks and then runs over the sand and pebbles and the colonizing scrub weeds. Her dress shoes serve poorly for moving over the sand and stone, but her building anxiety that Joe has been in an accident is overwhelming other thoughts, and this blooms as an aching certainty.
She rounds the rock face cut and sees two vehicles sixty or eighty feet farther up the road with Joe’s rental closest to her, and she sees a cop or deputy who’s leaning into Joe’s car, she sees a shadowed flash and hears the sound of a gun firing, and the flash is blossoming red on the rear windshield.
Panic crashes and she’s trying to place herself, trying to roll the tang of danger flooding her from past the rock face she’s ducked behind. In her eyes’ after-image she still sees the big white SUV with a harsh flashing light bar pulled in front of Joe’s rental, each vehicle half off the shoulder of the county road, she sees the man jumping back, wiping at the blood splatter on his face and on the blouse of his uniform, and she at this moment knows Joe is dead.
Her mind is a roaring blank but for a single loudest voice within shouting, Joe!
That’s the loudest voice, but another part of Cyn’s mind is now trying to understand there will now be no meeting, even as another part is trying to grasp that something has happened, but the world is slanting off axis, and she is falling into a pressing darkness of overwhelming dread and animal panic.
She tells herself she’s gone unseen, that the man—the policeman!—hasn’t seen her, she’s pulled herself back unnoticed.
Joe is dead, a voice keeps telling her.
His blood scattered on the rear windscreen.
Joe is dead.
She hasn’t screamed.
Cyn pushes her back against the solidity of the rock, and then she slumps down. She can hear the man in uniform cursing, the sound of the shot still echoing off the cut rock formation on the other side of the road, drifting into the empty flat desert.
Just moments ago, she’d relished the landscape as she waited for Joe at Mile Marker 27.
Joe would like that, she thinks. But Joe is dead up ahead around the rock face cut. With a hiccup of surprise, she won’t get to tell him her sense of delight in the landscape.
And then she is again seeing the man lean in and with the echoing sound of a gun firing, and then she locks back to her eight-year-old self on that day the police came to the house.
Eight-year-old Cynthia sees her father slumped against the wall in the hall by the front door, her father looking at her, that strange half smile above the blooming blood starting to sag his t-shirt. Out here in this desert she is slumped against this wall, and eight-year-old Cynthia is seeing again that her dying father is embarrassed. And she is slumped against rock and her mind again rolls, and she’s aware Joe is dead, that she’s twenty-six years old.
She didn’t scream then either, back in her childhood home.
Her mind went off and on then too.
Joe is dead.
She knows all this, and some part of her knows just a moment has passed, and the gun fired on the other side of the massive cut face of rock still echoes here and in the ghost of her past.