The Bargain

Rock Martin is a geologist from Indiana, Pennsylvania who explores the human spirit through his writing. A Penn State graduate, he depicts life’s challenges where the main struggle lies within. Rock enjoys fitness, camping, and hiking with his wife and young son, finding inspiration in nature and resilience.

Content advisory: Descriptions of Bodily Injuries

“You used to believe in the truth.”

The memory of Emily’s words whispered through the dense swamp fog, causing me to yank my jacket tighter as rain trickled down my shivering neck. I crept forward, peering through the brush, the frigid water seeping into my boots as the humid air clung to my face.

Three weeks after her disappearance and I was close. I could feel it.

“Northern end of the swamp” was all the tip offered.

I pushed forward; the muck sucked at my feet and the quaggy soil oozed over the toe of my boot and rose up my leg. Ignoring it, I took another fatigued step, the soft drizzle painting the gnarled tree branches in deep blacks and browns as the thorny underbrush ripped and pulled at me.

I halted and gagged as the wind shifted, carrying with it a rancid smell of death. As I recovered, an eerie quiet covered the swamp and my eyes scanned the surroundings.

The sudden hissing of two turkey vultures caught my attention and my heart pounded a frantic rhythm against my ribs as I stumbled toward the growing stench. The vultures held tight to their prize, waiting until the last moment to take flight.

There, in the black, rippling water, stuck under a rotting log, were the remains of a young woman.

Her ripped clothing exposed torn flesh and protruding bone. Strands of hair floated in the dark water and her head was twisted and bent unnaturally on what was left of her neck. Among the mass of blood-soaked clothing, a silver object was visible just above her left shoulder.

My stomach rolled as I pushed my fingers through the sinewy, waterlogged flesh until they met a sharp, metallic edge. I drew my hand back to reveal a dull Lockport City Police Detective pendant.

My lips quivered as the memories flooded in. Her hands, so tiny the first time they wrapped around a bike handle. Her hair, so radiant, even when tucked away under her ball cap, and the smile that she wore so proudly when she graduated from the academy. All of that reduced to nothing more than a lifeless mass of flesh under a moldy stump.

My left hand trembled as I reached for my phone, my world sinking into a numb haze. I barely felt the short, quick breaths squeezing in and out of my chest as I dialed Paul, my husband.

I’d known this moment would come.

But then Paul answered, and I had to say it out loud.

Three weeks of fear, worry, and heartbreak broke through my flimsy walls and I fell against the log, clinging to the phone, desperate for the lifeline Paul always offered. He heard my speechless anguish, and he knew what I’d found. I’d worked countless murder cases, but nothing prepares you for losing your own child.

The line went silent, the faint click echoing in my ear. I needed to call Brian, my former partner, and now the mayor of Lockport. There wasn’t much time to find her killer before it became just another cold case.

“Brian, I found her.”

“And…?”

I paused for a moment, holding everything back, willing myself to speak.

“I need to find who did this. I need your help.” My body shook with each breath.

“Anything you need,” Brian said, that familiar tight determination seeping through his words. “You’ve put a lot of people away over the years. That’s a lot of targets on your back.”

“I know. I’ll see what I can find out. Can you…?”

“Of course. We’ll have a team over there immediately. I’ll be at the convention tonight, but will check in tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

I described the location to Brian before slowly sliding the phone back into my pocket.

I sat with Emily for the last time and recalled the day she told me she wanted to follow in my footsteps. A ghost of a smile touched my lips. She had the same idealistic drive I did, and I knew she’d excel.

And I knew what she’d found.

I returned to the source of the tip, Tommy Bates. An old, grizzled ex-con who specialized in carjacking and moving moderate quantities of contraband. After busting him a few times, he became an informant. He’d since cleaned up his act, but remained well connected to the town’s criminal underground.

Tommy spent most of his time at a dive bar called Klink’s, a known haunt for many of the unruly characters in Lockport. The place fell silent as I stepped through the door. I’d been retired for seven years, but this was still clearly enemy territory.

“Where is he?”

The bartender looked up. “Who?”

“You know who.”

He began to shrug, but my fist slammed against the bar as I leaned in. My voice deepened. “I’ll burn this place to the ground.”

“OK, OK! He’s over there, with one of the girls. Second room, I think.”

I strode down the hall and yanked the door open. A young woman attempted to cover herself as she fell off Tommy and into the corner of the room.

“You’ve got a mother, don’t you?” I growled at the young woman.

“Y-yeah.” Her meek voice barely reached my ears.

“Go home to her.”

She grabbed what was left of her clothes and ran.

“Jennifer!” Tommy smiled.

“Who did it?”

“Come on, Jen; you should know I’m not giving you anything for free. I accept cash, or a dance perhaps?”

In a practiced move I could still do in my sleep, my hand found my pistol and jammed it deep into Tommy’s wrinkled cheek before his next breath.

He blinked. “OK. OK. I was just breaking the ice a little.”

The gun pressed further into his skin as I drew back the hammer, deadly promise in my eyes.

“Alright. I could give you a name, but you probably already know.”

Tommy released a nervous chuckle as I holstered the pistol. He wasn’t wrong. I knew.

Ben Eldridge.

Brian and I worked his case years earlier, putting him away for murder.

Now I needed confirmation.

“Goodbye, Tommy.” I turned and left, my thoughts and focus beginning to narrow and simmer.

I cashed in a favor at the prison for a short notice visit as I sped across town, my knuckles white on the steering wheel.

It had been thirteen years since I’d last killed someone. My skills had certainly eroded in that time, but an old man in handcuffs in a prison visitation room wouldn’t pose much of a challenge.

I arrived and waited, rehearsing how it would all go down.

The sound of a metal door unlocking echoed through the room, and suddenly there he was. He shuffled in, arms and ankles in cuffs, and sat across from me.

A few gray hairs adorned his oblong head, which sat crookedly on his slender, wrinkled neck. He was always awkwardly thin, but the prison attire couldn’t hide that he’d only withered away further in his time behind bars, beaten down by two decades of incarceration. A lot of time to think about revenge.

He began in that high pitched, nasal voice I remembered. “Hello, Jennifer. It’s been a while. My condolences on the loss of your daughter.”

My pulse quickened as my hands clenched the table. “I know you did this.”

“Just like you knew I was guilty before, right?”

I tried to search for a rebuttal but couldn’t muster a word.

“You’re awfully quiet, Jenny. You had so much to say back then, so sure your little plan would work. I guess it did, really. I mean, you became Chief of Police, and all your dreams came true. Why’d you retire, anyway? Couldn’t handle the guilt?”

My hand moved under my coat, my fingers wrapping around the grip of my pistol. “All this time you’ve been—”

“Don’t lecture me on time, Jennifer!” Ben’s nostrils flared and his voice echoed and bounced off the block walls. “Twenty-four years! Do you know how long that is? For you and your daughter, it passed in the blink of an eye. For me, it’s been an eternity.”

My hand tightened around the gun as my index finger threaded the trigger guard, my body quaking.

Ben cleared his throat and continued. “Now, the past three weeks—they’ve been rather pleasant around here, though I’m sure for you they’ve felt like three years. Time can be funny like that, can’t it?” Ben leaned back in his seat and studied me for a moment, then continued. “I’ve spent every second of the past twenty-four years thinking how I could get back at you, and after what you did, this would certainly have sufficed. But alas, I’ll just have to take satisfaction in someone else’s work.”

A wry smile stretched across his face as he leaned closer. “Jennifer, I hate you. I hate you more than you could ever understand. And I hope this is only the start of your misery. But I’m up for parole in eight months on good behavior. I have a family of my own, and I want to spend the last few years I have on this rotten planet with them.”

“W-What? You can’t …” My eyes widened and then my shoulders slumped as it all became clear.

I looked up and met Ben’s gaze. “You didn’t do it.”

Ben glared back and then grunted before standing and leaving.

Ben was a lot of things, many of them bad. But he wasn’t a killer. He never was.

I once believed in the truth, back when my hair was thick and black, and my skin had the softness of youth. Before I’d seen the darkness of man.

Eight years into my career, Brian and I were assigned a case that gripped the town—a beloved local politician’s family torn apart by murder. The air felt heavy with expectation, the eyes of the whole town on us, demanding answers.

We worked for weeks, scouring every seedy corner of this town, and came up empty. Knowing that failure wasn’t an option, we did the unthinkable.

It was easier than I thought it would be. We searched the criminal database to find the right person, planted some evidence, and gave the people what they wanted. Ben Eldridge. He even looked like a criminal. It was the perfect cover.

Everybody bought it, and we were both heroes. We told ourselves we did the right thing, that Ben would have eventually committed a crime like this, anyway. And once enough people pat you on the back, you start to believe that. Eventually you live with it so long, it becomes part of your identity. It becomes your truth.

The real truth, though, is complicated and messy. It takes effort to understand. People love to say they want the truth, but they really don’t. What they want is someone to blame, someone to punish. They want their fear and hate to have a face.

My feet paused next to my car as my heart clenched in my chest.

It was the oldest con in the book, and now I’d almost fallen for it myself.

My tires squealed out of the prison parking lot, the accelerator glued to the floor. Back across town, Brian was the honored guest at the kickoff for the upcoming race for governor.

It all made sense.

With his big moment coming up, he needed everything tidied up. Ben couldn’t be given parole; he would only cause problems.

The ringing in my ears intensified with the throbbing in my chest.

But then, Emily must have figured out what happened, and that created a convenient way to clean everything up.

And Brian… Of course, he knew me too well. He knew I would go directly to Ben. He knew I would tie up the loose ends for him. I pressed the pedal harder. The car mirrors vibrated with the rumbling tires as headlights zipped past.

My tires squealed again as I turned into the convention center, slammed on the brakes, and leapt from the car. The conference room doors burst open as Brian was beginning his speech. His eyes shot to me, and a broad smile stretched across his face as my gaze, dark with pain and anger, burned into him. His mask of civility cracked, replaced by a chilling flicker of recognition.

“Jennifer, wait. This isn’t what you think,” Brian pleaded, motioning to his security team as I approached.

“Brian Faust is not who you think he is.”

“Jen, don’t do this.”

“He’s responsible for the murder of my daughter, Emily. Who, after watching her grow up, killed her and left her to rot, just to protect his reputation.”

“This woman is clearly delusional.” Brian again motioned to his security team as whispers began to circulate through the crowd. I knew his security team, and I knew they trusted me more than him. They continued to ignore Brian’s repeated signals, offering me a chance to speak the truth that had eluded me for years. The truth I used to cherish and protect. The truth that Emily died for.

“Brian and I used to work together, and we—”

“Jennifer, don’t do this. It wasn’t just me and you know this.”

I paused and considered his warning as tension filled the room like a thick fog. I’d lived with this for decades, trading the guilt for the promise of everything I’d aspired to be, everything I wanted to accomplish. A dark shadow had followed, growing each year, until I’d found myself dwarfed by it. The shadow of what I’d become.

The crowd grew restless, their whispers coalescing into a dull roar. I couldn’t hold back any longer.

“Long before Brian was mayor, and I chief of police, we worked a case we couldn’t solve.”

One by one, the audience members began to pick up the scent.

“Instead of admitting we didn’t have the answer, we framed an innocent man, sending him to prison while we climbed the department ranks.”

Brian pointed and shouted, his words drowned out by the eruption of the crowd. Most of them already knew he was a snake, they just needed to hear it. I backed away, slowly fading into the background as the room turned against him. Brian continued pleading his case, his face red with anguish. It was no use. The illusion Brian had built began to crumble, collapsing into the muck and peat that had always been at his feet. His hollow words couldn’t hide the stink of his fresh carcass as the vultures began circling.

I walked out and left him to his fate, feeling a veil lift. This winding road had taken me to the darkest of places and back.  In the end, I’d wound up in the same place I’d started, where I always should have stayed.

I spoke the truth. Finally.