Redhanded

by Michael Cadnum

  “Right there,” said Chad, a liquor store passing by on the opposite side of the street.

  “There’s a cop,” said Raymond.

  “I don’t see anyone,” said Chad.

  “I saw a policeman in the store as we went by,” said Raymond.

  “There’s no cop unit parked outside, Raymond,” said Chad.

  Raymond set his jaw.

  Chad let his silence fill the car, staring at the side of Raymond’s face, the muted hues of turn signals and businesses flowing over us.

  “Was this an Albany cop?” Chad asked after a moment. “Or was it a Berkeley cop? Or was it a security guard?”

  Raymond made an impatient hiss through his lips. “I saw him with his gun and his badge, and where you see one—”

  “‘Where you see one,’” Chad echoed.

  Raymond lifted himself up and resettled himself in the front seat, shaking his shoulders.

  “Maybe Raymond’s right,” I said, “and maybe he isn’t. It doesn’t matter.”

  Chad gave me an incredulous look, shadows shifting across his features.

  “We don’t want to take unnecessary risks,” I said.

  Chad waited, letting me talk.

  I said, “Let’s take the freeway up to Richmond.”

  Every traffic light was green, for blocks. The storefronts were all dark and empty. We took a right on University Avenue, and headed toward the interstate.

  As we passed the hulks of parked cars Chad put a hand out to Raymond’s sleeve, and Raymond slowed down. Chad rolled down the side window, studying a Toyota pickup parked under a streetlight.

  “The owner’s asking to have his little truck stolen,” said Chad. “Leaving it out here in this empty place.”

  But that tightness in me was gone. I could feel it now—nothing was going to happen. We had come close to walking into a wine and beer shop with a gun, and we didn’t do it.

  “Drive up the on ramp,” said Chad.

  We were out of danger.

  I felt like laughing, amazed at how close we had all come.

  I offered a prayer of thanks.

  “Go up on the freeway,” said Chad.

  The Firebird spat gravel from the rear wheels, good traction, as Raymond aimed the car up the on ramp, onto Interstate 80.

  The acceleration was pulling us back into our seats when we saw the stalled car beside the freeway.

  It was perched on the side of the road, a subcompact with its hazard lights pulsing. The outline of the small car was obscured by vapor or smoke. A figure stood well away from the vehicle.

  A woman waited, arms wrapped around herself in the dark, the flashing hazard lights illuminating her rhythmically as we passed her, her coat fluttering in the breeze from the bay and the swirling air in the wakes of the big trucks.

  Chad put the back of his hand on Raymond’s sleeve, just his knuckles, almost an affectionate gesture. The Firebird swung over onto the shoulder of the freeway. We braked hard, the three of us straining against the forward momentum, trucks rumbling past, their tires banging over a seam in the highway.

  Chad said something to Raymond, and Raymond reversed the Firebird, all the way back to the silver-gray Sentra. Raymond avoided meeting my eyes, frowning with concentration, having trouble keeping the Firebird on an even course, driving backward with weeds and litter popping and thrashing under our wheels.

  Chad was out of the car without a word.

  I jerked the door handle, and spilled out into the night air, the wafts of diesel dust and bay wind fluttering my clothes.

  Gouts of coolant-flavored steam swept over me, and the vapor parted as two people, Chad and the woman in a fluttering raincoat, came toward me, their steps crunching the gravel and glittering glass.

  Chad was hanging on to her, one fist around her arm, her hand flailing with each step, flopping, her face bent back to protest, or to record Chad’s features. Her purse slapped the side of her raincoat as he dragged her the remaining steps, and then she lurched and tried to run.

  She went nowhere.

  She kicked Chad, her dark slip-on shoe catching sand and trash that muffled her attack, and so it was only the second kick that really found meat and bone. He made a quiet sound. He stuffed her into the backseat beside me as I scooted over.

  She clawed him, caught his face with her fingernails, her mouth twisted, making noise.

  But not nearly enough, her scream raspy, and then when she found her voice, it was captured by the interior of the car. Chad jabbed at her with the muzzle of the handgun, methodically, like someone breaking the glass out of a window frame, hitting her in the face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  There was not enough air in the car.

  Raymond held on to the steering wheel with both hands. The car squealed and made a shrugging, sideways sweep into the flow of traffic. The match-head whiff of burned rubber filled the car for a few seconds.

  Chad had gotten back in the front seat, and I was sitting right next to the woman.

  Chad rasped directions into Raymond’s ear.

  We left the freeway, approaching a traffic light.

  Too fast, I thought.

  We’re going too fast.

  The woman’s raincoat spread all over the backseat, half falling off her. I was sitting on a sleeve and a long, loose cloth belt. She had her hand over her mouth, like someone appalled at what she had just said, embarrassed.

  I wanted to say something reassuring.

  She had blond hair, pulled back in a loose pony tail, strands slipping out, straying over her face. She wore a white or cream-colored blouse under her coat, starred with blood. Her purse, a well-worn eel-skin bag on a stout strap, was gaping.

  The Firebird careened through a yellow traffic light, Raymond struggling to pull the car to the left. Chad and Raymond both watched the road, like two people intent on a game, their team about to lose, no one breathing.

  I put my hand on her, but gently, trying to tell her everything would be all right.

  Chad called for me to hit her. “Go ahead and hit her,” he was saying, his voice loud, from somewhere deep inside his body.

  Even when a freeway overpass flashed over us, and then the road spread out, darkness everywhere, Raymond still had trouble with the car. By then it was plain to me that Raymond wanted to run into something—he hoped to slam into the timbers with their pretty red reflector lights along the road.

  We half spun to avoid a sports car puttering along.

  Raymond fought the wheel, getting the car back into control as we passed a long, low white building, Costco, with its broad, empty parking lot, and rows of shopping carts gleaming, chained together.

  A pay phone glittered beside the planter-box of black plants. I had a flash thought, one of us spilling out of the car, sprinting for the phone.

  The woman was not making a sound, folded over, trying to catch her breath, or getting ready to make a run.

  Two radio transmitters loomed up into the night sky, red points of light strobing off and on at their twin summits. Raymond swung the car wide around the corner, tires squealing. Red reflectors indicated the end of the road, dark timber barriers suddenly white in the illumination from the headlights.

  Chad uttered further instructions, words I could not catch. Raymond gunned the engine, and the Firebird lunged up over the curb, not with a rush—unevenly, lurching into the dark.

  The ground here was rugged, the car bouncing, our heads hitting the ceiling. Great jagged brown boulders reflected the headlight beams, and Raymond stood on the brakes.

  Chad flung open his door and was out of the car, yanking at the door beside me, the entire car rocking with his effort.

  I levered the door handle, then thumbed the latch, unlocking the door and causing it to open so easily Chad was sent off balance, staggering backward.

  He recovered his footing and leaned forward, his breath smelling of rum. “Bring her out,” he said.

  I was like someone who has run miles, a s
our taste in my mouth. Raymond was backing away, a shape dancing back toward the lights of town and muted freeway glow, and when I called out to him he didn’t say a word. He stopped and watched, too far off for his features to be clear.

  I helped the woman out of the car, trying to keep my body between her and Chad, but she fought me. I shoved her along at arm’s length, trying to give her the idea that this was when she should make her break, get out of here.

  Raymond was gone, running back toward the town lights, and I tried to send him a psychic snapshot, the phone by the side of the road.

  Chad brushed me aside, took her by one arm, and flung her out, into the dry grass. She almost fell down. She was a pale, windswept smudge, struggling for footing in the oat weeds.

  She put out her hands, like a person keeping a weight from falling in. Chad shot her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Why did you do that?”

  Was it my voice asking the question?

  It had to be, there was no one else.

  Chad made some adjustment to the automatic, setting the safety, and then he stuck the gun under his shirt, having trouble, the pistol not fitting where he wanted it to go.

  He said, “She saw our faces.”

  I moved past him, quickly, so I was between Chad and the woman lying on the ground.

  He emptied the contents of the purse haphazardly, over the weeds in the headlight glare. Kleenex and breath mints, lipstick, half-lens reading glasses, with a strand of glass beads attached. Pocket calculator, a brace of colored pencils held together by a twisted rubber band.

  Chad said, “She didn’t have any money.”

  Chad took the eel-skin purse in both hands and pulled. He tore it in two, the last pennies and grocery lists tumbling, the cold air perfumed with tired peppermint. He found a side pocket in the purse, and forced a zipper. A red leather wallet tumbled out, and he knelt and unfastened the snap.

  He straightened. “Seventeen dollars,” he said, letting the wallet fall.

  Chad peered back into the car, his head and shoulders full of color in the interior light, his skin flushed, his padded jacket sea blue. He looked over at me as though trying to remember who I was.

  Compress the wound.

  I took off my sweatshirt and folded it into a tight pack, and pressed down on the streaming bullet hole. I was sure I was too late, sure she was gone, but I felt for the pulse points in her neck. Her heart was beating. Her eyelids fluttered. I told her everything would be all right, forcing my voice to make a sound.

  After a long stillness Chad pounded the top of the car with his fist. He pounded several times, hard, the metal buckling.

  He wrestled the pistol out of his belt, and I heard the hard, sharp click of the weapon as he released the safety. He walked toward me, holding the gun down in both fists, straight-armed. He steadied himself and pointed the gun at her head.

  I stood.

  I didn’t have time to set my feet.

  I threw a straight right, a punch that whipped his skull back but didn’t make him drop the gun. I hit him again, stepping right into it, backing him up. I felt something break in the front of his skull, a bone or a tooth.

  I hit him again, hard, a left hook and a right cross.

  He went down and didn’t move.

  The thrum and glitter of highway traffic was far away.

  I knelt beside her. Her heart was still beating.

  Her eyes were on mine. We both heard it, at first too distant to have anything to do with us, and then getting closer, the high-low tune of a siren.

  About the Author

  Michael Cadnum is the author of 35 books for adults and young adults. His work—which includes thrillers, suspense novels, historical fiction, and books about myths and legends—has been nominated for the National Book Award (The Book of the Lion), the Edgar Award (Calling Home and Breaking the Fall), and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (In a Dark Wood). A former National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, he is also the author of award-winning poetry. Seize the Storm (2012) is his most recent novel.

  Michael Cadnum lives in Albany, California, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Michael Cadnum

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1978-1

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

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