13.
 "Hurry, Mickey!" Lisa said.
"Come on, you goddamn...." The rest of Ben's sentence was lost in the night as he stashed his towel-wrapped gun and moved from the back seat to the front.
With one last look up at the windows of Em and Monica, Mick hurried and got into the front seat. Lisa sat in the back.
"Bout time," Ben grumbled as he put the car in gear and they drove off. Lisa soon fell asleep in the back seat, wrapped in her quilt, her face resting on a pillow atop some boxes.
Halfway to California, as dawn arrived, they switched off. Mick drove, Ben dozed in the back, Lisa sat up front looking refreshed. She looked thin and youthful as she brushed her frizz. She often complained about how hard it was to have such hair. "But I love it," Mick would say. And she'd close her eyes. "Yes, I do too."
The marks in the roads. They were everywhere, black skid marks, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. They would pop out of nowhere, with no respect for lanes. They usually ran in a quarter arc and then disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Mick had seen them all his life. He'd always wondered about them. Sometimes you even saw them running up the side of a concrete median divider.
He saw several this morning as he drove. Lisa seemed tense. Jumpy. "Micky, are we anywhere near Phoenix yet?"
He pointed under her seat. "There's a map under there. We're on the highway between Flagstaff and Phoenix and we'll be there in a couple of hours."
Ben woke up. "Hey can you pull over for a minute?"
"Sure." Mick looked in the rearview mirror. "Gotta go?"
"Yeah. Gotta go."
"Me too," Lisa said. She looked nervously at Ben.
Mick pulled over, feeling something strange and prickly in the edge of his consciousness. Ben, wearing a plaid flannel shirt and khaki work pants, walked down the shoulder of the road through a small meadow to a stand of mesquite trees. He stood there a bit. Lisa, wearing a bright shirt with yellow and orange flowers, and white pants, picked her way further in, until Mick couldn't see her anymore. Gone to squat someplace, he thought. He wondered if he had to go, too, and he didn't, at least not bad enough to make all this effort. Maybe later at a rest stop.
Lisa came out of the woods about the same time Ben turned and headed back to the car. They met in the small meadow. There, they stopped and appeared to be arguing. Then they started laughing. It was a weird, dirty kind of laugh Mick had never heard before.
They climbed back into the car. The doors slammed. "Everyone in?"
"Yes," Ben said. "In," Lisa said.
Mick started the engine, speeded up, pulled into traffic. The engine seemed for a moment to stall.
"Did you feel that?" Ben asked in the back seat.
Lisa turned white and put her hands over her face.
"What's the matter?" Mick asked, reaching over to touch her shoulder.
She kept her hands over her face and looked at him. Tears dribbled down her face, and the look in her face said she'd done something terrible that she wished she hadn't.
"Get hold of yourself," Ben said.
The car shivered. Or was it a wind, rocking them? But the greenery in the ditches along the freeway appeared calm. There it was again, a bucking sound.
"Honey," Mick said, now frightened. "What's wrong?"
Tears dribbled over Lisa's hands as she stared at Mick. Her blue eyes were filled with pain and sorrow and guilt.
"Keep driving," Ben said.
Mick lost his temper. "Shut up and let me talk to my fiancee!"
In the next second, while Lisa sobbed and the two men argued, a strong force suddenly wrenched the car. It was all over in a moment. The windows went gray, then black. Lisa screamed. Ben swore. The car began to spin, and Mick cried out the last word he would ever say to her: "Lisa!" as he held his left arm over his face and reached out to embrace her protectively with his right arm.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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