Ride: A Bad Boy Romance (64 page)

E
llie grabbed
the folder from her backpack in the Jeep and headed for the Obsidian Public Library.

She hadn’t been kidding when she told Garrett that these things were solved by looking at endless boring documents in basements, not car chases and shootouts. Hell, she’d been a PI for five years now and never even drawn her weapon or exceeded the speed limit.

Several polite conversations later, Ellie was set up in a small, dark room in the back of the library, the microfiche reader glowing in front of her.

If she was being honest, she didn’t mind not having Garrett there with her. It would go faster this way, without Garrett to...
distract
her.

Small, dark rooms seemed like a recipe for trouble between the two of them, or at least a recipe for not getting very much done.

Scanning the headlines, Ellie blushed, thinking of exactly
what
they could get up to in there. The
Kane County Register,
a thrice-weekly publication, didn’t exactly have a lot to report, and its headlines said things like:

or

M
ost days
, the police blotter was empty, and when something had been reported, it was inevitably graffiti or a stolen bike.

Ellie found the days around the crash, and read the articles with a tightening feeling in her stomach. She’d read them all before — Garrett had managed to find
these
, at least — but they still made her feel almost nauseous.

What she was looking for was something,
anything
, that might help otherwise. She looked at the crime blotter, she looked at the classifieds. She read the letters to the editor, just to see if anyone was complaining about... well,
anything
.

There were calls for the road to be closed, of course. People condemning the way that “people these days drove like maniacs,” people saying that if the Monsons had prayed harder it wouldn’t have happened, people calling on others to send the three orphaned boys presents of toys and blankets.

I’m not sure most people realized they were teenagers
, Ellie thought.

But there was nothing she could
use
.

After an hour, she sat up and stretched, her back getting stiff after hunching near the eyepiece for so long. Ellie scrolled through a couple more police blotters, not expecting anything.

Then, something caught her eye.

Vandalism: Side view mirror torn from red 1991 Chevrolet Malibu, 4200 block of Canyon Ave. Please contact Kane County Sheriff with information.

Ellie read it again, and then one more time. It was dated a full month after Garrett’s parents had died.

Ellie’s mind
raced.

They might have waited until no one would connect the two things
, she thought.
Not that anyone was trying
.

But why report it at all? For insurance
?

Ellie wrote down the address, then left the small dark room.

W
hen Walter walked back
toward Garrett, he could already tell that the box was light from the way the old man held it.

“It’s a good thing you came in now,” he said, putting the file box down in front of Garrett. “That one’s due to go in the next round of shredding.”

Garrett held his breath and lifted the lid off of the box. There were only a couple of file folders inside, and he picked one up as Walter headed back to his own desk.

Inside was a Xerox of the accident report, filled out by hand by someone named James Marsh. There was hardly anything to it, and Garrett read the whole thing in minutes.

Single-car accident. Persons were reportedly driving home from Blanding to Obsidian via a small back road. Conditions were poor. Driver failed to brake adequately, causing vehicle to drive off the road.

It was so dry and clinical that Garrett almost felt like he was reading about someone else’s tragedy.

Vehicle rolled several times before coming to a stop
.
Both passenger and driver pronounced dead upon arrival at Blanding General Hospital
.

In short, the report didn’t have anything.

Garrett took a deep breath and picked up the other folder in the box and opened it.

Photos.

He shut the folder, took another deep breath, and opened it. The first photo was from far away, the mangled car only taking up a quarter of the paper if that. Garrett was pretty sure that this was the one photo he’d seen before: the car crumpled from every direction, both airbags limp and white in the front seat, the car itself upside down, the ceiling crushing the steering wheel.

What was it like?
he wondered.
Driving, and then you’re airborne for a split second before—

He shook his head slightly.

Stop it,
he told himself.

He’d never seen the next photos before, but they were all of the same car from different angles. It was clear that they had been taken the next day, when the sun was out, after the rain.

Some of them had the cleanup crew in them, and Garrett glanced at their faces. Most of them he recognized — either they lived in Obsidian, or they’d worked at the junkyard when he’d tried to get his parents’ car back.

He flipped through them again, a hopeless feeling slowly descending.

There’s nothing here
, he thought.
I came all this way and there’s nothing
.

The last photo in the set was another shot of the car. There was one person in the frame: a man with dark, slicked-back hair with sharp widow’s peaks. He had his hands in his pockets, underneath his bright orange vest, and he was looking up at the sky.

Garrett didn’t recognize him. He flipped back through the other photos slowly, squinting at them. At last, he pulled out two more, both with the stranger in them.

He put the other photos back but spread those three on the table, staring.

It’s probably just someone from Blanding
, he told himself.
You don’t know everyone in the whole county.

“That was a hell of a crash,” Walter’s voice said, just behind him, making Garrett jump. He hadn’t even heard the older man shuffle over.

“I’d never seen a lot of these before,” Garrett said. He swallowed the lump in his throat.

“We didn’t want the three of you to have to see them,” Walter said.

Yeah, I’m sure that’s what happened
, Garrett thought.

Instead of saying that out loud, he tapped the unfamiliar man in the photo.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked.

Walter pulled glasses from his pocket, then held the photo up close to his face, catching the light better.

His lips thinned. He looked at Garrett over his glasses, and then slowly lowered the photograph.

“My wife died six months ago,” he started.

“I’m sorry,” Garrett said, automatically.

What does this have to do with my parents?
He wondered.

“She was only seventy-six. Too young. This will sound cliché, but when she passed, I realized that the things I’ve done in my life mattered. They mattered to me, they mattered to her. They mattered to everyone.”

Walter looked at Garrett, his pale blue gaze steady.

“We found a hubcap that night,” Walter said. “It was just off the road, lying on top of a shrub, half its branches fresh broken off.”

Garrett was suddenly certain what was coming next, so certain he could barely form words.

“Was it from my parents’ car?” he asked.

Walter just shook his head
no
.

“I saw another car that night,” Garrett said, staring at the pictures. “I told the police. I told
you
, and no one believed me.”

“It came from the top,” Walter said. “Sheriff Tusk said he’d looked into it, and no one else saw a car. He chalked it up to youthful imagination, and told us the hubcap had been there a couple days. I knew better, but I kept my mouth shut. I figured it didn’t really mean anything.”

Garrett just closed his eyes and nodded. He forced himself to stay calm.

Yelling at an old man won’t accomplish anything
, he reminded himself.

“Tusk’s dead now,” Walter said. “So I can’t get fired if I tell you that the day after these photos were taken, I got into the station early — this was back at the old station — and saw this man coming out of Tusk’s office.”

He tapped the man in the photo Garrett didn’t know.

“Dressed much nicer than this, though,” Walter reflected.

“Do you know anything else?” Garrett asked.

That’s him
, he thought.
That has to be Boudreaux.

“Just that we all got bonuses that year,” Walter said. “Took the grand kids on a ski weekend.”

Garrett’s mind whirled.

There was another car that night
, he thought.
I’ve been right all along. There was another car, and Boudreaux, whoever the fuck that is, was there. He orchestrated this and then managed to get it all covered up.

“Did you talk to this guy at all?” Garrett asked.

Walter shook his head.

“Not once,” Walter said. “There was nothing strange about him until that morning I saw him coming out of Tusk’s office, and then he was gone.”

Garrett put the photos back into the folder and the folder back into the box.

“Thanks, Walter,” he said.

Walter just nodded.

“I’m sorry about your parents,” he said. “I don’t know if I ever said that before. Good luck.”

Garrett slipped out of the basement office and walked out of the police station in a daze.

I have to call Ellie
, he thought, his hand automatically going to his pocket before he remembered he didn’t have a phone.

Shit,
he thought.

Okay, she can’t be too far. It’s just Obsidian.

E
llie pulled
the borrowed Jeep up in front of a small house with vinyl siding. Laundry flapped in the breeze in the side-yard, and the lawn was neatly mowed, though the house needed another coat of paint.

Shabby, but well cared for.

This is a wild goose chase
, she thought.
I’m sure that whoever lost that side view mirror doesn’t live here anymore, and doesn’t even remember losing it.

She neared the door, raising one hand to knock, and paused. Inside, she could hear angry voices — no,
one
angry voice, and then someone else who sounded
afraid
.

Ellie gritted her teeth and knocked.

If I’m listening to someone hurt someone else, at least I’m interrupting,
she thought.

She waited a long time, and started wondering if she should knock again. Just as she’d made up her mind, the door opened, and women stood there.

The woman couldn’t have been more than fifty, but her hair was steel-gray and short, her mouth set in a very firm, straight line.

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Ellie said. “But I’m a private investigator working a case, and I had a question about a car registered to this address that was vandalized about fifteen years ago?”

Is this who I heard?
Ellie thought. Beyond the woman, there was no noise in the house.

Maybe it was the TV,
Ellie thought.

The woman stared at her through the screen door. Just as Ellie was about to apologize again, she nodded once.

“Okay,” she said. “Come on in, then.”

She turned from the door and walked inside, straight-backed. Ellie followed her to the living room, where they sat on opposing plastic-covered sofas.

“Did you own the vandalized car?” Ellie asked. “A Chevy Malibu, missing the side-view mirror?”

“My husband did,” the woman said. “We got rid of that car years ago.”

“Could I talk to him?” Ellie asked.

“Got a Ouija board?” the woman said, then snorted. “He’s dead,” she explained to Ellie. “Cancer. Last year.”

“I’m sorry,” Ellie said, automatically.

“You didn’t say why you’re looking for the car,” the woman said. “The mirror got knocked off fifteen years ago.”

Her eyes narrowed, and Ellie took a deep breath.

“A client lost some family members to a car crash, and I’m following up with anything that could be an accident,” Ellie said.

She hoped it sounded good enough.

The woman just
looked
at her. She started at Ellie’s toes and made her way up the girl’s body, like she was judging whether or not Ellie was fit for service.

“Hellfire,” the woman muttered, and left the room.

She was gone for a long time, and Ellie could hear her moving around in a back room.

Should I just leave
? Ellie thought.

At last, the woman came back, carrying a monstrous video recorder.

Her eyes were wet, and she sat on the couch again, the recorder on her lap like a terrible pet.

What the hell is going on
? Ellie thought.

“I found this in the attic when Mitch died,” the woman said. A single tear made a track down her cheek. “I was trying to make room for some of his things up there, and I — I came across this. I didn’t think we’d ever owned one of these, so I took a look at what was on it.”

Ellie felt her whole body go cold.

“What’s on it?” she whispered.

The woman placed the bulky camera on the coffee table, aimed the viewfinder at Ellie, and hit play.

For a long time, there was nothing but static, and then video of someone driving at night, the camera pointed out the windshield. All Ellie could see was the dashboard lights in the lower part of the frame.

Then, far away at first and getting closer: twin red dots. Tail lights.

Ellie got on her knees in front of the coffee table, moving her face closer to the tiny screen. The tail lights dodged and weaved, like they were swerving back and forth, blinking in and out.

Like they’re on a mountain road at night
, Ellie thought.

She had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

The tail lights kept getting closer and closer until, suddenly, the entire camera jolted, the tiny screen shaking.

“Oh!” Ellie exclaimed, putting both hands to her mouth.

“He just hit them?” the woman said, her voice flat.

“I think so,” Ellie whispered.

“Just wait,” the woman said.

Now the tail lights got more erratic, skidding back and forth across the small road, the car with the camera following suit. It nearly made Ellie carsick herself, even though she was kneeling on the floor of a perfectly steady house.

“What is this?” she asked the woman, trying to keep her voice from shaking.

“I think it’s proof,” the woman said.

Ellie just watched, glad that the video had no sound.

The tail lights swerved. They fishtailed, they seemed to leap away. The camera shook again.

Then the tail lights
fell
.

“Oh my god,” Ellie whispered, clapping her hands back over her mouth as the two red lights tumbled downward, the headlights of the car casting crazy shadows as it fell. “Oh my god, oh my god.”

On the tape, the car stopped. A man got out and ran to the edge of a dirt road. He stopped. He stood still for a long, long time.

Then he came back, got in the car, and drove on.

Ellie felt like the room was spinning, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

“
Why
?” she managed to ask.

“There were a lot of rumors that the woman in the car was... a witch, for lack of a better word,” the woman said. Her voice was still flat, but another tear ran down her face. “We lived in a trailer home. The roof leaked whenever it rained and the heat went out whenever it snowed. The kids would huddle together on one bed every night. A month after this happened, Mitch got a big bonus at work, big enough for us to finally put a payment down on this house. I know it ain’t much, but...”

She trailed off, and shrugged.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Whatever deal Mitch made, I wish he hadn’t. Those people left three teenage boys behind.”

I know
, thought Ellie.

“If it helps, I don’t think Mitch meant to kill them,” the woman said.

She stood, Ellie still kneeling on the floor, and walked toward the kitchen.

“I think he wanted proof of something,” the woman went on.

At the kitchen door, she stopped and turned around.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and then left the room.

“It’s not your fault,” Ellie said to the open doorway.

She looked at the camera again.

What do I even do with this now?
she thought.

“She wasn’t apologizing for the video,” a man’s voice said.

Ellie’s head snapped up. Standing in the kitchen doorway was a bald man wearing an expensive three-piece suit.

“She was apologizing for letting me in first,” he said.

He moved his hand, and Ellie realized he was holding a gun, trained on her.

That has to be him
, she thought.
Weird. I thought I’d recognize him from somewhere.

“Let’s go for a ride,” Pierce Boudreaux said.