Incident on a Florida Highway (A Vignette)
By Tyson Blue
A contract killer finds himself in an unintended and explosive predicament during a routine fuel stop at a remote country store.
I was driving my rental car, a metallic blue Nissan Kicks, along a two-lane highway south and east of St. Petersburg. The sun had gone behind a cloud bank out over the Gulf, and everything had turned a dusky purple color. It wasn’t dark enough to turn the lights on yet, but I had them on anyway.
I was returning from a successful job in Miami, heading across the peninsula to the Gulf to pick up a boat to take me to Mobile, so I could catch a train back to Boston, pick up my car and head back to New Hampshire without getting too close to Georgia. Things had been a little too hot for me there for the last few years. It wouldn’t do for some cop to get a little too suspicious and wind up connecting me with Ray Vincent, fugitive contract killer and fugitive from justice.
There were only a few cars on the road, which ran mostly through farmland, fenced off lots with a few cows and horses. The farmhouses on those lots were mostly manufactured homes, the rectangular one-story brick homes that seemed to make up most of the residences in the South, or ramshackle whitewashed farmhouses with rusted tin roofs that looked as though they’d been there since the Depression.
Looking down, I noticed that the fuel had crept down below an eighth of a tank while I wasn’t looking. I couldn’t say how long it had been since I’d last seen a gas station, so I thought I’d better start looking. I was bound to run across something pretty soon; the Gulf wasn’t all that far to the West. I hoped I’d run across something before I ran out. It didn’t look like help would be along right away.
Fifteen minutes later, I hadn’t even seen a sign for a gas station. I was beginning to wonder if there were people around here — one thing for sure, if they were, they weren’t out on the road. As I continued heading west, the area became less and less populated. I knew that there was bound to be some civilization soon, but it was definitely taking its time.
There was a quiet ping from the dashboard. I glanced down and saw the stylized yellow gas pump light come on. I didn’t see those very often, but I knew it meant I didn’t have a lot of time to find fuel. The road ran straight and true in front of me, and there wasn’t a thing in sight, not even a farm. I kept going, hoping for a change.
Finally, the road curved to the right, heading slightly north, and as I came out of the curve, I saw a small sign on the right that read “Drury’s Country Store 1 Mile”. Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to push the car any of that distance.
My luck was apparently in, as I passed a grove of trees on my left and shot past a small store set back off the road just past that one-mile mark. I slowed quickly and made a U-turn, pulling into the lot in front of a small wooden building, its plywood shell not painted at all, with a green tin roof that looked fairly new. A sign perched on the roof proclaimed that this was, indeed, Drury’s Country Store.
I pulled next to one of four gas pumps, none of which bore any oil-company markings. In fact, all the inner working of the machines were plainly visible. There was no credit-card slots on any or the pumps, and all were activated by pressing down chrome-plated levers, pumps of a kind I hadn’t seen since before the turn of the century.
Assuming I would have to pay cash in advance, I headed for the door leading into the store itself. Just ahead of me, a young Hispanic man wearing black jeans and a matching T-shirt pushed through the door, turning to hold it open for me, a grin revealing gapped, blackened teeth. I stepped past him, nodding thanks, and stepped up to the counter, behind which stood a man who could have been the other man’s brother.
At once, I was hit with an overwhelming smell of fuel, maybe even jet fuel. It had been awhile since I’d caught a whiff of a meth lab, but I had little doubt that there was one in the back of the building somewhere. I tried to keep the realization out of my eyes, and handed a twenty-dollar bill to the cashier.
“Twenty dollars’ worth, please,” I told him, and he nodded and muttered a reply. He turned on the pump, and I walked out the door, keeping an even pace as I walked out to the car and began filling it up. As I looked up, I saw the first man standing at the door and looking out at me. As I held the pump in place, I leaned my back against the door post and gently bumped the butt of the pistol stuck down my pants at the small of my back.
The pump disengaged and the hum of gas flowing into the tank ceased. I replaced the handle into the socket and released it. I glanced at the gauge, which showed that I had exceeded my twenty-dollar limit by about seven bucks.
I sat down in the driver’s seat and slid the key into the ignition. I left the door open. The man in the store straightened up a little in the doorway. I started the car, pulled my left foot inside the door and floored the accelerator, cranking the wheel as far to the left as it would go, spinning the car around in a sharp left turn, dust and grit spraying out from beneath the sheets. The force of the turn slammed the door shut next to me as I came out of the turn and headed for the highway.
As I ran onto the road and the tires took hold, I shot into the westbound lane, cutting off a stake-bed truck that was coming in from the west. As I squealed tires into my lane and the tires took hold, I could hear a squeal of tires from the truck and a flood of curses from the driver. Straightening out, I caught a glimpse of the man in black standing in the doorway, a machine pistol clutched in his hands. That lasted just a second, as the truck was between me and the front of Drury’s Country Store.
He yelled something in Spanish, and as I came out from behind the truck, I saw him raise the gun and get ready to fire.
“NOOOO!!” shouted a voice from inside the store.
“Oh, shit!” I muttered to myself.
I stomped the car’s pedal to the floor, continuing to accelerate away from the store as fast as I could. Behind me, I heard a loud burring sound as the man in the doorway pulled the trigger. I saw bullets hitting the road to my left, but only for a fraction of a second, then the gun’s muzzle flash ignited the thick miasma of combustible material that lay thickly in the store’s interior.
For a moment the dusky evening sky behind lit up like brightest day. I felt a shock wave push my car forward. Looking in my sideview mirror, I saw that the entire front of the store had blown out. The man in the door had become a human torch, thrown out of the building by the explosion and fetching up against the pumps.
A fireball rolled up into the sky above where the front room of the store had been, and a second later, a second explosion went off as whatever chemicals had been in the back of the building went up.
Then as I headed on down the road, the gas pumps blew up, ignited by the young gunman as he lay in a flaming heap against them. As bits of flaming debris began raining down behind me, I turned my attention back to the road before me, and continued on my way to my rendezvous in the Gulf. Behind me in rearview mirror, I saw the truck begin moving as well, getting as far away from the flaming ruins of Drury’s Country Store as he could before the arrival of the emergency vehicles that were sure to be attracted by the flames and explosions of a few moments before.
As I headed west toward the Gulf, I thought about my penchant for dropping into troublesome situations. Sometimes it seemed as though bad luck just followed me around. Most of the time, things went pretty smoothly for me. But then, there were things like unintended casualties getting in the way of jobs, or running into a cop who remembered me from a jail stay awhile back.
Sometimes there were mixed blessings, like getting broken out of jail by a gang of mercenaries, which was good, but picking up a couple of dead or injured police officers in the process, which wasn’t.
And now this — I stop in for a fill-up and land in the middle of a meth lab. I smiled to myself. At least I’d filled up before the shooting started, and I’d hadn’t fired a shot. The truck driver had gone, and anything I might have touched had gone up in flames. I hadn’t left much of a footprint, if any, unless you counted that big flaming crater by the side of the road, which I hadn’t made, if you wanted to get technical about it. As the light from the fires faded from sight, I turned right onto a dirt road and headed away from the highway to avoid any first responders, and continued on my way.
