No Return

30

The Escape was parked right beside the Triumph.

Wes climbed into the driver’s seat of the SUV and started to close the door. That’s when he spotted something tucked between the motorcycle’s gas tank and handlebars.

He got back out and stepped over to the bike. The object was a yellowed piece of paper that looked like it came from an old newspaper. There were enough random gusts of wind in the desert that finding a piece of trash lodged in his bike wasn’t particularly surprising.

But he realized as he pulled it out that if it had been trash, it would have been battered and torn by the wind and the terrain. There were no tears in this piece of paper, no places where it was punctured by branches or rocks or God knew what.

There was something more telling, too. The paper wasn’t a crinkled ball or even a scrap. It was a neatly folded, three-by-three-inch square.

Wes flipped it around, looking at both sides, then, worried that it might fall apart along the creases, carefully teased it open. He was pleased with himself that he was able to keep it from falling apart. But this sense of satisfaction lasted only until he focused on the article inside.

At the top was a school photo of a thick-necked kid of probably sixteen or seventeen. Though it was black-and-white, it was easy to tell the kid had blond hair. It was also easy to tell, despite the smile on his lips, that he was a jerk.

Or perhaps that was only Wes’s interpretation, since he had known the boy.

Jack Rice.

The kids at Murray Junior High used to have a nickname for him. The Tormentor.

In the teenage years, brawn still ruled over brains, and since Jack had a lot of the former and very little of the latter, he was one of the kings. A Class A asshole, through and through.

Wes had stopped riding the bus to school in seventh grade because Jack used to get into the seat behind him and slam his fists into Wes’s back. Wes much preferred taking the extra time to walk the three miles instead of suffering from the pain of one of Jack’s blows for the rest of the day.

There was a headline below the photo:

LOCAL BOY NAMED TO ALL-DISTRICT JV TEAM

Wes didn’t read the article. He knew it wasn’t important.

But he also knew there was no chance this was trash, either.

This article had been left for him.