Page 58 of Bucked Hard
“Rachel?” I grip the receiver so tight my knuckles crack and the plastic handle crunches.
Silence.
My heart is in my throat. It’s her, I can feel it.
“Rachel! Where are you?”
Static crackles for a moment, then her voice comes through. Hard and cold. “Put Jessie on the phone.” Her stoic words send a chill through me.
“No, where are you? I’m coming. Just tell me where you—”
Click. The line goes dead.
“Fuck.”
Jessie narrows her eyes at me.
“I’m going to say this once.” She jabs her cane in the air toward me. “That girl’s been through too much in her years already. If you aren’t the man I think you are, if you’ve done something to hurt her, so help me, Lord Jesus, I’ll commit every sin necessary to hurt you in ways the good Lord will never forgive.”
I raise my hands in a show of surrender. The last thing we need is to be fighting among ourselves. “I don’t know what’s going on. But I’ll swear on any bible you’ve got, I couldn’t hurt her if the devil himself demanded it.”
“Then what are you standing here for?” Jessie waves her cane at the door as I’m heading that way. “Go bring her home,” she shouts after me.
Leroy is hot on my heels and when I open the door to the pickup he jumps in, three legs or four, he’s ready to go. Sitting himself in the passenger seat and giving me the stink eye.
“I’m tellin’ ya,” I grumble as I climb in next to him, “I didn’t do a goddamn thing to our girl. But I’m sure as shit going to find out who did.”
My first drive by is her friend Tabitha’s apartment. But after knocking so hard on the door that it started to move in the frame, and pressing my face onto every window, I’m satisfied that there’s no one there.
So my next stop is where it all began. The chill in her voice over the phone at Jessie’s will not leave me. I know there is something wrong and if I didn’t know it before, I know beyond a shadow of any doubt it is my purpose in life to put right anything in her life that goes wrong.
My phone goes off in my pocket as I pull out of Tabitha’s parking lot and onto Route 2, heading toward Crutches. There’s oncoming traffic, but I punch through the first gap I see, spinning my tires and then darting my eyes from the open road ahead to the text on the screen of my phone.
Roger: Man, I swear to God I just saw your brother.
My brother. Leander. What the fuck?
Hammers immediately begin pounding in my temples and my mind is spinning. I jerk the steering wheel to the right, slamming on the brakes as soon as I’m at the side of the road and skidding to a halt.
I punch up Roger’s number. This isn’t a texting kind of conversation. It barely rings before his voice comes on and I cut him off.
“What the fuck? Start talking, you think you saw him?”
“Well, think ain’t exactly accurate. He’s hard to miss, you know? I was back up in Meyer taking care of some family business. I drove back this way through Plythesville. Driving down Main Street and he was slithering out of The Brass Bucket.”
The Brass Bucket is a dive hang out and used to be Leander’s second home. The type of clientele they get in there isn’t the kind you bring home to Mama, that’s for sure. The blood drains from my face. Leander’s not supposed to be out for another six months and I guess somewhere deep down, I’d hoped even when he did get out, I would never see nor hear anything about him again.
“Jesus.”
“Sorry, man. I didn’t think you knew.” Roger coughs and I can tell there’s more. I give him a second as I try to steady my breath. “Then he got into a gold Impala. Your mom’s old car. The one that was stolen, right? Well I guess it turned up after all.”
“Fuck. I don’t even fucking know what to think right now.”
“I followed him until he took a turn down RR 2. I would have followed him farther, but I had to get home. I had a sick horse and the vet was on the way.”
RR 2 isn’t much but cornfields. Jessie’s place is down there, but so are a dozen other farms and smallholdings and it’s a main route toward the interstate. It’s a hell of a stretch of country road. He could have been headed out of the state for all I know.
I say a silent prayer hoping that’s the case as I sign off with Roger and hit the gas. Leander’s part of the past, and Rachel’s part of the future. I hope he finds his way far away from here and I never have to deal with his sorry ass again. But right now, I have to find her. That’s all that matters.
