by James Grady
“Everywhere,” said Eric.
“So what,” I said. “Cameras here won’t see what matters. They’re looking for rowdies or shoplifters, not escapees from sanity.”
Eric said: “But there’ll be a record we were here.”
“If and when anybody looks for us on those tapes,” I said, “we’ll be long gone. Plus, as long as there’s no reason to check the tapes, it’s like we were never seen.”
“Still don’t like it,” said Russell. “It’s still not good.”
Hailey asked: “What happens to America when Homeland Security finally gets real time surveillance cameras all over the country?”
Zane said: “Shrinks like Dr. F will need to redefine paranoia.”
“Too late,” I said, casually leading the crew under the leafy canopy of a palm tree rising from a planter. “Everybody who’s not crazy is already paranoid.”
“The Animals sang it,” Russell told us: “We gotta get out of this place.”
“We didn’t get what we need!” said Zane.
“They don’t got it here,” I answered. “But now they got us.”
“We’ve only been here half an hour!” said Hailey.
“Time’s up,” I said, stepping to a booth where a sign read INFORMATION.
“What do you need to know?” said the booth’s white-haired woman.
“Everything,” I answered. “Or the fastest way to the biggest parking lot.”
“Your nearest exit might be through the all night drug store.”
“Should have figured that,” whispered Russell.
We went the direction she’d pointed until we spotted the drug store next to a place that sold football jerseys, soccer balls, Team Viagra NASCAR jackets—and sneakers.
“Bathrooms are next to the sports store,” I said. “Everybody use ’em.”
“Stealing a car from a mall is a bad idea,” said Russell. “Forget about how you might get filmed. You never know how soon someone will come out and find what they don’t have anymore, call 911 and stick your ride in the system. Stealing it while there’s still daylight…”
“This is the chance we’ve got,” I argued. “And we’ve got to get out of here.”
“Amen,” said Eric.
Zane shook his head: “Look at all your shaking hands. First, we’ve got to fix.”
A water bottle from a vending machine. Hailey shook high school pills out of the jar she’d borrowed from Jules. The only one who took more than three pills was Russell, and his Number Four was small and white. Hailey smiled at me as he popped that one. I was too jangled to pay her with a nod or a grin.
“Gotta get outside,” I said as we walked from the mall into the syrupy smelling drug store. Aisles of adult diapers and menstrual pads and mosquito repellent and ceiling lights closed in on me. “Grab what we need, I’ll scout us a sled.”
Russell tried to stop me: “Popping a ride’s not your thing.”
“Learn and live.”
Zane said: “At least let Eric—”
“Hey! I gotta be, gotta get out of here alone!”
And I blasted outside to the parking lot.
Pink hues softened the afternoon’s long sunlight. I fought to keep control. To look ordinary. Like I belonged.
Must be 2,000 cars out here. I drifted up one aisle and down another. I checked all the SUV war wagons and the minivans. None of the locks look popped up.
Few people were in the parking lot. It was as if human beings got sucked straight from their cars to the shopping experience by some mammoth vacuum inside the mall. Maybe that vacuum was the hum in the canned music that butchered songs of our youth.
Must be some vacuum, I thought. I still hear it hum behind me. Now focus:
Which vehicle to steal? The five of us would barely fit in that red Toyota. The minivan with the “SOCCER MOM” bumper sticker has low tires, locks clicked down, the polluted whiff of last year’s diapers and this year’s bubblegum. That gold SUV has its locks clicked down… but its driver’s window is open a few inches! Maybe—
Behind me, a woman’s voice froze me in my tracks, said: “Can I help you, sir?”
She had light short hair. Tan blouse and pants, black shoes. A silver badge rode her left breast and holstered on her hip was a 9mm Glock. Her idling police cruiser hummed behind her. I saw the radio mike clipped to her epaulet, the black patent leather pouch on her belt for handcuffs, but what truly nailed me were her mirrored black sunglasses that reflected the burning red ball of the setting sun. And me.
“Can I help you sir?” Second warning.
“Absolutely!” I smiled my most innocent smile.
Even though I absolutely knew she knew. Knew she knew I knew she knew. We stood there, each playing our part, each trying to write the ending for this script. Each living the cosmic wisdom that this was a scene to finish, not start. That choice kept us civil and standing right where we were until the other one made a damning move.
“What seems to be the problem?” Her uniform told me she was a local cop.
“Which one?”
“The one that’s had you cruising the aisles like you’re shopping for a car.”
“Call that luck. My car’s in the shop so we used my wife’s car to come here.”
“And this is it?” The sunglasses nodded towards the gold SUV.
“Yup. We usually take my Ford when we go out, so I only ride in her SUV a few times a month. These days, SUVs are all that’s out there and they all look alike.”
The black glasses swung from side to side as she worked her peripheral vision without looking away from me. “Where is your wife?”
“She’s not here.”
“And yet you are.”
“Well… sure.”
“Got a driver’s license to show me?”
“I’m not driving.”
“I’m helping you out. What if you got the wrong vehicle? Like you said, they all look alike. I’ll radio check the registration of this vehicle and be sure it matches the address on your license. You do live with your wife, don’t you?”
“Who else would?”
She didn’t laugh.
“I don’t have my driver’s license. Well, I do, but… It’s in the car.”
“In the car.”
“With my wallet,” I said. “That’s why I’m out here. To get my wallet.”
“You went into a shopping mall but left your wallet in the car.”
“Call me an optimist,” I said. “But my wife…”
“Your wife isn’t here.”
“She’s in the mall. Standing in a cashier’s line, actually. Waiting for me to come get my wallet so we can use my credit card, not hers.”
“That’s a good story,” said the cop.
“If only it had a happy ending.”
“Let’s get your wallet, then we can work on happily ever after.”
“See, that’s the problem.”
“Ahh. That’s the problem.”
“I know! I mean it’s one thing to leave my wallet in her junk compartment with all those random things that live in there, but then to have her send me out here to get it–”
“For the credit card.”
“—for the credit card and have both of us forget to give me her keys.”
“So everything’s locked up tight inside there.”
“There you go.” I shrugged my shoulders and grinned. Prayed.
Her black mirror eyes held my reflection as she said: “What are we going to do?”
Blue-orange flame arced down behind her idling cruiser—glass shattered.
The cop turned so she could keep me in her vision as she glanced left and right, saw nothing that looked like shattered glass. Her sunglasses swung back to target me in the same instant that over her shoulder I saw a w
isp of black smoke spiral up the far side of her cruiser’s hood, smelled rubber and roses burning.
Flames from the made-off-drugstore-shelves Molotov cocktail caught the far front tire of her cruiser on fire.
The cruiser’s tire exploded with a whap! The cop whirled, drew her gun. Black smoke swooped up from her cruiser. The exploding tire propelled the ignited Molotov brew up into the engine compartment. Flames hit a fuel-injecting gas line.
Wham! A burp of flame blew open the cruiser hood.
The cop staggered backwards towards me in the canyon between the parked cars.
KA-BOOM! Her cruiser’s gas tank erupted in a ball of flame.
Heat blast knocked the cop off her feet.
Me too, a wall of angry heat flashing my face.
Flat on my back on the pavement between two cars, I saw a roaring pillar of orange flame and black smoke rocket straight up into the evening sky. The explosion triggered dozens of honking car alarms.
So much for covert operations. How much of our cadre got filmed?
Get up! Fire roared outside my canyon between two SUVs. The dazed cop lay at my feet, her face and hands redder than mine felt. From everywhere came the stench of melting rubber, burning gas, hot metal, and… burnt hair. The gun had been blown from her hand. I saw her groping for her lost weapon.
She’s trying to fight the good fight.
So I dragged her back from the fireball. She was dazed, struggling to her knees as I ripped the mike out of the radio on her belt, tossed it away, yelled: “I’ll get help!”
And ran toward the mall drug store.
Soon as I charged out of the black swirling smoke, Zane—who’d concocted and thrown the Molotov cocktail—slammed a BMW sedan’s driver’s window with a back kick. The window crackled into a safety-glass spider web. His second kick pushed out the cobwebbed pane. Russell clicked the BMW’s locks, hammered the ignition cap off the steering column and used a screwdriver as a car key. The engine roared to life. Russell and Zane raced the stolen BMW through the parking lot where a crowd stared transfixed by the burning cop car. Hailey and Eric ran to meet my feet-pounding escape. The broken windowed BMW stopped just long enough for us to jump in with our gear, then in a cloud of black smoke and the honking of car alarms and wailing-nearer fire truck sirens, we roared away from the mall’s pillar of fire.
32
“Look at me!” I yelled at Zane from the back seat of our stolen BMW as Russell drove through first dark of the New Jersey suburbs.
Beside me, Hailey said: “You’ve got ’bout half of each eyebrow left.”
“Plus a healthy pink glow,” said Russell.
Zane said nothing from the front passenger’s seat.
Wind rushed in from the kicked-out driver’s window.
“I was doing swell!” I yelled.
“No you weren’t,” said Russell as he made a random left turn. “You always think you’re doing swell when you’re talking to a woman, but you aren’t.”
“Wasn’t a woman!” I yelled.
“See?” said Russell. “You were that confused.”
“It was a cop!”
“’Xactly,” said Zane. “And she was on her way to locking you up.”
Zane shook his head. “Good thing we had Hailey and Eric shadowing you. If Officer Mirror Eyes had put you in her car, we were all gone. Or you’d have had to lunch her when she did her frisk.”
“You almost burned me up!”
“Yeah, I kind of misjudged my toss. I meant to hit it in front of the cruiser where a ball of fire would be a zero-damage diversion you could use.”
“But blast was classic,” said Eric.
“Wild,” said Russell.
“Now the law knows—”
“Not as much as if they’d have nabbed you,” said Zane. “What they’ve got is a dazed street cop’s description of a citizen who saved her life when hell broke loose.”
“And the coming alert on this stolen car.”
Lights snapped on in New Jersey. Rush hour was steady, but we kept moving.
“Wish we’d scored a local map,” said Russell, peering out at neighborhoods scattered along the maze of city, county, state and federal roads we drove.
“Keep the ocean on your left,” said Zane, pointing to an arrow that claimed BEACHES were one mile thataway.
Evening became night blowing its chill through the kicked-out window of the stolen BMW. Road construction sent our route this way and that. We kept a gut reckoning on the ocean. Sometimes we were certain that its blackness loomed between light-dotted buildings flowing past Russell’s broken window, sure that the night sky held the scent of sea air. Sometimes we drove past mini-malls and fast food factories that could have been in Kansas, through neighborhoods that could have been Ohio.
We were 45 minutes on the road, rolling sort of south on a one way road past high rise condo buildings and ramshackle houses. Maybe it was the night blowing through the window while Russell drove, maybe it was my better self realizing that what the hell, they were only eyebrows, but I’d cooled down, was about to say something funny and nice to Zane when Russell glanced across a vacant lot towards the ocean.
“Holy shit!” yelled our driver Russell.
Look left: no red light spinning police cars.
Behind us: nothing but empty night road.
Same through the windshield.
“Right’s clear!” yelled Hailey from that side of the back seat.
Russell surged the BMW forward only to hit the brakes and skid through a left hand turn at the first corner. We raced along a deserted park, took another tires-crying hard left, shot down an empty one-way street going back the way we’d come—
Russell hit the brakes so hard we all flew forward, snapped back.
We were at a dead stop in the middle of a one-way street going the opposite direction of our plan. The empty park lay off to our left. To our right, a stone walled building rose up to the stars and ran for a full block past three lonely streetlights. Straight through its mountain should have been the sea.
Russell slammed the BMW into PARK, threw open the driver’s door and pulled himself half out of the car to gawk at the building’s roof.
Seconds later, he dropped back behind the steering wheel, said: “Oh… my… God!”
Then punched the gas. The Jeep shot forward. Russell steered the BMW into the horseshoe driveway of a WW-II Navy hospital converted to a grand dame haunted hotel.
“Wait here!” he yelled and dashed into the lobby.
“Oh,” I deadpanned as Russell disappeared into the hotel. “OK.”
I got out of our ride. Rolling blackness a block away had to be the Atlantic. To the left of the ocean stretched a wall of crumbling boardwalk pit stops. To the right loomed that huge abandoned Arabesque castle. I glanced up toward what Russell might have spotted that flipped him out, saw a huge unlit sign of bulb lights that read:
WELCOME TO—
“Get in!” yelled Russell, running to the BMW.
Not wasting a blink to finish reading, I did: he was the driver.
“Only five blocks away!”
Russell rocketed us out of the driveway and back the direction we’d been going before he’d seen whatever. We roared through that night with our driver. With faith.
Our stolen BMW cornered a left, shot down a wide street with cars angled-parked at a median strip. A car pulled out: Russell whipped into that space. He climbed out of the BMW and groaned in seemingly sexual awe. Staggered across the street to a long one-story building with walls of gray pancake-like bricks and a white awning. I was behind him when he dropped to his knees and spread his arms wide in hallelujah to the promised land.
Black letters on the building’s white awning: THE STONE PONY.
Glowing white letters on black background sign read: CAFÉ AND BAR.
Wailing rock guitars, throbbing drums and a husky-voiced woman singer echoed out to us as Russell knelt in the street.
“No,” I said.
“What the hell,” said Zane. “We need to eat.”
“OK,” I sighed. Knew then that the unlit electric lights on the Arabesque building read WELCOME TO ASBURY PARK, N.J. “We need to eat. We’ll be fine.”
Eric sealed the BMW’s kicked-out driver’s window with the wheel cover for the BMW’s spare tire. We paid a cover charge at the bar’s door and stepped into a black walled dream factory filled with beer fumes, cigarette smoke, and colored lights. A huge white pony adorned the black carpeted wall behind the band grinding it out on the stage for a crowd of two hundred college boys and hair-flipping co-eds, for 20-somethings from lawyer shops and cement plants, for faces who looked as set in their 30s as Russell, Eric and me. A Black man older than Zane limped past with a cane. We edged our way to a back bar. The sand-haired woman bartender with a tan, a halter top, and a navel ring held up a finger: Wait.
Guitars chorded with a drum flourish to end the song blaring from the stage.
“Thanks a lot!” said the woman bandleader with a slung guitar. A waterfall of black curls tumbled down her ivory face to her black blouse cut low and straining. She wore black jeans and strap-on shoes with thick black heels. “We appreciate you coming out to hear us tonight, hope you like that last one I wrote, it’s called Sex In A Stolen Car.”
A few people clapped.
“We’re gonna take a break now, but we’ll be back with covers of your fav’s and a few of ours we know you’ll love. You better, or you’ll break our hearts.” Waterfall woman’s crimson lips grinned to show she was joking, but the truth slipped out that she was serious. “Remember, like it says on the marquee, we’re Terri and the Runawayz.”
Our bartender leaned over and said: “What can I get you guys?”
My hand warded off her smile: “No booze!”
Zane told her: “I’ll have a beer.”
“Me, too!” said Russell.
“Make it four,” said Hailey. She nodded to pudgy Eric. “Ours are light.”
“OK,” I conceded, “but only one round!”
