Small Town Taxi (Honey Walker Adventures Book 1)

by Harriet Rogers

  Small Town Taxi

  by

  Harriet Rogers

  If you want to know what is really happening, ask the taxi driver.

  This book is dedicated to professional drivers everywhere.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or to actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Small Town Taxi

  Copyright ©2019 Harriet Rogers

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from

  Harriet Rogers

  Chapter One

  When she shot the front seat of my taxi, I thought about getting a different job, but it was the passenger side and empty, so I didn’t update my resume. I was surrounded by guys in blue uniforms with guns pointing at my cab. I was inside.

  I’m not asking for sympathy here, but I want to go on record that this situation wasn’t helping me be the best taxi hack ever. Prior to the bullet flying around my cab, I had been thinking about two things. One was the taxi business. The other was Jon Stevens, a lieutenant in the local police force and a person of interest in my strictly fantasy love life.

  A small-town taxi is a vehicle with built-in entertainment. I should know. My name is Honey Walker and I drive for Cool Rides Cab Company in Northampton, Massachusetts.

  I love driving taxi, I love moving people and I love the people I work with. Driving taxi was what I was meant to do. Most of my life, I’d been a ditz at earning a living and a massive disappointment to my parents and society at large. The phrase that echoes throughout my existence is “does not live up to potential.” When I dropped out of college to pursue my own direction, my parents told me not to come home until I had a diploma in hand or a job that would help add to their retirement. I didn’t react well to their attempt to exercise authority. I developed an aversion to any attempt to direct me somewhere I hadn’t chosen myself.

  So here I was trying to live up to my potential as a cabby. My potential seemed like it might be short-lived.

  I arrived in Northampton at age twenty-one. That was four years ago and I was on a quest to find something, anything, that I could do well enough to earn a living. But even on a quest, nature calls. I found Northampton when I got off the interstate for a bathroom break and I decided to stay for a while. Right now, I wasn’t sure staying was a good idea but there wasn’t a lot of choice.

  People use taxis for lots of reasons. We get calls from the cops telling us not to pick up a guy on whatever street. Contact central immediately if the escapee calls for a ride. I once delivered their escapee to the front door of the police station after he asked me to transport him across the state line, as fast as possible. Neither the cops nor the prisoner paid or tipped so I never did that again. This morning’s fare wasn’t an escapee—yet—but she definitely fell into the “shouldn’t have” category, as in “shouldn’t have picked her up.”

  She’d called for a ride to the courthouse. I figured her for a lawyer or a financial analyst. Both knew how to get money out of a stone. She had that arrogant, self-assured walk that reminded the rest of us we weren’t her. Might mean a big tip. She stood in a mini-mall in front of a hair salon, hair freshly styled, short in back, long in front. You don’t get that good a cut if you don’t tip well, so I just assumed. Hindsight is wonderful but it rarely solves problems. I should have noticed that the salon was next to a bait, tackle, and gun shop.

  She got in the back seat before I could open either passenger door. In a small-town taxi, where someone chooses to sit in the car frequently defines their purpose and their character. If they sit in the front seat, they want to talk, be friends. The back seat is the power seat. The driver is separated and is in the service of the client. This passenger oozed lawyer. Power seat, power clothing, briefcase, nice shoes—really nice shoes—red leather, four-inch spikes, with gold trim. Flashy, but you need to be noticed in a courtroom. I always thought if Marcia Clark had owned a better wardrobe, O.J. would have been in the slammer sooner.

  “So, where’d you get the shoes?” I asked, figuring she’d want to share sources. She must be a shoe girl—look at what she was wearing.

  “Just drive,” she snapped.

  “Yeah, okay,” I grumbled. What kind of woman wears shoes like that and won’t talk about them?

  We pulled up to the courthouse. “Wait for me,” she ordered.

  “There’s a 10-dollar wait fee.” I hated waiting and I’m not good at following orders.

  “Fine.” She stalked off up the sidewalk, those four-inch heels drumming like Charlie Watts playing Honky-Tonk Woman.

  Pulling into the no-parking zone, I down-buttoned the windows to let in a breeze and turned off the engine. I adjusted the band in my excessively curly blond hair. With the air-conditioner off, it was about ninety degrees in the sun. If the police noticed me, I could smile and hope my melting mascara didn’t make me look like a terrorist raccoon. Then I could move to a legal spot.

  Ten minutes later she flew out the side exit five feet from where I’d parked.

  “Drive,” she screamed and slammed into the backseat.

  Rule one of taxi driving: Never drive when someone is yelling at you. Then I caught the black metal shape of a gun in my peripheral vision. I felt something small, round and cold against my neck. I had never had a gun actually touch me. I didn’t react well.

  I yanked the steering wheel to the left and mashed my foot to the floor. The taxi leaped forward, right into the police car in front of me. The impact threw my passenger forward, whacking her head against the front seat. The gun went flying, landed with a thump, and shot the front passenger seat.

  “Shit!” I threw it into reverse, twisting the wheel the other direction. I hadn’t noticed the car behind me. A blue wave of cops flooded out of the courthouse and surrounded the taxi. They had guns, big guns. I felt like they were all pointed at me. Right now, in the moment, I tried to focus on surviving the lunatic behind me.

  “Oops,” I whispered and slid down the seat, wishing I were a lot more invisible.

  All four doors to my car opened at the same time and cops grabbed whatever they could get their hands on. That would be me, my fare, and her gun, which they handled with a lot more care than they handled either of us. We were cuffed, stuffed and driven over to the police station in the injured cop car. My fare maintained her silence while I stammered and stuttered about my innocence of whatever they thought I had done in the last five years.

  In thirty seconds, we pulled up to the police station. Northampton is not a big town. But there were rules about how to safely transport dangerous prisoners—as if one of us might try to escape with at least a million cops surrounding us—so there I was in handcuffs. I was pretty sure I had a lawyer sitting next to me, but she was as mute as a dead fish. They hauled us out and dragged us inside. My father taught me when a situation gets bad, tomorrow is a new day and life always gets better with the passage of time. I wasn’t sure he was right about this particular time slot. The next day I might wake up in a jail cell.

  Attitude goes with driving a taxi. In this town, there are women, men and others who can stop traffic with their appearance. We have gender combinations that turn visitors into rubbernecking idiots. Me, I’m the girl who makes the phrase “they all look alike” a reality. When I turned seven, I became a tomboy and wanted to look tough. Hoping a scar running down my cheek would create the desired fashion statement, I used one of my mother’s matched set of bone handled
steak knives to make myself into Scarface. Creating long-lasting damage to facial skin takes a lot of effort. I ended up with a scab that itched like hell for a week and no scar. As a teenager, I considered a tattoo of a feather drifting down on my small but expanding chest. Tattoos hurt. I’m about to turn twenty-five and I remain free of “distinguishing marks.” A nose job for me would be to add an inch and a bump. You could find my doppelganger walking down almost any street in London. Blond hair, blue eyes, 5 feet 6 inches tall, yada, yada, yada. It lets me be anonymous when I want to be. Which can be convenient…or not. Right now, it was hard to tell.

  Northampton is a city with a funky outlook, bizarre history and politics on every side of every spectrum. Close to the interstate, it’s a prime setting for everything from gourmet dining and till-you-drop shopping to drug running and money laundering. It has a courthouse because it’s the county seat, which is convenient for the drug runners and money launderers. Since the police force, the local legal establishment and the whole legal system partly depend on the existence of the dirty money and criminal activities, it all forms a nice circular economic interdependence with the courthouse at its center.

  The front half of this historic building is made up of huge gray stone blocks and dates back to the 1800s. The addition they slapped on looks like an 18-wheeler hauled in a prefab, postmodern trailer park. Given an uptick in the crime rate over the last decade, the addition was sorely needed.

  The population here is a mix of sane and crazy, rich and homeless, ultra-conservative and flaming liberal, and lots of other, more mysterious lifestyles. Our mayor of the moment is a liberal white guy. Our previous mayor was a liberal gay woman. The City has generated publicity for everything from being the best small arts town, to having the largest gay population outside San Francisco, to being a major stop on the north/south drug running corridor. One of our city councilors looks like King Kong and dresses like Marilyn Monroe. Northampton wears the sophisticated glamour of a big city, but the functional underwear of its agricultural, blue-collar origins sometimes rides up its butt crack and shows over the top of the tailored Armani slacks. I fit in pretty well and I had started thinking of this small city as home. It seemed laid back, crime free, and interesting in a weird way. Until now. Now it was exhibiting some of the problems that have been plaguing small towns throughout the country. Police forces were suddenly facing an uptick in violent crime, mostly involving drugs, especially opioids.

  But cops are cops everywhere, and none of them like to see anyone except them using, carrying or even thinking about guns.

  Half an hour after a bullet drilled my passenger seat, I was in interrogation thinking that, even with its odd construction, the courthouse seemed dignified compared with the cop house, which has been called one of the worst organizational disasters in the city’s history. Outside, it’s a flat-topped, utilitarian brick building. Inside, it’s a rat maze. Trying to find a way out would be time-consuming and pointless. The cops know where they are, and they know where you are. The City is putting up a new building to house the boys and girls in blue, but the old one is still in use and I was somewhere deep inside.

  My hands were stuffed under my butt to be sure they weren’t shaking. An over-weight, cheerful cop was beginning the interrogation.

  “You could be in a lot of trouble here, Miss,” he mumbled.

  “Hey, I had a gun in my face. I saved you guys a high-speed chase down Main Street. How was I supposed to know what my fare was up to?”

  More realistically, I’d had a gun in my back and no way to get out of the parking space without a tank.

  This guy was a sergeant. A gun in the courthouse should merit someone higher up the food chain. They were probably deciding who got the short straw and had to sort out my part in the fiasco.

  After ten minutes, there was a tap on the door and Lieutenant Jon Stevens poked his head in. I know Jon. He’s outrageously good-looking with tight buns and a fabulous smile. He wasn’t smiling now, and neither was I, but it was hard for me to keep my heart rate from picking up a little when he came in. My hands, released from under my backside, had stopped shaking, I wasn’t in tears and I hadn’t thrown-up. Circumstances considered, I thought those were accomplishments worthy of praise. The sergeant left.

  “You still drive for Cool Rides?” Jon stood over me, looking impatient. I wasn’t intimidated by his scowl, and my eyes were just below belt level. His face wasn’t what I was staring at.

  “Was that a question? Or are you introducing me?” I snapped, trying to brazen my way through a real police interrogation.

  His bright blue eyes stared at me for so long I looked down to make sure my shirt was buttoned and I didn’t have any blood dripping down my front. “What?” I jutted my chin forward.

  “Did you know the woman?”

  “Lady Red Shoes?”

  “No,” he said. “The woman in pink lace underwear. Who did you think I meant?”

  The image of pink lace underwear and the Lieutenant might have been appealing—a straight woman’s wet dream. And in this city, a lot of guys might be interested as well. But Jon was in super cop mode, a man of authority. His attitude pissed me off. Have I mentioned that I have some control issues?

  “She was a fare,” I said. “And I didn’t get paid. And I didn’t get my wait charge. And the boss is going to be pissed when he sees the dent in the car.” I was beginning to wail.

  “Jesus Christ, spare me. We got a guy in the hospital getting a bullet out of his ass cheeks and his lawyer-wife who put it there is in holding. I don’t give a rat’s ass about your cash flow.”

  He turned away but was still standing with his rear end at eye level. I had to admit it was a fine-looking backside. He gazed down at his feet. My gaze followed, down to his size ten shoes, authoritatively planted in front of me.

  He looked at the ceiling. I looked at the ceiling. Nothing there either.

  He stalked over to the door, knocked once and said to the sergeant, “Cut her loose.”

  “Can I have my cab back?”

  “Yeah, we got the bullet out. Good luck with the boss.”

  I dragged through the warren of the cop house. I didn’t want to face Willie, my boss. I did want to know the story on the lady lawyer. I wanted to collect my fare and, mostly, I wanted to know where she got those shoes.

  Northampton is an almost typical small New England town. When Eisenhower became president, he decided America needed an autobahn. The interstate highway system is America’s autobahn and Northampton is on the right side of the interstate. What the president, ex general, meant to be an efficient way to move troops has become a way to move merchandise from fresh produce to crack cocaine. Traffic from larger cities to the south is extensive and Northampton residents think of themselves as only one step from the Big Apple. We are the Little Apple, maybe even the Medium-Sized Apple.

  My curiosity sometimes gets me into trouble. I figured if I dealt with my boss first, I could come back to the holding cells later and visit the shoes. I called in and talked fast. I wanted to explain the situation before he started yelling.

  “How bad?” I could feel Willie seething over the cell phone. Word about the accident had gotten back to Cool Rides before I did. It was better to tell him about the dent rather than show up pretending I hadn’t noticed it, and that I hadn’t spent the morning running fares, but sitting in the police station admiring the Lieutenant’s backside.

  “We just got a scratch. And the cop car isn’t too horrible. The civilian car is kind of dented.”

  “If the cab can be driven, get your ass back here.” He didn’t ask whether I was hurt or even alive.

  I flipped the phone closed and started the car. It was late in the morning and I’d missed half a day’s worth of pickups as well as my morning caffeine and sugar fix. I sighed and headed back to the office to face the music.

  The crew was standing in front of the garage, next to our fleet of cars, when I drove up. The Cool Rides Company is like th
at TV show from the ’70s with Judd Hirsch and Danny DeVito. Except the cars are more like The Italian Job. We don’t have Mini Coopers, but the Scion XB has personality. Think a chopped British taxicab. Or a Mini on steroids. There were five of them lined up next to the glass wall that made up the front of the office. All in perfect clean condition, different colors, with creative graphics adorning their sides and cute names printed on the fenders. My personal favorite was the flame job with yellow taxi checkerboard inside the flames. “Cool Rides, the Best Ride Ever” was printed across the doors. They were all washed, waxed, and vacuumed. And now there was mine. The dented fenders would have fit in fine with any other cab company. At Cool Rides, it looked like it had been through a junkyard slalom. I didn’t mention the bullet hole in the seat. It hardly showed.

  Willie avoided looking directly at the car. I knew he wanted to kick my ass around the parking lot. But he had the personality of a golden retriever trying to pass as a Rottweiler. His curly white hair fell in uncontrolled splendor, his gray eyes were kind. He wasn’t the hard-ass he thought he should be.

  Andrew, one of the other drivers, stepped forward as I pulled to a stop.

  “Wow! Hey, boss, do you think the car is embarrassed? He fidgeted and danced around the car. “Maybe we should hide it around back.” He shuffled up the other side and almost stopped in front of me. He couldn’t actually stand still, but he gave it his best effort, drumming a loose finger on his leg, tapping a free toe, bobbing his head to music I could never hear. Being around Andrew was like being around a small explosive device. He jittered away, bouncing like an overheated electron, polishing a nonexistent spot on one of the cars with his shirttail.

  Mona, our dispatcher, gave me a look that would level Muhammad’s mountain. Her soft sultry voice came out of a 5-foot-2-inch body as wide as a linebacker’s. Short dark hair and smile lines framed a deceptively cheerful face. Her outlook, however, resembled the attack dog her boss wanted to be, and she protected him like one. Her dark eyes told me not to mess with him. He was in a pile of hurt. I wanted to say “Hey, me too,” but, in a rare moment of self-control, I kept my mouth shut.