Dead Silence by Randy Wayne White Read Free Book Online

care.
    Will came close to retching again, thinking about dying, because he knew it was true.
    Now he was at the rear of the trunk, his nose burrowed close to the taillight, where air filtered free of exhaust, cold off the highway. It was eerie red inside the trunk because of the taillights, the carpet hotter over the wheel wells.
    Beside him was a tire jack, a lug wrench and a screwdriver that he’d found under the floorboard. Still working in spurts, Will squared the jack on the frame and ratcheted the jack until it was wedged tight against the trunk lid. He continued ratcheting, hearing metal creak as if the lid was about to burst open. It didn’t.
    Just wait ’til you open this sonuvabitch, you morons!
    Will left the jack and rested for a few minutes before prying open the backside of a taillight. Every Skin on the Rez was a shade-tree mechanic. What he wanted was to short out the electrical system, but the damn fuses would blow first. Also, he didn’t have a stripper or side cuts.
    Instead, Will grounded a secondary wire just to see what would happen. The brake light began blinking. On the other side of the car, he yanked the ground wire free. The light went out.
    Good. Give the cops a reason to stop us.
    It was peculiar, lying there in the car’s trunk, as the red taillight flashed. Piercing red, even with his eyes closed, while thinking about what they’d done to him.
    Garbage . . . trash . . . oil-patch bucks. No water, his wallet stolen, no ID.
    Yep, they were gonna murder him.
    After several minutes of fuming about his situation, being killed by two spic-speaking strangers, Will felt a chemical sensation bloom in the back of his brain that caused his heart to pound. He sat up as the sensation radiated. He felt fear, then a suffocating panic.
    “Stop! Stop this goddamn car!”
    Will began kicking the floor, hammering at the trunk, wanting the assholes up front to hear. Kept yelling when the car veered right and began to slow. He didn’t care about signaling the cops now. The panic was fading, yet the chemical burn remained. The pulsing red light remained, too—even as he got on his knees and ripped both taillights from their harnesses.
    The red light he saw was behind his eyes, Will realized. Red, a color so bright he could smell it. He opened his eyes, then closed them. Red—still there, now strong enough to muffle his hearing.
    “A grand mal seizure or anger-management problems,” a government shrink had told Will’s parole officer the first time Will had screwed up and actually told the shrink how it sometimes felt when he got mad.
    What he didn’t tell the shrink was that it had happened before. Happened again tonight, in fact, when the big Cuban-speaking asshole grabbed him by the back of the neck and shook him as if Will was a rag, no more valuable than a dog’s toy.
    Flash.
    The man had snapped a photograph, causing more searing red dots to bloom.
    Whenever the fear inside Will changed to rage, he saw that pungent color. His vision sharpened, the world quieted. Will saw only his adversary, alone in a tunnel of red, red silence.
    The darkness of the trunk was red-hued now, as the vehicle bounced off the road and braked to a stop. Will checked the jack and cranked it one more notch, putting so much pressure on the lid that the trunk’s hinges creaked like springs on a steel trap.
    Will heard the car’s front door open, passenger side, a voice saying, in Spanish, “Hurry, check on the brat—it’s nine-thirty already!”
    Door closed . . . Then Will listened to the heavy steps of a man walking on gravel, coming toward the back of the car to check the noise Will’d been making in the trunk.
    Come on, you bastard, open it . . . Open it! Just you wait!
    Will felt his brain burning, the anger was so strong. In his right hand, he gripped the lug wrench, while air molecules circulated around the trunk space in darkness, tracing pale gray contrails when the boy’s eyes were closed . . . but sparking