Mad Dogs (29 page)

“Or be ‘over' myself, dead here on this road.” She didn't blink.

“We can shoot you any time. Choose something better, smarter, more true. Be our witness. Be who you are. Be a spy. Find out what you don't know.”

“Then?”

“When it's then, do what you do. Report. Finish satisfied.”

“If I help you, odds are I won't be able to walk away.”

“Nobody walks away,” I told her. “So what are you going to do?”

Zane said: “He's right. Do it. If nothing else, you need to be here to make it the best it can be. Because we'll keep going, and you'll end up no better than us.”

“You'd… trust me to… do
whatever
with you?”

“Hell no,” I said. “We trust you to be the spy you are.”

Cari said: “What if—”

“What if what if what if
what if
!” I yelled. “Fucking
find out
. Or walk.”

My gun flicked towards the road waiting behind her back.

“Shit,” she said.

Voice booming behind us!
Hailey, calling out: “Sorry I'm late.”

We all turned to see her standing at the edge of the forest and road, arms hanging down, a dazed look on her sweat-slick, thorn-scratched ebony face.

Hailey seemed to float like the fog onto the gravel road, glide towards us as inexorably as the dawn, stepping onto the gravel road, coming closer, closer.

“Sorry Vic,” she said. “Sorry Zane.”

“'S OK,” I said as she stepped past me and walked straight to Cari—slammed the bore of her automatic against the white woman's forehead.

Freeze, all I could do, all we all did was freeze.

“Sorry,” said Hailey and all Cari could see was the whites of her eyes. “Beat me once:
sorry
, shit happens. Beat me twice: makes me a
sorry
loser.”

Hailey thumbed the pistol's hammer to full cocked with a
snick!

Smiled as Cari trembled, the gun pressed against her forehead.

“Third time's the charm,” said Hailey as her gun's black barrel bored a perfect third eye on Cari's skull. “Three strikes and I'm out—right? O—U—T out.”

No quick karate move, no simple twist of fate would snap Cari to safety before Hailey's finger could squeeze the trigger/slam a bullet through Cari's perfect brain.

“So the
sane
move,” said Hailey, “the
smart
move, the
good
move, the
rational
move, the
fucking spy move
… is one sweet squeeze of my finger. Pre-emptive strike. Problem… solved. Every future ‘losing' battle with you would be averted. I'm dying anyway, but best to die free and making everything worth it.”

Can't. Move. Can't. Talk. Can't. Think.

“DAAA!!!”
The gun barrel thrust so hard into Cari's skull that she staggered as Hailey yelled: “
But I'm not smart rational sane!”

And she whirled to her right—BAM! blasted first one, then all ten rounds in her gun BAM! BAM! BAM! one right after another, slugs zinging into the trees and fog, brass casings ejecting and clinking into the gravel, until the pistol slide blew back locked open and in the roar of gunfire echoes through the startled trees, in the gunsmoke swirling around her into the fog, she stood there, said: “Out of bullets.”

I took the gun from Hailey's limp hand, told her: “We have more.”

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The sound of a car horn cut through the fog: Eric sounding recall after hearing war he could only hope was won by the right soldiers as Russell charged into the woods to
rock it
against anyone wrong in his gunsight.

Hailey didn't resist as I took her arm. Zane and I holstered our weapons, I stuck her empty Sig Sauer in my belt, realized:
Same kind of gun I used for my second suicide.

“Well,” said Cari as the horn beeped, “at least we know the way back to our car.”

42

Cari drove.

“You sure about this?” she asked when I opened the driver's door for her.

“I'm beat and our crew ain't much better,” I said.

“Tell her if she fucks us,” said Russell, “I'll shoot off her kneecap.”

“Tell her yourself,” I said from the front seat between Cari and Zane.

“Hey Blondie,” said Russell. “If you—”

“Got it.” She roared our white Caddy to life, drove out of the Pine Barrens and merged onto the New Jersey Turnpike.

We were in the ride. We let voices and music from the invisible
radioland
make our moments. We listened for news reporting something that we needed to hear. Found zip. We never changed a station playing a good song. Our four lanes of fellow travelers zoomed south as fast as they dared. We traveled inside the law.

“Why fuck with life more than you need to?” I said.

“'Xactly.”

Russell adjusted his sunglasses. “Sometimes life needs you to fuck with it.”

“Could I have something besides those optometrist blinders?” Cari asked. “The sun's coming up on me.”

Zane passed her a pair of Bonnie Parker
gangster girl
shades.

Cari slipped them on. Asked me: “Are your hands shaking?”

“Not now,” I answered. Truthfully locking every muscle tight.

“And Zane,” she said, glancing past me: “You look… unusually calm.”

He said: “I guess.”

Cari faced our windshield, but I saw her sunglasses record the rear view mirror where Hailey rode with her head on Eric's shoulder, his eyes open, hers closed as her lips muttered soundlessly. Russell slumped beside her, the road vibrating his skull while he matched Hailey's private mutters with face-shifting, mouth-working soundless songs.

Cari said: “You guys need to hold it together.”

Russell said: “Maybe we've held it
too
together.”

“Sure,” I said, my hands definitely not shaking. “That's been our problem.”

The radio played The Beach Boy's ‘
Don't Worry, Baby
.'

“Maybe that was Brian Wilson's problem,” said Russell as that rock poet soared high notes in the radio song about being consoled and counseled by his lover. Russell had blared the song
‘Lying in Bed (Just Like Brian Wilson Did)'
about that Beach Boy's crackup through Ward C to taunt Dr. F just before the big
oh-oh
. “Maybe if Brian hadn't fought being crazy, he wouldn't have gone down.”

“He was in pain!” I said. “He was doing what he thought would work.”

Russell shrugged. “But what about the songs?”

A huge computer lettered sign over the highway glowed with official edicts:

TERRORIST ALERT REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY

“Do you think that's for us?” said Zane.

Nobody answered as we whizzed under the sign.

Miles of interstate highway, then the Caddy slowed.

“The Delaware Toll Bridge,” said Cari. “Coming up fast.”

With tollkeepers. For drivers to pay. Pass notes to. Shout to.

Zane gave a $5 bill to Cari.

Forty, thirty, twenty miles an hour, the Caddy slid into a line of cars rolling towards a tollbooth where a woman in a uniform worked, taking what she was given.

“State trooper!” I said. “Parked just the other side of the toll-booths!”

“Don't see him!” said Zane and for a moment I feared I'd suddenly lost it, then Zane said: “Got him—No! Got two!”

Our white Caddy suddenly felt trapped in a rolling steel stream funneling down towards the wall of tollbooths.

“They're leaning on their cruisers talking to each other,” I said.

“That's all they're doing,” said Hailey. “Maybe that's all.”

“Don't think about them and they won't notice you!” called out Eric.

We stared at our scientific genius.

“Is that true?” I asked.

Eric shrugged.

Six cars away, five, four, the Caddy rolled towards contact with a woman toll-taker. She had a badge on her white shirt. Was she hiding a gun?

Russell shifted in the back seat. His left hand slid behind the apparently sleeping Hailey. Russell could shoot almost as well with his left hand as his right.

The Caddy stopped at a tollbooth. The woman collector took the $5 from Cari. As she made change, the collector with a silver badge on her white shirt said: “Nice old car.”

“Thanks,” said Cari. “It comes with a nice old husband.”

Two women shared a laugh and off we drove.

The state troopers seemed to join in on that joke, laughed with each other.

We never saw them give us a special look.

Russell and I checked on our mirrors.

“Didn't see her push any buttons, make notes, stop collecting tolls,” said Russell.

“They take pictures,” said Eric.

“Yeah,” I said, “but even if the cameras caught our faces, by the time analysts or computers review them, we're gone.”

“So all they'll know will be our incredibly discreet vehicle,” said Russell. “Where we were when and which way we were going. Nothing to worry about.”

“'Xactly.”

“The trooper cars are still parked back there,” I said.

“The only toll left is Baltimore's tunnel,” said Cari. “Then it's free road.”

“You did good,” I told her.

“What did you expect,” she said, not a question, not a glance at me.

And not a thing wrong with the way she paid the Baltimore toll. We dropped into a tunnel under the Chesapeake Bay, a sunless, moonless shaft of yellow brick walls smudged gray by toxic car exhaust. Air pressure squeezed my eardrums as we dove beneath seawater following the red eye taillights bouncing in our windshield while we fled the yellow eye headlights riding in our mirrors.

Then we swooped out to blue sky, the expressway curving like a seagull towards clouds. Baltimore receded, its glistening urban towers cupping the inner harbor where no freighters sailed away loaded with U.S. steel. The FBI Santa in the gym of my second suicide swore that even with its glitzy inner harbor, Baltimore was still a fine town for heroin.

“Thirty minutes to D.C.,” announced our driver Cari.

Highway hummed under our tires.

Signs for the approaching Beltway zoomed past.

“Which way?” asked Cari.

Hailey opened a map, said: “Wheaton is… Take the Beltway West.”

Cari nosed the Caddy into the right lane as the Interstate began to split in a Y.

“Which exit?” she asked.

No one answered as the Caddy curved onto the massive Beltway. Cari stole a glance at us. “Do you guys have a real plan?”

“
Real
,” I said. “There's a concept.”

“Shit.” Cari merged our white Caddy into zooming traffic on the expressway girdling the capital of the most powerful nation on earth. “Can I make a suggestion?”

We took her idea and the second exit, joined suburban traffic that streamed past a 30-foot tall alabaster statue of Jesus. We turned onto a street that led past somber brick high rise apartment buildings where a bus stop sheltered three men who looked Pakistani and were dressed for blue collar labor. We passed a parking lot where men from every country south of Texas swarmed a contractor's idling pickup.

Zane said: “Stop in front of that convenience store, I'll find someone to ask.”

Our white Caddy parked in front of a store that sold eggs, milk, disposable diapers, soda pop, condoms and lottery tickets. The restaurant on one side of the store advertised Guatamalan cuisine, the restaurant on the other boasted Mexican fare, and next to that café, the windows of a “DOLLAR STORE” had signs in English and Spanish. Across one street was a Chinese food carryout shed that also sold fried chicken and Italian subs through a bulletproof window. Kitty-corner from us was a delivery/carry-out pizza shack. The pink stucco building on the intersection's fourth corner was a Maryland state liquor store.

“I thought the edge of D.C. would be… I don't know,” said Zane. “Not like this.”

“Times change,” I said. “Places, too.”

Zane left our white Caddy, crossed the street towards the liquor store. Walked right past the shouting Black woman wearing lime green shorts and a white sweatshirt stenciled with the gold glitter letters RE SKI S. Her right hand gestured with an opaque plastic glass and her rant came through our open window.

“…an' this is an ILLEGAL MEETING! And there's nothin' in this here cup 'cept dietary cola!” Her eyes trapped mine. “Here a' comes a rip!”

Watching her meant not covering Zane. I let sunshine and shadow smells of the street stream into me until he jogged back to our car.

Told us: “I found a Vietnamese barbershop. Been awhile since I spoke
Saigon
, but the old man in charge was an officer for us way back when. He told me where to go.”

Zane directed the white Caddy down a road lined with trees, over a bridge in a park, past a gas station. We glimpsed painted houses with manicured lawns and back decks. A blonde mom who traced her roots to George Washington's officer corps strapped her daughter into a minivan babyseat while an Ethiopian nanny watched.

“One world on top of another,” said Russell as we turned onto a narrower street.

“Only one?” I asked.

“There's a police station coming up 'bout a quarter mile on the right,” said Zane.

Hailey shuffled her maps. “You sure we're going the right way?”

Cari slowed the Caddy, said: “We can ask her.”

‘Her'
was a flashily dressed, white 60ish woman strolling on the sidewalk the same direction we drove—whirling around to stalk the other way, waving her arms and shaking her curled hair, bobbing down like a robin after worms and snapping back straight again to stir her hand in the air, all the while working her pink lipstick mouth.

“No wonder they can't find us,” said Russell as we drove past the pink lipsticked woman directing the traffic in her own frenzy. “There's a crazy on every corner.”

One block past the cop shop with its parked cruisers, we took a right at a bus station where global citizens waited in the crisp afternoon air, their hands close to their suitcases and bulky black trash bags, their eyes watching the white Caddy of yesterday's wealth motor past. We drove past a “metaphysical meditation chapel” housed in a former insurance agency, past a barber shop where an elderly Italian man in a blue smock waited in his doorway, past a comic book store with windows filled by cardboard posters of Superman and the latest pointy-breasted, market-born Hero Babe. We parked at a meter on a block of stores built for our 21
st
Century.

“Eric,” I said, “go with Zane. You know what we need.”

“I'll come, too,” said Hailey. The smart move was for her to stay close to Eric.

Zane grabbed coins from our cup to feed the meter and vanished into a store.

“Don't like this,” said Russell from the back seat. “Parked in the open, split up.”

“Me in the driver's seat,” said Cari next to where I sat.

“Me right behind you.” Russell shrugged. “I'm getting used to
us
.”

“It's not a good idea to be out here,” I said, “but it's the best chance we've got.”

Tick-tock
, my watch would have said if it had been built the same year as our Caddy. But Mister Tick-Tock was dead. Life was no longer work then recovery, hard then soft. My watch's second hand swept its circle with a monomanical
tick tick tick
.

We sat sweating in the cold white Caddy of that spring afternoon. Cars drove past. A city bus. Late lunchers ate at a franchised Mexican café. The steel-beamed skeleton of a building rose from the next block. A hardhat wizard walked an I-beam above the last long fall. I sat in our dead man's dream machine.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Hailey strode out of the store holding a white plastic bag. Eric carried two bigger bags. Zane walked with empty hands, ready hands.

“God bless us everyone,” said Hailey when we were all in the car, doors slammed, Cari keying the engine. “We live in a time when you can buy three disposable cell phones, charged and ready to go for cash on the counter.”

The white Caddy slid into traffic.

Zane told our driver. “Great idea.”

“Thanks,” said Cari.

That had to be a smile of professional pride she couldn't hide.