Off the Grid

All in all, Ray was happy with the way the interview turned out. After Greg’s colossal fuck-up last night, they had to scramble to come up with something. He remembered the phone call from Neil, trying to downplay what his brother did. The call came in at 3:18am. Ray had been sleeping and had been dreaming about cutting Lynda’s nose off and feeding it to the dog in front of her. A great dream as far as dreams go because Lynda was getting on his goddamn nerves. She wasn’t afraid of him and she let him know it at every opportunity. She called him her daddy’s whipping boy and he wouldn’t dare touch her and did he know why? Because when it came to being tough, he didn’t have it. That’s why he needed her dad and her uncle. Without them, he was nothing more than a pervert jerking off to bondage porn in his mommy’s basement. God, how he was getting to hate her. Those inventive insults pulled the scabs off of his insecurities and laid them bare to the cold air. She stole his power from him. She made him feel weak. She made him feel useless. He wanted to gut her and pull her intestines out and strangle her with them. What was stopping him? Neil. So in that at least, she was right. But there would come a time when they would have to kill her and that time was fast approaching. Ray believed he could take out Neil alone if he had to but Neil and Greg? He wasn’t so sure about that. And since Greg was Neil’s puppet, he would end up facing both of them. What made the whole situation worse was that he liked Neil. They’d been great friends since, well, since first grade. He guessed the dream was the only way that he could attack Lynda without repercussions. He was enjoying that dream. Seeing the hole in her face where her nose used to be and feeling the dog licking his fingers after he had fed it the tasty morsel. Yeah, it was one hell of a dream. Until the burner phone interrupted it.

Neil said, “We got a problem.”

Understatement of the year. Greg messed things up and they had to deal with it. They came up with a plan. According to Neil, Greg was certain his wife would be his alibi and after Neil explained why, Ray had to admit that Greg had handled that part well. And surprisingly, with some intelligence. The totality of what he had done was a dumb-fuck thing to do but since it was done, and not too poorly, they had to deal with the fall-out. How Greg thought killing two cops would be helpful was beyond Ray. Didn’t he know killing or attempting to kill a cop would bring a whole slew of cops to their little town? You won’t be able to move without bumping into one from now on. Ray told Neil to expect undercover cops to be tailing him from now on. They believed one major question running throughout the investigation had been, where’s Ray? The cops asked Neil, they asked Neil’s wife, they asked Greg and his wife and no one had an answer that satisfied them. Hell, they even pestered his old mother about where he was. She called him up (he gave her the burner phone number in case of emergencies) and spat the usual vindictive words that had caused him to start cutting himself off from her when he was twelve. He still cringed under her barrage of insults. No one could hurt you more than your mom. One of his many fantasies involved cutting her head off with a rusty hacksaw while staring into her eyes. Would she fear him then? Respect him? It didn’t matter. At the end of their discussion, they decided Ray needed to make an appearance to quell their suspicions. But then once he exposed himself, the surveillance team would pick him up and trail him back to Lynda so that was a problem since once they found her all of them would be going to jail. So how to deal with that? They wrestled with that one for a bit. What it came down to was Ray would have to slip away from the surveillance team. Easier said than done right? Get away from cops who were trained in that shit? Probably wore disguises and all that crap you see on TV. The plan they eventually came up with was rather simple. Before he walked into the police station that morning, Ray parked his mother’s old beater, a Toyota Camry, outside of a house two blocks away from the police station. Taking side streets, he ended up on a trail that ran parallel to the fence line at the back of the police station. The scary part was creeping up to the fence while seeing the police station through the trees and the little cameras on the corners of the building. He was sweating like crazy when he started cutting a line through the chain link vertically beside the steel post. He didn’t want to walk through the neighbourhoods with bolt cutters sticking out of his back pocket so he had to use a small pair of wire cutters. It took time getting through the fence and at the end of it, his hand and wrist ached. Every time a car drove into the lot, he slunk back into the trees and waited for it to park or leave his sight. After that, using the trails to stay out of sight, he jogged to his mom’s place to pick up his own car. He then drove to the police station and parked at the back of the lot, along the fence line near where he had cut the hole. The spot he wanted was taken. He reverse-parked two spots over, the last available space near the cut fence and turned the engine off in annoyance. He muttered, “Nothing is ever easy.” After making himself mentally ready, as ready as he could be, he walked into the station and introduced himself to the detective.

After the interview, he sat in his car and took out his phone and pretended to fiddle around on it for the benefit of whoever might be watching. He didn’t turn on the car and he kept the windows up. Sweat dotted his forehead and lined his collar. What must the surveillance guys think he is up to? Ray smiled and waited. Jodie stepped out of the station. A man exited a car and Ray frowned. The man walked with his head down, wearing a big hat. He walked like a man who didn’t want to be seen. Curious. An older woman got out of the same car as the man and they all talked at the car for a bit and Ray wished he had one of those parabolic mikes you see the FBI guys use in the movies when they are trying to listen in on the mafia. The man hopped into a different car beside Jodie while she went back into the station. The car the man arrived in, turned around and left the lot. Still, Ray waited. Two cars passed by his nose. Smaller sedans. Not helpful. Jodie exited the station, got in the car with the hat-man and they too left the lot. Sweating in the hot car, getting irritated, Ray saw what he was waiting for. A middle-aged man hopped into a pick-up truck. He carried a police uniform shirt and pants under one arm. An officer leaving work. Ray didn’t care about that. He cared about the big truck the man got into.

Ray placed his hand on the door handle of his car and waited. He would have to be quick. He figured the one place someone could watch him from was in the same lot he was in or at the exit. If they were in the lot, they weren’t close to him. Ray had scanned all the cars walking to his own and didn’t see anyone. He might have missed someone sitting in the back of their car but he didn’t think so. They wouldn’t want to be too close would they?

The large truck rumbled past the nose of Ray’s car and at the same time, Ray opened his door, rolled to the ground while closing the door behind him. He scrambled on all fours to the back of his car and gathered his breath. Someone might have seen him. He wasn’t as fast as he thought he would be. Getting older.

Ray crab-walked to the fence line, slipped through the hole he had cut and in seconds was screened by the branches of thick summer trees. He fast-walked towards his mom’s car, shooting a look over his shoulder, certain they hadn’t seen what he had done with every step but still glancing back to make sure. If they were in the lot, they would notice that he wasn’t sitting in his car any longer. If they were watching the exit, he’d have some time before they got curious enough to send someone into the lot to check. Either way, he had some time and now he could slink back to his hidey-hole and consider what exactly was the benefit of keeping Lynda alive. He’d either have to convince Neil they had to kill her to avoid jail or kill her, and tell Neil from a distance and hope the guy would eventually see it as the right thing to do. Either way sucked. But the longer this dragged on, the longer the spotlight would be on them for.

Ray made it back to his mother’s Camry in good time and wanting to get out of the populated area of town before he was seen, he sped towards their cabin. He caught up to a red sports car with the top down, an older man at the wheel with his white hair slapping at his bald spot and he had to slow down. Trying to peer around the car to see if was safe to pass, Ray saw a car turn off and disappear into some trees. What the hell? Ray tapped the brake as he neared the turnoff and saw branches swaying back and forth and red tail lights flash amidst drifting dust. Could that have been Jodie and the stranger? It looked like the car Jodie was driving. Why would they go back there? The scene had been cleared as far as Ray knew. And who was that dude she was with? He chewed on a nail. For some reason, he didn’t like it. He continued to the cabin, wondering what it meant.

“Fuck you, Ray! Eat a bowl of dicks while you’re at it, loser!”

Ray nodded and satisfied, but annoyed, that Lynda was okay, Ray made himself a cup of instant coffee and entered his study. He turned on a monitor and reading a Louis L’Amour western, waited. Jodie and the stranger heading to the rock worried him. It was strange because he couldn’t see any reason for them to be visiting a cleared crime scene but he wasn’t a cop and what he knew of how they did their job was from TV. And that was almost always a poor representation of real life. It didn’t hurt to sit here and wait and see if the motion sensor cameras at the cave were activated. Neil had them installed years ago just in case some errant hiker or hunter stumbled on it. They recorded when activated and could be checked remotely using a website. The footage could be wiped remotely as well. One of them in the group was supposed to check it nightly when they could. Since Ray was single, the task usually fell to him.

Ray read two chapters, folded down the corner of a page and put it on the desk. Ray had been gone from the cabin for a time and Lynda might need to use the washroom soon. She could do with a shower too. He hated that part. She had a mouth on her, that’s for sure. And the longer she stayed here, the more bold and angry she got. He’d catch her staring at him, measuring him up. A part of him wanted her to attack him. He thought of letting her get in a few good licks on him, injure him, so when he killed her, he could tell Neil it had been in self-defence. He wrinkled his nose. He didn’t want to deal with her. Not yet. Then the monitor turned on. He leaned forward in his chair, mouth slightly open, thinking everything had officially gone to shit. The stranger appeared on the screen first. The detective followed behind, the white bandage on her hand catching a stray beam of sunlight making her hand glow. The stranger moved ahead, chin pointing straight, moving with confidence. The stranger reached out and moved aside a screen of leaves. The same screen Ray and Neil had made by threading fake leaves on branches through a web of fishing line.