"There May Have Been an Accident"

Joe Loring and Tom Michaels had been friends for years. In high school, they promised to break up each others' marriages, if it ever got to that. One day Joe came home from work and saw that there was blood on the floor.

He followed the blood into Tom's room. There was a corpse in the bed and blood everywhere. "Tom?" He shouted nervously. There was no answer. He reached for the phone but stopped himself. "Fingerprints," he thought.

Joe ran over to the neighbors' house. "May I use your phone?" he asked, "there may have been an accident."

The police told Joe that he couldn't go home just yet, so Joe went to the bar. He saw people he knew there: Dave, Bob, Sandy. Joe ordered a beer and a shot of whiskey and waited for his thoughts to do something. But there was only one thing in his head, and it wouldn't go away: Tom killed somebody. He looked down the bar at a woman watching proclub. Tom killed somebody, he said to her in his mind.

The next day Joe went to work. His manager gave him a look when he came in the door. Joe did his best to appear to be observing some kind of protocol. There was a group of teenagers arguing at the counter. One of them wanted pepperoni. The other wanted cheese. You people have no idea, Joe thought. That night he slept at the Super 8. Because money was the last thing on his mind.

At four o'clock an order came in from a fake address. Joe knew it was Tom but pretended not to. When he got to the vacant lot, he even pretended to be lost. He even got out of the car, took off his ball cap, looked around, threw up his arms. Then a piece of gravel stuck the ground near his shoe. "Pizza man?" Tom shouted in a southern accent, "it's back here!"

Joe walked toward the trees at the far edge of the lot. "Hey man," Tom said, "guess you saw what happened." Joe nodded. "You talk to the police?" Joe nodded again. "Fine, fine. That's fine. You can even tell them that you saw me out here if you want. In fact, you should. Tell them that I said something about Mexico." Joe stood there a moment longer. Tom smelled like liquor.

When Joe got back to the restaurant he called the police and told them that he had seen Tom at the vacant lot, and that Tom had said something about Mexico. The police asked how Tom had seemed. "Drunk," Joe replied, "and high, possibly." The police had found methamphetamine in Tom's dresser.

The next day Joe called in sick. "Say no more," the manager said. Then Joe called Detective Sands and asked if it was OK to go home. "No, no, not just yet." Detective Sands sounded distracted. Joe figured he might as well move out. There was something depressing about the Super 8.

That night Tom was apprehended by a border guard on a bus to Toronto. A few days later the lab work came back. There had been methamphetamine in the girl's blood, too. Tom claimed temporary insanity and self defense. They gave him ten, but he got out in four.