THE BURNER

A Tale of the Hatchback Woman by Dan Jire

All the good sense Spider Hanson had told him to kick the metal post holding the public telephone that was no longer in service.

“How’s anybody ‘sposed to talk to anybody these days?”

Luckily Spider’s body betrayed his good sense and kept his feet planted firmly on the broken concrete pavement. As if by fate, his line of sight caught a red hatchback gliding into the gas station parking lot. He turned and followed it to the pumps.

“Eh?” he said, and then repeated with authority. “Eh!”

The woman’s dirty blonde hair bounced over her shoulder as she saw the beanpole of a man b-lining it straight for her. She didn’t flinch or cower with fear. Spider would later note how odd that seemed and had his good sense been good he might’ve known to walk the other way. But he didn’t.

“Ya got ya cellphone I can borrow?”

><><

Three days later, Spider Hanson sat across from a man who looked a little doughy to be a cop. Still, he was white, tall, clean cut, and named Tuel. So, he could’ve been as cop as far as Spider was concerned. Spider had watched his brothers’ good sense fail them in the presence of the law, but Spider was determined that would not happen with him. So, he told the man everything he wanted to know.

“She gave me that cellphone, then took off. I was only gonna make a call and give it right back. I guess I scared her. I got an ugly face, you know?”

The man nodded.

“Prettier than my momma’s, but don’t you be saying that.”

“What happened to the cellphone?”

“After what happened? Shit. I tossed it in the James River. How much you charge me for littering? Slipped out my hand, now that I recall it.”

Alan Tuel shook his head. He looked disappointed, but had taken enough notes that Spider was anxious to see just why this might-be-a-cop-man was so interested in this lady in the red car.

“She ain’t dead, is she?”

“Maybe. Don’t know what she is,” Tuel said.

“Missing.”

Tuel nodded as if it was an acceptable story and stopped writing.

“You live up in Church Hill, right?”

Spider nodded.

“You’ve got urban legends up there, ghosts and such.”

“Yeah, like Blue Moon gonna get you.” Spider’s good sense was telling him this man was about to tell him some very strange stuff. And as strange as the last three days had been, Spider expected this to be the icing on the cake.

“This woman is a bit of an urban legend. You never heard of her before?”

Spider shook his head, pouted his lips, shrugged his shoulder, and tapped his feet. One of those had to translate universally for Tuel that Spider had no clue what he was talking about.

“I’ve been at this for almost ten years now. I’ve heard stories just like yours. I’ve even got one myself. “

“I’m not on drugs.”

Tuel nodded. “I believe you. As I’ve said this isn’t the first time that I’ve heard a story like yours. Over the past twenty years, there have been almost a hundred similar stories. People who stop to help this blonde woman. They call her the Hatchback Woman. She always gives them something. And that something always leads to trouble.”

“Yeah, maybe it was a burner, like all them drug dealers got, that’s what I thought, one of those phones you pay cash for an all and cops don’t know it’s you. That’s why I threw it in the river. I wasn’t disposing of evidence. Naw, it was evil or something.”

“I agree.”

“This is like that show, the X-Files. I don’t believe in aliens. You gonna tell me this lady is an alien?”

Tuel shook his head. “She’s been called worse.”

“She a witch!” Spider’s good sense celebrated a Jeopardy victory. “Crazy-ass voodoo white chick!”

Tuel didn’t give him the satisfaction that Trebek might’ve. Instead, he just stared at Spider and after Spider’s smile diminished, he asked, “Can you take me to where you threw it in the river?”

><><

“You believe me, right?” Spider had already asked this so many times that Tuel had to make his nod a bit more distinguished. “I didn’t kill no one. They did it themselves. I help you catch their killer.”

Three people had died in the past three days. Spider had spoken to each one. Not directly. He cursed them as he held the phone. The first woman had given him a disgusted look for leaning against her car as he phoned his Cousin Ru in the Willow Lawn Shopping Mall parking lot. He told her, “Go find a bridge and walk off it.”

It made the front page of the Richmond Times Dispatch. No one knew why she killed herself. The nearest bridge was a plummet onto I-195. Spider’s good sense tingled, but he didn’t just assume it was his magic words. He figured that woman had good reason enough. Everybody got a good reason to end it all, anyone who says they don’t is a damned liar or has Alzheimer’s.

The woman’s face would haunt him after the next two. He didn’t watch the news again just in case they ran the story again.

“Right here,” Spider said as his feet sought the position beside the river. He was almost certain it was from right there in the muddy bank just before Brown’s Island that he had stood and chucked the cellphone. He pointed behind him to the towering Federal Reserve building. “They caught me on the camera, didn’t they? That’s why you come and find me.”

“Same cameras have you at Willow Lawn, and outside a VCU dorm during the time of the second death. Witnesses place you at the third death.”

“You aren’t actually a cop, are you? You got to show me your badge.”

“No, I’m not a cop. I’m like you. Someone this woman has cursed.”

Spider’s sense was all bad. Something about Tuel was very wrong.

“Yet you say what I said into that phone of hers is why them people did what they did to themselves?”

Tuel nodded and examined the current. Spider thought maybe he was thinking about jumping in the river and trying to find the phone. Catfish and the current would’ve got it, and it was probably halfway to Virginia Beach by now.

“I said nice things too. I asked my mama to make me a nice pork chop dinner and she did. You think she did that because I used that phone?”

“Does your mother normally make you pork chop dinners?”

Spider shrugged. “Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes she does so maybe it weren’t the phone, maybe none of it was. Maybe it was just them people’s time to kill themselves.”

“Angie Henderson was nineteen years old, had a nice scholarship, good grades. Happy relationship with a young man that would cause most fathers to pay for the wedding in full. She was drug and alcohol free and you told her to . . .”

Spider cut the man off. He didn’t want to hear what he said. The words still haunted him. The squeal of the airbrakes hung in his eardrums.

“I could tell you about the third woman, too. You look like you hate women, Mr. Hanson. The jury would be quick to hate you, too.”

“Course juries hate me. You see this face. Do I look like a pretty ass white girl to you? What would you do if you found that phone, Mister? It’s probably ruined now.”

“I’d destroy it. Like all her little toys.”

“Well, I destroyed it already so let’s call us even and if you can’t arrest me then I think it be best I be getting.”

Tuel didn’t seem to be listening. He started walking down the side of the river until he came to a patch of rocks, tall grass and trash. He squatted and reached into the river. All of Spider’s good sense told him to run.

Run as far as you can.

Tuel pressed a button on the cellphone. Its blue glow illuminated his hand.

It still worked.

“Destroying her toys is not as simple as throwing it into the river. They have a way of finding people again.”

><><

The fear never left Spider’s eyes. But he didn’t run. He followed Alan Tuel wherever he went. Alan had been a normal guy, he was the middle-class American that wasn’t poor because he didn’t qualify for food stamps, but he could barely afford to live like all the commercials promised. He had made the mistake of helping the Hatchback Woman one day when her car was on the fritz. She gave him a plastic bag that could steal anything. Got him jail time even though he had had evidence that showed he didn’t take the camera he was accused of stealing. Soon as he was out, he enlisted in the great search to apprehend and stop the Hatchback Woman.

But Tuel was going to keep Spider out of jail. That’s what he promised.

“How you gonna destroy it?”

Alan Tuel didn’t answer. He had pocketed the phone in his jacket and it had left a wet mark that Spider had not been able to take his eye off as they drove north on I-95, leaving Richmond.

“What if we can tell people good things to do? That’d make up for what I did? We could call up Oprah and she could give us all new cars.”

“She twists everything. The Hatchback Woman, not Oprah. You can’t do good with anything she gives you. It’s going to come back to haunt you, somehow. Trust me.”

“I want forgiveness. Because if I believe you, then I did kill those people and I ain’t never wanted to kill no one. Swear it. Even when they got me so mad. It’s just talk. That’s all. I wasn’t even saying to them. I was on the phone with my friends, so how’s it the phone made them do what I say if I’m not calling them up or something. I bet they didn’t even hear me. That’s all it was, just talk. All I ever had was talk cause look at me. People been beating my ass since I was three years old.”

“Well, Mr. Hanson, you just stumbled into the biggest bully in your life. Are you going to let her push you around?”

“Don’t want to, but I’d say she already beat my ass. Leaving Richmond ain’t going to help. I still gotta live with what I said. Right? Guilty conscience and all. I wished them dead into that phone and then poof they did it.”

“You’re not leaving Richmond. I’m taking you to someone who believes our stories. Who, if you care about forgiveness, is going to help us catch her before she causes any more harm.”

His name was Edward Benner. He was short and round and lived in a big house in the town of Ashland. His house smelled like cigarettes, but everywhere Spider looked there was no sign of smoke or an ashtray. It was an old house, might’ve smelled that way for a century. Spider sat nervously in what appeared to be a very uncomfortable room—the kind where children are always being told to keep their feet off the furniture and not touch anything.

There were stacks of books about whales and Russians, and the only comfort Spider could find was the name Martin Luther King, Jr. gracing the spine of a thick book.

Edward Benner and Alan Tuel talked briefly before Tuel turned over the cellphone.

“I used to live in Church Hill,” Benner said. “Such a pretty view over Rockett’s Landing as if the sunset was made to be seen from there.”

“Guess that depends where you live,” Spider said. “Sun go down, I lock my doors and cover the windows.”

“Yes, it’s unfortunate.”

Tuel stood up and said, “I’ll leave you two be. See you at the funeral.”

Benner nodded. “I want you to consider taking Miss Pace on as your partner. She’s a good sort. I think you two together will get closer to the Lady than anyone. She and Steinberg were close. I could feel it, Alan.”

Tuel nodded and turned to Spider. “Have a good one, friend.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Spider felt nervous being alone with the rich fat guy. His good sense was telling him he should stay with Tuel. But the door soon closed behind Tuel and the faint sound of his truck engine started up outside.

“So, Mr. Hanson,” the fat guy clasped his hands together and eyed the cellphone sitting on the end table beside his big winged chair.

“You going to destroy it?”

The fat man nodded. “That’s what I do. I undo what she has done the best I can. So, I want to present you with a few options.”

Spider didn’t like the sound of that, and his bladder suddenly filled and made it impossible for him to sit still.

“We are Stalkers. We catalog, track and hope to catch and stop the Lady who drives the red hatchback. As I’m sure Alan has briefed you, her legacy is quite dark and extensive. We have reports that go back decades and yet she still eludes. Option one is that you join us. You take on an equal share of the responsibility to catch her. In return, we have ways to keep the police off your trail in connection with the deaths.”

The fat man let silence swell in the room until the kettle in Spider’s mind began to screech.

“You said options like they be plural.”

“I was hoping you would take option one.” Benner smiled. “Option two or three or four, whichever one you want to rank it as, is that you accept your responsibility in the crimes and go to jail. It’s not the preferred option but it is an option.”

“That’s not an option.”

“No, it really isn’t. So, your other option is that you still work for us, but on a more lenient basis. We might call on you to help protect others who have been cursed by one of her foul gifts.”

“Yeah, what else you got?”

Benner cleared his throat and picked up the cellphone. “Alan told me about this gift of hers, if you spoke into it people had to do as you said.”

“That’s what we’re thinking, yeah, if that’s even possible.” Spider scoffed, “No way cops say I killed people with a magic cellphone. You gotta give me better options because they ain’t going to give me jail.”

“Unfortunately, that is not true, it would be very easy for me to have you locked up. And when you say options, if you want monetary awards, well you will have to work. No one ever did anything good with money they were given.”

“I ain’t dumb, that ain’t true. Money is given. Simple as that. I can’t get a job cause I look like a bum, but lazy white dudes who play on the Internet all day make all the money, complain they’s poor.”

“What do you want then?”

“I just want this to go away. I got me. You can believe that.”

“I can see that you won’t be much help to us. You only care about yourself.”

“I care about those that care about me,” Spider said with a badge of honor. His good sense said he shouldn’t have said that and that he should run. Now.

Benner flipped the phone open.

“Maybe one day you will be help for us. Maybe Alan is wrong, maybe there’s nothing special about this object. You see Alan refuses to use any of her little gifts. So how can I be sure that you’re telling the truth? Sure, I believe Alan believes you, but he is capable of mistakes. That’s why he is here. He made a mistake helping her.”

“I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want nothing to do with it. If she’s so bad maybe it be best we just leave her alone.”

“She doesn’t choose anyone at random, Mr. Hanson. Concern yourself with that.”

“So now it be getting personal?”

“I’m most certain that it is.”

Spider shook his head. “Can’t you just make this all go away? I want no part in nothing, man.”

Benner examined the cellphone in his hands. “She isn’t going to leave you alone. She wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“Please, man.”

Benner put the cellphone to his ear. “Perhaps it will be best if you forget all of this.”

><><

Spider’s head burned like he had been drinking. But he didn’t drink anymore. Long ago he got the good sense to stop. Yet he could’ve sworn that’s what it felt like. Maybe he was getting sick. He couldn’t remember much of anything, could barely remember getting out of a van and ending up at the gas station three blocks from his house. He had told the driver to drop him off there or at least he thought he must’ve.

He had wanted to buy a soda or something. He was just thirsty. But his pockets were empty, which wasn’t abnormal. He almost never had any cash or change on him. All he wanted a soda. They say Sprite can cure hangovers. So that’s what he wanted. He just didn’t have any money. Someone had to lend him some.

Spider’s good sense would’ve told him something was wrong if he could remember. But when the red hatchback pulled up and the blonde woman stepped out, he didn’t think twice. He called to her, “Eh! Lady!”

She turned and smiled.

Like she knew him.

THE END.