Chapter 5: JOSLIN

Chapter Five

JOSLIN

O nly a few minutes in this man’s presence and my terror is out of control. Steel. It could be a real name… but I don’t think he’s a Steel. He looks more like an… I don’t know. He looks like a ‘Tony’ – a scary, dark-haired movie mobster.

Most likely an ex-con. My stomach thumps.

He looks scarier the more I stare at him and the way he manhandled me to get me in his vehicle… I keep looking at him like he’s going to snap and rip me in half. He might. I barely know him. I don’t have a damn clue what’s going to happen to me.

I don’t want to tell this man what happened to me or what I saw out in the desert. It doesn’t help that one of the last things I remember is sitting in my Jeep, staring at the three patches on the biker’s cuts. A lot must have happened since then since it’s pitch black out, but it was broad daylight when I saw them.

“I need water.”

He looks over at me in a mixture of disgust and confusion. I don’t know how he can’t see that I’m burned from the sun and on the verge of death. I want to open the damn truck door and jump out onto the highway just to put this nightmare to an end.

I’m just grateful to be alive at this point and out of the damn sun. I must be burned to a crisp by now. I can’t imagine what my mom would say about my skin tone. It never made sense to me how she had a baby with a black man but criticized me for how dark my skin got after time in the sun. Lady, you’re the one who made me mixed race. Not like I mind the sun. It’s just hard not to think of her.

It’s even harder to push the thoughts out of my head. She wasn’t perfect, but she’s still my mother. It’s too bad I had to be in this position.

“I don’t have water. Just whiskey” Steel mutters. “How bad do you need it?”

He looks over at me almost unsympathetically, but he steps on the accelerator. I feel heavy behind my eyes as I replay what I just saw out there…

I took a life. It shouldn’t be that shocking to watch other men do the same. But I did what I had to as a form of long-term self-defense. What I saw in the desert was different.

The heat pushes the memories to the edges of my mind. I’ve never been this thirsty in my life. I didn’t even know people could get like this — so thirsty they feel crazy. I remember sitting in my Jeep for a while watching the bikers and taking notes. They broke up their blockade in front of the desert access pass and rode off.

I watched them disappear from behind the wheel of my Jeep, content that I had gone undetected. I couldn’t tell much about what they were talking about, although they didn’t bother to be quiet about it. I heard them say something about a bunch of redneck country boys. I heard the word hole.

Mostly, I just wanted to make sure they weren’t going to start scanning the area and find my ass. They didn’t. If they had, I wouldn’t be sitting here in the passenger seat of a red truck with… this man. He’s obviously a biker and possibly an ex-con. Not like I’m an expert or anything, but I love True Crime, and this man has a face that looks prison hardened.

Not to say he isn’t handsome. He has the type of jawline that would trend on TikTok and he has serious but pretty blue-green. His hair is short with thick grey streaks through the brown hair, an unusual shade of brown like what you find on a mouse. This man looks way too young to have this much grey hair on his head, but it does have the effect of making him look as much like a professor as he looks like an ex-convict.

After I watched the bikers drive off into the desert, I foolishly thought I waited long enough and I could just follow the GPS and continue on my path. The first few miles following the access pass, I could see bike tires and when they disappeared and the desert appeared just as empty and freaking hot as I expected, I relaxed a little too much.

I didn’t bother to ask where the bikes went or what they might be doing. I just kept driving. The heat stopped my cell phone from working entirely about fifteen minutes out from Globe. I had to take a circuitous route to get back on track due to some rocks and debris blocking my original path. Once I found my way back to the main route, the Jeep started making a funny sound.

It’s nothing, I told myself. Just an old car doing old car things. But even then, I knew it was the big bad thing I expected to go wrong — a lot later than I expected and at the worst time.

“God,” I whispered out loud. “If you’re real… please don’t make this Jeep crap out on me…”

The Jeep immediately stopped as if on God’s direct command. I won’t lie, I let out an ungodly, thoughtless scream that echoed around the desert and shook me up real good. Everyone around for miles must have heard that scream and worse, I heard it echoing back to me dozens of times, emphasizing how painfully alone I was out there.

I had put too much effort into my escape to let things end like that. I climbed out of the Jeep and tried my best to problem solve with what information I had. But the engine wouldn’t start. Thinking about it now makes me glance instinctively at this crazy grey-man’s dashboard.

But the truck engine is fine. Just fine. He looks over at me again, and I look away. He doesn’t look like any of the men I saw out in the desert, not like I got a good look at them, but they must be members of a rival gang or something. These gangs are filled with racist white boys, so even if this desert murder has the flavor of a cartel killing, it is pure Caucasian mess. And I have no idea how dangerous this man is. Or what he’s going to do to me for information.

When I gave up on the Jeep — shortly after finishing all of the water supply I could handle at once — I packed everything I could reasonably carry on my back and abandoned the Jeep. I planned on hiking back to Globe with the GPS. I couldn’t tell you now what the hell my plan was for arriving back on foot thirsty as hell in a mining town with racist insignias spray-painted on half the buildings.

But it was the only plan I had. I walked for over two hours before the GPS sputtered an error message, suggesting that I might have been walking in the wrong direction, and then the solar powered GPS made a strange popping noise. The smell of burned wires worked its way into a deep internal knot.

God must hate me.

I knew it was wrong to think, but it was the only thought that popped into my head.

The funniest part of that was, I hadn’t even witnessed the murders yet. God might not hate me, but he sure has a sense of humor…