Blood Trade

CHAPTER 1-1

January 16th, 2002

Wednesday

Chapter 1

He kept his distance from her car, letting up on the gas pedal just long enough to release her rear bumper from the imposing beams of his headlights. The evening had already been awkward enough. The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was following her back to her apartment to begin a new round of arguing.

If the traffic weren’t so sparse, it wouldn’t have been a worry. He would have just faded into a sea of other beams and she never would have even known he was still there. It would have spared him the mental torment of worrying about what might be bouncing off the walls of his twenty-year-old daughter’s head as she glanced into her rearview mirror. He’d already caught her doing it twice.

Andrew Carson didn’t have an appetite for more drama. He had no interest in further badgering Katelyn about wasting her time and energy on a loser boyfriend who had no ambition and didn’t treat her right. He certainly hadn’t the stomach to listen to more details of how blissful his ex-wife’s life was with her new husband, either. Katelyn clearly liked her new stepfather, which made the repeated mention of him even harder to swallow.

All Andrew wanted right then was to clear his head and get over to the 24-hour Walmart to pick up some supplies for an accounting conference down in Colorado Springs the next morning: last minute items, like printer paper and binders for his presentation of a new software line. The late night detour to the store had been planned in advance, but he’d failed to mention the side-trip to Katelyn during dinner.

He sat in gratuitous silence that soon grew cumbersome under the intermittent glare of overhead street lamps. The muteness let his mind race with odd thoughts and regret. He leaned forward and twisted an illuminated radio knob, then went for the tuner. He found an unfamiliar song that was winding its way through a long, lonely guitar solo. It seemed to fit his mood, so he returned his hand to the steering wheel.

A light drizzle that had been sprinkling down across his windshield began shaping into fine flakes of snow, much like what he’d observed the night before from the upstairs bedroom window of his bare house as he laid awake in bed, unable to sleep.

He lifted his hypnotic gaze from the back of Katelyn’s car and met his own dim reflection in the rearview mirror. He looked as tired as he felt. Above his brows dangled the bangs of his long and wavy dishwater-blond hair. He knew that most men his age would kill for such a dense mane. He mused that it was one of the few things beyond his job that he now had going for him in life.

Quickly approaching the adulthood milestone of a half century, his appearance often led others to speculate that he was younger than he was—perhaps not even a day over forty. He kept himself fairly trim, too, which added to the perception.

He certainly didn’t feel young, however. For the most part, he had physically recovered from the automobile accident that had crushed his leg two years ago, so it wasn’t his health that weighed on him. It was the emotional toll. Though his body was nearly mended, his marriage couldn’t be. For someone once so content with every aspect of his life, the strange new world of solitude and self-doubt felt like a persistent opponent intent on keeping him off a game he had forgotten how to play.

Brake lights flared brightly in front of him, and his attention swept back into focus on the road. Katelyn’s right blinker began pulsating. He smirked at the sight, knowing he needed to make the same turn.

He sighed. “Just another mile or so, sweetie, and then you’ll be rid of me for the evening.”

A years-old memory of how he used to read stories to his daughter before putting her to bed at night flickered through his head. It brought the slightest of curl to his lips, but the expression soon returned to one of sadness. It was good that they drove separate cars to the restaurant. He couldn’t imagine riding back with her in close quarters after how they’d left things. Who knows what else would have been said?

He watched her veer onto the side exit, which led down a mild slope to the waiting interstate below. He was following her maneuver with his gaze when an unexpected sight grabbed his attention. A cloudy cloak of what appeared to be fog suddenly engulfed her automobile.

His eyes absorbed the transformation of her taillights from clearly defined rectangles to a pair of red blurs inside the fog. He found himself pressing his foot down heavier on the brake pedal that he had already been pumping to make the turn.

As best he could tell, Katelyn wasn’t at all fazed by the billow that surrounded her. She even seemed to be picking up speed, prompting Andrew to speculate that she may have decided to use the opportunity as a proverbial smoke screen to put some distance between them.

His car entered the swell, and once inside, an odor of thick exhaust and burnt rubber poured in through his slightly cracked window. He quickly realized that he wasn’t inside a dense fog but rather the product of some form of combustion. The cloud was thicker to his left where plumes of it rose up from the bottom of a steep gully off the shoulder of the road. He sat up in his seat and peered out his window over the edge of the slope to try and determine its source. What he saw was another set of taillights. They pointed upward toward the top of the hill. An automobile had gone over the embankment and crashed front first at its bottom.

“Christ,” he muttered.

He quickly checked his mirrors before veering over to the opposite shoulder of the road, away from the ledge. He came to a stop about thirty yards past where the car had most likely gone over, skidding the last couple of feet along gravelly dirt. He flipped the transmission into park and twisted the ignition off.

Katelyn was already far off in the distance, speeding down the interstate, and most likely feeling relieved that he was no longer trailing her. It seemed that she hadn’t noticed it was a car accident that had caused the cloud.

When Andrew opened his door, the cold and crisp January night air quickly flooded in along the open chest of his leather jacket. Guided only by a dim dome light, his hand found the brass handle of the wooden walking cane he occasionally used where it was wedged between the passenger seat and the center console. The slope of the road had a more than moderate angle to it, so the cane could be useful.

He knew from the lingering fume in the air that the accident had to have just happened. From the glance he had stolen, the drop-off was steep, but was probably no more than forty feet in depth. It didn’t appear that the car had rolled. It possibly wasn’t even totaled. No flames were present, which made him question if the thinning cloud was even actual smoke or a combination of exhaust, scorned pavement, and possibly steam from under the hood. There was definitely a stench of antifreeze in the air.

Even if the car was spared major damage, there was a decent chance that the driver was injured. Andrew felt obligated to help.

He stepped out of his silver Lexus LS and into the brisk darkness. He clearly remembered the night that he and his family had been in that accident two years ago on a remote road in the mountains where help hadn’t arrived for thirty minutes. It had felt more like an eternity. It was a horrifying experience, especially for his teary-eyed, then teenage daughter, whose inability to pry her father free from the wreckage or wake her mother added to the chaos of the quandary. It was a night none of them would ever forget.

He wouldn’t wish such torment on his worst enemy. If there was a chance he could spare someone else from such suffering and a sense of helplessness, he was at least going to try.

Feeling the tingle of cold moisture brushing across his face, he whisked his way out from under the dull light of a street lamp and walked across the road. Once on the other side, he began making his way back to the incline to the spot where he believed the car had gone over. He could hear no moans or cries for help, only some distant, oblivious traffic from the interstate below and the crinkle of patches of frozen grass that strayed up from cracks in the pavement beneath his feet.

The brake lights of the car below were no longer on, nor were the headlights. The darkness wouldn’t let him make out the outline of the automobile or the shape of anyone who might have exited it.

“Don’t go down there!” commanded a loud, unexpected voice from the night.

The abrupt order nearly caused Andrew to drop his cane. It hadn’t come from below, but from above—further up the hill. He halted in his tracks. His head twisted back and forth as he struggled to pinpoint the voice’s source.

A pair of headlights quickly flicked on and off about twenty yards up the road from him. There was another car, a van, hidden in what was left of the diminishing cloud. It was parked along the ledge of the embankment. The flash of the lights acted as a homing beacon, sent to Andrew from the van’s driver.

He glanced down at what he could make out of the wreckage below before turning his gaze back to the parked van. He walked toward the vehicle, intermittently planting the tip of his cane into the gravel-laced shoulder as he did.

The van was a full-sized Chevy, a few years old. It looked to be white, and was possibly a work-van, though there was no company name visible on its side. As Andrew approached the vehicle, he could make out the driver’s hand draped outside of the open window, motioning him to step in closer.

“The guy’s crazy!” said the same voice, now nervous. “He was driving like a madman. The police are on their way.”

Andrew reached the driver’s side door and leaned forward to greet the man inside. Dim, blue light from the dashboard gauges offered little clarity, but enough for him to distinguish the contour of the man’s face and body. He had curly hair under a dark baseball cap and a mustache with a crowded thickness that seemed a bit outdated for the current styles. He wore thick-framed glasses with even thicker lenses and looked to be of average weight and height. He was dressed in a dark sweatshirt and jeans.

“What’s going on?” asked Andrew.

“I think he’s drunk. He was all over the road up there,” replied the man, nudging his head in the direction of the highway. “He took the turn way too fast and went over the edge.” He held what looked to be a cell phone up for Andrew to see and explained that he had already been talking on it with a dispatcher to report the erratic driving when he witnessed the crash.

Andrew nodded. “You keep saying he. Are you sure it’s a man?”

There was some hesitation. “I’m just assuming,” the man finally said. “I guess I don’t know.”

“Okay. How long has the driver been down there?” Andrew asked. He twisted his head again toward the wreckage.

“Just a few minutes. Not long.”

“You haven’t gone down there to check on him? Or her?”

“No!” The response was impulsively defensive. The man took a deep breath before continuing. “Listen, he was driving like a lunatic. He didn’t care one bit about anyone else on the road, so I say we should just let him sit down there in his car until the police come. Let them deal with him. He doesn’t deserve our help.”

“But what if he’s injured?” asked Andrew.

The man said nothing at first, and then shrugged his shoulders. “Better him than us.”

Air left Andrew’s lungs. He considered the man’s attitude, but couldn’t bring himself to share it. “Well, maybe he’s crazy or drunk, or whatever,” he said, “but he might also be injured.”

The man blew a chilly exhale from his mouth in frustration. He shook his head. The lights from the dashboard danced across his glasses.