An Incidental Reckoning (21 page)

The others in that chain of the dead had chosen the lifestyle that brought them into his path. He had never forced anyone to live or die for him. Sure, once they had come on board, he demanded obedience, but that went with the job; they knew what they had signed on for, and he accepted only volunteers.

But the end. The end bothered him. By conscripting Jon and Will, he could no longer claim innocence. Brody did not seek redemption, but had never considered that he might be utterly damned, until now. Perhaps by corrupting two innocent men, men that had only tried in their own way to get even and one them inadvertently, he had crossed some definitive line.

Or maybe it had been a warning of what might occur, and not a sentence already passed, that the turning to stone symbolized the result if he followed through with his plans. He laughed out loud, half-expecting Jacob Marley to appear and tell him he'd be visited by three spirits that night. But the laugh sounded hollow and he now understood the heaviness in his heart as he rode away from the doomed Marcus. It had nothing to do leaving behind a traitor soon to sink beneath the waves. It had everything to do with Jon and Will.

He yawned and rubbed his eyes, looking through the bathroom door at the clock next to the bed. It read three-thirty, or at least according to his best interpretation with several of the led display lights burned out. What a shithole.

He had taken the room in a motel on a desolate stretch of highway outside of Erie, run by a fat Indian man who smugly told him that all of the smaller rooms were booked, and he would have to take a larger suite for ten dollars more. This despite the presence of one other car in the lot. Too tired to argue or threaten the man with a beating, he paid cash in order to spend the night and meet with Will the next day, unannounced. Now, he didn't know the agenda of that meeting anymore, considered calling the whole thing off and leaving it as it stood when they parted, with the pictures and threats of bodily harm as a deterrents to going to the police.

Brody crawled back into the bed, wishing he had someone to share it with to take the edge off of his thoughts, but instead stared at the ceiling and looked for faces or animals or other recognizable objects that his mind crafted from the peeling paint and cracks in the plaster, until he fell asleep.

Chapter 14

Will checked to make sure he had everything before leaving his apartment. The inventory included new bullets for the gun that Brody had allowed him to keep, a Wisconsin Badgers sweatshirt found in a thrift store, and a ski mask he didn’t remember owning pulled from his collection of winter clothes. It fit snugly on his head and stretched out his face, so he decided it belonged to Justin. He wore a dress shirt to go beneath the sweatshirt; the latter he planned to discard after the robbery. He had considered stealing a car, but didn’t want to complicate his plans by adding an additional felony and upping the odds in favor of being caught. He needed to start out slow and work his way up.

Will had already scoped out the small hardware store in the tiny village of Loudenville, nearly thirty miles south of Erie, noting that the town possessed no police force of its own, and sat directly on the main artery accessing the village, so escape should be easy. Not easy. He shouldn't think in terms like that. Easier, perhaps.

He had driven around the area, following the roadways, discovering which connected to what, familiarizing himself as much as possible for an informed flight that could be altered as necessary in case of pursuit. He would initially drive off heading west, and then double back on a different road and eventually go north, to throw off the scent should the hounds come baying.

He didn’t expect to get much in spoils, but rather wanted to take his training to the next level, take responsibility for all of the planning and execution of the robbery. He would enter with a fully loaded gun this time, so the wild card would have to come from some other quarter. Will hadn’t fully admitted it to himself, but he also sought Brody Stape’s approval, and desired for once to stand on the other side of weak versus strong equation: humiliation and self-loathing or once not his daily bread.

And he needed to feel the rush again.

Nothing else in his life had compared to it, and he didn’t see many thrills heading his way as he looked down the pipeline to eventual old age and then death.

He looked at his watch. Two in the afternoon on Friday. Another daylight raid, this time out of necessity, since the little store closed at five. He didn’t want to break a window and scramble to grab what he could in the darkness before the police arrived. Will wanted to hold the gun in his hand and point it at the clerk, wanted to own the power of life and death compacted into that small, cold object that he could stuff in his pocket. He didn’t intend to harm him any more than the convenience store guy; less so since he knew the gun could kill this time.

Will went outside, all of his items in a duffel bag to bury or burn later when finished, except for the gun, and got into this car. He put a compilation CD he had created of favorite 80’s hair bands into the player and hit play. Cinderella sang Nobody’s Fool and he smiled. Perfect. He, Will Roup, was nobody’s fool. Not anymore. He put the car in drive and drove away towards Loudenville, nervous, sure but even more excited than the evening in college when he had lost his virginity.

Will had driven by twice on the two lane road that passed for a highway in these parts, and knew he needed to go in or go home before somebody marked him. The first time a car had been parked in front, and on the second pass the small lot had been vacant but he had balked and kept going. Thinking and planning it was easier than doing it. He hadn't known beforehand what Brody had expected from them, and so lacked the awareness to obsess over everything that could go wrong. He now had the time to consider everything that
was
wrong about this, his conscience offering a spirited rebuttal to this idea.

Will had shoplifted a candy bar in the eighth grade as his sole instance of breaking the law before the previous weekend, had never considered crossing any ethical line during his stint of selling kitchen remodels to bored housewives, convincing them that contentment lay just a new countertop and cabinet away. Except for the one night stand with the girl at the conference. He had always believed, as they told him in the sales meetings and especially at the yearly conference, that if he worked hard enough- spilled more blood, sweated a few more gallons, kept a smile in place - someday he would make it. And he had believed it when he had sold software packages, medical equipment, and frozen food from a truck. Hell, he had been the top seller of garden seeds and greeting cards and wallpaper in his neighborhood as a kid, earning enough to stir envy in his peers with the reward of a new bike. But no matter how hard he tried, the good life remained just a sale away: the top seller award went to someone younger and better looking, and his dreams remained just out of reach. And like the housewife with her new kitchen that temporarily outshines her lazy husband, her ungrateful and disappointingly average children and her lucky friends who have so much more but don't deserve it, the novelty had worn off and the reality of a failed life loomed large. And the longer his life lasted under these circumstances, the worse it felt, bitterness even now worming its way into a permanent place in his heart. He had to do something.

Will finally stopped driving and parked in the lot of a closed bar about a mile down the road. It looked like it ought to be condemned, but the tire tracks connecting the water-filled potholes like a drunken effort at connect-the-dots suggested a popular drinking spot here in Hickville. He got out and walked beyond his car to the edge of the woods and relieved himself, then sat back in the driver’s seat and thought again about his plans and the alternative. He could go home, go back to work (assuming he still had a job), go through with his divorce and try to be a part-time father to his son, get old and die. But there was the thing with Brody, the wild card, that could end in his death or imprisonment and make it all irrelevant. And what if the police failed to catch them, but Brody didn't let them walk away?

And to some degree, he liked how things were going, these new horizons to explore. It had felt so good refusing to accept the slight from the bartender. This would just be an extension of that; holding that absolute power in his hands one more time. He closed his eyes and tried to bring back the certainty he had experienced in his apartment while planning this, relived the robbery with Jon, remembered Michelle hurrying to the window so she could pull down the shade and screw another man in his bed. Will reached into the duffel bag and pulled out the ski-mask and tugged it down over his face. With his nose flattened, and pushing lint off of his dry lips with his tongue, he drove back down the road to the store.

It had gone well, better than he could have hoped, and so Will shouldn't have been surprised when two farmers, a father and son by their appearance, walked through the door despite the sign he had flipped to “Closed” on entering.

Will had parked as far as he could from the door, so that his car wouldn't be visible without stepping outside to inspect it. The store had no other customers. The swing set at the house next door was vacant. No one outside hanging laundry or chatting with a neighbor. He waited until a car passed and got out, pausing for a moment to listen. A lawnmower droned from somewhere on the other side of the store, and a hammer pounded out a steady rhythm before ceasing, but all too far away to matter.

He carried the gun in his hand, raced up the wooden steps and went inside. Nobody waited at the counter, set halfway towards the back and parallel to the relatively narrow space. Will felt the eyes of a hundred dead animals on him and looked up, saw deer heads mounted all the way around about twelve off the floor with some black bear and a stuffed wild turkey thrown in, the effect unsettling. As he walked to the counter, passing bins of nuts and bolts, he breathed in the musty scent of the place. Not exactly musty, but earthy, like freshly tilled soil with a hint of manure and lumber, a scent that should be unpleasant but wasn’t.

“Be right with you,” he heard from the back of the store, down long aisles displaying hand and power tools. Will stopped by the counter, as he would at any store as a typical customer, faltering in his plan through his lifetime of conditioning as a law abiding citizen. He looked at a picture of an old man and woman hanging on the wall behind the register, the woman’s eyes beady and sharp and staring right through to his soul and condemning him and he shivered. He peered back into the gloom, searching for the man, trying to gain control of his mounting uncertainty. Some compound bows hung on the back wall, and Will envisioned him stepping into the aisle with an arrow fitted and drawn, loosing with the same accuracy that had brought down the trophies above.

Fast and aggressive.

Don’t give him the chance to react.

He had to get going, or risk blowing this and inviting a host of consequences, or at the least adding another notch of failure to his belt.

Will forced himself to move down the aisle. He found his quarry crouched down with his back turned, straightening some swatch books resting on a shelf supporting cans of paint. He took a deep breath and put the gun to the back of his head.

“What the…”

“I want whatever money you have in the register. I’m going to back up. You stand up slow and keep your hands where I can see them and walk out there ahead of me.”

“There isn’t much in there. I barely get by on what I sell.”

“I don’t care. Get up.” Will spoke in a gruff voice to mask the true sound of it. “I will kill you,” he added, in what he hoped was a convincing tone that covered the lie.
The man stood up and walked behind the counter to the register. He was taller than Will, thin and supple, his movements fluid with no wasted energy. He opened it up, and put maybe a few hundred dollars in a plastic grocery bag. “That’s all I have. Now please just leave.”

The store owner remained calm, nothing like the pants-wetting clerk at the convenience store. This irritated Will. He wanted something more for his efforts, stood balanced between issuing further threats and waving the pistol to provoke a reaction and the prudence of getting away clean while he could.

A rap on the door startled him, and he swung around to stare at the storefront. He could see two bulky man-shapes standing outside. He froze, licked his lips to force some moisture onto them. The knock came again. The store owner watched him impassively and Will tried to think of what he should do. He had it. He would force Steve to the door under threat of the gun, to explain that he had a family emergency, had closed early…

The door handle turned, and the two men stepped hesitantly into the store. They wore rubber boots up to their knees coated with a fresh application of the substance that created the scent that hung in this place. Each wore a pair of stained blue jeans and battered ball caps perched over wide faces and flat noses. They had huge hands. Will had never seen hands so large, so strong; weathered and calloused hands that he imagined could effortlessly snap bones, and he felt the first shiver of real fear. He didn’t know if these men would wait for the cops to subdue him, might prefer to notify the coroner instead. They bore a strong resemblance to one another, the older betrayed only by gray hair peeking from beneath the cap and deep lines on his face. But he didn’t think age would prevent the man from hurting him. They had advanced about ten feet down the aisle, their eyes still adjusting to the dim light inside.