Off the Beaten Path (25 page)

Kristin kicked off her shoes and tip toed across the hard wood floor over to the king sized bed. She grabbed one of the throw pillows of the bed and quietly went back to where Sam was vigilantly guarding the door. Kristin lay down on the floor with the pillow resting it against Sam’s Left side; Sam didn’t move a muscle when Kristin’s head came to rest against her fur covered rib cage. She knew that there was no chance of drifting off to sleep but she closed her eyes and tried to relax. Kristin also knew that if anything out of the ordinary happened in the house she would be the first to know, probably even before Jack, thanks to Sam.

Jack moved slowly along the bedroom wall until he reached the bathroom door. He turned off the bathroom light that Kristin had turned on and crouched down in a low squat. Even though Jack had turned off the bathroom light, the sky-light coming from the ceiling of the bedroom was still spilling a diffused yellow glow over the entire room. Jack was trying to decide if this was a good thing or a bad thing. He stayed in the crouch and moved across the room until he reached the bed. From his hunkered down position beside the bed he ruffled the bed covers and stuffed a couple pillows under the covers to look like there were two people in the bed. He laughed to himself at this lame stunt that probably only worked in the movies.

When Jack finished rearranging the bed he realized that he had an important choice to make, wood or glass. There were only two ways into the bedroom, which position should he taking up to give himself
the best strategic advantage. He swiveled his eyes back and forth between the glass patio door and the wood door that led to the hallway. He asked himself, if he was breaking into this room which way he would choose to gain access. Coming through the wooden door that came from the hallway would mean that he would first have to get into the house through a door or a window. Then he would have to make his way through the house and up the stairs without being heard. There was also a good chance that the bedroom door would be locked, another barrier. Climbing up to the balcony and coming in through the patio door would mean fewer barriers to get through, but it would also mean that he would be visible through the glass patio doors to anyone inside, especially with the full moon blazing down from the cloudless sky.

While Jack was weighing his options he crept quietly over to closet and turned the handle as slowly as he could. Jack eased open the door and let himself into the walk-in closet, he didn’t dare turn the light on. He groped around in the dark until his fingers came to rest on the item he was searching for. He picked it up the item and slipped out of the closet. Then he moved quickly back across the room over to the patch of bare wall next to the patio door. Just as he reached the spot against the wall where he would wait he heard the horses give a nervous bray, a sound that they usually let out when they sensed danger.

Gerard saw the light go out in the kitchen and watched as the cowboy crossed the floor and turned off the lights in the living room. He waited to see if any other lights came on in the house, none did. After a couple minutes Gerard went around back of the barn where he could see the north side of the house, there was a light on in a small window on the second floor that looked like it might be a bathroom window. He watched the window with the nervous anticipation of a hunter watching its prey.

As Gerard waited he thought back to the first assignment that Clarence had hired him for. The week after Kristin had filed for divorce Clarence had hired Gerard to keep an eye on his ex-wife, to follow her. After about three weeks Gerard reported that a man had taken an interest in Kristin, Clarence had become enraged. He picked up a glass paperweight off his desk and threw it against the wall with such force that it dislodged a picture off the wall in the adjacent waiting area. The new receptionist flinched and bolted out of her chair and into the office to see what the problem was. Clarence had ordered her out of the office with a spitting snarl, a week later the receptionist quit.

Gerard’s Monday morning report to Clarence detailed how a handsome younger man had approached Kristin repeatedly at the upscale gym she worked out at. At first Kristin had been cordial but detached; she had sweetly turned down the man’s advances. But eventually the man had eroded her resistance and Kristin had agreed to dinner with him the previous Friday evening.

Gerard had done his research over the weekend. He had discovered that the persistent suitor was an ambitious stock broker with the Seattle office of a Wall Street investment firm. He was smart, extremely handsome, professionally and personally driven and seemed to be rather full of himself.

In his report, Gerard had provided the date, time, and location of the dinner date along with fifteen glossy eight by ten pictures of the evening, including a perfectly innocent good night peck on the cheek by the man. Clarence saw nothing innocent about anything in the report.

After the receptionist retreated meekly back to her station, Clarence had been very blunt, he stabbed the picture on his desk with a violent thrust of his expensive Cross pen and announced in a low growl,

“This guy needs to go away.”

Gerard had planned a wonderful little surprise for the stock broker on his Monday morning commute. He spent the next week following the stock broker to work every morning, and like most successful people he was a creature of habit. He left the apartment every morning at precisely five forty five and immediately jumped onto the I-5 northbound for the seven mile jaunt into the city. He took the James street exit into downtown, headed for the gym where he had first seen Kristin.

Just like clock-work. The first thing Monday morning the stock broker jumped into his metallic blue Porsche 911 and raced out of his parking garage, ecstatic that he would hopefully see his latest drop dead gorgeous love interest. The Friday night date had been flawless with one slight exception, that it had not ended as he had hoped, all in good time he thought to himself, all in good time.

When the stock broker climbed into the polished Porsche he hadn’t noticed the small puddle of brake fluid that had pooled just inside the left front tire. The brake line had not been cut outright; Gerard had placed two small and very selective punctures in the brake-line about
six inches apart. If he had cut sliced completely through the brake line all of the brake fluid would spurt out the first time he stepped on the brakes. This way the oily red liquid would drain out of the brake lines a little at a time until the moment that the arrogant asshole really needed them, then nothing. The brake pedal would slide effortlessly to the floorboard and the stock-broker would have that, “Oh Shit” look on his face. A look that Gerard wished he could be there to see in person.

The Porsche 911 shot up the on ramp to the interstate like one of those rocket sleds on rails. The stock broker was doing ninety miles per hour by the time he reached the top of the ramp. He backed off a little, “No sense in starting the day with a speeding ticket,” he thought to himself.

Then he said out loud with a mischievous laugh, “To hell with the speed limit,” and punched the accelerator. The speedometer on the 911 was hitting one hundred and twenty miles per hour before you could blink an eye. The problem was that the Porsche didn't feel like he was blasting down the highway at over a hundred miles an hour, it felt more like seventy five or eighty miles an hour in a regular car. Even though it had been a long time since he had been in a regular car.

There was hardly anyone else on the interstate at this hour and he felt pretty damn good, in fact he felt invincible. He thought about that Will Smith movie, I am legend, and found himself fantasizing about being one of the last people alive on earth. He saw himself with a different car for each day of the week, hell, and each day of the month. The thought of doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted without penalty or consequence made him damn near euphoric. No rules, no speed limits, no traffic, and damn sure no cops.

The stock broker was deep into his last man on earth fantasy when he came around a curve in the highway and saw something so overwhelming that it didn't seem possible. It might have been because he had just been thinking about a movie or the fact that he was traveling at over one hundred miles per hour but the vision in front of
him didn't seem real. When his mind finally grasp that the twenty or thirty cars with their brake lights on, the two dozen cop cars, and the eighteen wheeler laying on its side were very real it was too late. Out of pure reflex his hand shot to the gear shifter and his right foot dynamited the brake petal.

Something was wrong, his foot and the brake petal were pressed as far as they would go to the floor and nothing had happened. No ABS brakes pumping hard to slow the 911 back to a legal speed, no screaming tires grabbing at the highway for traction, and worst of all, no series reduction in speed. The look in his eyes was more than shock or surprise, it was pure terror. But despite being gripped with almost complete panic, he did the only thing his mind and reflexes would let him do. He jerked the wheel hard to the left and away from the bedlam directly in front of him.

Something inside him would not allow him to just plow into the chaotic scene no matter what the consequences. It was the same reflex that made a fighter pilot stay with his plane and turn it away from a housing subdivision when he could just as easily bale out and save himself.

The slick blue Porsche snapped hard to the left without the slightest hesitation and both the stock broker and the car were headed straight for the dull gray guardrail. As the car swerved to the left away from the rolled over tractor trailer the stock broker saw another fly in the ointment. The stretch of guardrail that he was closing in on at a heart pounding one hundred and fifteen miles per hour was already pretty well mangled. It appeared that the shredded metal in front of him had either been a result of or the cause of the tractor trailer currently laying across the interstate. In a split second the stock broker determined that he had done everything he could do to avoid the inevitable and the only thing he could do now was just hang on and see what happened.

There was a heightened sense of awareness to sitting at an accident sight and waiting for your turn to squeeze from the normal five lanes of traffic into the single lane that the cops seemed to always set up at every crash sight. People looked in their rear view mirrors more than they needed to, and for good reason. Who wants to be sitting helpless in traffic and get rear-ended by some damn fool driving one-hundred and twenty miles an hour in a shiny blue Porsche 911? So that commuters sitting at the crash-sight that morning in the early morning light that were looking in their rear view mirrors got one hell of a show.

What the people sitting at a dead stop had just witnessed happened in the blink of an eye. The first thing they saw was a pair of low headlights shooting around the bend in the road. They could tell even in the early morning light that the car behind the headlights was coming at them faster than anyone should be going, even on a deserted road. What struck them as odd was that the car did not appear to be making any attempt to brake or even slow down, at one point it simply turned and headed for a gap in the guardrail. That is when most of the people watching recognized the low smooth lines of the Porsche. They watched in slow motion horror as a jagged piece of the guardrail caught the front left corner of the blue car and flipped it into the air like a catapult. The car was rolling over in the air like a side of beef on a BBQ spit, and then it was gone, the car simply disappeared from sight.

The people at the back of the traffic jam jumped out of their cars and ran to the edge of the guardrail where they had last seen the blue sports car. The people closest to the edge of the guardrail that got there first could still see what was left of the Porsche rolling over and over sideways across the northbound lanes of I-5. There were no cars in the northbound lanes and the car finally came to rest on its wheels in the ditch on the other side of the interstate.

What the onlookers standing at the guardrail watching the horrendous wreck didn't notice was the silver BMW come around the curve and pull over to the guardrail less than thirty seconds after the Porsche launched into the air. The man in the tailored Brooks Brothers suit got out of his BMW and mingled with the crowd. He didn't say a word, he just listened intently. What he overheard ran somewhere between, “Damn fool,” and “The guy driving that car is a hero, he could have run right into the back of me but he choose to veer away from the traffic jam.”

After listening for a minute or two and being completely satisfied that the group of onlookers had as many different versions of what they had seen as there were people that had witnessed the accident he turned and walked away. He climbed back into the silver BMW and fired up the engine, they would not even remember that he had been there.

Gerard cut across the five lanes of the highway behind the thirty or so abandon cars with their driver side doors open and their engines still running. The flying Porsche had attracted the attention of almost all of the people waiting to get around the rolled over eighteen wheeler. The people that hadn't actually seen the flying Porsche noticed other people running from their cars and had followed them to see what they were running to look at. This was more than he had hoped for, at best he thought that the brakes on the stock-brokers car would fail as he came down the off ramp at James Street. Clarence thought that the Porsche would hit or sideswipe another car or at best hit a tree or a bridge abutment, doing a half gainer off a twenty foot embankment was a God Damn work of art.