Break Down

Break Down
by Sonia Suedfeld

The gas station was one of those all-in-one, pump-and-rest stops strategically located every forty or fifty miles along desolate stretches of highway - the kind of place where the main building serves as garage/restaurant/convenience store, offering every amenity to passing travellers. The kind of place where one could purchase gas, an order of burger and fries to go, and even cold beer and live bait from the same giant cooler in the back of the crowded store.

On my way north to spend the holidays with my mother, I hadn’t pulled off the highway on this late and chilly Christmas Eve afternoon for any of those things. My tank was nearly full, I wasn’t the least bit hungry and I couldn’t imagine selecting a six-pack of beer and a Styrofoam container of worms at the same time, for any reason, in this lifetime or the next. I had only stopped for a quick caffeine fix; all I held in my gloved hand was a large Colombian Roast, double-double.

There were two people ahead of me in the checkout line, an older woman in a pink knit scarf and matching hat and a balding man in his late thirties who was turning every so often to look at me out of the corner of his eye.

I pretended not to notice and sipped my coffee instead, letting my eyes roam along the shelves packed with merchandise and the walls and windows covered in paper Santas and reindeers and strings of blinking, coloured lights. They abruptly stopped when they landed on the front page of The Times, the newspaper I had worked for in the city, piled high by the register.

“Third victim found shot to death” proclaimed the headline above a photograph of a handsome, smiling man with dark hair and warm, brown eyes.

I reached around the balding man to grab a copy of the newspaper where I had worked as a copy editor for the last seven years. Until just over a week ago.

Bastards, I thought. They even had the gall to blame it on downsizing, as if that would cushion the blow.

With teeth clenched, I focused on the page.

“Dennis James was found dead in his Ford F-150 along Highway 77-A, just outside the small town of Bellingford, early yesterday morning by a passing motorist,” read the cutline under the photograph. “The 43-year-old computer analyst died of a single gunshot wound to the chest.”

I quickly read the accompanying story. The man had left behind a wife and three small children, all under the age of eight. A friend of the family was quoted as saying: “This is a tragedy, especially with Christmas just around the corner. Dennis was a great guy, a wonderful father… there’s no reason anyone would want to kill him, no reason in the world.”

The other two previous victims, also white men in their thirties, were also found dead in their vehicles along remote highways out of the city, killed by a single gunshot wound to the chest. The first, John Guthrie, had been found just over a week ago; Maurice Leblanc’s body was discovered four days later. With few leads in the case, investigators were appealing to the public to come forward with any information which might lead to the apprehension of the killer or killers. There was even a reward of $50,000.

I felt the prick of tears in my eyes, thinking about the victims. I thought about Dennis James’s poor wife and wondered how she would carry on now, all alone with three small kids to raise.

And how would I carry on, I wondered, without my job?

“Some bad shit, eh?”

The man ahead of me had turned all the way around and was indicating the newspaper with a wave of the beef jerky stick he was holding in his hand.

I blinked a couple of times and gave him one of those polite smiles meant to discourage conversation, but it was apparently lost on him.

“That poor bastard… pardon my French, but that’s some bad way to go, man,” he said with a continuous shake of his balding head. “Shot right in the chest, wasn’t he?”

There was something I didn’t like about him, something about the way his eyes shifted around and didn’t quite meet my own when he looked at me that made me feel slightly uneasy.

I gave him another very brief smile and nodded. “That’s what they’re saying.”

“Saw it on the news today,” the man went on, still shaking his head. “Nice family guy… had three little kids and everything. Poor son-of-a-bitch. Makes no sense why someone would kill him like that... and two days before Christmas, for God’s sake.”

“It’s terrible. Just awful.”

The woman with the pink scarf and hat left and the man moved ahead, placing his beef jerky on the counter.

“There were two others, you know.” He had lowered his voice and spoke out of the corner of his mouth, aiming the words over his shoulder at me. “All three were shot dead in their trucks, apparently.”

I watched him fish two rumpled twenties out of his pocket and hand them to the teenaged, pimply-faced clerk manning the cash register. “Yeah, just this and the thirty bucks of gas,” he told the boy and then, turning towards me, “The cops are stumped, you know… they couldn’t figure it out if their lives depended on it.”

“Really.”

“Yeah, but you know, I’ve got this theory. All those guys were probably low-life, scum-sucking dealers selling drugs to kids,” he went on, accepting change from the clerk and smirking in my direction, “and got exactly what they deserved.”

I couldn’t help the incredulous look that crossed my face. Could this man really believe that? Or could it be that I knew far too much, as usual, having been in the newspaper business all those years?

Probably. But any fairly intelligent person should have been able to deduce that three murdered men - all killed in the same cold-blooded way along quiet roads and highways north of the city and all in the last week - did not equal drug dealers offing one another for whatever reason - money, territory, a deal gone bad. There was something far more insidious going on, something far more horrifying, and I knew I wasn’t the only one who knew so.

Although the investigating cops hadn’t so much as whispered the words ‘serial killer’ yet, everyone knew only one person was responsible; everyone knew the cases were linked. Everyone except this man, apparently.

But I said none of those things as I watched him pocket his change and his beef jerky, and move aside so I could pay for my coffee and newspaper.

“Hi, how are you this afternoon?” the clerk asked in a voice that cracked on the last syllable. His face glowed as red as the neon sign announcing ‘Cold Beer Sold Here’ in the window behind him.

“Fine, thank-you,” I answered, handing him a crisp five out of my wallet.

“It wouldn’t surprise me, you know,” the bald man went on, oblivious to the pained expression on my face. The clerk, however, caught my look and smiled in sympathy. “What do they call it, you know, when bad guys like that kill each other off?”

“Cleaning house?” offered the clerk as he handed me my change and my purchases in a bag, and wished me a merry Christmas.

“Yeah, that’s it,” the man said, falling into step beside me as I headed for the door. “Cleaning house. Makes the cops’ jobs a hell of a lot easier, eh? What did you say your name was?”

He had followed me to the driver’s door of my silver Acura and showed no signs of getting lost any time soon. My unease deepened and I felt annoyance, too, coursing just under the surface.

“I didn’t.”

“Right,” he said, his eyes shifting around the parking lot before coming to rest on mine for a fleeting moment. “Well, I’m Gerard… just call me Gerry. All my friends do. And you are?”

“Running late. I’m sorry, but I really must get going.”

My tone must have been harsher than I realized because a hurt look crossed his face. “Well, Running,” he said, quickly recovering and chuckling at his own joke, “it was real nice talking to you. Drive safe now and have a Merry Christmas.”

“You, too.”

I escaped inside my Acura and watched him walk over to a blue GMC Sierra parked at the self-serve pumps. He climbed inside, but not before he had turned to look at me one last time, smiling and waving.

Gooseflesh broke out over my arms; nausea rolled in my stomach.

“Goddamned pick-ups,” I muttered as I started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot, leaving behind clouds of gravel dust hanging like ghosts in the air.

*****

Ten minutes along the highway, I could fight it no more.

Pulling over onto the shoulder, the memory was a tidal wave, huge and terrifying as it crashed inside my mind, and suddenly I was there again, reliving the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

Just over four and a half years ago, I was held captive for eight hours by a man who had offered me a ride after I broke down on the side of a country road. A road much like this highway, come to think of it, long and straight and bordered on either side by miles upon miles of forest. A road a lot like this two-lane highway, I thought in panic as I started looking around, remote and spooky and hiding a million spots where a man could rape and torture a woman in the dirty cab of his brown pick-up truck for hours on end and never worry about another soul coming along.

It had been a Friday, late afternoon, summer only two weeks away. A day that had started like any other; a day that would end like no other. A nightmare that would last for all eternity.

I’d been about twenty-five minutes into a fifty-minute commute home from The Times when trouble hit. The highway I always took home was actually a deserted country road through farmland and forest and stretched as far as the eye could see. The windows were down, the wind whipped through my hair, Tom Petty was on the radio. And white smoke was pouring from under the hood of my sage-green ‘92 Toyota Tercel.

There’d been no warning of any kind; no ‘service engine soon’ message had popped up anywhere. I had just enough time to pull the smoking car off the road before the engine sputtered one last time and died. Swearing served no purpose, but I did it anyway, shouting terrible words at the top of my lungs especially when I discovered I was in a dead spot - my cell phone was out of serviceable range.

Twenty miles from home, stranded on a deserted country road, I waited ten minutes for the first car to come along. An older couple inside, they zoomed by without even slowing down. The next car, some five minutes later, actually slowed but didn’t stop. It was another ten minutes before the brown pick-up truck came along.

It pulled up ahead of my still-smoking Tercel. I watched a muscular young man with short, spiky blond hair climb out and approach my car with a smile on his face. He was very good-looking and reminded me a little of my girlfriend’s husband, tall and lanky and deeply tanned from working in the sun.

“Afraid I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you, sweetheart,” he drawled with a slow smile as he came up to the driver’s side window of my car and bent over to look in at me. “Which do you want first?”

I smiled back, looking into a pair of laughing blue eyes. “Well, the bad news I think I already know.” I indicated the smoking hood of my car with a nod of my head. “The transmission just blew, didn’t it? So what’s the good news? You’re a mechanic, just passing by?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, no, ’fraid not. But I can give you a ride, take you anywhere you want to go.”

I didn’t think twice about accepting a ride from him. He told me his name was Tony as we climbed into the truck. I told him mine was Rachel as we buckled our seatbelts. Then we were off.

The first stirring of unease didn’t hit me until he’d turned down a road I’d never travelled before, a road he assured me was a little-known shortcut into the small town where I lived. Full-blown panic set in a few minutes later when he pulled onto a dirt path in a forested area and parked his truck in a thicket of trees and bushes. Then there was nothing but cold, white fear as he pounced on me.

I screamed, I cried, I fought. He laughed as he beat me with his fists, held a hunting knife to my throat, and stripped me naked. He smiled as he tied my hands behind my back, burned my chest with cigarettes, and raped me over and over again, sometimes so brutally I could feel my flesh tearing and blood leaking down my legs.

The more I screamed, the more I cried, the more I fought, the more he seemed to enjoy himself and the more he drank, guzzling vodka straight from a bottle he’d pulled out from under the driver’s seat. And the more he drank, the more sadistic and cruel he became. The more depraved and monstrous.

To this day I cannot speak about some of the things he did to me during those long, hellish hours. But I remember everything. I remember praying for him to kill me so the nightmare would end.

Hours later, when night had fallen and it was dark and cold in the cab of the truck, I finally managed to free my hands, wrestle the bottle away from him and smash it over his head with every ounce of strength I had left. He crumpled against the door, knocked out cold and bleeding from a gash in his forehead, and I sobbed in relief.

Finding my clothes and leaving the truck, I hobbled my way out of the dark forest and along the road back to the highway where I flagged down the first vehicle I saw - a transport truck. Seeing the state I was in, the driver took me directly to the nearest hospital where I spent the next few hours being examined for a rape kit, treated for my injuries, and interviewed at length by the police.

Not that it did any good. To this day, the monster who held me captive remains free, despite everything the cops did to track and catch him, despite everything I did to help them. Free to rape, free to torture, maybe even free to kill.

And that’s what haunts me most of all - knowing I was probably not the first and certainly not the last, knowing that others might not have survived.

*****
A blinding flash of light, twin beams of headlights in my rear-view mirror. I blinked several times, startled, as I came back to the present.

I glanced at my watch. Only a few minutes had passed, but in that time, freezing rain had begun to fall, temperatures had dropped, and twilight had deepened all around me. I felt cold seeping into my bones.

The headlights flashed again in my rear-view mirror; a vehicle was slowly approaching.

I saw the blur of the driver’s face through the passenger side window as the vehicle passed me. I saw red brake lights as the vehicle pulled onto the shoulder some fifty yards ahead of me. I saw the vehicle stop and the lights wink out.

The vehicle was a pick-up truck.

Fear clawed like icy fingers at my throat and all I could hear inside my car were the sounds of my panicked breathing and galloping heart.

But there was no time to waste. Throwing open the door of my car and stepping outside, my boots sank into wet gravel and rain slashed at my exposed face, needle-sharp and bitingly cold. I barely noticed. Every fibre of my being, every cell of my body, was focused on one thing and one thing only - the pick-up truck parked ahead of me on this godforsaken stretch of dark highway.

I started towards it, almost running.

Along the tailgates, I made out the letters GMC, and along the side, Sierra. The truck appeared to be black or navy blue in the gathering darkness, and looked exactly like the truck I had seen at the gas station pumps a few miles back. Could it be the same one? The one that annoying man had climbed in?

Gerry, I remembered as I came up to the driver’s side window and rapped hard on the wet glass with a fisted hand.

The window began to lower and a second later, I saw that I was right. Gerry stared down at me, a huge smile splitting his face.

“Hey, hi! It’s me, Gerry, remember? From the gas station? I thought that was your car back there… that’s why I pulled over. What a coincidence!”

“Isn’t it, though?”

“You’re telling me! Makes you realize just how small the world really is,” Gerry drawled with a long shake of his balding head. “So, do you need some help? Did you break down back there?”

I smiled. “Yes. Yes, I think I did.”

“Well, don’t just stand out there… that freaking rain’s cold, man. Hop in and get warm,” he invited.

I was still smiling as I walked around the front of the truck to the passenger side, opened the door, and pulled myself up into the cab. Heat blasted my face as I closed the door and leaned back against the seat.

“So if you’re broken down, I can call a tow for you or give you a ride to where you’re going, or whatever you want,” Gerry went on, looking over at me. “Christmas Eve and all… it’s a hell of a night to break down on the side of the highway.”

“Isn’t it, though?” I said again, smiling at him, as I slipped my gloved hand out of the pocket of my coat.

I aimed the gun straight at his heart and pulled the trigger.

Gerry’s body jerked once, then slumped against the driver’s door. He died with a look of complete surprise on his face.

Just like the others.


(Note: This story was short-listed in the 2006 Scene of the Crime Short Story Contest, and was chosen as the second place winner in the 2007 Cape Fear Crime Festival Short Story Contest in North Carolina.)