Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

Augie told me, but there was no place in me for those words to take hold. I sat silent and looked at what I could see of his face in the dark.
    “You haven’t reconciled with Frank, have you? You haven’t buried the hatchet with him?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “I suppose not. If things were reversed, I’d probably make a deal with the devil too, if I thought you were putting yourself in danger.”
    “Frank is your friend, Aug. I’m your friend, too.”
    Augie laughed once and looked away then, grinning with disbelief.
    “I’ll shove it up your asses,” he said softly. “Just watch me, Mac. Just watch me.”
    He turned his head then and fixed his eyes on the mirror mounted outside his door. We didn’t say anything for a while after that. The cab of the truck was warm now, a bubble of shelter in the middle of nowhere. Eventually something about the way Augie was sitting motionless told me that something had caught his attention.
    He stared intently at the mirror outside his window, then suddenly turned around and took up watch out the back window. He was looking hard but I don’t think he was really seeing anything, not anything that he could point to anyway.
    “What?”
    “There’s someone out there.”
    I looked from him to the rear view mirror. “Where?”
    “I saw someone run from one side of the road to the other, from the grass on the edge of that field there to those trees ten or twenty feet in from the shoulder.”
    I turned and looked through the back window but could barely see the shape of the bend in the road, let alone anything else. The trees were only visible where they stood against the shifting sky.
    “He’s out there, by that first tree,” said. “Give your eyes a minute to adjust. Look by the trunk.”
    “Who the hell would be out here running around in this cold?”
    “I can just see him,” Augie whispered. “He’s on our side of the tree, like he’s hiding from something in the other direction. What the hell is he doing? Wait a minute.”
    “What?”
    “Do you see that?”
    “What?”
    “He’s moving. He’s away from the tree. It looks like he’s lifting something.”
    I looked but didn’t see anything but stationary shapes in the dark. And then, suddenly, my eyes detected brief motion.
    “Wait, now I see it. By that tree. I see something.”
    Augie was motionless.
    “What’s going on?” I said.
    Augie didn’t answer. Something else had caught his attention in the dark behind us.
    “Shit.”
    “What?”
    “Headlights.”
    For some reason I turned and looked into the rear view mirror. I saw the grass that lined the side of the road light up suddenly, and then there it was, rounding the bend and racing past the tree where Augie’s man stood concealed. I could tell by the way the car flung around the curve that it was speeding, and I could tell by the way it hung the curve tight that it was a sports car of some kind.
    We heard the whining of the motor and sound of the exhaust tearing down the pipes, but the pitch was lower than I had expected it to be. Before I could say anything about that, Augie announced, “It’s not the Fiat. It’s someone else.”
    And then it all went to hell.
    Without warning the car turned tail first into a spin and veered onto the shoulder, kicking dirt and clumps of grass into the air. Within seconds the nose of the car rounded forward and caught air and rose off the ground, and the spinning turned into a door-over-door tumble down the shoulder. It turned over several times in the matter of a second and seemed as light as a toy. After fifty feet or so the car caught the bank along the road like a boat catching a wave and went up and over it and was gone suddenly from our sight. All that was left of it was debris in the road and a faint cloud of kicked up dust.
    “Jesus Christ,” Augie said.
    He reached for his cell phone while I took hold of the gear shift and turned on the headlights and the floodlights mounted on the roof above. It was as if daylight had hit the road in front of us. I punched the accelerator and turned sharp onto the narrow road, made a U-turn, and sped us straight into disaster.
    The car had gone down a steep bank and landed in a sinkhole pond some fifty feet below the level of the back road. I could barely see from the top of the bank the tail end of it protruding out of the dark water. The ambulance and police would be here soon enough, but there was no shaking the thought that someone could still be