He tried to rationalize his
decision. He had a meeting. He was running late. It was a busy highway. You
never know about people nowadays: he could have been a conman about to rob him
at gunpoint. None of those excuses washed, really.
Jason had seen the man lying by the
side of the road, crumpled like a discarded bill. He was pretty sure there had
been blood on the man’s face. Still, it hadn’t been enough to make him stop to
help.
It wasn’t a usual sight on a busy
highway. Whether the man was dead or alive, someone should have stopped.
Someone should have at least called 911. Someone. Yeah, he was someone, and he
hadn’t bothered.
He tried to tell himself someone
else had probably called, but at that hour of the night few cars drove on that
highway. And he hadn’t bothered to follow up to see if someone else had. The
victim was dressed in dark clothes, so perhaps others hadn’t seen him.
Jason didn’t want to be delayed any
more than he already had been. There would have been questions: how had he
found the man, what was he doing in the area, and so on. He would have had to
wait for an ambulance and answer police questions. They might have thought he
looked suspicious.
Meeting with the techs who would help him sabotage his
business partner wasn’t exactly an innocent thing to do in the middle of the
night, and if he did stop to help, it might somehow come back to bite him
later. No, he couldn’t risk stopping to help someone in need this time.
His cell phone rang and jarred him
from his reverie just as he reached his exit. He turned up the exit ramp as he
pulled the phone from the holder on his belt. He fumbled a little as he worked
it around his seat belt. There was a traffic light at the top of the ramp, and he came
to a stop as he flipped open the phone.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Jase, it’s Ken,” his partner said.
Great. Just the person he didn’t
want to talk to.
“What’s up?”
“I can’t locate the file on the
Granger account. I had it saved on my computer, but it’s corrupted, and I don’t
know what happened to my thumb drive.”
“Look, can I help you out tomorrow?
I’m not at home right now and I don’t have access to my computer,” he said as
the light changed and he pulled away from the intersection, the thumb drive in
question in his pocket.
“Aw, geez, I promised Granger I’d
have everything ready to go tomorrow.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll get it worked
out in the morning. I’ll be in first thing.”
“All right. I guess there’s nothing
I can do about it now, anyway. Late for you to be out, isn’t it?”
“On my way home from a birthday
party for a friend of Olivia’s,” Jason replied. “One of those ones she couldn’t
miss.”
“Oh, well, give her my love.”
“Will do,” Jason said and closed
the phone.
Olivia, the convenient girlfriend.
Well, Jason would mention something tomorrow about having a fight with Olivia
on the way home. That would eliminate the need to ever produce the non-existent
girlfriend.
As he started to put the phone back
into its holder, it slipped from his grasp. He looked away from the road, and
didn’t see the deer dart out from the line of trees. He looked up and stamped
on the brake as he saw himself careening toward the deer that turned to look at
him. Too late. The car hit the deer, forcing it up onto the hood where it
smashed the windshield. As the car spun out of control, the deer kicked once as
it died, hitting Jason in the forehead. His skull cracked from the force.
The car stopped finally, facing the
wrong direction on the road. The pain was only brief before Jason lost
consciousness. On the floor of his car, the cell phone started to ring.
# # #
3/24/10
