The Road to Freedom or Hell

I park in front of the massive warehouse used to dry-store boats for the winter. My headlights spotlight what appears to be a regular garage door, just as described. This has to be the place, but I cannot imagine how or why my brother would have chosen it to store a vehicle, much less how he paid for it from prison. Perhaps the owner had long ago forgotten about the arrangement. Or the entire derelict building. 

There is a combination lock, so I try the code given to me. When it inevitably fails, I can leave, my curiosity satisfied. 

I spin the dials: 5 2 2 9.

I pull the lock, and it doesn’t budge. Thank the Lord for small favors. 

Now I can return home to the glass of cabernet I had poured to catch up on client emails before opening the encrypted email that changed my evening plans because life wouldn’t make sense if my brother Eric weren’t interrupting the status quo. 

“It’s rusted. Try kicking it.”

I nearly jump a foot into the air and spin around, landing with my back pinned to the garage, my hand a salute to block my headlights from blinding me. A woman—her features blacked out, but her silhouetted figure unmistakably female—approaches me; her laugh apologetic and amused by my scare. 

“Didn’t mean to startle you.” 

She extends her hand, and I shake it. 

“Are you Rick?”

“I was when I woke this morning. Christ, I thought I was alone. You nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Now up close, I feel my guard fall. She is five foot and a hundred pounds, soaking wet. 

How’d you know my name?”

“Because I assume we are on the same errand. But it seems they only told me to expect company.” My head swirls with confusion, and my longing to be home and drink mediocre wine while responding to whiney clients intensifies. 

She introduces herself as Jessie Williams, and we agree to confirm what is or isn’t in the garage before getting deeper into the weeds. I take her advice, kick the lock with my boot, and pop it open. Inside the garage is a vehicle covered by a tarp with enough dust to suggest it hasn’t moved in years. 

I remove the tarp, uncovering a white Honda Civic, the exact make and model the encrypted email told me I’d find. All four tires need air, but the outside of the vehicle seems in okay shape considering the circumstances. The driver-side door is unlocked, and a set of keys is above the visor. I open the trunk and find a locked, hard-shelled suitcase next to a small duffle bag. I grab the duffle bag and leave the suitcase as instructed. I put the duffle bag in the front seat and tell Jessie to wait outside as I try to start the car. 

The battery is dead. Of course, the car has been sitting for years. 

I grab my portable jump starter and air compressor from my truck, and within minutes, the Civic is running and sitting on tires full of air. Coughing and bitching about it, but running. 

Parking my truck in the storage unit is tighter than I’d like and not something I’m overly comfortable with, but leaving it outside the warehouse isn’t an option. 

Jessie gets into the driver seat of the Civic and tells me to get in; she’s driving. And just like that, I’m riding with a stranger en route to the city where my brother is jailed. 

***

“How do you know Eric, and what were you asked to do,” I ask. The highway lights are enough for me to see Jessie. Her figure suggests she is young, but her face isn’t keeping any secrets. She has the rugged, weathered look of a diner waitress in Anywhere, USA. And she smells like a pack of menthols. 

“Seen him around, here and there. Eric knew everybody,” she says, telling me nothing. 

“You dropped everything to drive nine hundred miles to drop off a car for an acquaintance?”

We drive in silence for a while. I think about my brother and figure out what he is doing. I haven’t heard from him in three years. Seven long years ago, he began his prison sentence.

He had driven his buddy to a girlfriend's house, unaware she had barricaded herself inside to prevent the friend from entering. Or she had gotten a restraining order prohibiting him from visiting her residence. The friend forcefully knocked down her door, and her brother shot and killed him. Considered an accomplice to a felony in which a death occurred, my brother was found guilty of felony murder with a minimum sentence of sixteen years and a maximum of life behind bars.

“Did you know he has a son?”

My heart rate spikes. Something about how she asked the question. Her cold tone, blunt and assumptive—correct, of course—that I didn’t know, left me without any doubt that it was true. 

“Enough of the bullshit,” I say.

“You tell me you’ve seen him here and there, and that's the extent of your relationship. Then you drop a bomb about him having a son? Who are you, and what is your involvement with my brother? What is he planning? I want to know everything you know, or you can drop me off at the first hotel off the next exit.”

She looks at me with a sad understanding. 

“My younger sister started seeing him about a year before he went away. They were really into each other the way young people are. He was good to her, and she thought he was the one. All that shit went down, and she found out she was pregnant three months after his sentence started. She never had the heart to tell him. She had the boy and has been raising him alone. I think word got back to Eric.” 

“What does that have to do with you?”

“I think he doesn’t want her to worry. I don’t know what he has planned, Rick. The email I got was short and to the point. Wait for you at the garage, drive the car to Shady Side campground in Alabama, and hide the duffel bag behind the paint cans in the shed. The suitcase stays in the car, and the keys above the visor. Swear to God that is all I know.”

If that is what her email said, I wonder why my email gave me further instructions to throw the suitcase off a bridge into the lake that Shady Side Campground overlooks. Or if she is hiding something. 

***

Somewhere around the seven-hundred-mile mark and well into the morning, Jessie asks if we can switch so she can rest her eyes. I fill up the tank and take over driving. Instead of resting, Jessie is texting a mile a minute. 

“Everything okay,” I ask. 

“Just work. I can’t buy a vacation day. Even on my day off, my boss guilts me into covering shifts for the pretty young things that wouldn’t recognize a day's work if it showed up in their TikTok feed.” 

I’m not sure I follow, but I nod along. 

Twenty minutes away from Shady Side, Jessie asks to stop at Denny’s for breakfast. She begins acting strange as we walk in, folding her arms and looking around as if afraid of someone. When our breakfast comes, she pokes around at her pancakes and hardly eats. Once the bill comes, I pay our tab, and Jessie insists on leaving a cash tip. 

We get back on the road and begin crossing the bridge. I pull over on the shoulder, and Jessie asks me what I’m doing.

“I need to check something,” I say, feeling guilty about lying to her. 

I open the trunk, grab the suitcase, and heave it over the guard rail. It lands with a thwack and begins sinking under Lady Song Lake. 

Jessie gets out of the car and starts screaming at me. Her directions differed slightly from mine, but her reaction crossed the line into insanity. She begins hitting my arms and sobbing, flailing, and thrashing away as cars pass by, slow enough that some of their drivers may have even considered helping. 

A police car pulls up with lights flashing, and two officers exit, drawing their weapons and screaming at me to let the woman go and put my hands in the air. I comply and wait for my turn to speak. 

“He’s going to throw me over the bridge! Please help me!” Jessie screams as the officers slowly approach me. The officer in command cuffs me and tells me I am under arrest. 

***

Jessie is in fact, the sister of my brother’s baby mama. Unfortunately, I was blinded by my love for my brother and fell victim to a scheme concocted by people who wanted to ensure he never got out, using me as a means to an end, collateral damage. My brother had been unaware of the pregnancy and had been trying to break off their short love affair. 

Jessie hired someone to email me the encrypted email. Her directions differed from mine because she made them up and wanted to throw me off. Her father owned the Honda Civic, and somebody filled the duffel bag with old belongings my brother left with Jessie’s sister and the suitcase was full of Jessie’s clothing, planted to look as though I kidnapped her and planned to throw her and her belongings in the lake, and hide my brother’s duffel bag so he could later fetch it after escaping from prison. She switched driving with me just in time to text everyone she knew that she was kidnapped and to describe the car but turned off her location sharing until after we finished breakfast. She put on a show for the camera, a desperate kidnapping victim terrified of her kidnapper. She even wrote HELP ME HE KIDNAPPED ME on the five-dollar bill she tipped the waitress. 

So when the officers reached us on the bridge, they found a hysterical woman matching the kidnapping victim’s description and the car reported stolen within the same hour. Oh, and the man (me) had pulled over and thrown a suitcase into the lake full of the victim’s belongings (oops). I looked about as guilty as OJ Simpson but without the million-dollar defense. 

It turns out Jessie was the girlfriend my brother Eric’s buddy was seeing when he was shot and killed by her brother. Her brother was also the one she had hired to send the encrypted email to me. Unfortunately for Jessie, he wasn’t as tech-savvy as he had made himself to be. Nowhere near the level of murder for hire, he had been. Yeah, they schemed the death of my brother’s buddy and my brother’s felony murder charge as a two-for-one. And now, because of the email snafu, my brother and I have been exonerated. Finding out the truth about my brother’s injustice and helping correct it made the nightmare worth living. 

I won’t be road-tripping with any strangers anytime soon, though.