The Wayside

Flash Fiction by Roy Dorman

At a little after 7:00 PM on a warm August evening, Danny Sullivan pulled off the highway onto the exit lane leading to the rest area.  Except for an older model station wagon and a battered pick-up truck that appeared to be abandoned, it looked like he’d have the place to himself.

And that suited Danny just fine.  He had something to do that needed to be done without the presence of an audience.

He pulled his Dodge Charger up to a parking spot near the restrooms and the picnic area.  Whoever owned the station wagon must have been in one of the restrooms. 

He’d wait them out.

After a few minutes of drumming his fingertips on the steering wheel, Danny stepped out of his car to stretch his legs.  He walked over to the picnic area and stopped when he saw fast-food containers on one of the picnic tables.  He supposed they could belong to whoever was in the restroom.  He’d been hoping they would just do their business and take off.  He didn’t want any personal interactions.

He strolled nonchalantly up to the table and looked more closely at the containers.  Chinese food.  Four of them.  Two with rice and two with what looked like beef and shrimp, both of those two mixed with snow peas.  All four were more than half full.

They went to the restroom and they’d be back.

But both of them? He supposed that was possible. Women he’d known did that a lot.

Danny had work to do and couldn’t wait around.  Another car could pull in and just drag this out further.

He walked up to the MEN’s and went inside.  Nobody at the urinals and nobody in the stalls. 

Two women?

He went to the entrance of the WOMEN’s and hesitated.  If he went in to check, there could be some unwanted commotion.

“Maintenance.  Anybody in there?”  No answer.

And then, “I’m comin’ in.”

There was nobody in any of the stalls.

Danny didn’t need a mystery.  He had a mystery of his own making in his trunk.

He walked back to the picnic table and looked around the area a bit.  There was a drop-off where the mowed lawn ended that Danny had taken note of on his way in.

He walked over to that area and started down the steep incline.  There was still some daylight, but it was getting a little shadowy.  Crickets in the tall grass had begun their evening serenades. 

About thirty feet from the top, he came across the two who’d left their Chinese behind.  Their throats were cut and they were lying on their backs looking at the sky with looks of horror on their faces.

***

Forty feet from where Danny stood looking down at the two corpses someone was hidden in a grouping of older poplars and birches.  This person was interested in what Danny would do next.  Would he reach for his phone and call 911?  Or would he scramble back up the incline and get the hell out of there?

If a call was made, the watcher would have to kill this guy and leave quickly himself.  If no call was made and the guy took off, he’d have time to consider his next move with the bodies of the couple he’d killed.

But this guy did neither.  Resting on his haunches, he looked at the bodies more closely and then stood up and slowly turned in a circle, checking out the area.  At one point, he stared at the grouping of trees as if trying to see into them.

Then, seemingly convinced about something or other, he carefully made his way back up the incline.

Roger Brotherhood, the man in the trees, decided to stay where he was until he heard his visitor leave the parking lot. 

What happened next surprised him.

***

Danny popped the trunk of the Charger and lifted the tightly wrapped body out of it.  He carried it over to the drop-off and stood for a minute before he decided it would be easier to toss it down than carry it down.

Giving it a good throw got it started, momentum then carried it almost to the feet of the two deaders already down there.

Movement of something light blue in the poplars and birches caught his eye.  Danny pretended not to notice it, but figured it would have to be investigated.

Trudging down the slope once again, he came to what was rapidly becoming a collection of bodies.  He dragged his own contribution to the pile over to where the first couple lay.  He unwrapped the body and placed it on its back between the two.  His corpse had a single bullet hole in the forehead, and like the other two, had a look of surprise on its face.

Danny smiled as he thought he’d give anything to see the first reactions of the detectives and the forensics people when the bodies were discovered.

***

Roger Brotherhood had watched all of this and now started from the trees toward Danny.  He had no plan other than to kill Danny.

Roger was a homicidal maniac and had escaped from a Wheeling, West Virginia, mental institution.  He’d left a trail of bodies across the hills of West Virginia in the last month, and authorities said it was only a matter of time before he’d be caught.  Of course, the authorities always issued statements like that.

***

Danny heard Roger’s footsteps coming at him from behind and ducked just as Roger swung his straight razor in an arc that would’ve almost certainly cut clean through the back of Danny’s neck.

Danny pulled a Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster and put three quick shots into Roger’s chest, dropping him in his tracks.

He dragged Roger over to the other three bodies and placed him face down on top of the body he’d brought to the party.

He took a few minutes to go through everybody’s pockets and came away with very little.

But he still had a satisfied smile as he started back up the incline.

“Weeks,” he said to himself, chuckling.  “It’ll take ‘em weeks to sort that mess out.”

---

Bio: Roy Dorman is retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Benefits Office and has been a voracious reader for over 70 years. At the prompting of an old high school friend, himself a retired English teacher, Roy is now a voracious writer. He has had flash fiction and poetry published in Black Petals, Bewildering Stories, One Sentence Poems, Yellow Mama, Drunk Monkeys, Literally Stories, Dark Dossier, The Rye Whiskey Review, Near To The Knuckle, Theme of Absence, Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, The Yard, and a number of other online and print journals. Unweaving a Tangled Web, published by Hekate Publishing, is his first novel.

Cover Photo by:Pexels/Jared Brotman

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