“Slow down,” said the boy. “The turnoff’s coming up.”
The Plymouth rolled to a crawl.
“There it is,” said Ricky.
Serge couldn’t see anything down the dirt road, but he did make out fresh tire tracks leading into the field. “Ricky, you need to trust me. Get out and wait here by the road for the others for your own good. This is my specialty and I work alone.” He pulled something from under the seat and Ricky opened the door. “And you didn’t see this.”
“What gun?” Ricky closed the door.
Serge hit his high beams and sped off into the black desolation of the cane field . . .
Soon, other headlights came up the highway. They caught Ricky waving madly on the side of the road. Calhoun pulled alongside. “What’s happening?”
Ricky stuck his head in the window. “He went in after him. And I’m not supposed to tell you, but he has a gun.”
“Shit!” Lamar cut the wheel and raced his car down the dirt road . . .
Serge’s lights eventually hit the back of Captain Crack’s pickup. Dark and empty. Bad sign. “Coleman, wait in the car. I may need you to drive this out of here in a hurry.”
Serge planted his feet in the soil and crouched to listen. A brief gust of wind carried a snippet of noise. He crept like a ghost in its direction, quietly parting cane stalks. The sound grew louder. Voices. Soon they weren’t hard to follow. The captain had chucked all his business rules. He chugged Johnnie Walker straight from the bottle as Chris lay crying in the dirt at his feet. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Shut up!” A swift kick to her ribs. “Just dig!”
“I’m trying!”
More weeping, more kicks, more Scotch. Chris trembling too much to make progress in the soil. It wasn’t going anyplace good.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
She heard a click and looked up and saw the cocked pistol. “No!”
Then another sound, unexpected. The clack of metal on skull.
Captain Crack thudded to the dirt like an unhooked punching bag. In the space where he had been standing, another person now stood. Chris recognized him as someone she had just met back at the burger joint.
She ran crying into his arms.
He quickly held Chris out by the shoulders. “You have to pull yourself together. I know you can do it! Others are counting on you, okay?”
She nodded and stifled her sobs down to sniffles.
“Good,” said Serge. “If I’m correct, Coach Calhoun should be arriving just about now. I need you to walk straight down this one row of cane and start calling out for him.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Chris.
“You and Ricky and the other kids deserve to be happy. And safe. And that will never happen under the status quo.” Serge nodded in the direction of the cane. “Now get going. And don’t look back . . .”
“Coach Calhoun! Coach Calhoun! . . .”
Lamar’s headlights had just hit Serge’s Plymouth parked behind a pickup truck. He slammed the brakes and got out.
“Coach Calhoun! Coach Calhoun! . . .”
Lamar looked at Kyle and Cheyenne. “Did you hear that?”
“It’s coming from over there!”
They crashed through stalks. “Chris! We’re over here! We’re on the way!”
Moments later, they all burst through the last rows of cane, and everyone embraced in terrified relief.
“What happened?” asked Calhoun.
“I don’t know,” said Chris. “The guy was going to kill me for sure. I just know it. But then that friend of yours came out of nowhere.”
“And where are they now?”
She shrugged. “He just told me to leave and not look back.”
Kyle and Cheyenne glanced at each other. They heard sirens in the distance. A lot of them.
Calhoun took off his Pahokee football jacket and wrapped it around Chris’s shoulders. “We need to get you to my car.”
Back at the highway, Ricky was waving a long line of police cars down the dirt road. Blue and red lights flashed through the crops as the speeding vehicles kicked up a long plume of black dust.
The officers arrived at Calhoun’s car just as the former coach and the others emerged safely with Chris.
But the ’69 Plymouth and pickup truck were gone.
Highway 78 Revisited
High beams pierced the black countryside.
Nothingness for miles. The pickup’s windows were down, allowing a cool night breeze to accompany the peaceful, silent, green glow from the instrument panel.
It hadn’t started that way. In the passenger seat, the captain had been quite chatty. What do you want? I have money. I’ll give you anything. Blah, blah, blah.
Serge put a stop to the annoyance with another bloody skull crack from his Colt .45. Calmly as a librarian: “Shhhh . . . I’m enjoying the tranquil drive.” He kept the pistol in his left hand, aiming across the pickup’s cab as he steered with his right.
It was indeed a mellow ride. Dim fields of wildflowers under the economic light of a crescent moon. More miles of blood-pressure-reducing serenity through the wilderness.
Finally, Serge let off the gas, and the pickup truck from a marine-towing company uneventfully rolled to a stop with the sound of small crushed white rocks under the tires. He ordered the good captain out of the car at gunpoint.
A gold Plymouth arrived and parked behind. “Coleman, wait here until I get back.”
A hike began. Crack Nasty looked around in the night landscape. Emptiness only led to even more emptiness. His thoughts pinballed as they can at a moment like this. Heaven, hell, God, the devil. Anything you want! I’m begging! Crack!
Another half hour.
Serge poked a gun barrel in ribs. “Walk down the bank and watch your step.”
It was precarious, with loose soil and gravel collapsing and rolling down the incline under their feet, but they made it with only a couple of stumbles. They arrived at a modest shoreline.
“We’re here,” said Serge. “Sit down.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Wait for someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s your problem,” said Serge. “Your least.”
They sat, as they say in kindergarten, crisscross applesauce, amid sounds of insects and bullfrogs and rustling leaves.
Serge’s ears perked, and he stood. “Here they come.”
“Who?”
“Like I said, I don’t know.”
“You’re insane, aren’t you?”
“My gain is your loss.”
Crack Nasty opened his mouth to scream, but Serge bashed him once more before he could get it out. “Try to yell again, and it’s game over. Two taps to the head. But play nice and you might get away. Here’s my offer: If you behave and wait until I release you, you’re free to swim for it. But utter a peep, even in the water, and I can plug you way over here. Deal? Just nod.”
He nodded.
“Great! A cooperator! Sit still . . .” Serge listened intently as the distant motorized sound grew louder. “That’s the person I’ve been waiting for. Okay, Florida Man, take off all your clothes.”