The first Chinese restaurant we found was a little place in a shopping plaza, tucked between a drug store and a Greek cafe. There was, of course, a big aquarium filled with tropical fish right by the door and across from the counter. A dozen booths filled the rest of the room. I picked a booth where my back wouldn't be exposed and I could see the front entrance, and we both sat down.
A paper place mat explained the Chinese zodiac; Tiger, Ox, Monkey, all that nonsense.
It was early March and the weather was beginning to warm, the rest of the restaurant patrons were wearing light jackets. Birds began to chirp outside. My birthday was in a month, I realized. I wondered if my life would be settled down by then, or if I'd still be choosing restaurant seats based on what my back is against and whether I can see the door. The thought made me feel tired and depressed.
A young Chinese woman with limited capacity for English came over and brought menus and took drink orders. I looked the menu over, trying to find the sweet and sour chicken, found it, and set the menu down. Amy's menu was still on the table.
"No point looking?" I asked.
"Everybody has beef and broccoli."
"They might have something new and innovative that would blow your mind."
"Then what are you getting?"
"Sweet and sour chicken," I smirked.
"Maybe they use a new kind of sour that'll blow your mind."
Drinks were brought, orders taken, menus removed.
"How was school?" I asked to fill the silence.
"Usual," she said, "How was truancy?"
"Usual," I nodded. "Bought a car today."
She feigned amazement, "Really? A gun, a knife, and a V-8. You're like a walking action movie now."
"I'm not carrying the gun with me, thank you very much."
I sipped hot tea from a tiny cup. It tasted like ginger; the tea, not the cup. The cup tasted like china; the porcelain, not the country.
"What. Is. Up, with your dad and those knives?" I asked, reflecting on the butterfly box full of sharp, pointy death.
"They're Emersons, man," she started, craning her head back, "they're all he ever talks about. Ernest Emerson. He was some Navy SEAL guy who needed one of those flippy-foldy-butterfly-whatever knives for a class, but he couldn't afford one so he made his own with his machining tools. Everybody says it's the best knife they've ever seen, so they start paying him for them. Flash forward a few years and he's designing the most sought-after knives for special forces people. Delta Force, SEALs, SAS, everybody goes nuts for them. They're supposed to stand up to a lot of abuse, whereas I suppose lesser knives fall apart after you slice a few throats open."
"So that's why you were looking at this one in the store," I said, looking down at the metal and epoxy clipped to my right pocket.
"Yeah, I was just seeing if I remembered any of the ones he let me look at."
"So these are the best in the business, I guess. I thought $180 seemed like a lot for a pocket knife."
"Oh, you can spend a lot more. Why was he showing you the collection anyway?" she meant her dad.
"I don't know, he saw that I had the knife in my pocket when I showed up and he asked about it, like 'why is this kid showing up for my daughter packing edged weapons?' I said the word Emerson and he turned into a museum curator."
She smiled, "Well, when you left he started grilling me for answers. Who was that boy. How do you know him. Where does he live. Not like he wanted to hunt you down, but like he was subscribing to your fan club. Most he's said to me in a while."
The food came; hot and steamy. I love the smell of fresh white rice when it's nice and sticky.
Before I started eating, I asked, "You said military guys use those knives. Do you think your dad used them when he was in the Corps or something?"
Amy looked up from her plate, "You mean like maybe one of those knives saved his life so he's had a boner for them ever since?"
I shrugged.
"It's possible," she said, "but there's no way I could know. I'm not entirely sure what he was doing in the Marines. When I was little he would take long trips all the time, when we lived on-base. He could have been some kind of black ops commando, or he could have taught recruits how to zip their pants up. He certainly doesn't talk about it, either way."
She started eating her food, so I did the same. The sweet and sour was more sour than sweet, which was surprisingly alright with me. I thought about Amy's parents; she said her mom left because of something her dad did. Maybe he was some black ops unit member and always had to rush out last-minute to go to some foreign country we're not supposed to be in to kill some guy we're not supposed to have killed. I'd never heard of the Marine Corps having special forces, though. Army had Green Berets and Delta, Navy had SEALs and Team Six, the Air Force had the mostly-useless SOC, but the Marines... everybody talks about the Marines like they're all special forces. Maybe Amy's mom was sick of him having to live some secret life, or found out what he did, and left. When they lived on-base. Wait a minute.
"Wait a minute," I said, sticking my fork in a tender chunk of chicken, "On-base. You lived in Quantico?"
She finished chewing and nodded. "Yeah, in on-base housing."
"In Quantico."
"Yeah..."
"Agh!"
"What?" she didn't realize what she was missing.
"Why didn't I know that?"
"Why... is that such a big deal?"
"My dad worked in Quantico my whole life and I've never been in there. It's supposed to be like a fortress town or something. Whenever I asked if I could visit, he said security was too tight."
"I remember it being like that," she said, trying to turn her eyes backwards and see into her memory. "We lived there until I was like eight or nine. I had to carry around a security pass and all kinds of papers for if I got lost or something. When we'd leave and come back, like for shopping or anything, we went through checkpoint gate thing and my mom had to show a card and ID. There was a special sticker we had to put on our car too."
"But you know the layout and everything, how to get in?"
"Layout? It's not like it's a warehouse or something, it's a whole town. The parts I saw were mostly just housing and offices and the PX. I never went inside the actual base, of course. We went through the east end a few times, by the river and all the academies."
"East end?"
She took another bite, then explained the general organization of the town. On the far west was base housing and administrative buildings. In the middle was the base itself, spanning miles and miles of wooded terrain with some airfields on the far east end. There was a whole fleet of helicopters there, and Marine One, the helicopter the President rides around in, is kept and maintained there. East of that, right on the Potomac, were the DEA and FBI Academies, the Marine Corps University where my dad worked, and a few more buildings she never found out about. Near the river were some small parks and fields where officers would go jogging or sprawl out and watch the river roar.
"If you wanted to go to where you dad worked, you'd use the southeast entrance, it's right by the University. There's a checkpoint there, too."
"I guess there's another thing for my agenda," I said.
"What's your fixation with the place? It's got nothing to do with any of this. The FBI aren't headquartered there or anything, just an academy for them."
"Oh, it's nothing like that," I said, "it's just that I feel like I've got to see the place at least once. My dad lived and died there, under a shroud of secrecy. I want to see where he worked, at least, maybe talk to some people he worked with and try to get some sort of explanation for why he died, or at least what he spent his life working on. Was he building nukes? Designing biological weapons? Calculating the optimum paint color for an oversea barracks? I know nothing; absolutely nothing about what he did and barely anything about who he was."
I felt my voice begin to shake, so I stopped talking. Amy's eyes were deep, and searching mine again. I slid a piece of pineapple around a pool of sauce with my fork, thought of Paul Bunyan and his giant flapjacks, for some reason.
"Alright," she said eventually, "I can get you in there if you want. I mean, I can show you how to get there and all that. I don't have the credentials to get us in there anymore."
"My dad's car should still be there," I said, "someone called the house about it a week or so ago. I can use that as an 'in'."
She nodded, "That might work, but I wouldn't call them about it first. They'll tell you they'll move it outside the gate for you to pick it up, or they'll have someone drop it off. Just show up at the gate and explain to the guy why you're there. If you have any of your dad's ID it might help. That way everyone will be in a scramble and you might get in. Bonus points if you look completely destroyed."
"There's still the other thing, though," Amy continued. "Comstock. The FBI wants you to ask them something about him, so you/I/we have to figure out what the story is with him."
"Yeah," I sighed, "the whole thing sucks. I want answers, but I can't exactly admit to the FBI or police about what I did Saturday night. And they know that, so it's like we're dancing on some stupid tight-rope with innuendo and code words. It seems like they want to help me, but first I have to help them."
"Maybe Comstock is selling drugs or something. Using students to filter the product down to the street level," Amy said, thoughtfully.
"DEA would be dealing with that."
"Selling government secrets?"
"CIA. No, NSA."
"Running stolen guns through Africa?"
"ATF."
"Playing professional basketball?"
"NBA."
"Then I'm out of ideas."
"And I'm out of acronyms," I said.
"So what exactly does the FBI deal with, then?"
"Everything else, I guess. They're like a federal version of a police force. Anything that the police would usually deal with, but it crosses state lines."
"So Comstock's just breaking some law, some big law, or he's working for people who are. Fine, he seems stupid enough that we could just tail him and wait for him to do something suspicious. He's not like a spy or anything where he'll be looking over his own shoulders."
"Yeah," I said, "We can keep an eye on him. When you're at school, try to hang around near him and watch what he does. Don't write anything down and don't be obvious. I'll try to find out where he lives so I can check around his house."
She nodded slowly, then shook her head. "Doesn't this seem, like, extremely stupid? We have no idea what's going on, and the FBI's giving you secret clues like Yoda or something. We're just kids, practically, what do we know about any of this stuff?"
I looked over at the fish tank. A large, stripped fish was chasing a smaller orange fish around the tank. The smaller one suddenly turned and charged toward the bigger fish, who stopped short and swam away to go play around the fake coral.
"Extremely stupid," I said.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Monday, January 29, 2007
American Muscle
Monday, the next day, I didn't even consider waking up for school. I was a free man, as far as I cared. I woke up in my own bed, took a shower for the first time since my milk shower on Saturday, and finally put on some clothes that advertised overpriced trendy teen clothing stores instead of a gasoline company. I felt free, and born anew. A new day, a new week. Seven new days with infinite possibilities and opportunities to be attacked killers and hounded by federal agencies.
Amy maintained that she needed to attend her morning classes, so that gave me a few hours before she'd be available for mischief. I only had one thing on my agenda today: get a car.
I'd lately been noticing a certain car with a "For Sale" sign on the windshield parked in the lawn of a house a few neighborhoods over. After I ate whatever I could find in the kitchen that didn't require milk poured over it, I went back up to my room and researched a few car-buying tips online. I wasn't sure the year of the car I'd seen, or the mileage, so I memorized the private party sale value of three different yearly models and with three different landmarks for mileage. I called my bank and asked what the fee was for certified checks; $1.75. I figured I could manage that.
After I'd gotten all that planned, I checked local auto sale listings online to make sure I wasn't missing out on a much better offering a few blocks down the road. I didn't find anything I was interested in, nothing that suited my youthful charm as much as this one.
All that done, I spun my desk chair around and flipped on the small TV in my room and realized how long it'd been since I'd watched any television. Surprisingly, there was no explosive coverage of anything I'd done that weekend on the 24 hour news channels. Nothing about the rampaging teen who trashed a grocery store, hunting for milk like Popeye after spinach. Nothing about the dead cop and the dead fake cop. Nothing about the FBI, or the kid who picks up a gun for the first time in his life and is already an expert at them. Maybe I missed all that coverage on Sunday, and by now it was old news. Or maybe the impact of my life's events don't weigh as much on the global consciousness as most teenagers expect they should.
When Amy left school, I called her and asked her to meet me at the house with the car for sale, then I started walking. For all the walking I'd been doing lately, I thought maybe I didn't even need a car; I could be like the people in ancient times who walked everywhere, before horses or combustion engines were all the rage. Amy was already there when I arrived, sitting in her dad's car parked on the street. She got out when I came up, and we both took a good look over the car for sale parked on the lawn.
It was a white 1998 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. A two-door sports car, it had a long angled hood with curves and lines that made it look like some kind of angry beast. Over in the driveway was an older-looking gray Trans Am, probably mid-1970s. Perhaps the owner traded up for an older model. It had an emblem on the back for theFirebird & Trans Am Club of America.
"It looks fast," Amy said, looking at the white car.
"Should be, it's a V-8," I said, returning to read the list of features printed on a sheet of paper taped to the driver's window. She stepped over to read it as well.
"If I ever get in any more low-speed chases, this would be good for it," I said to nobody in particular.
"How do you know it's a '98?", she asked, "It doesn't say the year on here anywhere. Do they expect you to know by sight?"
"Probably," I said, reading about the factory CD system and engine improvements, "I can tell from the VIN number."
She squinted her eyes, "You what?" She bent down and looked at the tiny digits pressed into a metal plate at the base of the windshield and front of the dash.
"It doesn't say the year in there," she said.
I leaned in again, "Yes it does, right there," I said, pointing at the long series of digits. "The tenth character, 'W', that means it's a 1998."
"Double-you? How in the world does that mean 1998?"
"It just does, I thought everybody knows that."
"That W, in the tenth letter of a big long number that nobody pays attention to at all, ever, means 1998?"
"Yes."
"Well they don't."
I shrugged.
The front door of the house opened slowly. It was a one-storey house, dark brown bricks. An older guy stepped out of the door a few feet and asked out loud, "You interested in it?"
I looked up, over the car at him and hollered, "Yeah, you still selling it?"
The man tucked his hands in his pockets and nodded slowly, "Yep, my son is, anyway." He looked around at the trees for a moment, then wandered over toward us.
"It's a nice car," he said.
"Sure looks it," I said, making a show of looking it over. There were slight signs of a dent on the rear bumper, but nothing drastic. It had a solid T-top, two glass sections of the roof could be removed and stowed in the trunk if you wanted the wind in your hair, and didn't mind the fact thatthere'd still be a metal beam going through the opening.
"This mileage is right?" I asked, pointing at the sheet in the window that boasted just over 28,000 miles.
"It was when he printed that up last month, might be a few more by now, but not by much," the man said.
"And what's the asking price?" I asked.
The man looked at me, hesitating and letting worn gears grind in his mind. "Ehh," he started, "you mind if I ask how old you are?"
"Me? I'm 19," I said. I turned to Amy, "This is my sister, she's 16. We just moved in here last month from Detroit and I've been having a heck of a time finding something that's not a Mitsubishi or a Hyundai or anything."
He nodded, clearly a patron of American muscle.
"Well," he started, "he's asking ninety-six for it. He's starting school up at Brown and he wants something better for the climate and for drives up and back and such, and his payments for this are through the roof, still. Book money, he says."
Uh huh. Whatever.
"And if I can pay cash, today -- no loans or liens to deal with -- how about eighty-nine? That's all I could get for my rusted-outGTO I just sold." Amy looked at me, then rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly.
"I guess he could live with that," the man said after a few scratches on his chin. "He'll just be excited to sell it. Not much market for American-mades around here anymore, as you said."
"Great," I said, "how about this, we can take it on a test-drive over to my bank just up the road, and so long as the engine doesn't fall out on the way there I'll have the teller cut you a certified check. You have the title signed?"
He stuck his hands back in his pockets and said, "Yep, he left the title and signed it, I can fetch it when we get back."
And off we went. Amy stayed at the house, as collateral I suppose, and I drove the Trans Am with Mr. Whoever over to the closest branch of my bank, making small talk about how I liked living in Detroit and other lies. The car drove pretty smooth, but I could feel the power of the engine transferring through the pedal. At red lights I toyed around with the seat controls and radio to make sure everything worked fine enough. The seats were leather and a bit worn, but not too bad. All around it was a nice improvement from the Civic, even when it wasn't smashed into a police car.
We got to the bank and we both got out of the car and went in. I asked the teller to issue a certified check for $8,900 made out to the old guy, whose name I had to ask for awkwardly right there. I had to fill out a withdrawal slip to certify the check, and I could feel the heft of the money as it was sucked from my account. This was the most I'd ever spent on anything, and despite the fact that after the interest I'd earn on my full balance it'd still be greater than it was before this, it still hurt. I sucked it up and handed the check over to the smiling man, and we drove back to his house where he went inside and brought out a manila envelope with the title to the car, signed by the owner to initiate private transfer. All I'd have to do is sign it myself and take it to theDMV and they'd register the car to me and re-issue the title to me. Too bad I probably wouldn't do that. At least not until the possibility that I might have to crash the car into a person abandon it in the woods has decreased.
We shoot hands, then Amy and I left in our own cars. Her in her dad's Oldsmobile, me in a car I'd just bought without any parental help. The man was standing in the doorway looking at the check in his hands as I pulled away.
Amy dropped her car off at home, then hopped in mine, and we drove off with no destination. For a moment, I almost felt like a kid again.
"It's nice," Amy said, rubbing the instrument panel.
"Glad you like it," I said.
"What was with all that junk about being your sister and living in Detroit and having a GTO?"
"I dunno, really," I said, squeezing the steering wheel and trying to get a feel for the car's handling, "he's obviously into Pontiacs, so he's probably into American cars so I gave him a story he'd like so he'd feel more comfortable selling a car to a 17 year old who has car-buying money to throw around."
"You should be in sales."
"Maybe when this is all over," I said.
We drove past a Dairy Queen, they were just opening for the first time now that the cold season was ending. "You want an ice cream?" Amy asked.
"I've been having trouble with dairy, lately," I said, feeling my stomach climb up. She laughed, figuring I was joking.
"Well we should do something. When you do something big like a buy a car, you're supposed to go get ice cream or something self-rewarding like that."
I thought for a second, "Chinese food?"
"That's pretty rewarding."
She began looking around the car again. At the strip of probably-illegal tinting on the windshield to match the probably-illegal tinting on the windows, at the center console and in the glove box, then turned around. "Not much of a back seat," she said, "doubt two people could fit back there."
I kept driving, trying not to infer anything from that statement.
Amy maintained that she needed to attend her morning classes, so that gave me a few hours before she'd be available for mischief. I only had one thing on my agenda today: get a car.
I'd lately been noticing a certain car with a "For Sale" sign on the windshield parked in the lawn of a house a few neighborhoods over. After I ate whatever I could find in the kitchen that didn't require milk poured over it, I went back up to my room and researched a few car-buying tips online. I wasn't sure the year of the car I'd seen, or the mileage, so I memorized the private party sale value of three different yearly models and with three different landmarks for mileage. I called my bank and asked what the fee was for certified checks; $1.75. I figured I could manage that.
After I'd gotten all that planned, I checked local auto sale listings online to make sure I wasn't missing out on a much better offering a few blocks down the road. I didn't find anything I was interested in, nothing that suited my youthful charm as much as this one.
All that done, I spun my desk chair around and flipped on the small TV in my room and realized how long it'd been since I'd watched any television. Surprisingly, there was no explosive coverage of anything I'd done that weekend on the 24 hour news channels. Nothing about the rampaging teen who trashed a grocery store, hunting for milk like Popeye after spinach. Nothing about the dead cop and the dead fake cop. Nothing about the FBI, or the kid who picks up a gun for the first time in his life and is already an expert at them. Maybe I missed all that coverage on Sunday, and by now it was old news. Or maybe the impact of my life's events don't weigh as much on the global consciousness as most teenagers expect they should.
When Amy left school, I called her and asked her to meet me at the house with the car for sale, then I started walking. For all the walking I'd been doing lately, I thought maybe I didn't even need a car; I could be like the people in ancient times who walked everywhere, before horses or combustion engines were all the rage. Amy was already there when I arrived, sitting in her dad's car parked on the street. She got out when I came up, and we both took a good look over the car for sale parked on the lawn.
It was a white 1998 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. A two-door sports car, it had a long angled hood with curves and lines that made it look like some kind of angry beast. Over in the driveway was an older-looking gray Trans Am, probably mid-1970s. Perhaps the owner traded up for an older model. It had an emblem on the back for theFirebird & Trans Am Club of America.
"It looks fast," Amy said, looking at the white car.
"Should be, it's a V-8," I said, returning to read the list of features printed on a sheet of paper taped to the driver's window. She stepped over to read it as well.
"If I ever get in any more low-speed chases, this would be good for it," I said to nobody in particular.
"How do you know it's a '98?", she asked, "It doesn't say the year on here anywhere. Do they expect you to know by sight?"
"Probably," I said, reading about the factory CD system and engine improvements, "I can tell from the VIN number."
She squinted her eyes, "You what?" She bent down and looked at the tiny digits pressed into a metal plate at the base of the windshield and front of the dash.
"It doesn't say the year in there," she said.
I leaned in again, "Yes it does, right there," I said, pointing at the long series of digits. "The tenth character, 'W', that means it's a 1998."
"Double-you? How in the world does that mean 1998?"
"It just does, I thought everybody knows that."
"That W, in the tenth letter of a big long number that nobody pays attention to at all, ever, means 1998?"
"Yes."
"Well they don't."
I shrugged.
The front door of the house opened slowly. It was a one-storey house, dark brown bricks. An older guy stepped out of the door a few feet and asked out loud, "You interested in it?"
I looked up, over the car at him and hollered, "Yeah, you still selling it?"
The man tucked his hands in his pockets and nodded slowly, "Yep, my son is, anyway." He looked around at the trees for a moment, then wandered over toward us.
"It's a nice car," he said.
"Sure looks it," I said, making a show of looking it over. There were slight signs of a dent on the rear bumper, but nothing drastic. It had a solid T-top, two glass sections of the roof could be removed and stowed in the trunk if you wanted the wind in your hair, and didn't mind the fact thatthere'd still be a metal beam going through the opening.
"This mileage is right?" I asked, pointing at the sheet in the window that boasted just over 28,000 miles.
"It was when he printed that up last month, might be a few more by now, but not by much," the man said.
"And what's the asking price?" I asked.
The man looked at me, hesitating and letting worn gears grind in his mind. "Ehh," he started, "you mind if I ask how old you are?"
"Me? I'm 19," I said. I turned to Amy, "This is my sister, she's 16. We just moved in here last month from Detroit and I've been having a heck of a time finding something that's not a Mitsubishi or a Hyundai or anything."
He nodded, clearly a patron of American muscle.
"Well," he started, "he's asking ninety-six for it. He's starting school up at Brown and he wants something better for the climate and for drives up and back and such, and his payments for this are through the roof, still. Book money, he says."
Uh huh. Whatever.
"And if I can pay cash, today -- no loans or liens to deal with -- how about eighty-nine? That's all I could get for my rusted-outGTO I just sold." Amy looked at me, then rolled her eyes and shook her head slowly.
"I guess he could live with that," the man said after a few scratches on his chin. "He'll just be excited to sell it. Not much market for American-mades around here anymore, as you said."
"Great," I said, "how about this, we can take it on a test-drive over to my bank just up the road, and so long as the engine doesn't fall out on the way there I'll have the teller cut you a certified check. You have the title signed?"
He stuck his hands back in his pockets and said, "Yep, he left the title and signed it, I can fetch it when we get back."
And off we went. Amy stayed at the house, as collateral I suppose, and I drove the Trans Am with Mr. Whoever over to the closest branch of my bank, making small talk about how I liked living in Detroit and other lies. The car drove pretty smooth, but I could feel the power of the engine transferring through the pedal. At red lights I toyed around with the seat controls and radio to make sure everything worked fine enough. The seats were leather and a bit worn, but not too bad. All around it was a nice improvement from the Civic, even when it wasn't smashed into a police car.
We got to the bank and we both got out of the car and went in. I asked the teller to issue a certified check for $8,900 made out to the old guy, whose name I had to ask for awkwardly right there. I had to fill out a withdrawal slip to certify the check, and I could feel the heft of the money as it was sucked from my account. This was the most I'd ever spent on anything, and despite the fact that after the interest I'd earn on my full balance it'd still be greater than it was before this, it still hurt. I sucked it up and handed the check over to the smiling man, and we drove back to his house where he went inside and brought out a manila envelope with the title to the car, signed by the owner to initiate private transfer. All I'd have to do is sign it myself and take it to theDMV and they'd register the car to me and re-issue the title to me. Too bad I probably wouldn't do that. At least not until the possibility that I might have to crash the car into a person abandon it in the woods has decreased.
We shoot hands, then Amy and I left in our own cars. Her in her dad's Oldsmobile, me in a car I'd just bought without any parental help. The man was standing in the doorway looking at the check in his hands as I pulled away.
Amy dropped her car off at home, then hopped in mine, and we drove off with no destination. For a moment, I almost felt like a kid again.
"It's nice," Amy said, rubbing the instrument panel.
"Glad you like it," I said.
"What was with all that junk about being your sister and living in Detroit and having a GTO?"
"I dunno, really," I said, squeezing the steering wheel and trying to get a feel for the car's handling, "he's obviously into Pontiacs, so he's probably into American cars so I gave him a story he'd like so he'd feel more comfortable selling a car to a 17 year old who has car-buying money to throw around."
"You should be in sales."
"Maybe when this is all over," I said.
We drove past a Dairy Queen, they were just opening for the first time now that the cold season was ending. "You want an ice cream?" Amy asked.
"I've been having trouble with dairy, lately," I said, feeling my stomach climb up. She laughed, figuring I was joking.
"Well we should do something. When you do something big like a buy a car, you're supposed to go get ice cream or something self-rewarding like that."
I thought for a second, "Chinese food?"
"That's pretty rewarding."
She began looking around the car again. At the strip of probably-illegal tinting on the windshield to match the probably-illegal tinting on the windows, at the center console and in the glove box, then turned around. "Not much of a back seat," she said, "doubt two people could fit back there."
I kept driving, trying not to infer anything from that statement.
Friday, January 26, 2007
The Suitor
Amy's house was bigger than mine. I always thought my place was a bit too big for three people, but Amy's seemed to exaggerate that notion. I'd only seen it in the dark, but now that I'd made the walk in the daytime it seemed bigger than it had at night. Dark tan bricking and copper accents, the front lawn was big enough to play some pick-up football, if I knew how to play football. It was being used by just two people now, like my house. My dad was gone, leaving me and my mom alone in our house; Amy's mom was gone, leaving her and her dad alone in theirs. If this were a bad Disney Channel movie, my mom and her dad would end up together and Amy and I would wind up as siblings.
That notion disappeared when I met her father.
I stood outside the house for a few minutes, looking at the upstairs windows trying to decide which one was Amy's room. I thought about choosing one and throwing a rock at it, but that seemed a bit too Gentleman Caller. I would have just called her, but after the police and FBI left my house I had to get outside before my head exploded. I hung up after the conversation with my mom, threw the phone on the couch, slipped my shoes on and ran out the door, trying to find some calmness or clarity in the trees or the clouds. I only found whispers, so I started walking. Walking through backyards and over a small brick wall in the only direction that seemed to make sense, toward the only person on Earth who seemed to make sense.
So I went up to the front door and rung the bell. A man in his late thirties answered, a longneck beer bottle in one hand and wearing a USMC t-shirt that didn't suit his probably newly-acquired beer gut. When he pulled the door open, the sleeve pulled back revealing the bottom of a "Semper-Fi" tattoo on his left arm. As soon as I saw him, I remember Amy telling me how she didn't tell him about anything she did. I was probably the first guy to show up on his doorstep to ask for her, and I could feel the wheels in his head churning horrible thoughts about me.
Probably didn't help that I was still wearing that gas station t-shirt.
I croaked, "Is Amy here?" and after a moment he nodded and gestured his head toward the stairs leading upstairs. He stepped away from the door so I stepped in and allowed him to close the the door. Amy's dad scratched at his neck for a moment, then hollered "Amy!"
Upstairs and through a door, I heard her yell back, "What?"
"Visitor for you," volleyed Mr. Westborne. Silence from upstairs.
"She'll be right down, then," he said after a moment.
I stood there in the foyer, tapping my fingers against my legs. Sunday afternoon football noises came from a TV somewhere down the hall. Amy's dad just stood there, opposite me, looking me over. I tried to imagine all the horrible things evident about me that moment; I hoped my eyes weren't red or puffy anymore, to make me look like a pothead. I adjusted my posture, looked around at what I could see of the house and try to seem impressed. He just kept looking me over, then his eye caught on the stainless steel clip hanging out over the right pocket of my jeans. The big, deadly, probably illegal to carry knife was still on me.
Great, a kid shows up asking for your daughter wearing a gas station shirt and carrying a knife. Go get the shotgun.
"You always carry a knife, Mr..." he said dryly, before taking a sip from his bottle.
"Baker, sir," I croaked again, "Chris. And, uh.. I just got this yesterday. It's, um... it's an Emerson." I don't know why I said that.
His eyes shot up at that last word, though. He set his bottle down on a table behind him and said, "An Emerson, really?"
I didn't know if that was bad or good. Did I just tell him I drove a Pinto or a Jaguar? "Yeah," I said, unsure whether to sound apologetic or satisfied.
He seemed to liven up, and said, "Really, what kind is it?" with an outstretched hand. I delicately pulled the knife from my pocket and handed it over to him. He took it and looked the handle over, then flicked the blade open with a simple flip of his wrist. I hadn't tried that yet.
"Ah, a CQC-7," he said. "The classic."
I guessed I'd made the right choice. I was pretty sure the model number wasn't printed on the knife anywhere, he must have recognized it by sight.
"You must like Emerson," he said, "You have any more?"
Before I could answer, he almost squealed, "I have a whole set of them, here, I'll go get them." He closed the blade with one hand and tossed it to me, then practically pranced out of the foyer and disappeared down a hallway.
A moment later, Amy appeared at the top of the stairs. Her hair was wet and tangled, some strands clinging to the side of her face and neck. She was wearing a fresh shirt, brown featuring an animated frog that looked bored to be alive, and deliberately-frayed jeans. Bare feet.
"Oh, you," she said when she saw me. She started down the stairs when her dad came back, carrying a wooden box that looked like the sort of thing you find dried butterflies pinned to felt inside of. I looked apologetically to Amy and held a finger up, then stepped forward to look inside the box her dad had set on the table next to his beer. Inside the box were five or six knives, folded closed in handles that looked more or less identical to mine.
"Here's a SARK," he said, picking one up then setting it back down. He pointed at another and said it was a CQC-7B like mine, but without "Wave", then pointed at another and said it was a CQC-10, then finally picked one up and held it like you might hold a baby dove with a broken wing. "This," he said, "is a CQC-12. Just came out about a year ago." He flicked the blade out, and I stepped back for a moment almost to sheer fright. The blade looked like hot death, about seven inches long with a bowie curve at the end. It made my three-point-something incher look like a butter knife. "He designed it to match the AK-47 bayonet. This thing is serious business." I tried to imagine who "he" was, then just said, "Ah, the 12. I've been trying to find one of those." I looked at Amy, who was standing just to my left now, and grinned.
He folded the knife shut and stuck it back in the box. "I know a guy who owns a gun shop in Lorton, he gets me a good deal on them," he said, picking the box up. I looked over at Amy, now she was grinning.
"You wanted that study guide for the algebra exam, right?" Amy asked me.
"Right," I said, after some consideration.
"Ok, I can print a copy and we can go over it upstairs," she said, turning around and heading up the stairs. I followed.
"Leave the door open," Amy's dad said, still holding the box of knives. I started to laugh, thinking he was joking, then remembered the size of that knife and just shut up.
"I thought you were going to call first with the story," Amy said when we got in her room. The room was a bit bigger than mine, a few small posters of bands I've never heard of decorated the wall behind her bed, an L-shaped computer desk was in the far corner, a fat monitor and a monster-sized printer taking up what room wasn't occupied by strewn papers and textbooks.
"Change of plans," I said when my attention returned to her.
"So what's the new plan," she asked, taking a seat on the edge of her bed and pointing to the desk chair a few feet away. I pulled the chair out and sat down.
"The new plan is to make a new plan," I said. Then I told her about earlier that afternoon, about the soup, the FBI, the cops, the general lack of information as to why the FBI was even there, and the ominous suggestion that Mr. Comstock, my high school administrator was behind it all.
She pulled up her legs and sat Indian-style while I told the story, nodding and asking understandable questions throughout.
"I thought we'd figured Comstock was working for the government," she said after the shock and awe wore off.
"We don't know that," I said, "we just know that somebody's paying him a boatload of money from an unmarked account. The money could be coming from out of the country, where laws are different."
"And the guy last night, the fake cop. Nobody said anything about who he was?"
"No, this Bremer guy just said he was a 'John Doe' -- which means the police or anybody else has no record of him and can't identify him."
"They could just be saying that. Hell, he could have been working for the Feds."
I nodded, "Could be. Whoever he was, I'm mostly off the hook for killing him. Just like I'm off the hook for that fight at school on Thursday, which brings us back to Mr. Comstock. And besides that, you know how people are supposed to have nightmares and flashbacks and feel all shitty after killing someone?"
Amy nodded.
"Nothing," I said.
She frowned, "Well maybe I wouldn't feel so bad about killing someone who tried to kill me either. If you ran over some old guy crossing the street, you might feel bad, but this guy killed a cop and tried to kill you -- probably us."
We sat in silence for a while.
"So what are we even supposed to be doing now, anyway?" Amy said, breaking the calm.
"Waiting? Waiting for the FBI to... something?" I said. I didn't know.
"It sounds like they want you to do their job for them. The guy, Rubino whatever, he said if you want questions to start with Comstock, right? Maybe they need you to do some groundwork because they can't legally go there, or something."
"Possible. You think they might be interested in his bank records we got? I still have that CD."
She shook her head, "If they're FBI then they can get into his bank account on their own, can't they?"
I thought for a moment, "Yeah, I think so."
"And how they kept telling you to ask them questions before they'll talk to you. It sounds like they need you to find something out about Comstock, and when you ask them the right question they'll start helping you. Like the right question is the passphrase to answers, or something like that."
I thought about that. Special Agent Bremer did keep saying I should have questions for him, and to call him when I did. Either he wanted me to flat-out ask, "What the hell is going on with me?" or he was trying to tell me I had to figure something out on my own first. If he wanted me to ask what was going on, he could have just told me. They wanted to make sure I knew the question before they gave the answer, so it had to be that I had to find the question on my own.
"Alright," I said, "when we find something new about Comstock, I can call the FBI agents and start getting answers."
"Am I going to have to be Sarah from the bank again?" Amy asked.
"No," I said, "we're going to have to do some old-fashioned recon."
"You don't have a car," she said. "Or do you? Did your dad have a car?"
"Yeah, but it's still at his work. In Quantico. We never bothered to go get it."
"I don't think my dad will let me borrow his car to let us go get it."
"No, that's alright. I'll still need a new car, I don't want to be the seventeen year old driving a Cadillac around."
"So... what? You want to really kick off this crime spree and go steal a car?"
"Don't you remember," I said, "I told you I could afford it."
That notion disappeared when I met her father.
I stood outside the house for a few minutes, looking at the upstairs windows trying to decide which one was Amy's room. I thought about choosing one and throwing a rock at it, but that seemed a bit too Gentleman Caller. I would have just called her, but after the police and FBI left my house I had to get outside before my head exploded. I hung up after the conversation with my mom, threw the phone on the couch, slipped my shoes on and ran out the door, trying to find some calmness or clarity in the trees or the clouds. I only found whispers, so I started walking. Walking through backyards and over a small brick wall in the only direction that seemed to make sense, toward the only person on Earth who seemed to make sense.
So I went up to the front door and rung the bell. A man in his late thirties answered, a longneck beer bottle in one hand and wearing a USMC t-shirt that didn't suit his probably newly-acquired beer gut. When he pulled the door open, the sleeve pulled back revealing the bottom of a "Semper-Fi" tattoo on his left arm. As soon as I saw him, I remember Amy telling me how she didn't tell him about anything she did. I was probably the first guy to show up on his doorstep to ask for her, and I could feel the wheels in his head churning horrible thoughts about me.
Probably didn't help that I was still wearing that gas station t-shirt.
I croaked, "Is Amy here?" and after a moment he nodded and gestured his head toward the stairs leading upstairs. He stepped away from the door so I stepped in and allowed him to close the the door. Amy's dad scratched at his neck for a moment, then hollered "Amy!"
Upstairs and through a door, I heard her yell back, "What?"
"Visitor for you," volleyed Mr. Westborne. Silence from upstairs.
"She'll be right down, then," he said after a moment.
I stood there in the foyer, tapping my fingers against my legs. Sunday afternoon football noises came from a TV somewhere down the hall. Amy's dad just stood there, opposite me, looking me over. I tried to imagine all the horrible things evident about me that moment; I hoped my eyes weren't red or puffy anymore, to make me look like a pothead. I adjusted my posture, looked around at what I could see of the house and try to seem impressed. He just kept looking me over, then his eye caught on the stainless steel clip hanging out over the right pocket of my jeans. The big, deadly, probably illegal to carry knife was still on me.
Great, a kid shows up asking for your daughter wearing a gas station shirt and carrying a knife. Go get the shotgun.
"You always carry a knife, Mr..." he said dryly, before taking a sip from his bottle.
"Baker, sir," I croaked again, "Chris. And, uh.. I just got this yesterday. It's, um... it's an Emerson." I don't know why I said that.
His eyes shot up at that last word, though. He set his bottle down on a table behind him and said, "An Emerson, really?"
I didn't know if that was bad or good. Did I just tell him I drove a Pinto or a Jaguar? "Yeah," I said, unsure whether to sound apologetic or satisfied.
He seemed to liven up, and said, "Really, what kind is it?" with an outstretched hand. I delicately pulled the knife from my pocket and handed it over to him. He took it and looked the handle over, then flicked the blade open with a simple flip of his wrist. I hadn't tried that yet.
"Ah, a CQC-7," he said. "The classic."
I guessed I'd made the right choice. I was pretty sure the model number wasn't printed on the knife anywhere, he must have recognized it by sight.
"You must like Emerson," he said, "You have any more?"
Before I could answer, he almost squealed, "I have a whole set of them, here, I'll go get them." He closed the blade with one hand and tossed it to me, then practically pranced out of the foyer and disappeared down a hallway.
A moment later, Amy appeared at the top of the stairs. Her hair was wet and tangled, some strands clinging to the side of her face and neck. She was wearing a fresh shirt, brown featuring an animated frog that looked bored to be alive, and deliberately-frayed jeans. Bare feet.
"Oh, you," she said when she saw me. She started down the stairs when her dad came back, carrying a wooden box that looked like the sort of thing you find dried butterflies pinned to felt inside of. I looked apologetically to Amy and held a finger up, then stepped forward to look inside the box her dad had set on the table next to his beer. Inside the box were five or six knives, folded closed in handles that looked more or less identical to mine.
"Here's a SARK," he said, picking one up then setting it back down. He pointed at another and said it was a CQC-7B like mine, but without "Wave", then pointed at another and said it was a CQC-10, then finally picked one up and held it like you might hold a baby dove with a broken wing. "This," he said, "is a CQC-12. Just came out about a year ago." He flicked the blade out, and I stepped back for a moment almost to sheer fright. The blade looked like hot death, about seven inches long with a bowie curve at the end. It made my three-point-something incher look like a butter knife. "He designed it to match the AK-47 bayonet. This thing is serious business." I tried to imagine who "he" was, then just said, "Ah, the 12. I've been trying to find one of those." I looked at Amy, who was standing just to my left now, and grinned.
He folded the knife shut and stuck it back in the box. "I know a guy who owns a gun shop in Lorton, he gets me a good deal on them," he said, picking the box up. I looked over at Amy, now she was grinning.
"You wanted that study guide for the algebra exam, right?" Amy asked me.
"Right," I said, after some consideration.
"Ok, I can print a copy and we can go over it upstairs," she said, turning around and heading up the stairs. I followed.
"Leave the door open," Amy's dad said, still holding the box of knives. I started to laugh, thinking he was joking, then remembered the size of that knife and just shut up.
"I thought you were going to call first with the story," Amy said when we got in her room. The room was a bit bigger than mine, a few small posters of bands I've never heard of decorated the wall behind her bed, an L-shaped computer desk was in the far corner, a fat monitor and a monster-sized printer taking up what room wasn't occupied by strewn papers and textbooks.
"Change of plans," I said when my attention returned to her.
"So what's the new plan," she asked, taking a seat on the edge of her bed and pointing to the desk chair a few feet away. I pulled the chair out and sat down.
"The new plan is to make a new plan," I said. Then I told her about earlier that afternoon, about the soup, the FBI, the cops, the general lack of information as to why the FBI was even there, and the ominous suggestion that Mr. Comstock, my high school administrator was behind it all.
She pulled up her legs and sat Indian-style while I told the story, nodding and asking understandable questions throughout.
"I thought we'd figured Comstock was working for the government," she said after the shock and awe wore off.
"We don't know that," I said, "we just know that somebody's paying him a boatload of money from an unmarked account. The money could be coming from out of the country, where laws are different."
"And the guy last night, the fake cop. Nobody said anything about who he was?"
"No, this Bremer guy just said he was a 'John Doe' -- which means the police or anybody else has no record of him and can't identify him."
"They could just be saying that. Hell, he could have been working for the Feds."
I nodded, "Could be. Whoever he was, I'm mostly off the hook for killing him. Just like I'm off the hook for that fight at school on Thursday, which brings us back to Mr. Comstock. And besides that, you know how people are supposed to have nightmares and flashbacks and feel all shitty after killing someone?"
Amy nodded.
"Nothing," I said.
She frowned, "Well maybe I wouldn't feel so bad about killing someone who tried to kill me either. If you ran over some old guy crossing the street, you might feel bad, but this guy killed a cop and tried to kill you -- probably us."
We sat in silence for a while.
"So what are we even supposed to be doing now, anyway?" Amy said, breaking the calm.
"Waiting? Waiting for the FBI to... something?" I said. I didn't know.
"It sounds like they want you to do their job for them. The guy, Rubino whatever, he said if you want questions to start with Comstock, right? Maybe they need you to do some groundwork because they can't legally go there, or something."
"Possible. You think they might be interested in his bank records we got? I still have that CD."
She shook her head, "If they're FBI then they can get into his bank account on their own, can't they?"
I thought for a moment, "Yeah, I think so."
"And how they kept telling you to ask them questions before they'll talk to you. It sounds like they need you to find something out about Comstock, and when you ask them the right question they'll start helping you. Like the right question is the passphrase to answers, or something like that."
I thought about that. Special Agent Bremer did keep saying I should have questions for him, and to call him when I did. Either he wanted me to flat-out ask, "What the hell is going on with me?" or he was trying to tell me I had to figure something out on my own first. If he wanted me to ask what was going on, he could have just told me. They wanted to make sure I knew the question before they gave the answer, so it had to be that I had to find the question on my own.
"Alright," I said, "when we find something new about Comstock, I can call the FBI agents and start getting answers."
"Am I going to have to be Sarah from the bank again?" Amy asked.
"No," I said, "we're going to have to do some old-fashioned recon."
"You don't have a car," she said. "Or do you? Did your dad have a car?"
"Yeah, but it's still at his work. In Quantico. We never bothered to go get it."
"I don't think my dad will let me borrow his car to let us go get it."
"No, that's alright. I'll still need a new car, I don't want to be the seventeen year old driving a Cadillac around."
"So... what? You want to really kick off this crime spree and go steal a car?"
"Don't you remember," I said, "I told you I could afford it."
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Fibbey
Handgun in hand, pocketknife in pocket.
Through the front door I could visualize their outlines. I could put two bullets through each, presuming the .45 rounds could pierce the solid-core metal door. Why'd I have to buy low velocity rounds? I know why, so that if I made an idiot mistake and accidentally let a shot off outside it would disintegrate before it went farther than 100 yards, so I wouldn't end up killing someone and ruining some drapes by letting the thing fall to the ground.
Lot of good it'll do me now.
Then a knock on the door, and a voice. "FBI, open up! We need to ask you some questions." The voice sounded grizzly, like a tired old man.
We need to ask you some questions. It sounds better than "we need to shoot you in the face and laugh about it afterwords," but who ever says what they mean these days?
I'd lived in the area long enough to have seen an FBI agent or two, and these guys sure fit the bill. Suits worn just for the sake of being suits, unremarkable sedans, always traveling in pairs. Mulder and Scully. Harris and Marquez. Butch and Cassidy.
I could hear the soup boiling, mirroring the temperament of the blood at the base of my skull. Another pound on the door, sounded like the base of someone's fist. I sighed, still contemplating firing blindly through the front door. If I'm supposed to be turning myself in for killing someone today, I might as well go for the high score.
Or not. They could in fact be FBI agents, they could have found the car and traced it back to me. Better err on the side of safety, I figured, so I lowered the gun from the door. My shoes were sitting a few feet away, so I grabbed one and set it on the floor in front of the door, turned the deadbolt back, and opened the door a few inches so it caught on the toe of the shoe and was stopped by the friction of the shoe against the floor.
"Badges, please," I said, peering through the two inch opening of the door. My left hand was on the back of the door, ready to slam it, my right hand was holding the gun behind my back. The two men bent forward to see through the crack. They looked at each other, shrugged, and pulled folding wallets from their belts and held them up.
"Hand one to me," I said again. The man closest to me was older than the other, looked to be in his fifties and with his sagging jowls and slicked back light hair, he looked like a depressed bulldog. He drew in a breath to speak, then shrugged again and handed the wallet through the crack in the door. I snapped it away with my left hand and slammed the door shut with my knee, turning the deadbolt again as I stepped away from the door.
The wallet was a simple black leather folder, when opened, the a gold badge sat sideways on the right fold and a plain blue card was slipped behind a clear pocket. It was a white laminated card with all blue writing. "Department of Investigation. FBI. This certifies that whose signature and photograph appear hereon is a regularly appointed special agent for the FBI." The picture matched the old man outside, the signature said his name was G-something Bremer. If it was a forgery, it wasn't an obvious one.
I kicked the shoe away and opened the door, still eyeing the badge.
"Special Agent Bremer?" I said, "Is there something to differentiate between 'agent' and 'special agent'? Because I only hear about 'Special Agent whoever' and never 'Agent whoever'."
The older one, Bremer, allegedly, scowled, exaggerating the lines in his face. The younger one smiled tritely and said, "An agent is a new hiree, once they go through the FBI Academy in Quantico they're appointed Special Agent."
I handed the badge back to Bremer. "Quantico, eh?" I said, "I hear that's a nice place."
Bremer took the badge and slipped it back over his belt, the annoyance fading from his face. "It isn't," he said.
"May we come in?" the younger one asked. He looked no older than thirty, had thin-framed glasses and wavy blond hair. He had about six inches over his old partner.
"Just a few questions, Mr. Baker," Bremer said, as if on cue, "No funny business, scout's honor."
I frowned. "You don't have any pepper spray do you?"
"Why, do you need some?" Bremer asked, playfully.
"Yeah, thought my soup could use some kick."
I looked them both over, if they wanted to gut me they could have done so already. I flicked the safety on the gun and tucked it into my pants' waist on my back and covered it with the back of my shirt, then stepped back away from the doorway.
"Be my guest," I said.
They both stepped inside, neither of them surveying the room or rest of the house. "I'm Special Agent Bremer and this is equally Special Agent Rubino, my partner."
Rubino didn't look very Italian, he looked like Navy man, save for the glasses. When I closed the door, Rubino stood in front of it and Bremer stepped into the kitchen. He seemed to be the one who liked talking, so I followed him.
"You want some soup?" I asked, stepping around the counter and over to the stove to turn the heat down.
"Naw, I only eat soup when I'm sick," Bremer said.
"And you're not," I said.
"What?"
"Sick."
"Not this moment," he said. He pulled a tall chair from the counter and sat down, resting his elbows on the counter. "So," he started again, "do you have any questions for us?"
I stirred the soup with a wooden spoon, "I thought you had some questions for me," I said.
Behind me he said, "We might. But I thought first you might want some answers."
"About what?" I asked.
"Oh.. anything really. Most kids I meet your age are just brimming with questions, about what 'Special Agent' means or whether we carry guns and if we ever use them."
I moved the soup pot from off the heat and turned around, leaning against the front of stove. He was looking at me flatly. I just shrugged.
"But you probably know all you need to about guns," he said. "The range target sheets they pulled from the back seat of your car this morning had pretty tight grouping. Your dad teach you to shoot?"
I bit the side of my cheek. "From my car?" I said, trying to sound innocent. "My car was out front last I checked."
"Huh. Must have been stolen, then. Stolen and taken to Lorton for some shooting, some Wendys, and a few gallons of milk."
"Crazy world we live in." There was no use denying it, he was pretty convinced.
"Very crazy," he said, leaning back in the chair, "so crazy that whoever stole your car looks exactly like you and has an accomplice that looks exactly like Amy Westborne. At least, that's what the security cameras at Hobson's Grocer saw, and verified by the testimony of a few shoppers and employees who are not used to seeing teenagers storm through the store and douse their face with two gallons of Dairy-fresh."
"Builds strong bones"
"But the most crazy thing was when a CPA was taking a shortcut to work this morning, he found his path cut off by your car, the one that was stolen by a pair of look-alikes of you and your friend, smashed into the side of a police car with a John Doe practically cut in half and a dead state trooper sittin' easy in the trunk."
Ok, so I'm going to jail then.
He sat there for a minute, reading my face. I stood and did the same.
"You never answered my question, though," Bremer said after a moment. "Did you learn to shoot from your father?"
"I don't think my dad liked guns," I said through my teeth.
Bremer smiled, "Ah yes, he did always seem the pacifistic type."
He was lying; he had to be.
Rubino stepped into the kitchen slowly. "Soup smells good," he said.
I looked back at Bremer, then stepped forward and sat both hands on the counter opposite him. Bremer looked over his shoulder at Rubino, "We were just talking about Dan," he said.
My dad didn't like to be called Dan, I thought.
"He didn't like to be called Dan, remember?" Rubino said.
"Oh, right," Bremer said with feigned realization. He then turned back to me, "So you must just be a quick learner, then. With the shooting, I mean," he made a play gun with his fingers and took a shot at the pot of soup behind me.
"Is this going somewhere?" I asked, trying to to keep my voice from wavering.
"As I was saying," Bremer said, "we just wondered if you wanted to ask us anything."
"And all you want to ask me is where I learned to shoot? Haven't you been watching the news? Kids these days are learning their combat and car-stealing skills from video games."
Rubino stepped forward and set his hands on the chair next to Bremer.
"If you don't have any questions for us, then we really don't have any questions for you," Rubino said. "We just thought, you know, you might be going through some things and you might want some input from some people as knowledgeable as us."
"Ok," I said, "How can I tell if a girl likes me likes me, or just likes me?"
Bremer laughed again, "That's not my department, kid," he pointed at the ring on his right hand, "Third marriage. Jake might be able to help you there." He turned to his partner.Rubino just shook his head.
"What we meant," Bremer said, "is that if you started noticing anything weird going on, like next time if -- instead of your car getting stolen -- it's actually you who drives a Civic through a guy with no record or file in any database. Should something weird like that happen, you might want to call us and see if we can do anything for each other."
They each pulled their real wallets out and slipped out a business card, then slid them across the counter.
In the distance I heard police tweeters, not sirens, calling every few seconds. The noise came closer and closer, until out of my kitchen window I saw two police cruisers, state trooper insignia, racing down the street and pull awkwardly into my driveway. From the first car came a uniformed officer and another man wearing a drab suit and thick overcoat to which a badge was pinned. Two uniforms stepped out of the second car.
"How's that for timing?" Bremer asked. He turned to Rubino and asked casually, "Why don't you take care of that, Jake?"
"Sure thing, sir," Rubino said, stepping backwards out of the kitchen.
I heard him open the front door, and stepped over to the kitchen window to see him walking toward the policemen with his badge held up. Bremer and I watched now as Rubino stepped up to the plainclothes officer and hand him the badge. He spoke for a minute, the officer didn't look happy. After Rubino stopped talking, the officer began talking back and, waving his arms in the air and I heard some obscenities through the window. The officer spun around and slammed his palm against the roof of the squad car.
"They get antsy when fellow officers turn up in trunks," Bremer said as he watched the show.
Rubino started talking again, pointing at his own car then at my house, then placed his hands at his hips. The officer swore again, then turned to the dumbfounded uniformed officers watching the exchange and waved them off. He got back in the passenger seat of the car he came in, and in a few seconds the second car was gone, then the first.
Rubino came back into the house and said to Bremer, "They're going to give it some space for a while, but I figure as soon as they can pull some new evidence from their collective ass they'll be back."
Bremer turned to me, "Alrighty, sport. You hear that? We can keep them off your case for only so long, so it'd be just grand if you could start helping us out sooner rather than later. You have our cards, so when you think of or find something you'd want to talk to us about, you can give either of us a call."
"Whichever of us you think would have the better phone voice," Rubino said.
Bremer stood up and straightened his jacket. "We'll be seeing you," he said as he left the kitchen and out the door toward their car.
Rubino held back for a moment, his hand on the doorknob, and said, "And in the unlikely event that you really are in the dark about things, you might start looking for answers from that principal of yours." He looked me over one last time, then stepped out the door.
Stiff-collar executives who like to read The Art of War and apply it to sales techniques and judge the careers of their peers based on the quality of the stock and lettering of their business cards have a technique they use after any meeting. They ask themselves, What new contacts have I just made?, What did I just learn that I didn't know before, and How can I use those two things for my advantage? I didn't have any justifiable answers for any of those.
My thoughts were cut short by my cell phone chirping. I found it on the coffee table by the couch I'd slept on, and answered it without looking at the caller ID.
"Hi Chris, sorry I didn't call before but things have been hectic around here with Cathy," it was my mother.
"Oh, well, that's fine," I said into the phone, looking around the room.
"Ok, and I thought I'd give you the weekend without bugging you. Didn't figure out how to throw any parties, did you?" she laughed.
"Nope, no parties."
"Well that's good I guess. Anything else going on, then? Anything exciting?"
I swallowed, my mouth felt dry and my stomach was rumbling for that soup. A mile or so away from my house were a few cops who wanted my blood and behind them were two FBI Agents -- Special Agents -- who seemed to know more than they let on and seemed only interested in playing mind games. An hour away there was a dead police officer and a "John Doe" was apparently in pieces.
"Nope," I said, "nothing at all."
Through the front door I could visualize their outlines. I could put two bullets through each, presuming the .45 rounds could pierce the solid-core metal door. Why'd I have to buy low velocity rounds? I know why, so that if I made an idiot mistake and accidentally let a shot off outside it would disintegrate before it went farther than 100 yards, so I wouldn't end up killing someone and ruining some drapes by letting the thing fall to the ground.
Lot of good it'll do me now.
Then a knock on the door, and a voice. "FBI, open up! We need to ask you some questions." The voice sounded grizzly, like a tired old man.
We need to ask you some questions. It sounds better than "we need to shoot you in the face and laugh about it afterwords," but who ever says what they mean these days?
I'd lived in the area long enough to have seen an FBI agent or two, and these guys sure fit the bill. Suits worn just for the sake of being suits, unremarkable sedans, always traveling in pairs. Mulder and Scully. Harris and Marquez. Butch and Cassidy.
I could hear the soup boiling, mirroring the temperament of the blood at the base of my skull. Another pound on the door, sounded like the base of someone's fist. I sighed, still contemplating firing blindly through the front door. If I'm supposed to be turning myself in for killing someone today, I might as well go for the high score.
Or not. They could in fact be FBI agents, they could have found the car and traced it back to me. Better err on the side of safety, I figured, so I lowered the gun from the door. My shoes were sitting a few feet away, so I grabbed one and set it on the floor in front of the door, turned the deadbolt back, and opened the door a few inches so it caught on the toe of the shoe and was stopped by the friction of the shoe against the floor.
"Badges, please," I said, peering through the two inch opening of the door. My left hand was on the back of the door, ready to slam it, my right hand was holding the gun behind my back. The two men bent forward to see through the crack. They looked at each other, shrugged, and pulled folding wallets from their belts and held them up.
"Hand one to me," I said again. The man closest to me was older than the other, looked to be in his fifties and with his sagging jowls and slicked back light hair, he looked like a depressed bulldog. He drew in a breath to speak, then shrugged again and handed the wallet through the crack in the door. I snapped it away with my left hand and slammed the door shut with my knee, turning the deadbolt again as I stepped away from the door.
The wallet was a simple black leather folder, when opened, the a gold badge sat sideways on the right fold and a plain blue card was slipped behind a clear pocket. It was a white laminated card with all blue writing. "Department of Investigation. FBI. This certifies that whose signature and photograph appear hereon is a regularly appointed special agent for the FBI." The picture matched the old man outside, the signature said his name was G-something Bremer. If it was a forgery, it wasn't an obvious one.
I kicked the shoe away and opened the door, still eyeing the badge.
"Special Agent Bremer?" I said, "Is there something to differentiate between 'agent' and 'special agent'? Because I only hear about 'Special Agent whoever' and never 'Agent whoever'."
The older one, Bremer, allegedly, scowled, exaggerating the lines in his face. The younger one smiled tritely and said, "An agent is a new hiree, once they go through the FBI Academy in Quantico they're appointed Special Agent."
I handed the badge back to Bremer. "Quantico, eh?" I said, "I hear that's a nice place."
Bremer took the badge and slipped it back over his belt, the annoyance fading from his face. "It isn't," he said.
"May we come in?" the younger one asked. He looked no older than thirty, had thin-framed glasses and wavy blond hair. He had about six inches over his old partner.
"Just a few questions, Mr. Baker," Bremer said, as if on cue, "No funny business, scout's honor."
I frowned. "You don't have any pepper spray do you?"
"Why, do you need some?" Bremer asked, playfully.
"Yeah, thought my soup could use some kick."
I looked them both over, if they wanted to gut me they could have done so already. I flicked the safety on the gun and tucked it into my pants' waist on my back and covered it with the back of my shirt, then stepped back away from the doorway.
"Be my guest," I said.
They both stepped inside, neither of them surveying the room or rest of the house. "I'm Special Agent Bremer and this is equally Special Agent Rubino, my partner."
Rubino didn't look very Italian, he looked like Navy man, save for the glasses. When I closed the door, Rubino stood in front of it and Bremer stepped into the kitchen. He seemed to be the one who liked talking, so I followed him.
"You want some soup?" I asked, stepping around the counter and over to the stove to turn the heat down.
"Naw, I only eat soup when I'm sick," Bremer said.
"And you're not," I said.
"What?"
"Sick."
"Not this moment," he said. He pulled a tall chair from the counter and sat down, resting his elbows on the counter. "So," he started again, "do you have any questions for us?"
I stirred the soup with a wooden spoon, "I thought you had some questions for me," I said.
Behind me he said, "We might. But I thought first you might want some answers."
"About what?" I asked.
"Oh.. anything really. Most kids I meet your age are just brimming with questions, about what 'Special Agent' means or whether we carry guns and if we ever use them."
I moved the soup pot from off the heat and turned around, leaning against the front of stove. He was looking at me flatly. I just shrugged.
"But you probably know all you need to about guns," he said. "The range target sheets they pulled from the back seat of your car this morning had pretty tight grouping. Your dad teach you to shoot?"
I bit the side of my cheek. "From my car?" I said, trying to sound innocent. "My car was out front last I checked."
"Huh. Must have been stolen, then. Stolen and taken to Lorton for some shooting, some Wendys, and a few gallons of milk."
"Crazy world we live in." There was no use denying it, he was pretty convinced.
"Very crazy," he said, leaning back in the chair, "so crazy that whoever stole your car looks exactly like you and has an accomplice that looks exactly like Amy Westborne. At least, that's what the security cameras at Hobson's Grocer saw, and verified by the testimony of a few shoppers and employees who are not used to seeing teenagers storm through the store and douse their face with two gallons of Dairy-fresh."
"Builds strong bones"
"But the most crazy thing was when a CPA was taking a shortcut to work this morning, he found his path cut off by your car, the one that was stolen by a pair of look-alikes of you and your friend, smashed into the side of a police car with a John Doe practically cut in half and a dead state trooper sittin' easy in the trunk."
Ok, so I'm going to jail then.
He sat there for a minute, reading my face. I stood and did the same.
"You never answered my question, though," Bremer said after a moment. "Did you learn to shoot from your father?"
"I don't think my dad liked guns," I said through my teeth.
Bremer smiled, "Ah yes, he did always seem the pacifistic type."
He was lying; he had to be.
Rubino stepped into the kitchen slowly. "Soup smells good," he said.
I looked back at Bremer, then stepped forward and sat both hands on the counter opposite him. Bremer looked over his shoulder at Rubino, "We were just talking about Dan," he said.
My dad didn't like to be called Dan, I thought.
"He didn't like to be called Dan, remember?" Rubino said.
"Oh, right," Bremer said with feigned realization. He then turned back to me, "So you must just be a quick learner, then. With the shooting, I mean," he made a play gun with his fingers and took a shot at the pot of soup behind me.
"Is this going somewhere?" I asked, trying to to keep my voice from wavering.
"As I was saying," Bremer said, "we just wondered if you wanted to ask us anything."
"And all you want to ask me is where I learned to shoot? Haven't you been watching the news? Kids these days are learning their combat and car-stealing skills from video games."
Rubino stepped forward and set his hands on the chair next to Bremer.
"If you don't have any questions for us, then we really don't have any questions for you," Rubino said. "We just thought, you know, you might be going through some things and you might want some input from some people as knowledgeable as us."
"Ok," I said, "How can I tell if a girl likes me likes me, or just likes me?"
Bremer laughed again, "That's not my department, kid," he pointed at the ring on his right hand, "Third marriage. Jake might be able to help you there." He turned to his partner.Rubino just shook his head.
"What we meant," Bremer said, "is that if you started noticing anything weird going on, like next time if -- instead of your car getting stolen -- it's actually you who drives a Civic through a guy with no record or file in any database. Should something weird like that happen, you might want to call us and see if we can do anything for each other."
They each pulled their real wallets out and slipped out a business card, then slid them across the counter.
In the distance I heard police tweeters, not sirens, calling every few seconds. The noise came closer and closer, until out of my kitchen window I saw two police cruisers, state trooper insignia, racing down the street and pull awkwardly into my driveway. From the first car came a uniformed officer and another man wearing a drab suit and thick overcoat to which a badge was pinned. Two uniforms stepped out of the second car.
"How's that for timing?" Bremer asked. He turned to Rubino and asked casually, "Why don't you take care of that, Jake?"
"Sure thing, sir," Rubino said, stepping backwards out of the kitchen.
I heard him open the front door, and stepped over to the kitchen window to see him walking toward the policemen with his badge held up. Bremer and I watched now as Rubino stepped up to the plainclothes officer and hand him the badge. He spoke for a minute, the officer didn't look happy. After Rubino stopped talking, the officer began talking back and, waving his arms in the air and I heard some obscenities through the window. The officer spun around and slammed his palm against the roof of the squad car.
"They get antsy when fellow officers turn up in trunks," Bremer said as he watched the show.
Rubino started talking again, pointing at his own car then at my house, then placed his hands at his hips. The officer swore again, then turned to the dumbfounded uniformed officers watching the exchange and waved them off. He got back in the passenger seat of the car he came in, and in a few seconds the second car was gone, then the first.
Rubino came back into the house and said to Bremer, "They're going to give it some space for a while, but I figure as soon as they can pull some new evidence from their collective ass they'll be back."
Bremer turned to me, "Alrighty, sport. You hear that? We can keep them off your case for only so long, so it'd be just grand if you could start helping us out sooner rather than later. You have our cards, so when you think of or find something you'd want to talk to us about, you can give either of us a call."
"Whichever of us you think would have the better phone voice," Rubino said.
Bremer stood up and straightened his jacket. "We'll be seeing you," he said as he left the kitchen and out the door toward their car.
Rubino held back for a moment, his hand on the doorknob, and said, "And in the unlikely event that you really are in the dark about things, you might start looking for answers from that principal of yours." He looked me over one last time, then stepped out the door.
Stiff-collar executives who like to read The Art of War and apply it to sales techniques and judge the careers of their peers based on the quality of the stock and lettering of their business cards have a technique they use after any meeting. They ask themselves, What new contacts have I just made?, What did I just learn that I didn't know before, and How can I use those two things for my advantage? I didn't have any justifiable answers for any of those.
My thoughts were cut short by my cell phone chirping. I found it on the coffee table by the couch I'd slept on, and answered it without looking at the caller ID.
"Hi Chris, sorry I didn't call before but things have been hectic around here with Cathy," it was my mother.
"Oh, well, that's fine," I said into the phone, looking around the room.
"Ok, and I thought I'd give you the weekend without bugging you. Didn't figure out how to throw any parties, did you?" she laughed.
"Nope, no parties."
"Well that's good I guess. Anything else going on, then? Anything exciting?"
I swallowed, my mouth felt dry and my stomach was rumbling for that soup. A mile or so away from my house were a few cops who wanted my blood and behind them were two FBI Agents -- Special Agents -- who seemed to know more than they let on and seemed only interested in playing mind games. An hour away there was a dead police officer and a "John Doe" was apparently in pieces.
"Nope," I said, "nothing at all."
Monday, January 22, 2007
The Long Road Home
We'd come out for a party and our ride had bailed on us. As far as anybody at the cab company was concerned, that's what happened. Forty minutes after I'd called and said I needed a ride from Lorton to Fredericksburg , a depressing minivan pulled up into the gas station parking lot, decked out in requisite checkered striping and business names and phone numbers plastered all over the vehicle's body.
Amy and I rode mostly in silence. She pulled her cell phone from her bag and fiddled with one of the games for a while, and I watched the darkness swoosh by out the window and absentmindedly rubbed the bruise on my upper chest with my right hand. I thought about taking a look at the knife I'd gotten, since I never really got a chance to check it out, but I didn't want to freak the driver out.
It was nearly one AM when we were dropped off at my house; Saturday was finally over with. The fare went through all of the cash I had left, so Amy had to chip in a few bucks to cover the tip. I felt rather poor for a moment. Just a moment, though.
I had the cab bring us to my house and not drop Amy off first because I wanted to keep exposure on her as minimal as possible. If someone were following us, I didn't want to lead them to her house, and if someone pulled up the taxi company's records or questioned the driver I didn't want him able to give anybody an address. From my place, her house was about a 10 minute walk if you cut through some lawns and hop over a low brick wall meant to divide two subdivisions.
"You'll call the police in the morning?" she asked as we neared her house.
"After some sleep, yeah," I said.
"And you'll tell me which version of whatever-the-hell just happened you're going to be using first?" she asked. Her hands were in her coat pockets, she watched her feet as she walked.
"I'll try to leave you out of it if I can, but I'll let you know either way."
"You might want a lawyer for when you make your statement. They could try to turn it around and make it your fault. Self-defense can be hard to prove."
"Self-defense against pretend cops with bad pony-tails has to be even harder."
"Does your family have a lawyer? This wouldn't be the best time to fish one out of the Yellow Pages. Someone who knows you and you can trust would be best."
It felt like we were acting out the conversation I'd had with myself a few hours earlier, like drama students reading lines and trying to act like they don't know where this is going.
"The only lawyer I know of is the Will guy," I said, "and I don't know if he's like a lawyer lawyer or just a Will lawyer. My dad might have had a lawyer he used for other stuff. He never mentioned it."
"You could ask your mom, she'd probably know."
"Man, my mom. I don't know how I'm going to explain all of this."
"Oh, it's easy," Amy said, "just make it a life-lesson thing. 'Hey mom, remember how when I was a kid you always used to tell me that if I ever get hit in the face with pepper spray, to pour a gallon of milk into each eye? Well, you'll never guess what happened to me today!' Then just let the good times roll."
It hurt to laugh, just like it hurt to walk and breathe.
When I got home it seemed like all of my muscles were just inches away from going on strike. I could feel them rallying together and starting to disobey orders. I plopped down on a chair at my kitchen table and dumped all of the stuff from the plastic bag from the gun store, then finally peeled my license plate from my back and dropped it to the floor, feeling a nice rectangular impression on my back.
I fished through the strewn papers and instruments of death on the table and found the pocket knife and the box it had come in. I only bought it because Amy had spent a long time looking at it when we were at the gun store in the morning, I didn't know anything about it. I guessed I'd gotten it for her, but with all that'd happened after that there was never a chance. Now it was a used knife. There was a film of white powder all over the handle now, I assumed it was from the air bag I'd used the knife on.
The box said it was an Emerson Knives Inc model CQC-7B. I'd heard CQC used for "close quarters combat" and thought maybe the 7B meant I could use it against seven badguys before the warranty expired. The box touted a "patented WAVE feature", which the instruction sheet explained was a small hook built into the blade so that you can draw the knife from your pocket and have it unfold in one motion, by making the hook catch onto the side of your pocket and pulling the blade from the handle. The knife was all black, with a solid handle that felt like raw fiberglass or something and a black clip on the side to secure it in your pocket. The blade swung out by thumbing a small disc on the dull side of the blade, just under the previously mentioned "wave" hook, and swinging it out in an arc. The blade itself was black, perhaps that's what the B stood for in the model number, and reflected no light. It wasn't a very long blade, just over three inches, but it looked serious enough. The end had a sharply angled point to it which was defined by the text on the box as a "tanto point". The forward half of the blade edge was smooth, the back half had a toothy serration. I grabbed one of the papers I considered unnecessary and sliced clean through it. Fancy.
I folded the knife closed and set it on the table next to the gun. I frowned, and picked up the gun now. There was a round in the chamber and the hammer was cocked. I dropped the magazine out and pulled the slide back to eject the chambered bullet, then locked the slide back and set the gun down again. A gun and a knife lay beside each other on a kitchen table. Yeah, don't mess with this kid.
I used the back of the chair to stand up wobbly, eyed the stairs to go up toward my room and decided against them. I instead swaggered gingerly toward the living room and spilled onto the couch. Something round and smooth was poking into my back. I rolled around and fished a small tube of fruity lip gloss from between two couch cushions. Amy must have left it last night. Last night. Felt like weeks. I seemed to have no sense of time anymore.
I got myself into a position where only some of my body hurt, and fell asleep wondering how long the next day would seem.
I awoke around noon, according to the clock on the DVD player staring at me from across the room. My head and neck felt tingly, but my arms and legs were responding to my prompts, so I rolled myself off of the couch and onto my hands and knees. My muscles all seemed to be yelling back and forth at each other, but the dull pain was better than last night's full-on burning. I walked in a circle around the couch until my brain started to unhinge from the corners of my skull and meld into one body of consciousness. I was supposed to call the police or something today, I remembered. The rumbling in my stomach was a higher priority, so I lurched into the kitchen like a zombie and opened the pantry door. Soup sounded good. Anything hot sounded good. A hot bath sounded excellent. With hot Taiwanese girls rubbing my sore legs and back. And chest. And anything else.
I banged and twisted the can opener against the top of a can of chicken noodle until it did its job, then poured it all into a pot and set it on the stove under high heat, then sat down at the kitchen counter, a few feet from the table where my small arsenal and library of car-owner documentation lay undisturbed. While I waited for the fog to lift, I just sat and rubbed my hands up and down my face until I remembered the bit about my eyes from yesterday. The puffiness seemed to have gone away, and I could blink naturally. I got up and started to look for a spoon to stir the soup with when the front doorbell rang.
I figured it was Amy. I gave myself a look-over. I was still wearing last night's jeans, and the itchy gas station t-shirt. I was amazed I slept at all. I walked toward the door and remembered the bit from yesterday about strange men wishing to kill me. I went back into the kitchen and peeked out a window that affords a view of the front door and driveway. In the driveway, where my car usually is, was a black Chrysler sedan with tinted windows. At the front door were two men in plain, black, non-tailored suits that did a rather poor job of hiding the shoulder-hanging gun holsters they were both wearing.
And then the headache crept back in.
Amy and I rode mostly in silence. She pulled her cell phone from her bag and fiddled with one of the games for a while, and I watched the darkness swoosh by out the window and absentmindedly rubbed the bruise on my upper chest with my right hand. I thought about taking a look at the knife I'd gotten, since I never really got a chance to check it out, but I didn't want to freak the driver out.
It was nearly one AM when we were dropped off at my house; Saturday was finally over with. The fare went through all of the cash I had left, so Amy had to chip in a few bucks to cover the tip. I felt rather poor for a moment. Just a moment, though.
I had the cab bring us to my house and not drop Amy off first because I wanted to keep exposure on her as minimal as possible. If someone were following us, I didn't want to lead them to her house, and if someone pulled up the taxi company's records or questioned the driver I didn't want him able to give anybody an address. From my place, her house was about a 10 minute walk if you cut through some lawns and hop over a low brick wall meant to divide two subdivisions.
"You'll call the police in the morning?" she asked as we neared her house.
"After some sleep, yeah," I said.
"And you'll tell me which version of whatever-the-hell just happened you're going to be using first?" she asked. Her hands were in her coat pockets, she watched her feet as she walked.
"I'll try to leave you out of it if I can, but I'll let you know either way."
"You might want a lawyer for when you make your statement. They could try to turn it around and make it your fault. Self-defense can be hard to prove."
"Self-defense against pretend cops with bad pony-tails has to be even harder."
"Does your family have a lawyer? This wouldn't be the best time to fish one out of the Yellow Pages. Someone who knows you and you can trust would be best."
It felt like we were acting out the conversation I'd had with myself a few hours earlier, like drama students reading lines and trying to act like they don't know where this is going.
"The only lawyer I know of is the Will guy," I said, "and I don't know if he's like a lawyer lawyer or just a Will lawyer. My dad might have had a lawyer he used for other stuff. He never mentioned it."
"You could ask your mom, she'd probably know."
"Man, my mom. I don't know how I'm going to explain all of this."
"Oh, it's easy," Amy said, "just make it a life-lesson thing. 'Hey mom, remember how when I was a kid you always used to tell me that if I ever get hit in the face with pepper spray, to pour a gallon of milk into each eye? Well, you'll never guess what happened to me today!' Then just let the good times roll."
It hurt to laugh, just like it hurt to walk and breathe.
When I got home it seemed like all of my muscles were just inches away from going on strike. I could feel them rallying together and starting to disobey orders. I plopped down on a chair at my kitchen table and dumped all of the stuff from the plastic bag from the gun store, then finally peeled my license plate from my back and dropped it to the floor, feeling a nice rectangular impression on my back.
I fished through the strewn papers and instruments of death on the table and found the pocket knife and the box it had come in. I only bought it because Amy had spent a long time looking at it when we were at the gun store in the morning, I didn't know anything about it. I guessed I'd gotten it for her, but with all that'd happened after that there was never a chance. Now it was a used knife. There was a film of white powder all over the handle now, I assumed it was from the air bag I'd used the knife on.
The box said it was an Emerson Knives Inc model CQC-7B. I'd heard CQC used for "close quarters combat" and thought maybe the 7B meant I could use it against seven badguys before the warranty expired. The box touted a "patented WAVE feature", which the instruction sheet explained was a small hook built into the blade so that you can draw the knife from your pocket and have it unfold in one motion, by making the hook catch onto the side of your pocket and pulling the blade from the handle. The knife was all black, with a solid handle that felt like raw fiberglass or something and a black clip on the side to secure it in your pocket. The blade swung out by thumbing a small disc on the dull side of the blade, just under the previously mentioned "wave" hook, and swinging it out in an arc. The blade itself was black, perhaps that's what the B stood for in the model number, and reflected no light. It wasn't a very long blade, just over three inches, but it looked serious enough. The end had a sharply angled point to it which was defined by the text on the box as a "tanto point". The forward half of the blade edge was smooth, the back half had a toothy serration. I grabbed one of the papers I considered unnecessary and sliced clean through it. Fancy.
I folded the knife closed and set it on the table next to the gun. I frowned, and picked up the gun now. There was a round in the chamber and the hammer was cocked. I dropped the magazine out and pulled the slide back to eject the chambered bullet, then locked the slide back and set the gun down again. A gun and a knife lay beside each other on a kitchen table. Yeah, don't mess with this kid.
I used the back of the chair to stand up wobbly, eyed the stairs to go up toward my room and decided against them. I instead swaggered gingerly toward the living room and spilled onto the couch. Something round and smooth was poking into my back. I rolled around and fished a small tube of fruity lip gloss from between two couch cushions. Amy must have left it last night. Last night. Felt like weeks. I seemed to have no sense of time anymore.
I got myself into a position where only some of my body hurt, and fell asleep wondering how long the next day would seem.
I awoke around noon, according to the clock on the DVD player staring at me from across the room. My head and neck felt tingly, but my arms and legs were responding to my prompts, so I rolled myself off of the couch and onto my hands and knees. My muscles all seemed to be yelling back and forth at each other, but the dull pain was better than last night's full-on burning. I walked in a circle around the couch until my brain started to unhinge from the corners of my skull and meld into one body of consciousness. I was supposed to call the police or something today, I remembered. The rumbling in my stomach was a higher priority, so I lurched into the kitchen like a zombie and opened the pantry door. Soup sounded good. Anything hot sounded good. A hot bath sounded excellent. With hot Taiwanese girls rubbing my sore legs and back. And chest. And anything else.
I banged and twisted the can opener against the top of a can of chicken noodle until it did its job, then poured it all into a pot and set it on the stove under high heat, then sat down at the kitchen counter, a few feet from the table where my small arsenal and library of car-owner documentation lay undisturbed. While I waited for the fog to lift, I just sat and rubbed my hands up and down my face until I remembered the bit about my eyes from yesterday. The puffiness seemed to have gone away, and I could blink naturally. I got up and started to look for a spoon to stir the soup with when the front doorbell rang.
I figured it was Amy. I gave myself a look-over. I was still wearing last night's jeans, and the itchy gas station t-shirt. I was amazed I slept at all. I walked toward the door and remembered the bit from yesterday about strange men wishing to kill me. I went back into the kitchen and peeked out a window that affords a view of the front door and driveway. In the driveway, where my car usually is, was a black Chrysler sedan with tinted windows. At the front door were two men in plain, black, non-tailored suits that did a rather poor job of hiding the shoulder-hanging gun holsters they were both wearing.
And then the headache crept back in.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Mind the Body
The absurd clairvoyance and imperviousness of adrenaline was starting to wear off and pain was creeping in through my body. My head started a slow throb, the rest of my body was slowly starting to burn. The old guy in the trunk probably felt worse, though.
Screw this, I thought, I've had enough. I wanted to go find a hole and go to sleep. The night was thick around me, insects buzzed around my ears. Two cars had merged into one, and two men were dead inside. My shirt was soaked in milk, both 2% and whole, everything smelled like paprika, it hurt to blink, I had no idea where I was, someone had tried to shoot me, my car was destroyed, and I had a gun in my hand. There's got to be a point where your brain just wishes your body good luck and powers down, but I apparently wasn't there yet.
I closed the trunk, wiped my prints off the lid. All I cared about was getting home, everything else -- the bodies, the auto carnage -- was just peripheral to that. The plastic shopping bag was still in the back of my used-to-be-a-car, under my canvas jacket. I slipped the jacket on and dropped the USP into the bag after flicking the safety. The airbags in the front seat were still inflated, so I fished the pocket knife I'd bought from the bag and took it from the box and wrapping, flicked it open, and punched a hole in the passenger side airbag. I took all the documents from the glove box and stuffed them too in the bag. I was ignoring Amy's questions, so she took a few steps back and sat down on the dirt road and wrapped her arms around her knees.
I used the knife to unscrew the license plate from my car. It wouldn't fit in the bag, so I slid it inside my belt under my jacket on my back. In my trunk was a small AAA emergency kit, from which I took a small package of first aid supplies and a handheld crank-powered LED flashlight. I appraised my car one last time, said a silent goodbye to my trusty ride of the past year, and started walking.
When I got my license shortly after my sixteenth birthday, my dad had bought me the car used from a friend of his' used car lot. It had a ton of miles on it and was in pretty cruddy shape, probably only cost five or six grand, but the Japanese safety record is what my dad was interested in for my first car. He gave it to me on condition that I not do anything to not deserve it, and said I should drive it until it falls apart or until I can buy myself another. Looks like both are the case now.
"Man, your car," Amy said as I pulled her to her feet. She nearly pulled me to the ground when my faulty muscles took the force, but I managed it.
"I can afford it," I said.
I hadn't told her about the guy in the trunk. He did pretty much verify that Mr. Pepper Spray wasn't a cop at all, and I liked the validation, but I didn't know how she'd handle the information of the sight. I squeezed the grip of the flashlight a few times, and a white light soon shot from the three bulbs at the end. I looked around for a bit, trying to find some landmark for baring, and started walking in the direction we'd come in the first place.
It took about an hour to get back to civilization, off the dirt road, past the lone house sunk behind trees, onto the main road, and to a gas station that was still open. My cellphone told me it was just after 11 when we'd hit the canopy of light and illuminated signs proclaiming the low prices of beer and cigarettes.
During the mostly-silent walk, I'd tried to imagine the information flow leading to me once somebody found the wreck. I took the license plate and all the papers that would lead to me, but there was still the VIN number. They could look that up and see that the car was last registered to Daniel Baker, deceased. It wouldn't take longer than a minute to connect that to me, since I'm at the same address. Casual glance might make it look like a genuine accident, that I'd just crashed into this police car that was split around a tree and blocking the road. Don't know how to explain my headlights being off, but teenage stupidity is better than vehicular homicide. Well, vehicular self-defense, but that would be hard to explain.
I decided I'd call the state police in the morning, that I'd figure out what I was going to say over the night and if I couldn't think of a way to not involve Amy, I'd let her know our version of the story before I contacted the police. I thought about calling a lawyer first, too. The guy who handled my dad's will seemed nice enough, but I had no idea if he was a regular lawyer or some specialized will-handling lawyer or what. Would I need a criminal defense attorney? Johnnie Cochran? What would I say? Do I tell him, or the police about the shooting range or buying a gun illegally? I didn't need to, since I never used the gun, but how would I explain being in Lorton? How would I explain any of it?
It just kept eating at me, between the throbs in my aching head and the shoots of pain from my feet up through my sore legs and seatbelt-bruised chest. Some guy killed a cop, took his clothes and car, then tried to -- what, kill me? If he wanted to kill me he wouldn't have used the pepper spray. Maybe he wanted to kidnap me, try to get my money. How would he know about the money? How would anybody, except the handful of bank tellers whose eyes always slowly widened as they eyed their computer screens after accessing my account. They'd go home from work that day and tell someone about the kid on a joint account with his mother that had over half a million dollars in it. They'd tell someone, and they'd tell someone. Then someone would hire some mercenary or something to follow and kidnap me? Does that make sense? If so, I would have to think about protection. If people know there's a lowly seventeen-year-old kid walking around the planet with a piece of plastic and a four-digit number between him and half a million bucks, I am in danger. My mom's name was on the account too, since I couldn't have my own bank account as a minor, so she could be in danger too. We'd have to move the money somewhere safer, maybe in bonds locked in a deposit box, or maybe in an account outside of the country. Swiss bank account. That sounds nice, but I'd probably have to wait a month until I turned 18 for that.
When we got to the gas station, I could finally stop thinking.
Since I was carrying a gun, and didn't feel like being party to any more adventure tonight, I handed the bag to Amy and asked if she could wait outside for a few minutes, then we could switch off. She nodded, took the bag, and leaned against the wall of the station's convenience store.
A heavyset guy only a few years older than me sat behind a thick bulletproof glass partition behind the counter. When I entered he looked at me, decided that I wasn't very interesting, and turned back to his portable television.
I grabbed a black cotton t-shirt with the gas station's logo printed across the front and "Driving Your Savings" printed between two cartoonish tires underneath it, then a box of extra-strength Motrin from one shelf, and some eye drops from the shelf across from it. From the refridgerated cabinet in the back I took two bottles of Gatorade and almost threw up when I saw the gallons of milk one door over. I paid for the items in cash, then went into the men's bathroom.
In the mirror was a person I didn't recognize. His hair was disheveled, his eyes were sullen and red. The skin around his eyes and nose was red and puffy. He looked like death incarnate. Not like me at all.
I took my coat off, then peeled the milk/sweat/tear-soaked shirt from my body and threw it in the trash can. I liked that shirt, but I figured I could afford to make my wardrobe disposable if I wanted to.
A dark and creepy bruise ran down my chest at an angle, where a seatbelt had gotten in a fistfight with inertia. It looked like I was wearing a messenger bag with a purpley-black strap. I opened the painkillers and took three with water from the sink, and then wrestled with the eyedrops for a while. I'm one of those people who doesn't like stuff in his eyes, so I tried to summon whatever stupidity allowed me to pour gallons of cow milk into my eyes so I could manage a few drops of saline.
I put the new shirt on, it was itchy and too big, then my jacket went over it. I tried to address my hair, then left to babysit the gun. I got to the door, stopped, turned around, went back to the bathroom and threw up.
When I was back outside and while Amy was inside, I looked through the phone book under a payphone for taxi services. There was one, which advertised itself as a 24 hour service with air-conditioned cars. Nobody uses taxis around here, I couldn't even remember seeing any taxis when I was in downtown DC. But I supposed there had to be at least one taxi service for any area, for situations just like this.
I smiled for a second, sure that this sort of thing happened all the time.
Screw this, I thought, I've had enough. I wanted to go find a hole and go to sleep. The night was thick around me, insects buzzed around my ears. Two cars had merged into one, and two men were dead inside. My shirt was soaked in milk, both 2% and whole, everything smelled like paprika, it hurt to blink, I had no idea where I was, someone had tried to shoot me, my car was destroyed, and I had a gun in my hand. There's got to be a point where your brain just wishes your body good luck and powers down, but I apparently wasn't there yet.
I closed the trunk, wiped my prints off the lid. All I cared about was getting home, everything else -- the bodies, the auto carnage -- was just peripheral to that. The plastic shopping bag was still in the back of my used-to-be-a-car, under my canvas jacket. I slipped the jacket on and dropped the USP into the bag after flicking the safety. The airbags in the front seat were still inflated, so I fished the pocket knife I'd bought from the bag and took it from the box and wrapping, flicked it open, and punched a hole in the passenger side airbag. I took all the documents from the glove box and stuffed them too in the bag. I was ignoring Amy's questions, so she took a few steps back and sat down on the dirt road and wrapped her arms around her knees.
I used the knife to unscrew the license plate from my car. It wouldn't fit in the bag, so I slid it inside my belt under my jacket on my back. In my trunk was a small AAA emergency kit, from which I took a small package of first aid supplies and a handheld crank-powered LED flashlight. I appraised my car one last time, said a silent goodbye to my trusty ride of the past year, and started walking.
When I got my license shortly after my sixteenth birthday, my dad had bought me the car used from a friend of his' used car lot. It had a ton of miles on it and was in pretty cruddy shape, probably only cost five or six grand, but the Japanese safety record is what my dad was interested in for my first car. He gave it to me on condition that I not do anything to not deserve it, and said I should drive it until it falls apart or until I can buy myself another. Looks like both are the case now.
"Man, your car," Amy said as I pulled her to her feet. She nearly pulled me to the ground when my faulty muscles took the force, but I managed it.
"I can afford it," I said.
I hadn't told her about the guy in the trunk. He did pretty much verify that Mr. Pepper Spray wasn't a cop at all, and I liked the validation, but I didn't know how she'd handle the information of the sight. I squeezed the grip of the flashlight a few times, and a white light soon shot from the three bulbs at the end. I looked around for a bit, trying to find some landmark for baring, and started walking in the direction we'd come in the first place.
It took about an hour to get back to civilization, off the dirt road, past the lone house sunk behind trees, onto the main road, and to a gas station that was still open. My cellphone told me it was just after 11 when we'd hit the canopy of light and illuminated signs proclaiming the low prices of beer and cigarettes.
During the mostly-silent walk, I'd tried to imagine the information flow leading to me once somebody found the wreck. I took the license plate and all the papers that would lead to me, but there was still the VIN number. They could look that up and see that the car was last registered to Daniel Baker, deceased. It wouldn't take longer than a minute to connect that to me, since I'm at the same address. Casual glance might make it look like a genuine accident, that I'd just crashed into this police car that was split around a tree and blocking the road. Don't know how to explain my headlights being off, but teenage stupidity is better than vehicular homicide. Well, vehicular self-defense, but that would be hard to explain.
I decided I'd call the state police in the morning, that I'd figure out what I was going to say over the night and if I couldn't think of a way to not involve Amy, I'd let her know our version of the story before I contacted the police. I thought about calling a lawyer first, too. The guy who handled my dad's will seemed nice enough, but I had no idea if he was a regular lawyer or some specialized will-handling lawyer or what. Would I need a criminal defense attorney? Johnnie Cochran? What would I say? Do I tell him, or the police about the shooting range or buying a gun illegally? I didn't need to, since I never used the gun, but how would I explain being in Lorton? How would I explain any of it?
It just kept eating at me, between the throbs in my aching head and the shoots of pain from my feet up through my sore legs and seatbelt-bruised chest. Some guy killed a cop, took his clothes and car, then tried to -- what, kill me? If he wanted to kill me he wouldn't have used the pepper spray. Maybe he wanted to kidnap me, try to get my money. How would he know about the money? How would anybody, except the handful of bank tellers whose eyes always slowly widened as they eyed their computer screens after accessing my account. They'd go home from work that day and tell someone about the kid on a joint account with his mother that had over half a million dollars in it. They'd tell someone, and they'd tell someone. Then someone would hire some mercenary or something to follow and kidnap me? Does that make sense? If so, I would have to think about protection. If people know there's a lowly seventeen-year-old kid walking around the planet with a piece of plastic and a four-digit number between him and half a million bucks, I am in danger. My mom's name was on the account too, since I couldn't have my own bank account as a minor, so she could be in danger too. We'd have to move the money somewhere safer, maybe in bonds locked in a deposit box, or maybe in an account outside of the country. Swiss bank account. That sounds nice, but I'd probably have to wait a month until I turned 18 for that.
When we got to the gas station, I could finally stop thinking.
Since I was carrying a gun, and didn't feel like being party to any more adventure tonight, I handed the bag to Amy and asked if she could wait outside for a few minutes, then we could switch off. She nodded, took the bag, and leaned against the wall of the station's convenience store.
A heavyset guy only a few years older than me sat behind a thick bulletproof glass partition behind the counter. When I entered he looked at me, decided that I wasn't very interesting, and turned back to his portable television.
I grabbed a black cotton t-shirt with the gas station's logo printed across the front and "Driving Your Savings" printed between two cartoonish tires underneath it, then a box of extra-strength Motrin from one shelf, and some eye drops from the shelf across from it. From the refridgerated cabinet in the back I took two bottles of Gatorade and almost threw up when I saw the gallons of milk one door over. I paid for the items in cash, then went into the men's bathroom.
In the mirror was a person I didn't recognize. His hair was disheveled, his eyes were sullen and red. The skin around his eyes and nose was red and puffy. He looked like death incarnate. Not like me at all.
I took my coat off, then peeled the milk/sweat/tear-soaked shirt from my body and threw it in the trash can. I liked that shirt, but I figured I could afford to make my wardrobe disposable if I wanted to.
A dark and creepy bruise ran down my chest at an angle, where a seatbelt had gotten in a fistfight with inertia. It looked like I was wearing a messenger bag with a purpley-black strap. I opened the painkillers and took three with water from the sink, and then wrestled with the eyedrops for a while. I'm one of those people who doesn't like stuff in his eyes, so I tried to summon whatever stupidity allowed me to pour gallons of cow milk into my eyes so I could manage a few drops of saline.
I put the new shirt on, it was itchy and too big, then my jacket went over it. I tried to address my hair, then left to babysit the gun. I got to the door, stopped, turned around, went back to the bathroom and threw up.
When I was back outside and while Amy was inside, I looked through the phone book under a payphone for taxi services. There was one, which advertised itself as a 24 hour service with air-conditioned cars. Nobody uses taxis around here, I couldn't even remember seeing any taxis when I was in downtown DC. But I supposed there had to be at least one taxi service for any area, for situations just like this.
I smiled for a second, sure that this sort of thing happened all the time.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Sound in the Night
Black mist seemed to swirl around my mind. Fragments of events shot through my vision like flashbulbs, coming in then fading just as fast. An explosion of gunpowder, a slide lurching backwards, a hot brass cartridge spinning from an ejection port, a hand on my wrist, my hand on someone else's wrist, a sharp spray of fluid right into my eyes, blurs of light and shapeless hues, a fountain of cold white liquid.
I felt the world falling back into place, could feel my back cold and wet. Sounds were coming back, I thought I heard my name.
I opened my eyes, they felt dry and cold. Light filtered in, I could see the ceiling and walls,then a big tan blob filled my vision. I rubbed at my eyes with my right hand, then opened them again. The edges of the blur started to fill in, colors separated into shades and shadows. I could see her face now. I was still on the floor, surrounded by milk, and Amy was leaning over me.
"You're pretty," I said. My voice was week and froggy.
Her mouth tightened to a line, "You're alive."
"It would seem."
I lay there for a second, trying to remember why I was on the floor of a grocery store. It came to me in a second, and I stood up in one motion. The teenage store clerk was still standing there, his lower lip handing down and out. He watched me in silence.
"We have to get out of here," I said to Amy as she stood up on her own. I looked around and started toward the entrance, Amy falling in behind me.
"Shouldn't we call the police?" she asked in step.
"No," I said without thinking. She looked at me and stopped walking in the middle of an aisle. Canned fruits were on my right, Pyrex dishes and cooking utensils on my right.
"Why not?" she asked, her arms folding.
I looked at a few cans of peaches, some in light syrup and some in their own juice. "Because," I said, looking at a can of diced peaches. In light syrup. "We don't know if that guy wasn't the police for sure. And even if he isn't, he's a lot closer to us than the real police."
"Then we could stay in here, he's not going to come after us inside the store, with people all around."
"He's dressed like a cop," I said, "he could come in here and do whatever he wanted and say we we're drug dealers."
She scrunched her eyebrows and leaned her head back, looking up at the drop-tile ceiling. A black plastic bubble sunk from the ceiling like a pimple a few feet away, concealing a surveillance camera.
"So what's the plan, then?" she asked finally.
"Oh, you know me," I said. "I work better without them."
The night air outside was colder than I remembered, the chill amplified by the milk soaking the front and back of my shirt which made the fabric cling to my skin. Although I'd just recently run through here, it was the first time I'd seen the parking lot so I was disoriented for a second. I got my bearings and saw my car, a depressingly mangled white Civic parked in the wrong direction in the street past the parking lot. The trunk was ripped and bent into an odd triangle rather than a rectangle, where it had struck the police car. Cars driving down the road were honking and pulling sharply into the left lane to avoid the car.
We waited until traffic was clear, then Amy ran around to the passenger side and opened the door. I saw a white streak in the corner of my eye, and looked up to see a police cruiser with a familiarly mangled hood around the front passenger side wheel. The car was driving on a cross-street and ripping through the intersection about two hundred yards from where I was standing. It drove on through the intersection and nearly out of sight, then I heard tires squeal and saw the car make a hard U-turn back toward my direction.
"Time to go!" I said, hopping into the driver's seat and pulling the door shut. Amy followed suit. The keys were still in the ignition, and the engine turned and started cheerfully. I pulled forward and turned the car around and drove forward as fast as I could convince my car to go. I drove past the freeway on-ramp, knowing a highway chase never ends on a happy note. I saw the police car turn hard onto this road behind me, heard the car's engine roar and sputter in attempt to catch up. The road kept winding past businesses and intersections until the trees were getting thicker and thicker and the side streets and businesses were farther between. My car was managing around 60 miles per hour. I could feel the damaged trunk affecting my wind sheer and the steering was put off-kilter from the wheels impacting the curb earlier. The police car was close enough that I could see that the front passenger side tire was shredded and was practically running on the rims, which explained why he was running so slowly.
Not too slowly, though. He was practically on top of me, his front bumper occasionally scraping against my malformed rear bumper. I didn't know where exactly I was trying to go, and I knew I wouldn't be able to outrun him. All I could hope was to escape him, which wasn't going to happen on this road. The next side street I saw I turned onto, nearly skidding into a tree in the process.
The pavement soon ran out as I passed a small house set back behind a few trees, and the dirt road began winding through the woods and over hills. The police car wasn't handling the dirt road as well, it kept cutting to the right as the shredded tire couldn't gain any traction in the dirt. My headlights were cutting yellow cones through the pitch black, casting thick shadows through the trees running tight on each side of the road. The police car was about ten feet behind now, illuminated only by my tail lights. Either he didn't have his headlights on, or they were damaged during the collision that had happened no more than 20 minutes ago but felt like a lifetime.
I could see in the distance that the road turned abruptly to the left, blazing a trail through the woods. I tried to calculate the distance to the turn, then switched off my headlights. Once again, I was driving blind. The moonlight barely filtered through the bare trees. Amy asked what I was doing. I didn't answer.
When I was as sure as I could be that I'd gone far enough, I slammed on my brakes and skidded forward about thirty feet then cut hard to the left, barely following the turn of the road. My brake lights probably blinded the man in the police cruiser, and with his steering banking to the right, he had no chance of making the turn. I drove on in the dark, completely unaware of how the road moved for a few seconds before I heard the incredibly loud crunch of the police car crashing head-on into a tree. Then there were no noises besides those of my car.
I stopped and pulled over to the side of the road, and got looked out my back window toward where the road turned and where the car must have hit. It was only about a thousand feet away, but all I could see were a few odd angles and reflections.
I quickly pulled the gun from the cardboard and foam box in the back seat and started feeding rounds into the magazine with nimble fingers. I slid the clip back into the pistol, chambered a round, and handed the gun to Amy. She looked back with deep and inquisitive eyes, illuminated by my car's dome light.
"Take this and get out of the car and hide back in the trees. You know how to use it if you need to," I said.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, trembling with the gun still balanced between her two open palms.
"I have to make sure he's..." I was lost under the weight of the situation for a moment, then said, "make sure he's not still a threat."
She looked at me like she knew what I meant, then nodded, her hair falling over her face. She opened her door and stepped out, I saw her step into the thick of the woods, her head still low.
I turned off my dome light and pulled back into drive with my headlights still off, then drove forward far enough to turn around with a sloppy three-point turn. I then drove forward slowly in the direction I'd came and crept toward to the road's turn.
I heard a distant pop, like a marble being dropped on a sheet of aluminum. Then another. The sounds were coming from ahead of me, where I'd guessed the crash must have been. I heard the sound again, and a small hole appeared in my windshield. Tiny fragments of glass sprinkled onto my dashboard. I heard another pop, then my windshield grew another hole, a few inches from the first. The glass splintered between the two holes, a spiderweb of hairline cracks. They looked like bullet holes.
With new resolve I turned forward, and tightened the chest strap of my seatbelt. I tried to slide my seat back but it was as far as it could go. Then I pressed on the gas, as hard as I could.
My car rumbled forward, rattling and deliberate. Another piece of glass fell from the windshield. I accelerated onward, toward the source of the noise, toward the turn in the road, toward the crashed police car.
I turned on my headlights and then fingered on the high-beams, slicing through the darkness in an instant and illuminating the wrecked police car ahead of me. The hood and engine were split down the middle and wrapped around a rather unaffected tree just off the road immediately ahead of where the road turned. The car's door was open, and I could see the deflated airbag dangling limply from the steering wheel. Standing between the partially-open door and the car's body was the man in the police outfit, his face bloody and broken, gingerly holding a gun with his left hand, supported by his right. A long silencer jutted from the barrel of the gun, and from it spat more rounds, drawing new perforations in my hood and windshield. The switch from low-beams to high-beams blinded and startled him, and he drew backwards toward the car's body as my car drove straight into his door, into him, and into the police car.
I'd loosened all of my muscles before the hit, and when my car struck the other head-on I felt as if I were being punched from all directions at once. Something tugged at my chest, then something sprung forward at my face from my steering wheel like a battering ram as I lurched forward and struck it. The noise never seemed to end, echoing around the inside of my skull. Something wet dripped from my nose and down my mouth, tasted like copper.
Then I felt hands across me, groping at my face and across my chest. Something slid around my waist and made a clicking noise, then what felt like snakes slithered across my lap and chest until they were gone. I weakly tried to swat at the hands pulling me to the left, then I heard my name again, her voice, then saw her face.
"You're still here?" I muttered.
"I'm everywhere," she said, just as mysteriously as the first time, then she pulled again and I slid out of the car onto my back, into the dirt.
When my muscles began responding to my requests, I stood up slowly and wiped the blood away from my face with my milky-- and now bloody shirt. My arms and legs felt like fire as they moved, and my head seemed to have angry little mine workers hammering away at the inside of my brain. I tried to push through the pain, and rotated my jaw a few times until I felt like I could speak. I told Amy to stand back for a minute, then took the gun from her hands.
I walked in a wide arc around the back of my car until my eyes adjusted to the dark. It looked like the police car had a Siamese twin jutting from the left side -- my car. The two heaps of metal seemed fused together, my car's hood had cut into the side of the police car like a finger through a loaf of bread, buckling the top and bottom together. I walked around to the passenger side of the police car and looked through the broken window. It was dark, and I could see the top of our jolly police man spread across the bench-style front seat, his arms splayed out wildly. At his waist, his body seemed to be lost among the wrecked metal. He was dead, I could be sure.
I went to walk back toward Amy, and when I was standing at the former police car's trunk I noticed the lid bobbing up and down. One of the impacts had unlocked the lid, and almost like a miracle the inner trunk light was on, spilling some light from around the edges of the lid.
I lifted the lid with my left hand, the gun still in my right. A man's body lay folded and mangled inside the trunk. He looked to be in his forties, with a large belly and thinning brown hair. He was wearing a white undershirt, no belt, and brown pants with a black stripe down the side of each leg. The same colors as the police uniform shirt the other man wore. His body was contorted violently, from the crash I assumed.
"Hello, officer," I said to the body.
I felt the world falling back into place, could feel my back cold and wet. Sounds were coming back, I thought I heard my name.
I opened my eyes, they felt dry and cold. Light filtered in, I could see the ceiling and walls,then a big tan blob filled my vision. I rubbed at my eyes with my right hand, then opened them again. The edges of the blur started to fill in, colors separated into shades and shadows. I could see her face now. I was still on the floor, surrounded by milk, and Amy was leaning over me.
"You're pretty," I said. My voice was week and froggy.
Her mouth tightened to a line, "You're alive."
"It would seem."
I lay there for a second, trying to remember why I was on the floor of a grocery store. It came to me in a second, and I stood up in one motion. The teenage store clerk was still standing there, his lower lip handing down and out. He watched me in silence.
"We have to get out of here," I said to Amy as she stood up on her own. I looked around and started toward the entrance, Amy falling in behind me.
"Shouldn't we call the police?" she asked in step.
"No," I said without thinking. She looked at me and stopped walking in the middle of an aisle. Canned fruits were on my right, Pyrex dishes and cooking utensils on my right.
"Why not?" she asked, her arms folding.
I looked at a few cans of peaches, some in light syrup and some in their own juice. "Because," I said, looking at a can of diced peaches. In light syrup. "We don't know if that guy wasn't the police for sure. And even if he isn't, he's a lot closer to us than the real police."
"Then we could stay in here, he's not going to come after us inside the store, with people all around."
"He's dressed like a cop," I said, "he could come in here and do whatever he wanted and say we we're drug dealers."
She scrunched her eyebrows and leaned her head back, looking up at the drop-tile ceiling. A black plastic bubble sunk from the ceiling like a pimple a few feet away, concealing a surveillance camera.
"So what's the plan, then?" she asked finally.
"Oh, you know me," I said. "I work better without them."
The night air outside was colder than I remembered, the chill amplified by the milk soaking the front and back of my shirt which made the fabric cling to my skin. Although I'd just recently run through here, it was the first time I'd seen the parking lot so I was disoriented for a second. I got my bearings and saw my car, a depressingly mangled white Civic parked in the wrong direction in the street past the parking lot. The trunk was ripped and bent into an odd triangle rather than a rectangle, where it had struck the police car. Cars driving down the road were honking and pulling sharply into the left lane to avoid the car.
We waited until traffic was clear, then Amy ran around to the passenger side and opened the door. I saw a white streak in the corner of my eye, and looked up to see a police cruiser with a familiarly mangled hood around the front passenger side wheel. The car was driving on a cross-street and ripping through the intersection about two hundred yards from where I was standing. It drove on through the intersection and nearly out of sight, then I heard tires squeal and saw the car make a hard U-turn back toward my direction.
"Time to go!" I said, hopping into the driver's seat and pulling the door shut. Amy followed suit. The keys were still in the ignition, and the engine turned and started cheerfully. I pulled forward and turned the car around and drove forward as fast as I could convince my car to go. I drove past the freeway on-ramp, knowing a highway chase never ends on a happy note. I saw the police car turn hard onto this road behind me, heard the car's engine roar and sputter in attempt to catch up. The road kept winding past businesses and intersections until the trees were getting thicker and thicker and the side streets and businesses were farther between. My car was managing around 60 miles per hour. I could feel the damaged trunk affecting my wind sheer and the steering was put off-kilter from the wheels impacting the curb earlier. The police car was close enough that I could see that the front passenger side tire was shredded and was practically running on the rims, which explained why he was running so slowly.
Not too slowly, though. He was practically on top of me, his front bumper occasionally scraping against my malformed rear bumper. I didn't know where exactly I was trying to go, and I knew I wouldn't be able to outrun him. All I could hope was to escape him, which wasn't going to happen on this road. The next side street I saw I turned onto, nearly skidding into a tree in the process.
The pavement soon ran out as I passed a small house set back behind a few trees, and the dirt road began winding through the woods and over hills. The police car wasn't handling the dirt road as well, it kept cutting to the right as the shredded tire couldn't gain any traction in the dirt. My headlights were cutting yellow cones through the pitch black, casting thick shadows through the trees running tight on each side of the road. The police car was about ten feet behind now, illuminated only by my tail lights. Either he didn't have his headlights on, or they were damaged during the collision that had happened no more than 20 minutes ago but felt like a lifetime.
I could see in the distance that the road turned abruptly to the left, blazing a trail through the woods. I tried to calculate the distance to the turn, then switched off my headlights. Once again, I was driving blind. The moonlight barely filtered through the bare trees. Amy asked what I was doing. I didn't answer.
When I was as sure as I could be that I'd gone far enough, I slammed on my brakes and skidded forward about thirty feet then cut hard to the left, barely following the turn of the road. My brake lights probably blinded the man in the police cruiser, and with his steering banking to the right, he had no chance of making the turn. I drove on in the dark, completely unaware of how the road moved for a few seconds before I heard the incredibly loud crunch of the police car crashing head-on into a tree. Then there were no noises besides those of my car.
I stopped and pulled over to the side of the road, and got looked out my back window toward where the road turned and where the car must have hit. It was only about a thousand feet away, but all I could see were a few odd angles and reflections.
I quickly pulled the gun from the cardboard and foam box in the back seat and started feeding rounds into the magazine with nimble fingers. I slid the clip back into the pistol, chambered a round, and handed the gun to Amy. She looked back with deep and inquisitive eyes, illuminated by my car's dome light.
"Take this and get out of the car and hide back in the trees. You know how to use it if you need to," I said.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, trembling with the gun still balanced between her two open palms.
"I have to make sure he's..." I was lost under the weight of the situation for a moment, then said, "make sure he's not still a threat."
She looked at me like she knew what I meant, then nodded, her hair falling over her face. She opened her door and stepped out, I saw her step into the thick of the woods, her head still low.
I turned off my dome light and pulled back into drive with my headlights still off, then drove forward far enough to turn around with a sloppy three-point turn. I then drove forward slowly in the direction I'd came and crept toward to the road's turn.
I heard a distant pop, like a marble being dropped on a sheet of aluminum. Then another. The sounds were coming from ahead of me, where I'd guessed the crash must have been. I heard the sound again, and a small hole appeared in my windshield. Tiny fragments of glass sprinkled onto my dashboard. I heard another pop, then my windshield grew another hole, a few inches from the first. The glass splintered between the two holes, a spiderweb of hairline cracks. They looked like bullet holes.
With new resolve I turned forward, and tightened the chest strap of my seatbelt. I tried to slide my seat back but it was as far as it could go. Then I pressed on the gas, as hard as I could.
My car rumbled forward, rattling and deliberate. Another piece of glass fell from the windshield. I accelerated onward, toward the source of the noise, toward the turn in the road, toward the crashed police car.
I turned on my headlights and then fingered on the high-beams, slicing through the darkness in an instant and illuminating the wrecked police car ahead of me. The hood and engine were split down the middle and wrapped around a rather unaffected tree just off the road immediately ahead of where the road turned. The car's door was open, and I could see the deflated airbag dangling limply from the steering wheel. Standing between the partially-open door and the car's body was the man in the police outfit, his face bloody and broken, gingerly holding a gun with his left hand, supported by his right. A long silencer jutted from the barrel of the gun, and from it spat more rounds, drawing new perforations in my hood and windshield. The switch from low-beams to high-beams blinded and startled him, and he drew backwards toward the car's body as my car drove straight into his door, into him, and into the police car.
I'd loosened all of my muscles before the hit, and when my car struck the other head-on I felt as if I were being punched from all directions at once. Something tugged at my chest, then something sprung forward at my face from my steering wheel like a battering ram as I lurched forward and struck it. The noise never seemed to end, echoing around the inside of my skull. Something wet dripped from my nose and down my mouth, tasted like copper.
Then I felt hands across me, groping at my face and across my chest. Something slid around my waist and made a clicking noise, then what felt like snakes slithered across my lap and chest until they were gone. I weakly tried to swat at the hands pulling me to the left, then I heard my name again, her voice, then saw her face.
"You're still here?" I muttered.
"I'm everywhere," she said, just as mysteriously as the first time, then she pulled again and I slid out of the car onto my back, into the dirt.
When my muscles began responding to my requests, I stood up slowly and wiped the blood away from my face with my milky-- and now bloody shirt. My arms and legs felt like fire as they moved, and my head seemed to have angry little mine workers hammering away at the inside of my brain. I tried to push through the pain, and rotated my jaw a few times until I felt like I could speak. I told Amy to stand back for a minute, then took the gun from her hands.
I walked in a wide arc around the back of my car until my eyes adjusted to the dark. It looked like the police car had a Siamese twin jutting from the left side -- my car. The two heaps of metal seemed fused together, my car's hood had cut into the side of the police car like a finger through a loaf of bread, buckling the top and bottom together. I walked around to the passenger side of the police car and looked through the broken window. It was dark, and I could see the top of our jolly police man spread across the bench-style front seat, his arms splayed out wildly. At his waist, his body seemed to be lost among the wrecked metal. He was dead, I could be sure.
I went to walk back toward Amy, and when I was standing at the former police car's trunk I noticed the lid bobbing up and down. One of the impacts had unlocked the lid, and almost like a miracle the inner trunk light was on, spilling some light from around the edges of the lid.
I lifted the lid with my left hand, the gun still in my right. A man's body lay folded and mangled inside the trunk. He looked to be in his forties, with a large belly and thinning brown hair. He was wearing a white undershirt, no belt, and brown pants with a black stripe down the side of each leg. The same colors as the police uniform shirt the other man wore. His body was contorted violently, from the crash I assumed.
"Hello, officer," I said to the body.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Used Against You
Oldest trick in the book.
You hold something out for someone to reach for, and when they do, you grab their wrist and slip handcuffs on. Or rob them. Or kill them. Everybody knows it. It's what he tried to do, and I saw it coming.
I rolled down my window, he held mine and Amy's drivers licenses up a few inches outside the window without saying a word. I couldn't be completely sure this wasn't a cop, despite the oldest trick in the book, so I was stuck in a stalemate. I just looked at the two licenses in his left hand, then up at his shadowy face. I kept my hands inside the car.
"So am I a kidnapper or no?" I asked, unmoving.
He grinned, and moved his hand closer into the car. It felt a bit safer, so I reached my right hand up and pinched them from his hand. Like a spring his hand twirled around and grabbed mine, at the wrist. Oldest trick in the book, alright.
This was it. He had my right hand in a death grip and as my left arm shot forward I kept my eyes on his right arm. Amy gasped. Was she reacting slowly or am I just thinking fast? Watch his hand, watch his hand.
His right hand drew quickly toward his belt, where his gun perched. Time seemed to slow to an even slower crawl as I eyeballed that hand floating toward the gun -- no, he didn't grab the gun, he grabbed the mace canister. Or was it pepper spray? I hoped it was pepper spray, because by the time I realized what he was grabbing and yelled "Up!" to Amy as loud as possible without seeming ridiculous, I'd already taken a blast of it to the eyes.
It was definitely pepper spray, for although the entire northern territory of my body was now in hot searing pain I could be certain that my eyes weren't boiling down my face.
Regardless, I was gripped in a pain like flaming gasoline was being poured into my eyes and my face was entirely out of commission. My left hand was working fine, though, so I grabbed the man's right arm and lunged it forward into the frame of my door and heard the bottle rattle around my windshield and dash as I felt a radius or ulna snap. The man screamed, I was still blind.
Still pulling his right arm through my open window, I found the door handle with my free hand and released it, then with my knee pushed the door open and into the man's body. I yanked back on his arm again, which slammed his body into the car and what sounded like his jaw crashed into the roof. I felt his body go limp and let his arm pull away. I was still in the dark, my eyes had daggers in them and red flashes of light were piercing the black of my vision. My nose burned too and my throat felt like it was closing.
I started my engine and pulled the shifter into reverse from memory, and called to Amy.
"You can look," I said as best I could.
"I already am!" she screamed. "Was that mace?"
"Pepper spray," I said. "Can you see the guy?"
I felt her lean across me. "He's on the ground but he looks mostly ok."
Wouldn't be time to change drivers then. "Alright," I said. "You'll have to direct me."
"What?" she asked, but I'd already pressed down on the gas.
The police car was about 10 or 12 feet behind me, I knew, parked sideways. My car took off in reverse, and I tried my best to turn the steering wheel so I'd hit his front axle. I couldn't even try to open my eyes, they weren't responding. The pain was only getting worse. I tried to say "Hold on" but got stuck on a cough. The impact was harder than I expected, my car's trunk collided with the front end of the police car (if it was a police car) and kept moving slowly as it pushed the other car away. Metal and fiberglass scraped against eachother violently, but soon enough I was clear and somewhere on the street. I shifted to drive and gingerly moved forward.
"Is he still there?" I asked hoarsely.
"He's getting up!" Amy said. "Well, slowly."
I swore. This situation refused to get any easier. I felt my face for a second, my skin was dry save for the tears dripping from my eyes. My eyelids were tender to the touch, and everything still hurt. My nose and throat felt as if I'd just snorted a line of cayenne pepper. I needed some water. No, water is bad.
"Direct me so I don't hit anything," I managed to say as I leaned on the gas.
I was soon at the end of the small neighborhood road and turned sharply onto the main road. Traffic was light as I remembered it, but I was literally flying blind.
"Car in this lane."
"Move left."
"Slow down."
"Where are we going?"
My mind was racing, my eyes and face were killing. I kept thinking of the words "capsaicin" and "emulsify" but I didn't know why. I didn't even know what capsaicin meant and all I knew about emulsifying is that it's what soap does. Why was I thinking about soap? God it hurt. Capsaicin emulsify, capsaicin emulsify, what did it mean? Emulsify, soap. What does soap do? It takes away dirt. They used to make soap out of fat. Fat. Emulsify. Capsaicin. I must have been going insane. I'm driving a car at night down a road and I cant see because a fake cop sprayed me with mace and I didn't know why. No, not mace. Pepper spray. Pepper spray -- peppers, that's what capsaicin is, it's the stuff that makes peppers hot!
"Where's your milk?" I asked suddenly.
"What?" Amy asked, between directions.
"The milk you got at Wendy's? I need it." I held my left hand out. In a few seconds there was a cold, plastic bottle in it.
"What for?" Amy asked, mid-panic.
"Fat emulsifies capsaicin," I said. Still driving, I ripped the cap from the bottle, forced my eyes to open, and dumped the cold liquid straight into my eyes. I screamed and jerked the car to the right. It felt like going from sunburn to frostbite, or like icicles digging into my eyes now. The milk ran out faster than I expected, it was after-all just a single serving bottle.
I shook my head and wiped at my eyes with my wrist and blinked a few times. The pain was still there, but I could at least open my eyes. My vision was blurry, shapeless forms and blobs of light all around me. Better than nothing.
"Where did you learn that?" Amy asked, still mid-panic.
"I don't know," I said, "but I need more. Isn't there a grocery store on this road?"
"Yeah, right there," Amy said. That didn't help much.
"Where?" I asked.
"Right--- HERE!" she said as I felt the steering wheel cut to the right without me. The car turned sharply right and slid to the left, I pumped the brakes but the car went into a full spin then stopped suddenly when the wheels hit a curb.
"Ok," Amy said, "I wont do that anymore."
We got out of the car and she said we were on the street in front of the large grocery store I remembered from the drive up here. She led me by the arm through the parking lot and through the automatic doors. All a fuzzy blur to me.
Amy grabbed a teenage employee and asked where the dairy was. I must have been a sight. He led us both to the back and I felt the air get colder and could smell the butter, eggs, plastic, and milk.
"Here's the milk case," Amy said to me.
"Where's the whole milk?" I asked. More fat meant more emulsification, I figured.
The young clerk said "here" and I felt a gust of chilled air as one of the milk case doors opened. I lunged forward between him and Amy and grabbed two one-gallon jugs by the handles and pulled them out. I unwound the safety tabs and peeled the caps off with my teeth, stood back, forced my eyes open as wide as I could, and up-ended the two jugs right above my eyes.
Two gallons of ice-cold milk poured out into my eyes, down my cheeks, over my shirt, and onto the floor. The pain from the pepper spray was dulled by the pain from freezing liquid being poured onto my eyeballs. I'm sure I screamed. I fell forward onto my knees, kept pouring. Fell backwards onto my back, kept pouring. The jugs emptied and I tossed them aside as I lay in a pool of milk. My eyes felt wet and raw.
"Ugh," I said weakly. "I should have found some wood."
"What?" the teenage employee asked.
"Nothing," Amy and I said in unison.
Everything went black again, as I felt my body and mind slip away into sleep.
You hold something out for someone to reach for, and when they do, you grab their wrist and slip handcuffs on. Or rob them. Or kill them. Everybody knows it. It's what he tried to do, and I saw it coming.
I rolled down my window, he held mine and Amy's drivers licenses up a few inches outside the window without saying a word. I couldn't be completely sure this wasn't a cop, despite the oldest trick in the book, so I was stuck in a stalemate. I just looked at the two licenses in his left hand, then up at his shadowy face. I kept my hands inside the car.
"So am I a kidnapper or no?" I asked, unmoving.
He grinned, and moved his hand closer into the car. It felt a bit safer, so I reached my right hand up and pinched them from his hand. Like a spring his hand twirled around and grabbed mine, at the wrist. Oldest trick in the book, alright.
This was it. He had my right hand in a death grip and as my left arm shot forward I kept my eyes on his right arm. Amy gasped. Was she reacting slowly or am I just thinking fast? Watch his hand, watch his hand.
His right hand drew quickly toward his belt, where his gun perched. Time seemed to slow to an even slower crawl as I eyeballed that hand floating toward the gun -- no, he didn't grab the gun, he grabbed the mace canister. Or was it pepper spray? I hoped it was pepper spray, because by the time I realized what he was grabbing and yelled "Up!" to Amy as loud as possible without seeming ridiculous, I'd already taken a blast of it to the eyes.
It was definitely pepper spray, for although the entire northern territory of my body was now in hot searing pain I could be certain that my eyes weren't boiling down my face.
Regardless, I was gripped in a pain like flaming gasoline was being poured into my eyes and my face was entirely out of commission. My left hand was working fine, though, so I grabbed the man's right arm and lunged it forward into the frame of my door and heard the bottle rattle around my windshield and dash as I felt a radius or ulna snap. The man screamed, I was still blind.
Still pulling his right arm through my open window, I found the door handle with my free hand and released it, then with my knee pushed the door open and into the man's body. I yanked back on his arm again, which slammed his body into the car and what sounded like his jaw crashed into the roof. I felt his body go limp and let his arm pull away. I was still in the dark, my eyes had daggers in them and red flashes of light were piercing the black of my vision. My nose burned too and my throat felt like it was closing.
I started my engine and pulled the shifter into reverse from memory, and called to Amy.
"You can look," I said as best I could.
"I already am!" she screamed. "Was that mace?"
"Pepper spray," I said. "Can you see the guy?"
I felt her lean across me. "He's on the ground but he looks mostly ok."
Wouldn't be time to change drivers then. "Alright," I said. "You'll have to direct me."
"What?" she asked, but I'd already pressed down on the gas.
The police car was about 10 or 12 feet behind me, I knew, parked sideways. My car took off in reverse, and I tried my best to turn the steering wheel so I'd hit his front axle. I couldn't even try to open my eyes, they weren't responding. The pain was only getting worse. I tried to say "Hold on" but got stuck on a cough. The impact was harder than I expected, my car's trunk collided with the front end of the police car (if it was a police car) and kept moving slowly as it pushed the other car away. Metal and fiberglass scraped against eachother violently, but soon enough I was clear and somewhere on the street. I shifted to drive and gingerly moved forward.
"Is he still there?" I asked hoarsely.
"He's getting up!" Amy said. "Well, slowly."
I swore. This situation refused to get any easier. I felt my face for a second, my skin was dry save for the tears dripping from my eyes. My eyelids were tender to the touch, and everything still hurt. My nose and throat felt as if I'd just snorted a line of cayenne pepper. I needed some water. No, water is bad.
"Direct me so I don't hit anything," I managed to say as I leaned on the gas.
I was soon at the end of the small neighborhood road and turned sharply onto the main road. Traffic was light as I remembered it, but I was literally flying blind.
"Car in this lane."
"Move left."
"Slow down."
"Where are we going?"
My mind was racing, my eyes and face were killing. I kept thinking of the words "capsaicin" and "emulsify" but I didn't know why. I didn't even know what capsaicin meant and all I knew about emulsifying is that it's what soap does. Why was I thinking about soap? God it hurt. Capsaicin emulsify, capsaicin emulsify, what did it mean? Emulsify, soap. What does soap do? It takes away dirt. They used to make soap out of fat. Fat. Emulsify. Capsaicin. I must have been going insane. I'm driving a car at night down a road and I cant see because a fake cop sprayed me with mace and I didn't know why. No, not mace. Pepper spray. Pepper spray -- peppers, that's what capsaicin is, it's the stuff that makes peppers hot!
"Where's your milk?" I asked suddenly.
"What?" Amy asked, between directions.
"The milk you got at Wendy's? I need it." I held my left hand out. In a few seconds there was a cold, plastic bottle in it.
"What for?" Amy asked, mid-panic.
"Fat emulsifies capsaicin," I said. Still driving, I ripped the cap from the bottle, forced my eyes to open, and dumped the cold liquid straight into my eyes. I screamed and jerked the car to the right. It felt like going from sunburn to frostbite, or like icicles digging into my eyes now. The milk ran out faster than I expected, it was after-all just a single serving bottle.
I shook my head and wiped at my eyes with my wrist and blinked a few times. The pain was still there, but I could at least open my eyes. My vision was blurry, shapeless forms and blobs of light all around me. Better than nothing.
"Where did you learn that?" Amy asked, still mid-panic.
"I don't know," I said, "but I need more. Isn't there a grocery store on this road?"
"Yeah, right there," Amy said. That didn't help much.
"Where?" I asked.
"Right--- HERE!" she said as I felt the steering wheel cut to the right without me. The car turned sharply right and slid to the left, I pumped the brakes but the car went into a full spin then stopped suddenly when the wheels hit a curb.
"Ok," Amy said, "I wont do that anymore."
We got out of the car and she said we were on the street in front of the large grocery store I remembered from the drive up here. She led me by the arm through the parking lot and through the automatic doors. All a fuzzy blur to me.
Amy grabbed a teenage employee and asked where the dairy was. I must have been a sight. He led us both to the back and I felt the air get colder and could smell the butter, eggs, plastic, and milk.
"Here's the milk case," Amy said to me.
"Where's the whole milk?" I asked. More fat meant more emulsification, I figured.
The young clerk said "here" and I felt a gust of chilled air as one of the milk case doors opened. I lunged forward between him and Amy and grabbed two one-gallon jugs by the handles and pulled them out. I unwound the safety tabs and peeled the caps off with my teeth, stood back, forced my eyes open as wide as I could, and up-ended the two jugs right above my eyes.
Two gallons of ice-cold milk poured out into my eyes, down my cheeks, over my shirt, and onto the floor. The pain from the pepper spray was dulled by the pain from freezing liquid being poured onto my eyeballs. I'm sure I screamed. I fell forward onto my knees, kept pouring. Fell backwards onto my back, kept pouring. The jugs emptied and I tossed them aside as I lay in a pool of milk. My eyes felt wet and raw.
"Ugh," I said weakly. "I should have found some wood."
"What?" the teenage employee asked.
"Nothing," Amy and I said in unison.
Everything went black again, as I felt my body and mind slip away into sleep.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
To Remain Silent
I told Amy to slowly move my unused jacket to cover up the bag in the back seat, she did. It was completely dark out now, the only light available was from my headlights bouncing off the garage door of the house I had pulled up to, and the spinning blue and red cascade from the police car parked on the street behind me. It was enough to let me see that the police officer was walking right up to my window.
He looked young, no older than 30. He had long brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. His shirt hung loose around his neck and bagged a bit at the waist.
"Don't say anything unless he asks you a question," I said to Amy through my teeth, "Don't look nervous, we haven't done anything wrong."
I put my window down, looked the officer in the face. Drivers license and state registration in-hand.
He looked at me for a short moment, then at Amy for a long moment. "License and registration please, sir?" he said, still looking at Amy. I could feel her getting uncomfortable.
I handed him my information, which finally dragged his attention from the sixteen year old girl in the car. He looked at my license, ignoring the registration. "Mr. Baker," his voice sounded older than he looked; maybe he smoked, "do you know why I pulled you over?"
You're not supposed to volunteer anything when they ask that. If you say, "Speeding, probably," you just admitted to speeding and he doesn't need radar information or witness account. You just did his job for him.
"Could you tell me?" I asked the officer. He stood up straight, I had to lean out of my window to see his face.
"Changed lanes without signaling," he said. I couldn't remember doing that, but then I couldn't remember anything before.
The officer leaned back in, looked at Amy and said, "Do you have any ID, ma'am?"
She looked at me, I looked at him. "Is there a problem?" I asked.
He looked annoyed, and drew in a breath. "A young lady was kidnapped around this area recently, fitting her description. Just need to check." I thought for a second, then nodded at Amy. She pulled her license from her purse and handed it over.
The cop looked at it, said he'd be right back and took our licenses back to his car. I rolled my window back up to keep the cold out.
"That's weird," Amy said, "he didn't say another word about your lane changing. Maybe he thinks he's wrapped up a big kidnapping case."
I didn't reply, I was watching the officer walk away in my side mirror. His shirt was cinched in the back, bunched together into a knot and tucked into his pants. What you do when you've got a shirt that's way too big for you. Like, because it's not your shirt.
"I don't think that's a cop," I said, still looking on the mirror. I couldn't see him once he got into the car, it was too dark.
"What do you mean you don't think it's a cop? Looks very coppish to me," Amy asked.
I didn't say anything, I was too busy thinking. When a cop takes your license back to his car he's swiping your license through his in-car computer to check for warrants and stuff, probably radios to dispatch an update, and writes out a ticket if you're getting one. What he was doing, I couldn't see. My heart started beating faster.
Strangely, I kept picturing myself throwing my new knife into his throat. Since I'd bought that knife I kept having weird mental flashes of doing all sorts of unseemly things with it. I must have been giddy about owning weapons now, after a lifetime of playing make-believe.
Regardless, I can't throw a knife into a cop unless I'm sure he isn't. Besides all the other reasons not to, I mean.
He stayed back in his car for quite a long time, I was really wishing I could see what he was doing. If he was using his computer or writing a ticket he'd have a light on, I realized. What's he doing in the dark?
I turned around and looked at his car out through my rear window, then pressed down on my brake pedal. My brake lights kicked on, casting a red glow behind my car and battled the rotating lights from the police car. It was enough to cast some light into the car's front seat. I could see the guy sitting in the driver's seat, the light startled him and he looked toward my car. In my brief glimpse of him before I let off the brake, I saw him with one hand up to his face and another holding some black object in front of him. He was on a cell phone, it looked like, and holding... I couldn't be sure. Looked like a metal tube, like a short telescope or a gun silencer.
"It's not a cop," I said, finally convinced.
Yellow light soon filled the police car as the driver's door opened yet again and the man stepped out. He started slowly walking toward my car with what looked like our drivers licenses in his left hand and his right hand down at his side. My reflected headlights lit him well enough that I could see his belt holster holding a standard police issue, probably aGlock , no silencer sticking out. Next to that was a large black aerosol-looking can, definitely mace or pepper spray. Handcuffs and beating stick were on the other side. He was walking a bit slowly, deliberately. Time seemed to be slowing down to a crawl, like I was back in that hallway, like a fist was rocketing toward my face with the quickness of a half-inflated zeppelin.
I couldn't feel my heart beating, but thought I could hear something ringing in my ears. Might have been the sound of my brain churning faster than usual. I looked at Amy and said calmly, "You know the recline handle on the side of your seat?"
She nodded, a bit slowly, deliberately. Her eyes seemed to be screaming fear, but I couldn't listen to them now.
"Put your hand on it right now," I said.
The man was up to the rear of my car.
Amy's hand glided across her body like a skater on fresh ice, and disappeared between her seat and the door, she kept looking at me.
"If at any time after I finish this sentence I say the word 'down', pull that lever and lean all the way back, then cover your ears with your hands. If I say 'up', don't pull the handle but turn away toward the window and close your eyes, hold your breath, and cover your mouth and nose with your hands. Do you understand?" It was me talking, but the words were coming out like the lyrics to a song I already knew, I wasn't thinking about them. On autopilot.
The man was up to my window, now. Tapping on the glass.
I was still looking at Amy. She nodded slowly.
"What are you going to do?" she asked in a whisper.
I didn't say anything. I didn't have an answer.
He looked young, no older than 30. He had long brown hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. His shirt hung loose around his neck and bagged a bit at the waist.
"Don't say anything unless he asks you a question," I said to Amy through my teeth, "Don't look nervous, we haven't done anything wrong."
I put my window down, looked the officer in the face. Drivers license and state registration in-hand.
He looked at me for a short moment, then at Amy for a long moment. "License and registration please, sir?" he said, still looking at Amy. I could feel her getting uncomfortable.
I handed him my information, which finally dragged his attention from the sixteen year old girl in the car. He looked at my license, ignoring the registration. "Mr. Baker," his voice sounded older than he looked; maybe he smoked, "do you know why I pulled you over?"
You're not supposed to volunteer anything when they ask that. If you say, "Speeding, probably," you just admitted to speeding and he doesn't need radar information or witness account. You just did his job for him.
"Could you tell me?" I asked the officer. He stood up straight, I had to lean out of my window to see his face.
"Changed lanes without signaling," he said. I couldn't remember doing that, but then I couldn't remember anything before.
The officer leaned back in, looked at Amy and said, "Do you have any ID, ma'am?"
She looked at me, I looked at him. "Is there a problem?" I asked.
He looked annoyed, and drew in a breath. "A young lady was kidnapped around this area recently, fitting her description. Just need to check." I thought for a second, then nodded at Amy. She pulled her license from her purse and handed it over.
The cop looked at it, said he'd be right back and took our licenses back to his car. I rolled my window back up to keep the cold out.
"That's weird," Amy said, "he didn't say another word about your lane changing. Maybe he thinks he's wrapped up a big kidnapping case."
I didn't reply, I was watching the officer walk away in my side mirror. His shirt was cinched in the back, bunched together into a knot and tucked into his pants. What you do when you've got a shirt that's way too big for you. Like, because it's not your shirt.
"I don't think that's a cop," I said, still looking on the mirror. I couldn't see him once he got into the car, it was too dark.
"What do you mean you don't think it's a cop? Looks very coppish to me," Amy asked.
I didn't say anything, I was too busy thinking. When a cop takes your license back to his car he's swiping your license through his in-car computer to check for warrants and stuff, probably radios to dispatch an update, and writes out a ticket if you're getting one. What he was doing, I couldn't see. My heart started beating faster.
Strangely, I kept picturing myself throwing my new knife into his throat. Since I'd bought that knife I kept having weird mental flashes of doing all sorts of unseemly things with it. I must have been giddy about owning weapons now, after a lifetime of playing make-believe.
Regardless, I can't throw a knife into a cop unless I'm sure he isn't. Besides all the other reasons not to, I mean.
He stayed back in his car for quite a long time, I was really wishing I could see what he was doing. If he was using his computer or writing a ticket he'd have a light on, I realized. What's he doing in the dark?
I turned around and looked at his car out through my rear window, then pressed down on my brake pedal. My brake lights kicked on, casting a red glow behind my car and battled the rotating lights from the police car. It was enough to cast some light into the car's front seat. I could see the guy sitting in the driver's seat, the light startled him and he looked toward my car. In my brief glimpse of him before I let off the brake, I saw him with one hand up to his face and another holding some black object in front of him. He was on a cell phone, it looked like, and holding... I couldn't be sure. Looked like a metal tube, like a short telescope or a gun silencer.
"It's not a cop," I said, finally convinced.
Yellow light soon filled the police car as the driver's door opened yet again and the man stepped out. He started slowly walking toward my car with what looked like our drivers licenses in his left hand and his right hand down at his side. My reflected headlights lit him well enough that I could see his belt holster holding a standard police issue, probably aGlock , no silencer sticking out. Next to that was a large black aerosol-looking can, definitely mace or pepper spray. Handcuffs and beating stick were on the other side. He was walking a bit slowly, deliberately. Time seemed to be slowing down to a crawl, like I was back in that hallway, like a fist was rocketing toward my face with the quickness of a half-inflated zeppelin.
I couldn't feel my heart beating, but thought I could hear something ringing in my ears. Might have been the sound of my brain churning faster than usual. I looked at Amy and said calmly, "You know the recline handle on the side of your seat?"
She nodded, a bit slowly, deliberately. Her eyes seemed to be screaming fear, but I couldn't listen to them now.
"Put your hand on it right now," I said.
The man was up to the rear of my car.
Amy's hand glided across her body like a skater on fresh ice, and disappeared between her seat and the door, she kept looking at me.
"If at any time after I finish this sentence I say the word 'down', pull that lever and lean all the way back, then cover your ears with your hands. If I say 'up', don't pull the handle but turn away toward the window and close your eyes, hold your breath, and cover your mouth and nose with your hands. Do you understand?" It was me talking, but the words were coming out like the lyrics to a song I already knew, I wasn't thinking about them. On autopilot.
The man was up to my window, now. Tapping on the glass.
I was still looking at Amy. She nodded slowly.
"What are you going to do?" she asked in a whisper.
I didn't say anything. I didn't have an answer.
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