I hit play before Frank could grab the phone.
The video was dark and shaky at first. Tyler had apparently started recording from his hoodie pocket. You could hear country music playing low through the truck speakers and bottles clinking around on the floorboard.
Then Frank’s voice said, “Keep us straight while I text him back.”
I honestly thought Tyler meant steering for a second or two. Just touching the wheel on some empty road like Frank claimed.
Then the headlights drifted across the center line and Tyler’s hands suddenly grabbed the wheel fully while Frank laughed about “not being that drunk.”
You could hear Tyler breathing hard asking him to slow down.
The speedometer flashed into view for a second when the phone shifted.
Seventy-eight.
Frank kept trying to snatch the phone away while the video played. Tyler finally yelled, “Show her the other part!”
That’s when the recording changed.
Apparently Tyler kept filming after they stopped near Deer Park Road. Frank got out of the truck to throw up beside a ditch while Tyler whispered into the phone that this wasn’t the first time. He said Frank had been doing this for months after softball games and late-night bar trips. Then Tyler turned the camera toward the windshield.
There was damage on the passenger side mirror and a long scrape down the truck door I’d never seen before.
Tyler said quietly, “This happened last Tuesday after we hit the mailbox.”
Frank immediately started yelling that it was “just a mailbox.”
But Tyler looked at me and said, “That wasn’t all we hit.”
Turns out Frank sideswiped a parked Honda outside a gas station near Riverside High three weeks earlier and made Tyler help him leave before anybody came outside. Tyler thought somebody might’ve been inside the car because he heard yelling after they drove off.
I made Frank hand me his keys that morning.
By Tuesday afternoon a Spokane County deputy was standing in our driveway asking about a hit-and-run involving a blue Honda Civic owned by a seventeen-year-old girl named Marissa Cole.