Trust Me

5

They were well past the city now, past the sprawl of lights and the scattering of outer suburbs and smaller towns, into the denseness of the piney woods. Luke kept a hard grip on the wheel. He badly needed to go to the bathroom and hunger clenched its fist around his stomach. The gas needle hovered toward the red zone of empty.

‘We need to make a gas stop,’ he said.

‘You’ll pull over when I say.’

Two minutes later they came upon a farm to market road, empty of traffic. Beyond its edges, heavy growths of loblolly pines stood like guardians.

‘Drive a ways down the road,’ Eric ordered.

He’s going to kill me now. Whatever strange reason I was useful to him is over and he’s going to kill me. Terror rose in his throat.

‘Stop.’

Luke stopped.

Eric removed the keys from the ignition. ‘Get out of the car. Slowly.’

The last movements his muscles would ever know. Luke obeyed. He’d been stuck behind the wheel, body locked in fear for hours. The night was silent, the stars mute witnesses.

‘You need to pee?’

‘Yes.’ Was this a final kindness? What did it matter?

‘Go on the other side of the car.’ He stuck the gun between Luke’s shoulder blades.

Luke relieved himself. When he was done, Eric steered him toward the trunk. He popped it open with the remote.

‘I’m going to give you a break from driving. But if I hear one peep out of that trunk, you’re dead. As much fun as we’ve had together, I’ll just pretend you’re the guy I killed and it’s boom, you’re done.’ The shakiness was gone from Eric’s voice. He’d said earlier that breaking the law changed you, and now he had broken the greatest law of man. He had taken a life.

‘I know.’ Shivering, Luke climbed into the trunk. The lid slammed down. Darkness. The engine revved. The tires hissed softly on the gravel, and the car backed and pulled into a U-turn.

Luke, alone, stretched his legs out as far as he could. You may be called upon to fight, Dad had said. The time was now. He had to think of something.

The car stopped and Luke opened his eyes in the dark.

He heard Eric’s soft whisper near the trunk. ‘Filling the tank up. No noise from you or I’ll kill the clerk inside.’

Luke pressed a fist against the door.

‘The funny thing is… shooting that man was much harder in my mind. I’d built it up as this terrible thing but after the first squeeze of the trigger my mind turned off a little bit and it wasn’t too bad.’ He sounded almost surprised.

I have to stop you, Luke thought. I can’t let you hurt another person. The pump clicked as Eric settled it back into its slot.

Luke groped in the darkness. He needed a weapon. He felt a circular shape – a set of jumper cables. He groped past the cables and his fingers closed on a pile of plastic boxes. Old cassette tapes. Nothing beneath. He kept searching, turning over to face the front of the trunk. He felt the rim of the spare tire. There were tools to change it, but they lay under the tire, and he couldn’t get to them with the trunk closed.

He reached out and touched the coil of the jumper cables again. Heavy plastic, like a thick braided rope, with the copper clamps on the end.

As the car started and pulled away from the station, Luke began to uncurl the coil.