Free Caretakers (Tyler Cunningham) by Jamie Sheffield

( It’s easy to snatch someone, anyone ... much harder to get away with it for decades and not leave a body for others to find somewhere/sometime ). My brain yelled at me, the clever bits in the back of my head insisting that they had made those intuitive leaps that make what I do fun ( at times ). Unfortunately, it came at exactly the wrong moment for me to lose focus, and my attention to the road in front of me greyed out a bit just as I arrived at the intersection of Routes 30 and 3. I stepped hard on the fat brake pedal, and felt the wheels all lock ( pre-ABS ) as the wide harness bit into my left shoulder, causing me to wince as this was sensitive scar tissue and still-jumbled nerves from the injury that I had received last summer in the course of an investigation. We, the Porsche and I, skidded off the road and into the grass to the right of the ‘STOP’ sign; Barry stepped out from behind the sign to wait for the car to stop scraping its way through grass and small bushes and saplings that the road crews had neglected to trim. He waited in exactly the right spot to bend over and speak to me as I shut off the engine and bounced out of the car, willing the adrenaline to finish burning through my extremities. ( A calm and rational part of my mind posited that Barry could have only judged the correct spot to wait in with my understanding of physics and this particular car’s abilities, further proving that he was nothing more than a creation of some odd corner of my consciousness, and must serve some purpose ).
    “Smooth move, Ex-Lax! Hah!” he snapped in my face, in that deep voice of his, and leaned back. I nodded.
    “That thing ain’t your Honda, Tyler. The toaster may be a silly car, but it’s got safety features out the wazoo. Anti-lock brakes, airbags everywhere, reinforced cabin frame, less than half the horsepower of this thing ( I was going to interrupt and give him the exact numbers, but remembered just in time that if I knew them, he knew them, so I just sat, and waited ).”
    “Your shoulder hurts right? Where Justin shot you. You don’t know how lucky you got, Tyler, with that, with us, with me.” He looked me in the eye ( not having to say ‘when you killed me’ ). “This thing you signed on for, for the dog lady, it could bigger than the stuff with Cynthia and George and me and Justin last summer, much bigger; and we, I, nearly killed you last time out.”
    I should have felt silly, parked in the grass off to one side of the street, at the end of a serious set of skid marks on the road and in the grass, being lectured to by a dead giant, but I didn’t. ( My lack of the social software, that virtually all of humanity comes pre-loaded with, has marked up and down aspects, at various times, and in different situations ).             
    “So what are you saying, Barry, that rich/powerful/fancy people are more dangerous than you and Justin and George? Remember, I grew up with rich and fancy people … I didn’t grow up in the Adirondacks. I was born and raised in Manhattan. I know these people,” I finished, already knowing where he was likely going with his rebuttal ( I should, given that both sides of this discussion originated in my head ).
    “You are the dumbest smart guy I ever met, you know that Tyler? You know money, may even have money, but that doesn’t mean that you understand the way it works, the way it can be used, the way it affects those with, and around it over time.” The sentence structure seemed more complex than living Barry would have been able to use, but my sub-conscious had something to say, and it was using what it had, so I let it go rather than point it out to … myself, essentially.
    “These people, people like the Crockers—fuckin’ Kitty and Skip and Pip and who knows what else—they may be like regular people back in New York ( City, I added, smiling at how crazy it was to be correcting my ‘imaginary friend’ ) or Boston or wherever, but up