The Fall Guy Read online

  The small man’s irritation evaporated his grin. He yanked out an automatic pistol and jammed it in Todd’s face. “You drive or you die. Your choice. You’ve cost me a lot of money and I think I’ve been damn charitable giving you this chance to redeem yourself. So what’s it to be?” He snapped the safety off the pistol.

  “Drive,” Todd managed.

  “Good. You said two days, but I’m going to be generous. You have three days to get this car to Texas.”

  The preamble was over. A minute later, he was on the road, Texas bound. The euphoria he felt stealing the Jag seeped away with the prospect of the boring drive ahead of him. The small man had really screwed him this time. He’d given him a schedule that meant no time to pack any clothes or leave a message. He hit the road as he was dressed. He couldn’t blame the small man too much. If he’d done the right thing in the first place, he wouldn’t be on I-580 now.

  “You’re a dumb, dumb man, Todd,” he said to himself and turned the radio up.

  ***

  The miles passed swiftly at that time of night, but compared to the length of the drive, he seemed to be crawling. Fatigue got to him by the time he reached the California/Arizona state line and he pulled off the highway and slept in the car. The sleep did little to rejuvenate his spirits. The small man’s vice grip around his nuts forced him to drive hard. His fellow freeway users received no charity from him. They were on his road and in his way. He flashed his high beams when someone moved into his lane and never conceded an inch to anyone who wanted to merge or change lanes. He didn’t stop to eat or drink. He took a piss when he filled up with gas. His bad mood lasted as far as New Mexico.

  Evening was descending and he was driving into another night. His stale breath cloyed at the back of his throat to the extent that he could taste its noxious odor. His BO was so ripe that its stench permeated the inside of his skull. He’d washed up as best he could in a gas station restroom, but his clothes were rancid. He pulled off at Gallup and raided a Wal-Mart for a change of under shorts and a couple of tee-shirts. At a diner that boasted all-day breakfasts, he changed into his fresh clothes in the restroom and tossed the dirty ones in their trash. He decided to eat there too. Having only eaten his own stomach acid along with the junk food he’d gotten from gas stations, their sausage and egg skillet tasted like heaven at nine in the evening. He couldn’t help but groan with pleasure with every swallow of coffee. He drooled over their pies, but resisted. He wanted to get on the road again. He’d spent too long indulging himself. Besides, on a different day under different circumstances, this meal would have rated only a couple steps above pet food.

  He hit the roads in good spirits, which improved the closer he got to the Texas state line. Sure, he’d screwed himself with the small man, but that would soon end. Texas was a big state but he’d be in Dallas by this time tomorrow and then he’d be a free man again. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have any way of getting back to the Bay Area. All that mattered was that he would be out from under the small man and wouldn’t that first inhale of air taste sweet? Forgetting himself, he took in a practice breath. It jolted him from his reverie.

  The Lexus’ interior stunk with his odor. He wouldn’t be surprised if it had impregnated the vehicle linings and leather seats. If Ruskin’s couldn’t get it out, the small man would exact his wrath.

  Sweat, hot and persistent, leaked out from under his arms and down his spine, ruining his fresh clothes. The hairs on the back of his neck bristled and gooseflesh broke out underneath it. Payback, he thought. Delivering this car was payback for screwing over the small man. One of the small man’s lieutenants had been taken down by Todd’s mistake. Stealing one car and transporting another seemed like a small price to pay for the potential loss in revenue he’d caused and the subsequent heat provided by a police investigation as a result. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t enough. The small man wouldn’t let him get off this easily. What Todd had done as payback hardly measured a pound of flesh. There had to be more.

  He sniffed the car’s rank air again. It didn’t smell right. He powered down the windows for twenty minutes and let the night air flood in and wash the stink away. When he powered the windows back up, he sniffed again. The smell was still there, just as pungent and persistent and it didn’t smell like sweat or bad breath.

  His hands trembled as a thought punctured his brain. He fought to keep them steady. At the first off-ramp, he pulled off I-40 and drove along some poorly maintained county road until he found an abandoned strip mall. He parked around back out of view of passersby. He popped the trunk and walked to the rear of the vehicle. He didn’t have to guess at what he’d find. The stench rammed a fist through the sweet night air.

  Shrink-wrapped in plastic was the contorted shape of a man. The corpse’s bulging eyes and tongue pressed against the tight plastic. Decomposition had set about its merry work and the body had bloated, stretching the plastic beyond the breaking point. The plastic seams had snapped in several places letting out the stink. Even through the distortions, Todd recognized the dead man from his picture in the newspaper. He was the Porsche owner the cops had picked up after Todd had hit his car.

  Todd sighed. The small man wasn’t going to let this slide. Todd should have seen the setup. Stealing the Jag was merely a ploy to keep him busy while the small man took care of the Porsche driver. The cops would know the Porsche driver worked for the small man and he couldn’t let a loose end like that exist without cutting it off. The cops didn’t know about Todd, but he was another loose end that needed trimming.

  He wondered how this was supposed to go down. Had the small man set up a tit-for-tat sting? What and who was waiting for him in Dallas? The cops? Thugs? No one? For all he knew, Ruskin’s dealership had nothing to do with the small man. Maybe the dealership was a name plucked from the Yellow Pages purely as a carrot for Todd to follow while the cops picked him up along the way.

  Todd could have been angry, but he smiled instead. Credit where credit was due. The small man had almost put one over on him. Todd had been eager to believe he could climb out of the hole he found himself in and was willing to accept any crap the small man wanted to feed him. It had almost worked. He guessed highway cops were supposed to pick him up long before he reached the Lone Star state. Instead, luck, in its twisted and cruel form, had intervened. He was still in the game. He might just get away with it. He slammed the trunk down on the body. There was a lot to do.

  Todd rejoined the I-40. He had to get rid of the body and car. The car had to be on the hot list, but he couldn’t dump it—not just yet. He consulted the maps he’d picked up in a gas station, then drove to Santa Rosa. It was a small town with an infrastructure just big enough to swallow up a stranger.

  He pulled off at the freeway exit and trawled the downtown. He parked across the street from a chain motel he had no intention of staying at. He looked for security cameras in the parking lot. He didn’t see any. It wasn’t surprising. This was the New Mexico equivalent of Green Acres. Crime just didn’t happen here. He scanned the rows of docile vehicles for a Lexus and found none. It would have been nice, but it wasn’t important. Any vehicle would do. He dropped to his knees behind a rental car with Texas plates, jerked out his penknife blade and unscrewed the license plate. Local plates were all he wanted. The cops would be looking for a Lexus with California plates. Okay, it wasn’t perfect. An inquisitive cop would see through that, even expect that, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. Stealing from a rental car bought him some additional time too. The renters wouldn’t give the missing plate a second thought, not like if it had belonged to their own personal vehicle. Who would care? The renters wouldn’t. They wouldn’t know the license plate number even if Todd parked next to them. It was flawed, but close enough for government work.

  Keeping to the shadows, Todd scurried back to the Lexus and swapped plates at a diner a couple of miles away. He stopped for coffee and time to think. Disposing of the body had to be done right
. He couldn’t be rash. That would get him caught. No, he wouldn’t dump the corpse tonight. Besides not having any tools, he didn’t know where to dump the body. He needed somewhere remote, not only for today but for the next decade. No, he’d sleep tonight, tool up in the morning, spend the rest of the day finding a burial site and dig a deep dark hole tomorrow night. He paid his check and there was a confident bounce to his step on the way out.

  He could have driven back to the motel where he’d lifted the license plates, but he decided against it. Fate didn’t need tempting. He picked up the freeway again. He didn’t have to be careful about the roads he used now. To the outside world, he was a Texas native in his Texas-bought Lexus, as long as they didn’t look too closely.

  He fancied staying the night in town for no good reason other than he liked the idea of sleeping in a bed. It sounded like a good plan. He settled into his drive. He switched on the radio for the first time and searched for a radio station that didn’t play country or Mexican music. He couldn’t find one and settled for country. He racked up the miles listening to people having the kinds of troubles Todd only wished he had.

  “You think that’s bad,” he said to the hapless cowboy lamenting the loss of his girl. “You should walk a mile in my shoes.”

  Headlights lit up the Lexus from behind and Todd deflected his rearview mirror to shield his eyes. He’d thought it was some jerk who didn’t know when to dip his high beams until he recognized the familiar outline of a police car. He hadn’t seen them, not that he’d been keeping an eye out. He’d been playing it safe, keeping to the speed limit and using his turn signals. He shouldn’t have registered on anyone’s radar. All the spit in his mouth escaped to somewhere safe.

  Now he wished he’d dumped the body back in Santa Rosa. He’d take the stint for grand theft auto and not bitch about it, but he didn’t want to go down for the body too. Not that it would ever come to that. The small man would have connections. Todd would never see the inside of a courtroom. He held his breath, waiting for the light bar to burst into life and bathe him in red and blue.

  But the lights never came.

  The state troopers were checking the license plate with the one on the hot car list. It wouldn’t match up. He thanked God that he’d switched the plates already.

  “I’m not the person you’re looking for,” he murmured at the car reflected in his rearview mirror. “Don’t stop me. Go by.”

  As if by magic, the troopers granted his request. The driver killed the high beams and sped past.

  Todd realized a mammoth breath he’d been holding. That was too close for comfort. Time to get off the road for the night.

  He pulled off at Tucumcari and checked into a motel. He had to show ID, but paid cash and hoped that wouldn’t leave a trail for the small man or anyone else to find.

  “No one pays cash these days,” the sleepy-eyed clerk said.

  Todd smiled. “Never a lender or borrower be.”

  The clerk shrugged, handed Todd a cardkey and went back to the TV he had playing behind him.

  Todd found his room and slept the sleep of the innocent, so much so, he didn’t wake until housekeeping knocked on the door. It was after eleven. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept that well. He was sure this was a sign. A sign of what though?

  He picked up a late breakfast at a drive-thru burger joint and tracked down the nearest hardware store. The Lexus stood out next to all the pickups, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about that. He trawled the aisles with his cart and filled it with a pick and shovel and bunch of unnecessary crap for cover. The last thing he needed was to be remembered by the staff as the guy who bought a shovel then asked for directions to a large chunk of nowhere. So he made it look like he was a greenhorn handyman who watched too much DIY TV embarking on a landscaping project he couldn’t possibly pull off.

  Standing in the checkout line, he examined the contents of his wallet. The hotel and this purchase would drain him of most of his cash reserves. He’d have to make some money soon, but that would have to wait until the corpse was in the ground.

  He paid and loaded up the Lexus. From his maps, the best place for a drug dealer burial was out at the parklands surrounding Ute Lake State Park. It was an hour or so from Tucumcari using the local highways. After last night’s run-in with the state troopers, Todd wanted to avoid the freeways.

  He reached the State Park by mid-afternoon. He left the Lexus on the road and explored the areas north of the park on foot. If anyone came snooping, Todd had his cover story. Sorry, Officer. I drank three cups of coffee and nature took its course. You know how it is when you’re miles from anywhere. I had to go somewhere.

  He climbed a small rise and surveyed the land around him. The place defined nothingness. Wildness spread in all directions marred only by the empty roadway he’d traveled. It was stunning to think that the US could still have places as unpopulated and undeveloped as this considering how high property prices were in the Bay Area. Undeveloped or not, it was going to make for a perfect burial site.

  Chain link fencing cordoned the land off from road users and signs stated the land was private property, but the land was so vast that the owners would need a herd of security officers to enforce the penalties threatened on the signs.

  He didn’t see much point in driving off and coming back under the cover of darkness. He busted off the padlock on the gate and drove through and relocked the gates with a padlock he’d brought with him. He picked his gravesite and parked the Lexus out of the view of the roadway. He retrieved the shovel and the pick from the car’s trunk and broke ground. Digging a grave wasn’t as easy as in the movies. This wasn’t Hollywood dirt. The sun-baked ground yielded little to his pick. It bounced off the dirt leaving behind a minor dent in comparison to the effort he exerted. To soften the ground up, he poured all his bottled water onto the dirt. The thirsty earth sucked up every last drop without giving anything back in return. He was in no mood to be screwed over now when he was so close and smashed away at the ground until it finally succumbed.

  The sun had long set and the day’s heat was waning when he had a person-length hole just under two feet deep. It was a shallow grave fit for a drug dealer. How his blistered and bleeding hands and aching back wished that were true. But two feet wasn’t anywhere deep enough. Scavengers would be chewing over the remains in no time. Six feet was too much to ask, but four, that sounded like a reasonable depth to him. It got no easier the deeper he dug. The ground was softer and gave way to his pick and shovel more readily, but it was a damn sight harder to hurl the dirt to the surface from that depth.

  When the hole reached chest deep, Todd stopped. He tossed the shovel out of the hole and tried to straighten. His lower back screamed as each vertebrae failed to pop back into place. It took him three attempts to clamber out of the grave. How ironic would it be if he ended up digging his own grave? He imagined the small man would get a kick out of it.

  He hefted the plastic-clad corpse from the Lexus. He possessed enough strength to lift the body over the seemingly mile-high trunk lip, but not enough to stop it from rolling out and crashing to the ground. On his knees, he rolled the dead drug dealer to the edge of the grave. He went to give the corpse one final roll when he stopped. He couldn’t bury it with the plastic on. It would take forever to decompose. He’d have to remove the drug dealer from his packaging. It was a simple task, but Todd didn’t relish it. The stink associated with releasing the three-day-old corpse from its shroud turned his stomach, but it had to be done. He retrieved the box cutter from his purchases and sliced open the plastic. He didn’t allow himself time to psyche himself out of doing this. He just dropped to his knees in front of the corpse, stuck the blade in at the head and ran the keen edge all the way down to the feet. There was no finesse or skill to this action and he took no care to avoid cutting the clothes or the body. He held his breath as the stench poured from the rapidly expanding slit. He gagged, but the moment the body was free of the plastic, Todd r
olled it into the grave. It struck the bottom of the hole with a satisfying thud.

  Fluids rested in the folds of the plastic sheeting. Todd gagged again and he kicked the plastic in with the body. There was no way he was taking that back with him.

  The drug dealer’s leaking residues galvanized Todd. He snatched up the shovel and thrashed at the freely dug earth, piling it back onto the stinking body. His disgust petered out when he’d filled the grave three-quarters full. After a short break, he piled on the rest of the dirt and smoothed it over. It looked pretty good, even under moonlight.

  He fell behind the wheel of the Lexus and drove off the property. Hitting the road, he realized that half his problems were over. He just had to offload the car and he was free. He wondered if the Lexus came with any papers—crooked or straight. He reached over to the glove box and popped it open. A nickel-plated .357 fell out into the passenger side foot well.

  Todd slammed on the brakes. The gun slid across the carpeting. He picked it up. Another present from the small man? he wondered. He rifled through the glove box’s contents. No registration, but there was a cell phone. The phone would come in handy. He switched it on and slipped it into the door pocket.

  He examined the revolver. It was loaded and well maintained. He didn’t like guns, but like the phone, it would come in handy. “You really want to see me burn, don’t you?” he said to the absent small man and returned it to the glove box.

  Todd went to pull away but hesitated. His gut churned. Something still wasn’t right. It wasn’t enough. He felt there was more. Anything less was beneath the small man. The car concealed another unseen surprise. He smelled it as strongly as he had the corpse.

  He shined his flashlight under the car. Nothing dangled underneath and he didn’t find anything in the engine bay or hidden in the trunk. He turned his focus to the Lexus’ interior. Still, nothing. He knew he wasn’t wrong. His punishment wasn’t over. Kneeling on the ground, he thumped the rear seat in frustration. His fist bounced off the rock hard backseat.