Dead Reckoning (28 page)

“How the hell can this door be locked from the inside? Is there another way…
.”

“Oh shit!” exclaimed the man as they both scrambled away from the door.

“Who’s in there?” asked one of the men.

“Open the door and come out!” exclaimed the other.

We didn’t make a sound.

“Ok, let’s blow the door off,” said one of the men, his boots clicking on the floor as he headed for the truck.

Joe finally spoke: “Stop! There are six of us in here, and we are all armed. This will be your only chance to leave us alone, or we’ll come out shooting.”

The men laughed.

“Yeah right,” said one. “We’re real scare’t.”

Joe stuck his gun through the hole and fired. The deafening explosion and blinding flash inside that little room stunned me. For a few seconds, I was completely deaf. My hearing quickly returned, mixed with a loud, sharp ringing.

“Do you believe me now, you sons a bitches?” Joe yelled.

“No, we think it’s just you. If you do that again, we’ll blow this whole god damned place up.”

“Listen,” said Joe. “This place is solid concrete and this door is solid steel. You can’t get in here unless we want you too.”

“We’ll burn you out. Smoke you out. Something.”

“Just tell us what you want.”

“We want in there.”

“We were already looking around in here before we closed the door, and there is nothing in here,” I said.

“Ok, so there are two of you. Big deal. Let’s hear from the other four.”

“Fine, there are only two of us,” said Joe. “But that’s all the more reason for us not to come out. Look just leave us here, give us ten minutes to get away and then you can have whatever it is you want.”

“Yeah, sure, and then you make off with the gold,” said one of the men.

“Shut up, you moron!”

The men were suddenly quiet due to the man’s accidental revelation.

“There is no gold in here,” I said. “We looked around. Nothing.”

“Yes there is. The owner told us so.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Let’s just say he felt like it!”

The men all laughed again.

I thought about the guy in the back of the pickup during my first encounter with them.

“The safe was smashed open, and there is nothing in there,” said Joe.

“Under the desk,” he said. “There is another safe in the floor. There is shit load of gold in there, we’ve got the combo, and we want it.”

“So just give us the combination and we’ll take out the gold and give it to you,” said Joe. “You can leave and we go our separate ways.”

The men whispered to each other and then finally agreed.

Joe pointed out that we couldn’t see to open the safe. One of the men pushed a lighter through the hole in the door, and it dropped to the floor.

“Now step back,” I said. “If I see so much as a finger near the hole when he opens the safe, I’ll blow it off.”

They all backed up.

Joe moved the desk as I covered the hole with a piece of trash I found on the floor.

“Ok, I’m at the safe,” said Joe. “Read me the numbers.”

One of the men read the numbers off as Joe spun the dial.

Joe opened the safe and it did, indeed, contain a large amount of gold, perhaps forty or fifty pieces. It also held thousands in cash, which, apparently, didn’t interest the goons, or they didn’t know about it. Joe collected the coins and began to feed them through the hole. The attractive ring of each coin hitting the floor echoed through the store, and as multiple rings and echoes mingled, the room came alive like a sort of random bell choir.

“Wait a minute,” I said. Joe stopped and the symphony rang to an end. “Once they’ve got what they want, what keeps them from blowing us up anyway?”

“Nothing, except that they don’t have any explosives.”

“What makes you say that?”

“They wouldn’t have agreed to this if they did. It would have been safer just to blow us up and collect the coins themselves. If I’m wrong, we’ll just have to shoot our way out of this, which is what we would have had to do anyway. Dolts like these three weren’t going to go away without the gold.”

“We can hear everything you are saying,” said one of them.

“I know,” said Joe. “So now you know your choices. When you’ve got all the gold, just leave, or we will try to shoot our way out of this. You know we are armed. Some of you won’t make it out of here. Which of you will it be? Who wants to die here today?”

The men didn’t say anything.

“And one more thing, you fucking idiots. You took some clothes, shoes, and a gun off a friend of mine a little while ago. Get it all and bring in here or nothing comes out of this hole except the barrel of my gun.”

The men still stood silently.

“Move!” Joe barked, loud enough that it even startled me.

“Go get his shit,” one of the men directed.

They did as Joe ordered and he fed the rest of the coins out through the hole. Joe’s plan worked. Once they had the gold, the men simply walked out and drove away.

“Do you really think they are gone?” I asked after a minute.

“They’re gone. Too stupid to do otherwise. They had no way to anticipate what we were going to do, so it was easier for them to just leave.”

Joe slowly opened the door and cautiously walked out. I followed. The store was deserted, the truck gone. I collected my stuff and handed Joe back his extra gun.

“You have no idea how it feels to get this stuff back, Joe.”

Joe smiled. Then he closed the door to the office, reached up inside, and locked one of the deadbolts again.

I shot him a puzzled look.

“When they come back they’ll think we’re still in there. It will keep them busy for hours.”

We laughed.

We slipped out the front door and ran around back into the woods. We stopped so I could put on my clothes. We could still see the store through the trees, and just a few minutes later, the truck returned, this time with more men.

“Maybe one of them has a brain this time,” said Joe.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“We better get going,” he said. “There’s always a chance they could figure it out.”

“We?” I asked.

“Mind if I tag along? I don’t have anything better to do.”

I would have preferred to say no, but I liked Joe, and he saved my ass.

“It would be my pleasure,” I said.

I started down a trail, and Joe followed.  He held out the pint to me, and this time, I took it willingly.

“Good thing it’s not bourbon,” he said as we walked off into the woods.

. . .

We walked silently through the woods as dusk settled over the area. We happened upon a trail heading in our general direction. We took it and picked up speed.

Joe took the last swig of Jack and pitched the empty pint into bushes along the trail. I had consumed about a third of the pint and marveled
, as I had many times, at how alcohol could warm a person from within—a sensation that I facetiously referred to as internal combustion in my drinking days. I recalled with a smile that the frequency and volume with which I made that reference both rose in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol consumed. I had no idea why alcohol warmed me, but I knew that thermodynamically speaking, the phenomenon made no sense.

We had been a half hour on the trail, and just as I was about to ask Joe his opinion about the warming effects of alcohol, a bright flash lit up the forest from behind us.

I turned and began counting. “Lightning?” I questioned.

The flash was followed by the sound of a gigantic explosion ten seconds later. Even with all the force- and sound-deadening forest between us and the explosion, we sensed a significant concussion. A large cloud of smoke, illuminated from below by the distinctive orange glow of fire, billowed up from the general direction of the convenience store.

“Good God!” I exclaimed.

“How long do you think they tried to talk us out of there before they decided to blow it?” Joe asked.

“The good thing is that the ruse worked, so they won’t come looking for us.”

“I hope they did the world a favor and blew themselves up in the process!” Joe said.

We walked on through the increasing cold.

After another half hour, darkness swallowed us whole, which made the going very difficult. Sense of direction faded in the ink black night, and the danger of trudging on blindly through the forest hit home when I nearly took out an eye on a low-hanging branch.

I groped the ground and gathered all the leaves and needles I could reach into a pile, flattened it, and laid down on it. Joe foraged around some feet away. He lit the lighter we got from the morons and then applied the flame to the small pile of dry duff he had assembled. The pile caught fire, smoked, and then went out. He tried again, this time holding the lighter to the pile until it was fully burning. He grimaced and pulled his hand quickly away and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

“Look, another gift from our loving creator,” Joe said, angrily holding his thumb out for me to see.

“I know how you feel,” I said.

The fire lit the scene just enough for Joe and
me to find some small dry twigs and more litter for the fire. It wasn’t much, provided little heat, and we had nothing to cook on it, but I could feel the rise in my spirit solely from the token sign of life.

I felt so tired—more so emotionally than physically. The experiences of the last few days had rattled me to the core. Everything I thought I knew was being tested. Until Joe came along, I thought humanity was gone from the world.

“So are you an atheist?” I asked bluntly.

“I hate that word.”

“Why?”

“We already have a word for people who don’t believe in Santa Claus and trolls and unicorns,” he said. “Adult.” He poked at the fire and then looked up. “Why do we need a special word for people who don’t believe in other fantasies like God?”

He waited for my reply, but I didn’t have anything to add.

“Do you believe in God?” Joe finally continued.

“Kind of. No, not really,” I stammered. “Until today, that is. Maybe.”

“You found God in this mess?” Joe asked.

At the depths of despair, it seemed as if I had finally had a prayer answered. I didn’t know how else to explain it. Now less embarrassed to admit such a thing as I had ever been, I told Joe exactly what happened. I expected him to laugh.

“I think that is the best reason for believing in God that I’ve ever heard,” Joe said. “I wish I had a reason like that. Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just believed all that bullshit.”

. . .

We awakened just as the darkness
eroded into a milky dawn. It used to be that dawn looked different from sunset, perhaps because of the temperature difference between morning and evening or perhaps because our perceptions were different at different times of day. Maybe it was just as simple as the light hitting objects from opposite sides in morning and evening. But I could not objectively say if it was getting dark or getting light. Dawn and sunset were identical—indistinguishably cold and monochrome.

We stood quietly and urinated. Out of habit, Joe kicked some dirt onto the cold, black smudge of last night’s fire. We began to walk. Some while later, we emerged onto a road that ran north-south. I recognized the road but could not name it. We turned right and immediately had to climb over a tree that had fallen across the road.

It suddenly occurred to me that killing a human being felt much differently than I imagined. While I didn’t feel any remorse for having shot the fat man the day before, I felt different as a person. I couldn’t name the feeling other than to call it something like loneliness.

“I killed a man yesterday,” I blurted out.

Joe turned his head and studied my expression. “How do you feel about that?”

“He deserved it,” I replied.

“I already assumed he deserved it. I asked how you feel about it.”

Joe was unusually perceptive.

“I feel weird,” I admitted.

“You’re still stuck in the old paradigm,” he said. “There is no law here now. Right and wrong have become much more subjective.”

“You sound like a relativist. There has got to be some objective right and wrong.”

“Name something that is always and everywhere wrong,” Joe said.

“Well, the guy that I killed was keeping a bunch of women as sex slaves. That’s wrong.”

“Not always and everywhere,” Joe said.

“What?” I exclaimed.

“Many societies throughout history have kept slaves, including sex slaves. It wasn’t considered wrong by them.”

“That is absurd. Of course, it was wrong!”

“Hold on,” Joe countered. “Don’t react; just think about it for a second. Where does that notion come from? What makes it an objective truth? The law? God? Those are your laws, your God. Different cultures have different laws and gods.”