Zero Nine Eight One F Thirty Read online

  Gaits studied Ellie’s arms once more, wondering if they’d gotten cut up in Omaha or along the road. He’d heard the roads were more treacherous than the cities now. Groups of scavengers would set up road blocks and ambush unsuspecting passersby, taking anything and everything they had before sending them on their way. And those were the ones who had a conscience. Had she lived through that kind of hell?

  “You got a gun? Your own, I mean,” Gaits said.

  “No.”

  “Well, assuming you do give mine back before night’s end——“

  “I will.”

  “Assuming you do, you can come back after dawn to find it. Walk straight out that door there, about ten paces to the broken down part of the fence. Go into the field behind it, another hundred steps. You’ll find it. You’ll need it if you’re going to keep traveling. Looks like you needed it already. So please. Take it.”

  Gaits watched as Ellie’s mind turned. Her lips opened slightly, but she remained silent.

  “Thank you,” Ellie said. She got up from the table, took her finger off the trigger, and took a seat at the bar. She placed the gun on top, offering it back to Gaits. “Talk just a little while longer?”

  OMAHA

  “Hey there, you’ve reached Martin Ponders. Sorry you’re in my pocket right now. Leave your name at the beep and I’ll get back to ya soon.”

  Beeeeeeeeep.

  “He—hello,” Gaits stammered into the phone. His lips quivered. “Listen, I——my name is Travis Gaits. I’m looking for the man who murdered my wife. He was driving a brown SUV, license plate Zero Nine Eight One F Thirty. I think he’s in Omaha. I found your daughter’s SUV stuck on County Six not far from Mile Marker Three. Thought it was the one I was looking for…there’s two silos just north of here, one with half the siding ripped off. I’d try and spot those best you can, considering the weather conditions. Your daughter is in the front seat. I shot her——”

  Gaits closed the phone and tossed it off the passenger seat. It collided with the dead girl’s leg before falling to the floor. He slammed the passenger door shut and continued his march toward Omaha.

  He spent the next forty-five minutes thinking about the girl, focused on the image of her lifeless body in the driver’s seat: quiet, at peace. Gaits wouldn’t admit it, but the thought allowed his mind a brief escape; a moment to forget what he had to do in Omaha. He reached the city limits and never thought about the girl again.

  Gaits had never heard such nothing at the edge of the city. All that remained were the crackling fires that shot into the sky from various stores and houses, the last breath of the riots from just hours before. Gone was the hustle and bustle of traffic, of businessmen and women running in and out of coffee shops and gas stations, fueling up for the day ahead. The constant dither of running engines and squealing tires and all the noise that goes unnoticed until it no longer exists.

  Gaits approached the gas station by the motel, the one he’d thought about the night before. Hot coffee and those donuts were coming. And warmth. The station was dark and lifeless and trash littered the parking lot. Through the shattered windows, Gaits could see the aisles, flooded with food, ripped-open packages, smashed items, and racks overturned every which way. The floor was sticky from spilt milk and soda; liquids were splattered across the ground and dripped from the racks, combining on the floor in a messy pool dotted with bloated fruit pies and cigarettes.

  Gaits rummaged through it, his hands covered in sludge as he tried to find something edible. He finally found a fully wrapped muffin and tore into it ravenously, then approached the coffee machine, his hope rising when he heard a low soft electric hum. He placed a cup below the machine, flipped the brew switch, and waited for the pour. No luck.

  Something rustled in the corner and Gaits raised his gun. It rustled again and he moved forward, peered around the refrigerators, and found a cat lapping up milk in the corner. A stray. A runaway in the night. He’d do just fine here.

  Gaits found a few packs of cigarettes and a lighter and shoved them in his pocket. He had quit smoking when he married Hannah, the last puff coming from a fine cigar the night before his wedding. This morning seemed as good a time as any to start again. Gaits stepped back outside and lit up, the orange flame crackling between his eyes. He gazed across the street at the motel he’d been in the night before. A few cars remained on the far side of the lot. Gaits’ room was quiet and the shades were half-drawn, but the door was wide open, as if it was begging him to step in and grab his things. The dress shirt and tie were probably still hanging neatly in the closet. Gifts from Hannah. For a man of style.

  He finished off his cigarette and dropped it to the concrete. It hissed as it melted a small hole into the ice. Gaits began to search the city, finding nothing but the occasional animal picking at the ground. A dog came up to him, whimpering and sniffing, begging for food, or a home. It had wide eyes and a floppy tongue, and it tilted its head every so often as though it was trying to understand something.

  Gaits knelt beside the dog and checked its tags. Harvey. 1602 Terrance Ave. Gaits knew the address. He could be there in thirty minutes. Maybe the owner was still alive. Maybe the owner knew Gaits’ man. Either way, he was sure they’d appreciate getting their pup back.

  Gaits patrolled the streets, a rogue vigilante watching over Omaha, his shotgun in hand and his trusty dog Harvey by his side. He thought about how misplaced he must look, how if a child were to see him passing by, he would slink down and push out a disappointed sigh, hoping the next traveler would be of more use. Gaits was no cowboy.

  He continued searching the city, puffing away at the pack of cigarettes and checking the license plates on anything that looked like an SUV. Zero Nine Eight One F Thirty. Zero Nine Eight One F Thirty. His anxiety increased as each moment passed without seeing another human being. Maybe I’m the only one left. Gaits began to jog and then to sprint. Harvey followed suit, barking excitedly.

  Gaits was out of breath when he finally turned onto Terrance. Harvey recognized his house immediately and ran ahead, spraying snow every which way as he flew to the front door. Gaits approached. The lock was busted, but the door remained shut. Gaits knocked and waited. No answer.

  He pushed the door and felt some resistance from the other side. A barricade. He forced his weight against it and it slid enough to let Harvey slip through. Gaits looked through the opening. “I brought your dog home,” he called out. “And I just have a question about a brown SUV…if you knew anything about—“

  A loud blast rang out from somewhere inside the house and split the door from the top hinge. “I’ll shoot your damn head off!” a woman yelled.

  Gaits spun around and dove off the porch. He scrambled across the snowy lawn, staying as low as he could until he got to the sidewalk, where he bolted upright and sprinted away at full speed, turning right at one corner and left at the next in case whoever had shot at him decided to follow. After several minutes, he finally slowed, his lungs burning and his heart exploding inside his chest. Just as effective as gas station coffee.

  That woman didn’t even know me. Gaits pulled a cigarette up to his lips. I guess that’s enough to kill someone now. He lifted his head from the newly glowing cigarette and found himself staring at a brown SUV. The day had warmed enough to melt most of the snow covering the license plate. Zero. Nine. Eight. One. F. Thirty.

  Gaits lifted his shotgun and moved steadily towards the car. He realized as he approached there was no one inside, and he lowered his gun. A scatter of boxed and canned goods littered the back seat——corn, green beans, pasta, soups——strewn about as if someone had robbed a store and thrown everything in as fast as they could. The passenger seat was loaded with bread and a familiar box holding raspberry coffee cake——a green sticker curled up along its side labeled Aunte Helen’s Bakery, the words worn and deformed.

  Gaits traced the sidewalk in front of the car up toward the front porch of a house. It was a mess on the outside——shingles hung fro
m the rooftop, the gutters were collapsed and rusted, and the windows were taped up and covered with cardboard. Graffiti was sprayed all over the front, and garbage cans were strewn all over the yard, tipped and overflowing. Gaits wondered if it had been that way before the previous night.

  A light flipped on inside and Gaits saw someone stand up from a table. Gaits spit the cigarette out of his mouth and sprinted to the side of the house, clutched the gun tight, and kept his breath low, listening for the front door and keeping his eyes on the back. Several seconds passed and nothing happened. He waited a bit longer just to be sure.

  Gaits went to the back where a busted out screen door lay limp. The entryway was split and wide open, a few short steps up to the kitchen on the right, and a staircase vanishing down into a dark basement on the left. Gaits stepped into the kitchen and froze as a loud crack rose from the cheap linoleum floor. He waited for a moment to make sure he hadn’t been heard. The house smelled like death, oppressive and toxic, and Gaits found it difficult to breathe.

  He kept moving forward, pointing his gun straight through the doorway as he entered the front room. The man he had seen moments earlier was gone. Gaits circled around, looking behind an overturned couch and opening a few closet doors. There was nothing inside, and he was about to head up the stairs when he heard the sound of glass shattering below him. The basement.

  Gaits rushed to the back of the house and peered around the corner. He stepped down onto the stairs, out of the soft sunlight, and into an all-consuming darkness. He stopped at the bottom of the staircase and waited for his eyes to adjust. From somewhere in front of him, Gaits heard the crackle of glass being crushed under someone’s foot. He fired a panicked shot into the room, and after several seconds of silence, he stumbled his way forward until he found a light switch. He flicked it on to discover a room piled high with garbage bags and littered with feces, tattered posters, and broken bongs. In the middle of it all lay a malnourished man with thin, wispy hair, his eyes glazed and a half-smile locked on his face. He turned his head toward Gaits and let out a slow, deep sigh. A syringe hung from his arm, the plunger only half-pressed.

  Gaits angled his gun downward and pointed it between the man’s eyes. The man rocked back and forth, his eyes looking down at the needle.

  “Who drove the SUV?” Gaits asked. “The one parked out front?”

  “Yeah yeah yeah…” the man said. “His car…”

  “Whose car? Is it yours?”

  “Nah…gotta go, honey, gotta go——“

  “Tell me whose car that is!”

  “Take a trip up to the Lake McConnaghey…” The man started to sing. “Take a trip to see my baby gone, gone away…”

  Gaits grabbed him hard by the wrist. The man’s eyes slid back up to Gaits.

  “Tell me,” Gaits said.

  “He came back. Soon.”

  “He’ll be here soon?”

  “Was back. Now he’s gone, honey. Gone.”

  Gaits kept asking, but the man just rolled his head back down to the heroin. “Brother,” he said after a few seconds of silence. ”A good man, my brother.”

  “Your brother. He’s the one with the SUV?”

  The man grabbed hold of the syringe and pushed the rest of the drugs into his vein. He sank down to the floor as the bliss took him over. Gaits walked back upstairs and into the house. He found a pen and some paper, scribbled down a quick note, and left it on the table in the front room.

  You killed my wife. Wes’ Tavern in Ebbotsville so I can shoot you where you stand. –Travis Gaits

  Gaits looked at the broken furniture around him and saw flashes of Hannah, of their last morning together——one he could barely remember. What if he’d sat down for eggs? Or asked her once more what she’d be up to for the day? Or stayed home instead of going to work? What if they had gone back to bed, and he had felt the soft heat of her breath as she nestled down on his chest, and the familiar joy of realizing that she was actually his? What if he had felt those fireworks explode in his heart one last time? What if he had held on to them in the first place…

  HOME

  “Did you find him?” Ellie asked.

  “Does it matter?” Gaits replied. He was at the end of his drink and a thick haze covered him. His mind drifted to the Miller’s land behind the bar. He could see Hannah standing in the cornfield in the summer, the gold sunlight speckling off the pale green stalks, the wind rustling the leaves and tossing her hair sideways.

  “Come home,” Hannah whispered.

  Gaits reached across the bar top for his shotgun.

  “You can find the gun out back,” Gaits said. “Five minutes. Then you come and take it.”

  The front door clicked open and a man entered, shivering from the cold, his hands stuffed in his pockets. He glanced around the room and rested his gaze on Ellie for a brief moment before turning his attention to Gaits.

  “Shot of tequila,” he said.

  “I’m not a bartender,” Gaits answered.

  “You’re behind a bar. I think that qualifies these days.” The man cleared his throat as the air deadened around them.

  “Listen,“ Gaits said, “we’re finishing something up here, so why don’t you——“ Gaits looked at the man for the first time. He wore a stained tan coat, and his face was obscured by a thick beard and a dark, rippled scar that carved across his forehead. “Why don't you take a seat at the bar,” Gaits continued. “I’ll pour you a drink.”

  “Thank you,” the man said. His hands remained deep in his coat pockets as he took slow and steady steps toward the bar. He slid onto a barstool and gave Ellie a friendly nod.

  “Tequila,” he said to Gaits, “if you have it.”

  “How ‘bout an old-fashioned?” Gaits asked.

  “Guess I won’t mess with a man holding a gun. Best be careful with that thing. Wouldn’t want any kind of…accident.” He widened his lips into a crooked smile and stuck his tongue up on the fronts of his teeth, licking them clean.

  Gaits slipped the gun off the bar top. He grabbed a bottle of whiskey, some bitters, a jar of sugar lumps, and a few dried up orange peels and placed them in front of the man.

  “What’ll we call ya?” Gaits asked.

  “I don’t know. Call me…Flint,” the man answered.

  “You from Michigan?” Ellie stepped up to the bar.

  “No. It was my brother’s name.”

  Ellie gripped the edge of the bar and darted her eyes to the whiskey. “You know what,” Ellie said to Gaits, “I’m gonna take you up on your offer.”

  “Two old-fashioneds, then,” Gaits said. He nudged the whiskey bottle forward with the tip of his shotgun. “Think I’ve had one too many, so I’m gonna let you two put them together.”

  “Not sure I know how to make one,” Flint said.

  “I’ll walk you through it,” Gaits replied, slamming a whiskey glass on the bar top. “Start with the lump of sugar, there, drop it into the glass. Usually, you need a little water, but hey, water’s hard to come by, so just drown it in whiskey.” Flint did as Gaits instructed, the sugar sizzling and dissolving in the brown liquor. “Now, it seems like it would take a while,” Gaits continued, “but really, that sugar dissolves pretty quick. Here one minute, gone the next.”

  “I think this is good enough——“

  “Now the bitters,” Gaits interrupted. “Pour them in. Just a little bit. There you go. We’ll skip the ice, because we haven’t had much of that since the night the world went to hell——“ Gaits cut off the sentence and let the awkward silence hang for as long as he could. “——And you put in one of those orange rinds. Then just stir the whole thing up.”

  Flint fidgeted in his seat and pushed a hand back into his pocket. He wiped his tongue across his teeth once more as he looked into the jar of brown, shriveled, dry rinds. He reached for the glass instead.

  “You can’t pass on the rind,” Gaits said. “It’s the final touch. It’s what makes an old-fashioned so satisfying.”

/>   Flint froze in place, the glass a few inches from his lips. “But they’re dried up.”

  Ellie grabbed the jar, took out a rind, and dropped it into her glass. She pushed it over to Flint, who still refused to pick it up.

  “You can’t pass on the rind,” Gaits repeated.

  Flint picked up the jar and pulled one out. He dropped it into his drink, where it sat floating like a dead fish in murky water.

  “Perfect,” Gaits said. ”Just like my wife used to make.”

  “Wife…”

  “Before she was murdered.”

  “That’s a common one.” Flint nodded. “The loved one getting murdered.”

  Gaits tightened his grip on the shotgun. He was tempted to drop the act and fire, to let the pellets rip through Flint’s chest and knock him backwards off the stool. He wanted to see Flint struggle for air, to hear the blood gurgling in his lungs.

  “You look familiar,” Flint said, shifting his gaze to Ellie. “You ever come to Omaha?”

  “No,” Ellie said, staring straight ahead.

  “I think you have. I think you were there this morning.”

  “No.”

  “You know, I have a soft spot for liars,” Flint continued. “My brother was a liar. Hated when he did that. But I don’t hate it much anymore. Not since I watched the blood drain from his stomach after someone put a knife through it. Breaks my heart every time I think about it, Ellie.”

  “I never told you my name,” Ellie said.

  “No,” Flint said. “But my brother did. Right before he bled out.”

  Ellie looked down at her arms. She traced her fingers along the scratches that ran all around them, dug in at different depths. Violent. Defensive. A last ditch attempt at self-preservation. Ellie reached into her pocket, slowly, and pulled out a phone. A message started to play.

  “Listen, I…my name is Travis Gaits. I’m looking for the man who murdered my wife,” the message said. For a moment, Gaits couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “He was driving a brown SUV, license plate Zero Nine Eight One F Thirty.” Flint’s spine stiffened, his right hand fidgeting in his pocket.