The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips (24 page)

“Why did you kill your son, you son of a bitch?!” Andy yelled as he kicked up his pace. By this point he’d already put a couple of miles between himself and Gnaw Bone. The shadows had taken over and the road was becoming harder and harder for Andy to see.
“By the time I got to him, it was too late. I could feel his spirit slipping out of him,”
John’s voice in Andy’s head said.
“I only had time to kiss him good-bye and promise I would see him soon.”

“It will be sooner than you think, you bastard,” Andy said. Then he yelled, “Why did you let Gabe die!!!!” Without realizing it, Andy was now running in a full sprint down the shoulder of a highway he could barely see. His legs and chest ached, but he kept pushing himself down the road, harder and harder and harder.

Andy didn’t even know he’d been hit until he landed headfirst in the ditch that ran next to Highway 46. His legs whipped up and over his body. A small tree came up to meet his side, and Andy swears to this day he can remember hearing his ribs crack. He ricocheted off the tree, his body twisting counterclockwise. Rolling twice more, he came to rest on his back in a small pool of stagnant water surrounded by tall weeds. Pain radiated through his body as he pushed down with his right arm, trying to lift himself out of the water. His collarbone was broken on the right side, but he wouldn’t know that for sure for a couple of days.

Andy’s splash landing in the water stirred up a swarm of mosquitoes, which began feasting on his face, neck, and arms. He swatted them away as best he could with his left arm as he pushed hard with his legs to try to get out of the water. Pain shot up through his left leg, while his right foot slipped in the mud. He let out a long string of profanity and yelled for help. Lying back, he listened. Nothing. The car that clipped him never stopped. All he could hear was the buzzing of the mosquitoes around him and the high-pitched squeal of tires on asphalt on the road somewhere up above him. The greasy water soaked into his shorts and T-shirt. He shouted again for help. Only then did he realize how long he’d been running, and how dark the night had become.
You gotta get out of the cesspool, Andy,
he thought. He tried lifting himself up with his left arm, with only a little success. He once again tried pushing with his legs, but the pain shooting through his left leg almost made him pass out. “Crap, it’s probably busted,” he said to himself.

He lay back for a moment and tried to figure out what to do. “Can anyone hear me?!” he screamed as he lay back in the water. Again, his cry for help was greeted with silence. “All right, all right, you’re okay. You just gotta get up out of this ditch and go flag down some help on the road. Concentrate. You can do this.” He rolled over onto his stomach in the water and pushed himself up on his knees. Cradling his right arm to his stomach, he managed to crawl up out of the water, then collapsed in the weeds. Headlights from a passing car shone into the tops of the small trees and bushes around him. That’s when he realized he’d crawled up on the wrong side of the water in the ditch. To get to the road, he’d have to go back through the water. “Oh, crap,” he said. He let out a long sigh and rolled over onto his back in the weeds and lay down. “Oh, God,” he said under his breath. “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” The pain made his head spin. Stars burst in front of his eyes as he lay back in the weeds and passed out.

Water splashing in his face woke Andy up, that and his body shivering. He had no idea how long he’d been lying in the weeds. The water turned out to be rain, but at least it made the mosquitoes stop biting. “Oh, God, I’m cold,” he said as his teeth chattered. Late-September nights in Indiana usually feel pretty comfortable, unless you’re lying next to a ditch wearing nothing but running shorts and a soaking wet T-shirt. The sharp pain from the car’s impact had given way to a dull ache that covered every inch of his body. He wasn’t sure he could move even if he’d wanted to. At this point, even as cold as he was, he didn’t want to move. He couldn’t move. The rain stopped, and Andy drifted in and out of consciousness.

He was back in Trask, driving his patrol car down Jackson Street. He stopped in front of 230 East Jackson, the house where he and my mother lived before they split up. “What the hell?” he said as he walked up toward the door and noticed the strange car parked at the side of the house. The front door stood open, and he walked inside. “Carol,” he called out. “Carol, I’m home. Is someone here? I didn’t recognize the car outside.”

Then he saw my mom come running out of a back bedroom, pulling on her clothes. He said it was my mom, even though she didn’t exactly look like my mom. She looked more like Loraine Phillips, but Andy swears it was my mother. “What are you doing home already?” she said in that same tone of voice you hear in a math classroom when someone says, “What do you mean we have a test today? No one told me we had a test today.”

“Nothing much was going on in town, so I thought I’d knock off early. Is everything okay?” Andy asked. My mom didn’t answer. She just glanced back at the bedroom with a panicked look on her face. “What?” Andy asked. “What the hell is going on here?” He stormed back toward the bedroom, while my mom pleaded with him to walk away.

Throwing open the door, he saw John Phillips lying in Andy’s bed, puffing on a cigarette, a smile on his face. “Thanks for the use of your wife, Officer Myers. I could get used to this,” he said.

“What are you talking about? What are you doing here?” Andy screamed.

“What do you think I’m doing here?” John asked. “I’m doing your wife, of course.”

“Like hell you are!” Andy screamed. He whipped out his service revolver and pumped three rounds into John’s chest.

John didn’t flinch and the bullets seemed to pass right through him without doing any harm. He just lay there, puffing on his cigarette, the same smile on his face. “Yep, I could get used to this,” John said with a little laugh.

The pain in Andy’s ribs and shoulders brought him back to the high weeds next to the ditch full of stagnant water along Highway 46, about three miles outside of Gnaw Bone. When he looked up, the sky was lighter. Andy let out a long moan. He tried raising up, but fell back again into Trask. The scene had changed. He was back at the Madison Park Apartments, slowly climbing the stairs of building three. With each step he told himself to stop, but his legs wouldn’t listen. He kept climbing and climbing and climbing. Finally he reached the top of the stairs and began walking down the corridor. A door stood open, and he turned and walked through it. Gabe Phillips sat on a couch just inside the door, his eyes red as if he’d been crying. “They’re in there,” Gabe said as he motioned Andy down the hall. Andy tried to walk over to Gabe, but his legs wouldn’t obey. They moved him down the hallway instead, to a small bedroom with a floor that appeared to be painted red. A small, crumpled body lay on the floor. Loraine stood over it. She looked up at Andy as he walked into the room, her eyes cold and flat. “What have we done?” she said as he moved closer. Andy rushed over to the body, but Loraine said, “It won’t do any good. You’re too late.”

Ignoring her, Andy instinctively pushed the two forefingers of his right hand onto the body’s neck, looking for a pulse. “When did this happen?” he asked, his heart racing.

“Does it matter?” Loraine said.

“Of course, it matters! Maybe I can save him,” he shouted. He squared himself around to start CPR, and only then did he take a close look at the body’s face. “John?” Andy said.

“You knew my husband?” Loraine asked. “How?”

“I’m a friend of his son,” Andy said but didn’t elaborate. He cleared his throat and tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come. “How . . . how did . . .?”

“How did this happen?” Loraine said, finishing Andy’s sentence for him. “You already know the answer to that, don’t you?” She pushed past Andy to leave the room. As she reached the door, she looked back at him. Only then did Andy notice the blood that covered her nightgown. “What have we done?” She shook her head and said in an almost playful tone, “Oh, yes, what have we done?” She walked out the door and into the night.

“What?! We?! What do you mean
we
?!” Andy shouted. He yelled it so loud that he woke himself. When he opened his eyes, he found himself staring up at a blue sky surrounded by high weeds. His face and every exposed inch of skin itched, but he could hardly move his left arm to scratch. “Oh, God,” he said, but this time the words came out different than they did when he first landed in the ditch. It was the first time he’d prayed since he could remember when. Maybe it was his first time ever. “O God, help me,” he prayed. He closed his eyes and drifted back out of consciousness, repeating the same phrase over and over again, “O God, help me.”

The next thing Andy remembered was waking up in the Columbus hospital. Apparently, some retired guy out looking for discarded pop bottles and aluminum cans stumbled upon Andy around noon the day after he was hit. The old guy nearly had a heart attack when he found him. He thought Andy was dead. Then he heard Andy moan, and that almost scared him more than finding what he thought was a body. They kept Andy in the hospital for over a week. He’d messed up his leg pretty bad. They had to put a couple of screws in it to hold it together. His doctor told him he’d never go through another metal detector without setting it off. They were shocked that Andy hadn’t suffered more internal injuries. At first, they were afraid they would have to do surgery on his shoulder, as well as his leg, but they didn’t. They loaded him down with casts and slings and painkillers and sent him home. Since he lived by himself out in the middle of nowhere, Andy had to pay a local woman to come out to his house for a few hours a day to do some basic housecleaning and cooking. It was, I believe, the first time he really missed being married, at least the domestic side of marriage.

For a week and a half, Andy did nothing but sit in a chair, watch the NBC affiliate station out of Indianapolis (which was the only station he could pick up and even then it was fuzzy) and get hooked on
Days of Our Lives
. Given his background of trouble with alcohol, his painkiller prescriptions only lasted a week. That left his head clear to do a lot of thinking the second week he was laid up, which also happened to be the week leading up to his testimony at John’s appeal hearing. “I’d rather get hit by another damned car,” he said every time he thought about testifying. The more he thought about it, the more nervous energy built up inside him. Normally, he would have worn out the floors pacing, or shot out the door jogging, but since that’s what put him in his current physical predicament, he couldn’t do anything but sit, think, and contemplate how like sands through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

I’m not sure what made him so nervous about testifying at that hearing. After all, he testified in court cases two or three times a month. There was something very different about this one, and I’ve always suspected there was more than meets the eye. This was the last of John’s appeals on a state level, and that could have had Andy worked up. Maybe it was the dreams he had while lying in the ditch. Andy said he passed those off as nothing more than the random firing of neurons in his brain and the effects of shock on his body. Who am I to say different? Maybe he was nervous because of what he knew he had to say. I guess I should go ahead and answer the questions you’ve probably been thinking for a while now: Did Andy coach his witnesses and convince them to tell outright lies on the witness stand against John? Is that what had him so worked up over appearing in front of the appeals court? I will tell you the same thing he told me when I asked him that.

Chapter 19

A
NDY LOOKED REALLY BAD
when the day of the hearing rolled around. The bruises on his face had pretty much cleared up, but the scrapes remained. He also had to wear a shoulder sling that kept his collarbone in place. Even though he wore it under his shirt, it pulled his shoulders back like some guy trying to impress a girl walking by on the beach. His ribs remained tender, which made him move very slowly. That wasn’t much of a problem, since he could barely walk anyway with his busted-up leg. They suggested he use a wheelchair, but my old man is pretty stubborn. He thought by pushing himself he could make the bones heal faster. The crutches made his shoulder hurt so bad he would nearly pass out, but he used them anyway. To me, being a tough guy sounds a lot like being really stupid.

One of the guys he worked with in Columbus drove him up to Indy for the hearing. The guy had work to do at the capitol building, which meant Andy would have some time to kill after he testified. Andy and his coworker didn’t talk much on the way up, since they didn’t really know one another outside of work. My old man had become a bit of a hermit after moving down to Brown County. He kept all social connections to a minimum. He wore his uniform to court; it had changed from a lowly Trask police officer to a state trooper since he testified against John the first time. He had to ruin a pair of his uniform trousers by cutting out one of the seams to get it over his cast. Part of him thought the defense attorney and the judges might go easy on him because of his injuries. After all, an injured state trooper is a pretty sympathetic figure. Or, at least, Andy hoped it would be. The hearing was scheduled to begin at nine in the morning, which meant Andy had to sit around and wait in a holding room. It was torture. He could never get comfortable with the bad ribs and collarbone, and the institutional chairs in the holding room only made matters worse. Finally a bailiff stuck his head in the door, pointed at Andy, and said, “You’re on.”

The appeals courtroom wasn’t set up like the traffic courts and district courts he was used to. There was no jury box, nor were there seats for a gallery. Instead, a large table sat at the front of the room, with three large chairs behind it, one for each of the appeals judges. Across from the judges’ table sat another shorter table, where those testifying would sit. On either side were other tables for the attorneys for both the state and the one making the appeal. I think there’s some fancy name for the one appealing his case. It’s not defendant, I don’t think. But then again, I guess it doesn’t really matter what anyone was called. The point was, Andy had to go up in front of these appeals judges and answer their questions under oath.