They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (2 page)

"His birthday is not next month, dick. Christ, Will. Lemme get my shoes on."

"Hurry up, man."

"
Fuck you. Just wait.
"
I h
ung up. That dumb motherfucker.

I stumbled through the apartment and tore the cushions off the broke-down couch looking for my keys. I had to retrace my steps and finally found them in my
shoes for some jackass reason.

I threw my truck into gear and jammed down the gas pedal. I hadn't even used my fire in months, and the last time was by accident, so I prepped myself for the stress of going hot. The air in the cab of the truck got so hot that I had to roll down the windows and crank the A/C, which was a good sign.

Three blocks from the Texaco, I rolled to a stop with the squeal of old brake pads. Blue lights flashed up ahead, and the bullhorns shouted at Will inside the station. I left the truck and half tried to sneak in the shadows and half tried to look like I belonged in the neighborhood like there was any way I was going to make going for a walk at three in the morning seem normal to anybody. I stopped and stepped into a shadow to call Will.

"Where are you?!" he shouted at me over the phone.

"I'm down the street. You alone?"

"Yeah. Ran the clerk outta here. I rammed a car into one of the pumps, so everything will look perfect."

"Please tell me it's not your car."

"Yeah, it is 'cause I'm that stupid. No, I jacked it earlier tonight, asshole."

Thank God for small
favors. "Which way you headed?"

"I'm aimin' out back," he said. "Make it big."

"Uh huh. You owe me. You get what you were after?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Go fuck yourself when this
is over." I hung up the phone.

I moved within a few hundred feet of the gas station and mingled in with the growing crowd of ugly, cow-eyed people holding their phones up hoping to record a police shoot-out or an explosion or both. The smell of gasoline from the broken pump hung in the air. A fire engine came down the street to join the six police cars and ten officers that surrounded the station since the night shift had nothing better to do at three a.m. than g
un somebody down. Fucking cops.

I stayed in the shadow in case I flared up on fire or something, dropped into my breathing rhythm and focused on the gas pumps and the sedan Will had wedged up in them. Used to be they would blow in an eye's blink, but I was long out of practice. The octane stickers
on the pumps browned and curled
then caught fire, and the vapors ignited and blew the pumps
,
knocking everybody back with a pretty nice shockwave. I took a deep breath and manipulated the flames into spreading to the station and focused hard to catch the buildi
ng and push it into an inferno.

I texted Will, NOW, gave a little shudder to the flames for a signal and whipped up a big-ass fireball through the roof of the station th
at sent people scrambling away.

We had done this twice before, and it had worked both times to lose the cops. The fire wouldn't hurt him, and he would use the explosion as cover to jump through the ceiling in a huge leap that would take him away from the scene. I went back to my truck to wait for him. Two cigarettes and three unanswered calls to his cell later, he dashed out from behind an apartment building across the street, clothes torn and smoking, his shoes half-melted, with as many bottles of Jack Daniels and Grey Goose as he could carry along with a case of Budweiser. He loudly dumped the bottles on the floorboard as he dumped himself into the passenger seat he had already broken the adjuster on by doing that rough shit. I started the en
gine up and made a hard u-turn.

"I got some drinks," he laughed, out-of-breath, "That was cool as hell. You set off car alarms." He coughed his guts out from the smoke.

I turned the wheel hard around a corner. "I'd kick you in the dick if I didn't think I'd break my damn foot on it. You're welcome."

"Thanks, brutha. I got a nice, juicy stack from the--"

"Which I don't wanna know anything about. What you did, where you went or what you took. I don't wanna have to lie for you more than I already have to."

Will peeled his burnt shirt off. "All right. I'll still break you off a piece. You bring me any more clothes?"

"Man, hell no. I'm not your mom."

"We going to your place?"

"Anybody see you?" I asked him, staring at him hard in the dark.

"Nobody. It was clean. I had a little help from somebody on--"

"Ah ah ah!" I cut him off, slamming my hand on the steering wheel. "I don't want to hear it."

"All right, all right, whatever. We going to your place?"

"No, yours. We gotta get your alibi in place if the cops start sniffing around."

"My man. You berry, berry smart, round eye. So what
really
happened tonight?"

I lit a cigarette and breezed through a yellow light. "What happened was you were at my house all night. I picked you up because your car was messed up, so we're going to fuck it up in case they check it."

"What? Why do we need to bring my car into it?"

"We're gonna fix it tomorrow, all right? And we're gonna be smart about this and cover our asses."

"When are you fixing it? I got places to go in the morning."

I flicked my cigarette butt out the window. "Well, sorry, motherfucker, but you should've thought of that before you went and pulled this tonight. You think I give a damn if you have plans in the morning? You made me an accessory."

"Man, whatever. Thanks, though. I mean that."

"Go to hell."

"I love you too, baby."

I eased my truck into his apartment parking lot with the lights off and left it running while I slit the coolant line near the radiator and grabbed a shirt for him from the backseat of his black '92 Mustang, the one with a giant American flag and screaming eagle decal that filled the back windshield. The coolant drained out and made a nice, fluorescent pool that neighbors would see.

"Hey, I gotta run into my buddy's place real quick," he said before I could pull out of the lot.

I slammed the truck back into park. "What? What for?"

"Celebration time. I'm gonna pinch a little smokin' bud from him."

"No, not tonight."

"You said I should on the phone."

"
Will.
"

"All right, all right. You're right. Thanks. I'm taking you out this weekend, though. No excuses."

At my place, I gave Will a blanket and pillow to crash on the couch and checked the clock. Only an hour and a half until I had to get up for work. I stood in the kitchen with the light over the sink on and downed the rest of the pizza. Will started snoring like a chainsaw on the couch.

I grabbed an empty beer bottle and broke it on his forehead to rouse him up since I didn't feel like breaking my hand hitting him.

"What?" he said groggily.

"You're snoring, man. Turn on your side so I don't have to hear it."

He wiped off the glass shards on him, all confused. "The fuck's on me?"

"Nothing. Roll over and stop snoring. I got work in the morning. I can't be a lazy bastard like some people."

Will gave me the finger and roll
ed over to snore into my couch.

I brought a fresh beer to bed with me and put the fire extinguisher I kept on my garage sale nightstand on the covers beside me in case I set fire a fire while I slept. I hadn't done it in a while, but there was always the risk after a night of burning. Will's snoring came down the hallway with THX quality, so I shoved a pillow over my head. It didn't help. I shut the bed
room door. Still could hear it.

Fifteen minutes of trying to sleep later, I gave up and turned the clock back around to face me. It said 5:45 in blazing red numbers in the dark. No way was I going to make it in to work, so I flipped on the TV, watched an infomercial for a set of kitchen knives for a while, then cut over to the news. Some lawyers were in their little boxes on screen going over the evidence against G-Mod Killah and what the state had done
wrong in its case against him.

After a couple of minutes of that bullshit, I pulled out the locked trunk with my fireproof fiberglass suit and oxygen tank and covered it all up with magazines and clothes in case somebody with a badge came through my place. What I really needed was to stash it away from my place because the last thing I needed was for my past, the Feds and Interpol to catch up with
me because of a stupid robbery.

I flipped through the channels for a while, still trying to go to sleep without being able to make it happen. I came across one of those half-hour
Girls Gone Wild
advertisements, so I watched that until I got sick of the black boxes and pulled out one of the many
Girls Gone Wild
DVDs in my top dresser drawer and popped it in to get some use out of while I called Helen's voicemail at the factory and told her I was to
o sick to show up for my shift.

And while girls did things on my TV that would make their fathers cry, I
lied
back in my bed, regretting not going with Will to make sure the job had been done right.
He never thought it all through. That little hamster on the wheel in his head wasn't as smart as he thought it was.

With the sun coming up, I popped the fireballs in little flare-ups, getting them bigger and bigger, wider, fatter, thicker, just fucking around with them until they nearly set the ceiling on fire. Then I did a pitifully sad run-through of the practice exercises I used to do keep my firings sharp.

It started with a sphere of fire that looked more like a blob than it had back in the day. Then another next to it and another beside that one. I moved the three around while keeping them the same size. It took a few tries to get it right, they kept sputtering and trying to merge into one big flame, and I had to pull them back apart. With a deep breath, I held them in mid-air, one, two, three. Finally g
ot them all the same size in
a shape tha
t could be considered a sphere.

Then I got bored and stopped caring about that old stuff and switched the DVD o
ut for something more hardcore.

I smiled, thinking about bat-shit crazy days of my youth, and enjoyed the bleach-blonde woman with the lopsided implants wearing nothing but high heels on my television. And I thought about the old days of Will yanking ATM machines out of walls with his bare hands and hitting liquor stores and all the times we nearly got busted because of his half-assed way of doing things.

Yeah, I needed to find out
exactly
what he had done.

Falling off the Wagon

There was
only one sure way to get Will talking something other than bullshit, and that was to get him smoking. The problem with that was that I didn't keep any weed at my place. I always went over to his apartment to smoke because I would never get a goddamn thing done if I had the stuff in my house. So when I woke up at the crack of noon, I made due by putting on coffee and spiking it with plenty of Jack D
aniels to get the ball rolling.

"Get up, slick," I said, shoving him with my heel. "Let's get lit."

He grunted.

I set his cup on the coffee table in front of him and rattled the liquor bottles he'd from the gas station that were all over my living room. "These bottles are waiting for you, boy."

I sat down in my recliner to wait for him to come around and flipped on the local TV news. Of course the
y had to drone on about the gas
station explosion because it had been the biggest thing to happen in town in years. In the light of day, the building had been totally blackened and burnt. I over did the hell out of it with the fire. The place looked like it had been fucking incinerated. Bad enough that they were throwing the word 'arson' around.

"Fuck," I muttered, turning up the volume. I got up and kicked Will in the side. "Get up. Start drinking, you pussy. I'm already two ahead of you." That would get him going.

He rolled over and said with his eyes closed, "B
ottle race, bitch. Set 'em up."

"
--No suspects as of yet and no reports of robbery, but police are asking anyone with information about the two individuals spotted on Zachary Lane before the chase began to call them. There is a reward being offered.
"

"Zachary Lane," I repeated. I damn sure hadn't been on Zachary Lane; that was a mile away from the station on Cedar at least. I kicked Will again and jammed my damn toe. "You're back to rich neighborhoods?" I asked him.

He finally sat up, my damn sofa groaning under the weight of his dense leadskin ass. He grabbed the coffee without a word and downed it like he had a Ph.D. in getting shit-faced. "That's good. Hit me again, bitch."

I muted the TV. "Stop with the 'bitch' shit and tell me about Zachary Lane. What the hell did you do?"