One Fatal Mistake Read online

  Amber whipped the wheel to the left and the Camry took a turn without slowing. The tires screeched, cutting through the tranquil morning. She flew through an intersection. They sped past silent homes and empty streets.

  Next to her, Ross tore off his Chewbacca mask. The ponytail he’d tied his hair in before the robbery had come undone and his long hair flowed like the mane of a wild animal.

  “We did it!” he yelled. “Can’t believe it. We did it!”

  “Not over yet,” Amber said. “We need to get out of here first.”

  “Then, book it, babe. Let’s roll.”

  Amber sped through the sleepy town and took a left turn. Straight for a few blocks. After a minute, she passed a sign that read: THANKS FOR VISITING HASTINGS, NEBRASKA. Modest houses with small front yards immediately gave way to flat, frozen farmland.

  They motored down a two-lane highway, Hastings disappearing behind them.

  * * *

  After dropping off Joshua, Karen drove back across the city. Took Eighth Avenue SW over the Cedar River and arrived at Mercy Hospital, the biggest hospital in Cedar Rapids. After changing into scrubs, the day-shift nurses met the night shift for handoff. Then Karen’s day began.

  Fifty million places to be. Always on her feet. Medication to administer. Reports to write. Check-ins to update physicians. As a nurse in the intensive care unit, she spent her entire morning jumping between the patients under her care, making assessments of and adjustments to their treatment to keep them stable and hopefully move them closer to recovering from major surgery. One heart attack patient was diabetic, and she stopped by his room consistently to monitor his insulin levels. Another patient had spiked a fever—could mean a new infection—so she took a few samples to send to the lab.

  When her break came in the midmorning, she went to the small room that served as the floor’s kitchen/break room. A few of her coworkers sat at the table in the middle of the room. She poured a cup of coffee and sat down next to Carmella, a cute Hispanic girl with smooth olive skin and curly brown hair. She was in her mid-twenties, the youngest nurse on their floor, though she looked barely older than a teenager. Her green scrubs hung off her petite body like a tent.

  “Just the person we wanted to see,” Carmella said to her. “Tell us all about it. Right now.”

  “Tell you about what?” Karen said.

  “Your date. We want to hear all about last night’s date.”

  “That’s right, your date,” Peg said. She was a rail-thin nurse, a lifer who’d been a nurse for decades. “Was he cute?”

  “In good shape?”

  “What kind of car did he drive?”

  “What about his butt? Nice butt?”

  “Tell us all about the dinner, the conversation—”

  “And don’t leave out the part about the hot, steamy lovemaking,” Carmella said.

  “Oh, we definitely want to hear about that.”

  The ladies at the table began laughing. Karen couldn’t hold back a smile. “There was nothing of the sort,” she said.

  “Details, baby—give us the details,” Carmella said.

  Her date. The reason she hadn’t been home last night. Joshua hadn’t asked her about the date this morning, and she’d held on to a glimmer of hope that her coworkers would forget to ask about it, too.

  No such luck.

  So she rehashed everything about the date. She’d been exchanging messages with him on one of the dating sites she was a member of, and they’d decided to finally meet up at a bar last night. Her date had arrived ten minutes late; while waiting for him, she’d sat at a table alone, surrounded by young, beautiful drunk people who all looked like high school students to her, like they should be classmates of Joshua’s, not out drinking at a bar. Once her date finally showed up, he spent more time watching the basketball game on the TV than talking with her. The few times they did talk, it was clear from the look on his face that he was having difficulty hearing what she was saying. An unremarkable evening, just like every other date she’d been on recently.

  It had been scarcely a month since she’d decided to start dating again. For years, she’d simply had no time to date. Between raising Joshua by herself, going back to college for her nursing degree once he got older, and attending his golf meets and other functions when he reached high school, she hardly had a moment to breathe, let alone start a relationship. Joshua’s life was her life; there wasn’t time for anything else.

  But she knew that there’d soon be a huge void when Joshua left for college. It was something she could still hardly fathom, that in roughly six months she’d be in the house by herself, without him. And so came her New Year’s resolution, made barely more than a month ago: start dating. Really try to find someone.

  When she’d told her coworkers about her plans, the news had gone off like a bomb. All of them except for Carmella were married, and they’d thrown themselves into the task of finding her a man. Scouring online dating sites. E-mailing choices to her. Telling her about someone from church or a former coworker who’d be perfect for her.

  “Long story short,” Karen said, finishing up her recap, “I don’t think there’ll be a second date.”

  Carmella started talking about a doctor down on the third floor she wanted to set her up with. Karen politely nodded but barely paid attention. She’d heard it all before.

  “What about this weekend, lovergirl?” Peg asked. “How many hot dates do you have lined up for this weekend?”

  “None,” Karen said. “I have the weekend off and I’ll be relaxing. A nice, quiet weekend with nothing going on. Exactly what I need.”

  * * *

  A bell rang, classroom doors flew open, and students swarmed into the hallways. Joshua worked his way through the mob. The day was just half over and, already, it had been grueling. He didn’t know how he was going to make it through a few more hours.

  When he got to his locker, it took three tries to enter his combination correctly. He grabbed his phone off a shelf and quickly checked the same local news sites he’d checked after every class so far.

  No report of a body being found out by Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area.

  Nothing about a missing person.

  Joshua set his phone back in his locker. He closed his eyes, clenched and unclenched his hands. He’d hoped that the school day would provide a distraction, but it hadn’t. That same nervous, uneasy feeling had eaten away at him all day, just as it had every moment since last night.

  Right as he was about to close his locker, his phone chimed with a new message. He tensed up and grabbed it. The message onscreen was from the number he’d texted earlier:

  You there?

  Joshua typed out: Yeah. Here.

  How you doing?

  Not good.

  Me, either. Just know, we’re in this together. You and me. You’re not alone.

  I know. It’s still tough. Can’t stop thinking about everything that happened.

  A bell rang, signaling one minute until next period began.

  Gotta go, Joshua typed.

  Me, too. I love you. Never forget that. I love you more than anything in the world.

  K. Love you, too.

  Stay strong. Talk soon.

  Joshua set his phone in his locker and shut the door.

  * * *

  • • •

  The rest of the school day was just as difficult as the morning. Every class dragged by. Every hour was a struggle. After school, Joshua went to an indoor driving range across town with a few golf teammates. Around twenty golfers were lined up, spaced out a few feet apart, swinging mechanically, the boys’ team in a row on one half, the girls on the other. At the far end of the row his ex-girlfriend, Ashley, swung away, wearing a polo and a pair of khakis, her brunette hair pulled into a tight ponytail.

  The only sound in the cavernous room was the
smack of golf clubs and the occasional mumbled chatter.

  Joshua set a ball down, adjusted his grip on the club, and swung. The ball soared for a bit and sharply sliced to the right before it was caught in the netting set up at the edge of the room. He set another ball down and hit it. Another slice.

  “Gotta stop thinking about Ashley, man,” Aaron said from the tee box next to him.

  “I’m not.”

  “Sure you are. Better not get back with her. I’ll be pissed if you cost me twenty bucks.”

  Aaron laughed. Joshua didn’t react. He continued to hit drive after drive, most of them shanks. Twenty minutes in, the feeling suddenly hit him: a discomfort in his stomach, a feeling like he was totally overwhelmed. He ran to the bathroom. Once he was alone in a stall, he was certain he’d start vomiting. Or crying. But nothing happened. He stood in the bathroom, alone, staring down at the toilet.

  He returned to the driving range and continued hitting golf balls, his swing steady as a pendulum. The entire time, all he could think of was the body out in Hawkeye Wildlife Management Area. The body that was slowly rotting away.

  The body that was out there because of him.

  FOUR

  Two hundred miles outside of Hastings, Amber pulled up to a roadside convenience store in the middle of nowhere. Looked like a place that time forgot, like something straight out of the 1950s: a rickety, ramshackle building with a nonelectric Shell sign out front and, nailed to the walls, sun-faded tin sheets advertising car brands.

  “Why we stopping?” Ross asked.

  “Low on gas. Less than a quarter tank.”

  Amber parked next to one of the gas pumps. She stepped outside and put the nozzle in the tank. She stared at the counter as it ticked upward, the numbers passing in a blur. The bank robbery had happened four hours ago, but everything still lingered—the nerves, the jackhammering of her heart, the rush of the escape. After leaving Hastings, they’d driven through flat countryside interrupted by the occasional small town. The entire drive, she’d tried to calm herself, but she just couldn’t ditch that uneasy, anxious feeling.

  She looked at Ross, still slouched in the passenger seat. He blankly stared out the windshield, his mouth a straight line, forearms crossed over his slender chest.

  She walked around the car and tapped the window. Ross lowered it and she leaned in.

  “You doing all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. He ran a hand through his long hair. “I just . . . I can’t believe we did it. I can’t believe we screwed Shane over.”

  “I can’t, either. But it had to be done. You know that.”

  Ross continued to stare out the windshield, at the flat farmland that stretched forever beyond the gas station. He looked so sad. She knew it had to be difficult for him, the way they’d double-crossed Shane. Shane was his older brother. They’d grown up together, shared a lifetime of memories, had a bond that was almost as tight as the one she and Ross had.

  “Cheer up, baby,” she said to him. “Everything went exactly like we planned it. We’re rich.”

  That made Ross smile, which seemed to take ten years off his hardened face. Once they were safely away from Hastings, Ross had counted the money from both backpacks. Took him nearly half an hour. When he finished, he’d counted almost forty thousand dollars between the two bags, some loose bills, some stacks of money. The number blew Amber away. Shane had mentioned that the bank they’d targeted was some sort of shipping facility for other banks in nearby small towns, but going into the robbery she didn’t think they’d get anything near forty thousand dollars.

  Ross consolidated the money into one backpack and, for almost half an hour, he’d stared at all that money crammed inside, admired it, picked up handfuls of it, and dropped it back into the backpack. He’d talked about all the things they could buy with the money, speaking so excitedly that his words slurred together—and when Amber looked at him a few minutes later, he was asleep. Just like that, he’d crashed. Sudden, sharp crashes like that were common when he was coming off a high from drugs.

  “Forty thousand dollars,” she said to him now. “We can do anything with that kind of money. Go anywhere.”

  “I know,” Ross said. “But I just can’t stop thinking about Shane. Been through a lot with him. Tough to believe that it’s all over.” He turned to her. “Think he got picked up?”

  “Probably. Don’t know where he would’ve escaped to.”

  The backpack with the money was resting in Ross’s lap. Amber reached in and grabbed a handful of bills from inside, held them up for Ross to see.

  “You know what this money represents,” she said. “A new life for us. A better life. A life away from Shane, away from all the other distractions.”

  She stared out at the endless, empty land surrounding them.

  “Just you and me,” she said. “You and me against the world. That’s the way it’ll be from now on.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Once the gas tank was full, Amber went inside to pay. Even though the gas station was outdated, there was a display of disposable cell phones right inside the door. She bought one. She and Ross hadn’t packed clothes or any personal belongings before the robbery. They didn’t want Shane to get suspicious if he saw a suitcase. They hadn’t even brought their phones. They were starting over in every sense of the term. Nothing but their wallets and the clothes on their backs.

  Ross insisted he was fine to drive after his nap, and they switched seats. Despite her nerves, Amber fell asleep almost instantly.

  When she awoke, they were on a gravel road, kicking up dust and dirt behind them. Ross had an arm around her, one hand on the steering wheel. She was curled up, leaning into his body. There was a forest to their left, large trees rising into the sky. Flat farmland to their right. It was like the road was a divider between two completely different worlds.

  The radio was on low. Willie Nelson. Ross was singing along in the husky voice she’d heard belt out thousands of songs over the years. His voice was low and deep, barely more than a mumble.

  . . . on the road again . . .

  She silently sat there in his embrace for a moment, listening to him sing. The song was one of her favorites. He’d sung it on the night they met. Eighteen years ago, that had been. With Ross’s low voice sounding in the car, she stared out the window and thought back to that night, back to when it all began.

  Her life up to the point she met Ross was mostly unspectacular. She left home a few weeks after graduating high school in Tennessee. Traveled around, crashed on some couches. Worked as a waitress at nearly every townie bar and greasy spoon in the state. Before she realized it, a few years had flown by.

  The night she met Ross, she was doing what she did most every night she didn’t have to work: sitting alone at a bar, peeling the label off a beer bottle, wondering if she’d ever figure out her life.

  Two men carrying guitars walked onto the small stage at the front of the bar. They introduced themselves as Ross and Shane Youngblood. The Blood Brothers. They couldn’t have looked more different. Shane was a giant in every sense, tall and overweight, a bushy beard covering the lower half of his face. Ross was slender, with hair down to his shoulders. He wore a cowboy hat and a button-up tucked into a pair of jeans.

  The Blood Brothers sat on small stools onstage. Ross adjusted the microphone and began singing, one old country-western song after another. His voice was deep and throaty, smooth as honey. Shane played guitar in the background, occasionally providing backup vocals, but it was like he wasn’t even there.

  She kept her eyes locked on Ross as they played. He was ruggedly handsome, had that true cowboy look to him, but she felt more than physical attraction. It was like they shared something between them. It was a spark. A connection. The bar was half-full, but to her it felt like it was just the two of them, him serenading her.
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br />   After the set was over, she nearly melted when Ross walked up and offered to buy her a drink.

  They talked all night. Exchanged life stories. Ross had lost his parents when he was fifteen, and Shane, his older brother by a few years, had become his legal guardian. Ross dropped out of school and spent his days working with Shane at the car repair shop they inherited from their father. Spent their nights playing guitar together. After a few years, they decided to sell the car shop and go all in on chasing their music dream. Since then, they’d toured all over Tennessee, booking gigs at any bar or festival that would take them, hoping that their big break was just around the corner.

  Amber gave Ross her number. After only a few weeks of hanging out, she quit her job and joined Ross and Shane as they toured around to different bars throughout Tennessee in Shane’s old conversion van. Life became nonstop. Late nights. Constant partying. A different town every night. The three of them were inseparable, she and the Blood Brothers. One bar to the next. One performance after another.

  It was crazy, constant fun. Ross and Shane were forces of nature, identical in everything but appearance. Two hard-driving, hard-partying good ol’ country boys. Seemed like they had only two speeds: fast and faster.

  Her relationship with Ross moved just as quickly. Being with him was a trip, a wild ride; the spark hadn’t died out. They started living together. Got married after a few years, a small affair at a local courthouse with Shane as the only attendee.

  The late nights became later, the wild nights even wilder . . . and then things started getting a little too wild. Shane began using amphetamines. Ritalin, Adderall. The pills transformed him. He’d already had a short temper—every week or two, a night out would end with Shane getting in a fistfight—but the amphetamines made it worse. It was like he actively looked for a reason to start trouble. All it would take was a minor perceived slight to set him off. Someone looking at him wrong or cutting in front of him in line at the bar.