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14 years of hard time, and on the average day Gus Davis felt like he deserved every damn day of it and then some. Fourteen years spent working on car bodies with other prisoners instead of in front of high schoolers in his shop class. Then, three years into the sentence, he’d managed to convince the warden to let him testify in the odd case as an expert witness. Getting to be on the road as a shackled passenger in a bus was a poor, poor substitute for being behind the wheel of a hot rod, but it still made the onetime racetrack star feel a little more alive. It had also almost made him more dead, though, as he’d had to start looking over his shoulder for angry men with knives and a hatred for anyone police related. His cellmate Red and a few others sufficiently disillusioned with the so-called criminal codes had still talked to him and given him the occasional useful warning, but it had been a lonely time.
After two years of living like that, he’d gotten lucky. The new head of the prison’s biggest black gang turned out to be a big stock car racing fan who remembered Gus’s well-publicized friendships with some of the black pioneers who’d helped integrate the sport. The protection that came with that friendship had had let him stop looking over his shoulder for someone out to kill him. His protector was paroled two years before Gus was, but by then he had enough cigarettes saved up to trade for further protection. The only bad thing about that sense of security was how he’d run out of distractions. Distractions were al that kept him from having biweekly dreams about the way Cindy Warner had screamed when he hit her with a stolen car.
One stupid, unsanctioned desert race driven by had been all it took to kill the girl he thought of as a second niece. He’d promised his sister Shirley that he’s raise her little girl Renata right after Shirley and her husband got AIDs from a bad blood transfusion when Renata was four. And maybe he hadn’t been doing too bad if she’d grown up to be the kind of person who could shrug off their precious, precious car not beating the new kid on the block and his hot rod. If only Gus had been able to teach himself that attitude he’d somehow let her grow up with.
He’d told her and the cops that he’d wanted to prove to her how a driver meant more to winning than a car after her first-ever loss in sanctioned street racing. In the years of reflection since, though, Gus had made peace with having more mixed motives. He hadn’t just stolen the victorious Trevor Beck’s car to show Renata that he’d taught her the right skills it took to beat that car if she focused hard enough. Really, from the moment he’d seen that car, he’d wanted to race it himself. Wanted to beat it himself. He’d already been thinking of pretexts to do so before Trevor Beck even beat Renata to the finish line.
Even that wasn’t the worst of it, though. Maybe he could have just found a way to get Trevor Beck to race him instead of Renata a few weeks down the line, nice and legal. He might have got some ribbing about a man his age racing a bunch of kids, but he could have shrugged that off. No, his reason for arranging a private desert race with that car had been because he wanted a good excuse to race his niece one more time. His competitiveness in the first year after she got her license had driven her to make one excuse after another to skip more races with him. Mixing in some big lesson about proving her skills had been what it took for her to make an exception that would let him prove to himself that no student could surpass a teacher like him, no matter the car.
He’d had Renata and Cindy steal Trevor’s car for that fatal race rather than risk asking to borrow it and being turned down. After Cindy had died, they might have gotten life sentences for doing that under the felony murder rule. Trevor’s mother had surprised them by swearing that Trevor had known about them taking the car and discreetly allowed it, which had likely been a lie. Trevor himself couldn’t refute it, though. He’d died less than a day after his girlfriend, due to an undiagnosed brain condition.
Gus and Renata, already preoccupied with an understanding of death after what had happened to Cindy, had been the first people to send Trevor’s mother and sisters flowers and an eloquent sympathy card. Renata had also come by his house to sincerely congratulate him over beating her before Gus had voiced the idea of stealing that car for a private race. It hadn’t been too much, but it had been enough for the newly bereaved mother to feel sick of seeing lives ended and ruined and decide to tell a little white lie.
Gus was glad for Renata’s sake, but that mercy from Trevor’s mother also made him feel guiltier on his own account. In a lesser way than Cindy, Trevor was another death Gus laid at his own door. He’d had two friends on the stock car circuit who’d died of similar medical conditions after bumpy races. Why couldn’t he have swallowed his pride, been a graceful losing coach/mechanic, and gone over to shake Trevor’s hand and praise all the craftsmanship in his car. Trevor had learned a lot of that in Gus’s class, after all. That would have taken some of the sting out if Gus hadn’t been distracted by his selfish motives. If he’d faced Trevor, could he have noticed some of the signs of what was happening inside Trevor’s body in time to tell him he needed a doctor? Would it have made any difference? Those uncertainties sometimes felt as bad as the jolt of the car when Cindy had died.
Once, he’d tried to hate that stone-faced old-timer Jim Brass and the rest of the LVMPD for busting him. But all those dreams of the night he killed Cindy had taken that away from him. Red, who had also been arrested by Brass and his pet CSIs, admitted to similar feelings after Gus admitted that to him. He too had been caught by some of those same cops and was haunted by the blood of a girl on his hands and a desire to atone that transcended any resentment toward the cops.
Not too many years after he put away first Red and then Gus, Brass ended up with a member of his own family serving hard time for murder, and it had changed him just a little. He had ended up regularly traveling to the prison with groups ministering to some of the people he’d put away who had families on the outside. Gus and Red had both shaken hands with him as casually as if they’d been trading contact info at a yard sale.
Of course, it helped that Gus knew how, by arresting him, Brass had probably saved his life. The first thing Renata had done after seeing Cindy’s death and returning Trevor’s car was drive over to the Warners and confess what had happened. Gus had been furious when Renata admitted it to him the next morning, but she hadn’t cared. She and Cindy had been best friends since fifth grade. Renata had heard at least as many kind words from Cindy’s parents and sister over those years than she’d heard from her own parents before they died so young. They deserved to know the truth. If she’d tried to keep it from them, the guilt would have probably driven her to suicide sooner or later even if she hadn’t gotten caught and had to see the looks on their faces in court.
The Warners had loved Renata as much as she loved them. Even through their fury and heartbreak over Cindy, they could tell how horrified and remorseful Renata was and understood it had been an accident. They hadn’t turned her in, or even suggested she turn herself in. They never would have even if the investigation had lasted another decade. On the other hand, their feelings toward Gus, who knew them far more casually, had not come over to apologize, and had been the driver who actually hit Cindy, were far less kind. Cindy’s father had visited Gus once and, not quite in so many words admitted that, if Gus had gotten away with what he did to Cindy, then Hank Warner might have ended up knifing him in the middle of a parking lot, sooner or later.
Renata had gotten off easy thanks to the attitudes of Mrs. Beck, the Warners, and a soft-hearted prosecutor. She had gotten a two-year suspended sentence, and a four-year revocation of her driver’s license. She’d served that sentence without complaint.
Gus had been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison with no chance of parole for ten years, with another two years thrown in for four separate counts of obstruction of justice throughout the investigation. He’d been denied parole at two hearings before his release papers finally came in. But that didn’t mean happy days were there again. It was another three years before he could apply for his driver’s license. Once he could, his eyesight wasn’t what it once had been. He failed four years of tests even after skimping and saving for operations to get rid of cataracts or buy better glasses.
The day he got his driver’s license back again was the 21st anniversary of Cindy Warner’s death, which seemed too much of a coincidental for Gus to maintain his lifelong skepticism about a higher power. He had so immersed in his lessons that he only remembered of the anniversary when he went to drop by Renata’s house and found the Warners there, reminiscing with her.
Sweating almost badly enough to ruin a new shirt for good, Gus quickly offered to make one of his first drips with his new license chauffeuring them all out to the cemetery. Cindy was buried less than thirty feet away from Trevor. Visiting classmates often thought this was out of some design to commiserate the sweet and intimate but ultimately rather short time they’d had together. Actually, it was just a happy coincidence that came about from their families belonging to the same church and having both reserved new plots around the same time some space opened up and the church graveyard could expand.
It was a long, solemn drive over. Not exactly the joyful return to being behind the wheel that Gus had dreamed of for over two decades. Still, it was a small penance to pay for Cindy and Trevor’s memories. He promised to drive them out every year he still had a license, which was an idea he had been toying with for the future even before remembering what day it was.
The next day, Gus was alone in the car, but his mood wasn’t much better. His heart would beat faster every time he started to speed up. He unconsciously bit his lip whenever there was bumper to bumper traffic that reminded him of how he’d rammed into Trevor’s car so he could pass Renata right before hitting Cindy. His hands felt clammy on the wheel, and he seemed to sink into the car seat rather than fit smoothly into it.
Before long, he realized he wouldn’t have felt any different even if the trip to the cemetery had been a good six months after he got his license back. Readjusting to these new cars in his old body just felt too strange for him even without the fact that he’d killed a person one of his most recent times behind the wheel. Between the time he’d killed Cindy and when Brass had booked him, Gus had found himself going ten miles below the speed limit, using a turn signal on empty roads, and keeping the lights off in his garage so he wouldn’t have to look at a car any more than necessary. It was just being cut off from driving altogether that had made him miss it so much.
When he told Renata, she just nodded. “I feel kind of the same way even as just a witness in the car next to yours” she confessed. “I’m a lot more like Trevor now: building and fixing cars. It took a year of arguments with Manny before I’d even let my kids watch the HotWheels movies that he kept watching and rewatching together when I was in middle school.”
Gus nodded in understanding. For the first seventeen years of his life, he’d expected Renata to follow his footsteps as a racecar driver. Instead, she’d followed his footsteps as an auto shop teacher; at one of Las Vegas’s better trade schools. However bad he felt about his decades of imprisonment and inability to still enjoy driving, it had once been a minor point of contentment that Renata met Manny at a support group meeting for relatives of prisoners. At least he’d given her that.
Then he’d learned that Manny had transferred to the high school where he’d taught at and Renata studied shortly after Gus went to prison and Renata was expelled. So no, his crime didn’t even have that silver lining of having brought them together, not when a couple like them would have had love at first sight either way.
By his third month back on the road, Gus still hadn’t ever gone above forty miles an hour, and barely went anywhere besides church, grocery stores, to the prison to see Red now and then, or for an occasional visit to Renata and her family. He spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks now. For a while, he’d listened to them during car rides. Then nearly missing a yield sign while engrossed in a steamy sex scene from a James Bond book had scared him out of doing that.
Jim Brass’s name had come up in two non-fiction books he’d listened to. One was a skydiver’s memoir about walking again through physical therapy after being taken hostage by a corporate assassin. The other book debated whether an infamous murderess who’d killed the grandsons of the people behind her own grandparents’ deaths had committed her crimes due to the postpartum depression from the birth of illegitimate twin children she’d given for adoption, a traumatic brain injury from an abusive ex-boyfriend, or simple hate and an inability to emphasize with people she only knew from unflattering stories.
The sixth year after Gus got his license back, his regular physician diagnosed him with cancer. On his third visit to an oncology specialist, he ran into an old friend, standing there in shackles . “Red,” Gus said, grief in his voice. “Anywhere else, I’d be happy to see you getting some fresh air and saving me the need to make my next monthly visit out to the stir. But damn is it hard seeing you in this place.”
“Cancer’s a bad disease to have as a murderer,” said Cooper. “If all I’d done was beat that stoolie into a wheelchair, or robbed another bank, maybe they’d have let me out on compassionate grounds, but it’s not easy getting that when your name’s written down in the same sentence as ‘homicide’. At least it lets Janice, Maddy and my grandkids see me outside that lousy hole and brought Janice back.”
He gestured to a family group sitting as close to him as the guards allowed. The guards looked uncomfortable about it, but the reason there were so many of them was probably specifically because a desperate, dying master criminal’s ever loyal and loving family would probably be the kind of people to try and break him out. Gus watched Janice lean over to kiss Red and listened to the old man talk to them about the need to do the right thing with the talents and education fund they had, making himself a cautionary tale in a tender way that wouldn’t traumatize the kids.
Gus wondered if he’d have ever had a family like that if he hadn’t had to take in Renata. Then he thought about the family she had…no, the family they had, and decided it was more than enough. When he looked at the hurt and pain on Red’s wife and daughter’s faces, he knew that it might have killed him by now to spend 20 years locked away from someone who loved him the way a wife loves a husband, or a girl like Maddy loved her father. A few minutes later, they called him to his examination room, and when he came back, Red was gone and his family was waiting outside the door of another doctor’s office.
Four months went by. Gus’s cancer grew worse, then, on his next drive back to the prison, he looked at the window of a prison bus he was passing by and saw Red again, apparently being taken back after another doctor’s visit. His old cellmate looked much worse than he’d been at the doctor’s office. Part of it was the dark, dark clouds that had enshrouding half the state for the last few days, but even on a sunny day, it would have been impossible to look at him and feel cheer.
They were approaching a bridge, and Gus glanced at the canyon beneath it, then back at Red. Red looked ahead, and saw what Gus had been starting at. The two men traded a long, tired look, their minds almost in sync about the grimness of their lives, and the thought of how it could all be over in just a second if Gus slammed into the bus just before the bridge and took them both off the road and then off cliff.
Then, Red glanced forward, at the driver’s seat of the prison bus. Gus could make out a picture of the driver in a wedding dress, giving a big kiss to a handsome, goateed man in a tuxedo. Then Red looked over at the prisoner asleep in the seat behind him. The man had a grinning woman and two little boys’ faces tattooed on his neck. Next, he looked at the picture of Renata and her kids on Gus’s dashboard before fondly glancing down at his own wedding ring before locking eyes with Gus.
The message was clear, and Gus found himself wondering how he could have ever thought about killing and hurting families again, and intentionally this time, no less. How he’d thought it would be the right thing to keep himself or Red from at least getting to say goodbye to their loved one. He pulled back and let the bus go over across the bridge ahead of him, then lagged behind until the prison came into view.
They pulled into the parking lot and exited their respective vehicles. Red’s knees were wobbling a bit as he walked, but he seemed content to be feeling the sun and wind on his face, and took in some deep, contented breaths of fresh air, savoring all he could before he’d have to go inside. The guards nudged him to move along, but only very gently, and after a long pause that suggested they didn’t mind him having that moment.
Then, for the first time in almost a week, the sun broke through the clouds. After so long in the near dark, the torrent of glowing sunbeams came as a shock for his old eyes, and he blinked a few times from the pain. When he stopped blinking, his vision was just a bit blurry, but he almost felt like he wasn’t in the prison parking lot at all. Instead, he had the sensation of some park with fields of bright green grass. Looking just past Red, he saw three people, middle-aged, full of life, and with the outlines of little family groups behind them. For just a moment, he knew that he was seeing Trevor and Cindy, the way they’d look if he had kept his fool head out of planning the rematch that killed Cindy, and actually paid attention to Trevor in time to just maybe do something for him.
Next to them was a kind-faced woman who reminded him strongly of Ally Sullivan, the girl whose pictures had filled the newspapers after Red killed her in a desperate effort to keep her quiet about his previous murder. Regarding that other murder, still further off to the side stood an elderly man who was looking in Red’s direction with pure forgiveness. Glancing over at Red, Gus’s blurry vision could make out Red’s face looking amazed, then serene, but the surroundings were a blur.
Gus wondered if he was dying and this was Heaven. Was he lying in his bed at home or taking a nap at the wheel and dreaming what he so badly wanted to see for his own sake and that of his best friend. Was all this just a moment of blissful wishful thinking brought on by a bout of poor vision in the prison parking lot? Or, was what he was seeing reality? Had Trevor, and Cindy, and those people Red killed all only died in his dreams? Was he waking up from some nice peaceful nap on a picnic to see them alive for real?
As his head and his vision began to clear, Gus knew that, in seconds, he’d know which answer was true, and which answer he had a horrible feeling wouldn’t be true. As those seconds ticked down, he prayed fast and hard. Prayed that the fourth option was the right one. That he and Red had never killed anyone. That Trevor had gotten to a doctor who could help him and gotten to grow old, maybe even with Cindy. Then, he knew which option was true, and it was time for him to go forward and make peace with it.