For whatever reason, that only makes me want her more.
Chapter Nine
The Girl from [who drove to] the Wrong Side of the Tracks
Kate
It’s not the easiest thing in the world to admit, but my parents were right about one thing: something has been changing in me.
When I’m at work, I don’t just quietly make my way from one place to another, dropping what I’m doing whenever someone wants me to do them a favor anymore. I’m still a little ways from full-on assertive, but it feels good to feel confident about myself for once.
Over the last few days, I haven’t seen too much of Eli. Every chance I get, I’ve been heading out to Ghost Town to practice taking corners.
There’s a rattling sound that’s developed since I went over the curb the last time, and I’m pretty sure my power steering is starting to go. Good thing I have a mechanic for a boyfriend.
I’ll give him a call in a little while, but for now, I’ve got an hour before I have to get to work.
If anyone saw me out here, I doubt they’d take me seriously. After all, I am a twenty-year-old candy striper racing around a deserted part of town in a completely unmodified economy car at nine o’clock in the morning.
I really couldn’t care less.
There’s freedom in this. It’s not a chaotic freedom, though. It’s incredibly structured. There is chaos there, but with the right approach, it can be more or less negated.
I’m still in town at the moment, so for now, I keep my speed within the limit. I’m the most courteous driver on the road, and that just makes what’s coming that much sweeter.
When I finally reach the edge of town, I keep my speed conservative until the car behind me turns off and, before they’ve completed the turn, I’m passing fifty on the thirty-mile-per-hour street.
A few seconds later, I’m pushing seventy-five, Ghost Town growing ever larger as I’m driving. By the time I get to Ghost Town proper, I’m keeping steady at ninety.
I’m just beginning to ease off the throttle when an unexpected sound jolts me out of my senses.
It’s a siren.
“Oh no,” I mutter, looking in the rearview mirror at the police cruiser directly behind me. “Oh no, oh no,” I repeat. I got so caught up in the thrill, I forgot to watch for cops.
There’s an instant there where I’m looking down at my speedometer and then looking over what I can see of Ghost Town. In that moment, I’m even checking for gaps in the fences for me to get through.
I’m already doing ninety. How long is he going to keep up with me after I start ducking in and out of warehouses and parking lots?
That instant passes in, well, an instant, though and I press down on the brake pedal, easing the car all the way from ninety to zero. I put the car in park.
I’m expecting the usual slow walk up, but as soon as the officer’s car is stopped behind me, he’s out with his gun drawn, using his car door as a shield, shouting, “Turn the car off and toss your keys out the window! Do it now!”
Oh my God.
“Do it now!” he shouts again.
I roll down the window and then turn the car off, throwing the keys out the window as instructed, just hoping the officer behind me has decent self-control.
“Put your hands out the window where I can see them!” the officer shouts. “Do not move!”
I put my hands out the window, wondering if I should be opening the door and getting on my knees or something, but the officer makes no further demands as he slowly walks along the side of my car to just behind my door.
His gun is still on me.
I’m not generally the type to cry in front of police, not that I would have had much opportunity to, but looking into that black circle I can’t control it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing going ninety down my streets?” the officer asks.
“I’m not armed,” I tell him. “I’m cooperating. Could you please lower the gun?”
The officer begins to shake his head, but I see his eyes drop down to look at my hands. They’re trembling. Tears are still streaming down my cheeks, no matter how hard I try to stop them.
Stoicism isn’t an option.
“Keep your hands exactly where they are,” he says. “I’m going to open this door and you’re going to get out of the car slowly.”
“What about my seatbelt?” I ask. It sounds like a stupid question, but there’s that gun. I do not want a misunderstanding right now.
He sighs. “Slowly, with one hand, unbuckle your seatbelt. Just remember, it’s going to take me a lot less time to squeeze this trigger than it would take you to try to draw on me.”
“I’m unarmed,” I tell him again. “I’m reaching over to undo my seatbelt.”
Very slowly, keeping my hand in the officer’s line of sight as much as possible, I reach over and press the button unlatching the seatbelt. I slowly return my hand to join the other.
“Keep your hands where they are,” he says.
I do.
He opens the door, and I stay as still as possible until he instructs me to step out of the car, “Nice and slow.”
With my hands still up I climb out of the car. As soon as both my feet are on the ground, the officer has me turned around and pressed up against the side of my car.
“Do you have anything in your pockets or on your person that I should know about? Weapons, drugs, needles, anything that could potentially be a threat?”
“No,” I answer, trying to breathe evenly. It’s barely a relief when the officer returns his gun to his holster.
He’s patting me down, telling me, “Spread your legs a little farther. Hands stretched out to the side.”
I follow every instruction as he finishes frisking me. That’s something I was hoping wouldn’t ever be crossed off of my bucket list.
“Arms down, but keep them where I can see them.” He grabs my shoulder and spins me back around to face him.
I’m still shaking, glancing back and forth between his gun and his eyes.
“What are you doing out here doing fifty-five over the limit? And don’t tell me you just lost track of your speed,” he demands.
I’m really trying to answer, but I’m shaken up to the point I can’t think straight. By the time I think I’ve got some sort of answer, it evaporates again.
The officer’s look softens. “Do you know why we have speed limits?”
“To lower the odds of people getting hurt,” I tell him.
He nods. “That’s right,” he says. “So how is it you know that and you just decided to ignore it?”
“I was out here alone,” I tell him, “or at least, I thought I was alone out here. I’m not saying I should have done it, but I wasn’t trying to put anyone in any kind of risk.”
The officer crosses his arms. “You were putting yourself at risk,” he says. “Why would you come out here? Were you specifically coming here to race over my streets or what?”
With the gun back in his holster, I’m a bit more comfortable, but not much.
“I just-” I stammer.
He sighs. “It’s all right,” he says. “Take your time.”
I take a breath. “I guess I just wanted to know what it felt like to be free,” I tell him. I’m laying it on thick, but I really don’t want to go to jail and I’m pretty sure milking my initial reaction is the only way that’s ever going to happen.
The officer winces a little at my words, but he commands for me to, “Turn around.”
I do.
“Put your hands behind your back,” he says.
I’m being arrested. I am actually being arrested.
He slips the cuffs on me tight enough I’m asking him if my hands are blue before I turn back around again.
“They’re not that tight,” he says without checking. With that, he leads me back to his car, opens his back seat and tells me, “Watch your head,” as he puts me in the backseat of his squad car and closes the door.
He
doesn’t get right in the driver’s seat, though. He goes back out into the street and collects my car keys before coming back to his car.
He gets in the front and we take off, leaving my car unlocked in the middle of Ghost Town. I just hope none of Eli’s racing friends are into stealing cars.
My tears have dried, and I’m looking out my window, my forehead pressed against the glass.
I’m actually going to jail.
“What made you think that cruising around at almost three times the posted limit is the only way you can feel free?”
Suddenly the excuse seems just silly.
“I don’t know,” I tell him.
“What you were doing was extremely dangerous,” the officer says. “I know it can be a rush going faster than you’re supposed to, but if you’d have seen the things I’ve seen during my career, you wouldn’t be quite so eager to put your foot down.”
“Yeah,” I answer blankly, still looking out the window.
“I know you don’t want to be lectured, but you could have killed yourself out there,” he says. “If you’d gotten into a crash, even a non-lethal one, and I hadn’t been around to pick you up, who knows how long you would have been there waiting to be rescued.”
“I know,” I tell him.
It’s more an intellectual thing than it is anything I’m particularly tempted to act on, but I’ve seen what can happen to people who get in car crashes, too. I know they don’t all come out of it as well as Mick.
I know a lot of people don’t come out of it at all.
Isn’t that kind of the point of the whole thing, though? If there’s no risk, where’s the rush? Where’s the reward?
“I don’t want to see you get hurt,” he says.
“I know,” I tell him.
He looks in his rearview mirror and adjusts it so I can see his eyes in the glass. He says, “So what are you doing?”
“Sir,” I tell him, “I honestly don’t have a good answer for you. I know what I did was stupid and reckless, and I know it was against the law.”
“So,” he repeats, “what are you doing?” He adds, “I take it you knew all this before I pulled you over and you still did it, anyway.”
Frankly, I’m already starting to get a little sick of talking about it. I know the officer is only doing his job. If anything, he’s going a bit out of his way to show concern.
Still, though, I’m handcuffed in the back of his car and he’s taking me to jail. There’s not much he could say that hasn’t already gone through my head.
“Are you from here in town?” he asks.
“Yep,” I answer blankly.
“Cheer up,” he says. “You made a mistake, now you’ve got to take responsibility for that mistake. Once that’s over and done with, you’re free to make the changes you need to make to ensure you don’t end up where you are right now again.” He waits a moment, I can only assume to confirm I’ve had time to process what he’s telling me. “This isn’t something that’ll ruin your life unless you go right back out there and let it,” he says.
We finally pull up to the jail and the officer pulls into a long garage.
He stops the car and gets out, opening my door and saying, “Watch your head on the way out.”
I keep my head down and he helps me out of the backseat. There’s no reason not to cooperate.
“We’re going to get you processed in and then maybe you can take a look at bail,” the officer says. “You know, see if you can get out of here today. You’ll still have to show up for court and it’s probably going to cost a pretty penny, but this doesn’t have to be the last thing you do today.”
He’s being really nice. I recognize that. The fact of the matter is, though, that I work a job that doesn’t pay me. What money I do have is handed down by the parents as allowance, and I doubt my bail is going to be that low.
The officer takes me into the back of the jail, and everything—floors, walls, ceiling, seating—is concrete and metal.
We reach a long, rectangular island with a counter along the edges and multiple officers stationed at it, looking through computers and processing people in and out of the jail.
The officer leaves me there, but he unlocks and removes the handcuffs before he goes.
I’m rubbing my wrists as another officer calls me over, saying, “Name?”
We go through all of my personal information, right down to political and sexual preferences—though my personal favorite is when they ask me if I have to register any part of my body as a deadly weapon. I really, really don’t, but it’s a great question anyway.
While I’m waiting on a slab of metal bolted into a slab of concrete, I try to think how I’m going to get out of this without Mom or Dad ever finding out. I have a feeling I wouldn’t have a car very much longer, and that’s a bit of a problem for me.
“Chavez!” one of the officers calls. I get up and walk over to him.
“Give me your right hand,” he says.
I do and he goes through, pressing my thumbs and fingers onto a touch pad which captures and stores my fingerprints. I’m actually starting to feel a little bad ass when the officer tells me to go stand against one wall.
It’s a wall with a lot of horizontal lines, and there are numbers relating to height off to the side. Fingerprints are one thing, but they’re actually taking a mugshot of me.
I’m not going to lie: I’m more than a little scared right now.
They flash a picture of me facing forward, then one of me facing to the side and then the officer tells me to go back and wait on the bench again.
On my way, I ask him if he knows how much my bail is going to be.
“I’ll have to check,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s going to be all that much. You weren’t racing anyone and you didn’t hit anything. You know what would have been even less expensive, though?”
I could do without the condescension. I’ll get plenty of that if I have to call my parents to bail me out of here.
“Not speeding and getting arrested in the first place?” I ask.
“That’s right,” the officer says and heads up to the counter. He’s talking with another officer for a moment and then he comes back, saying, “$1,000 cash or bond. You’ve got a charge for reckless driving, one for speeding, one for improper lane change, one for an illegal display of your vehicle’s power, one for—”
“Hold on,” I tell him. “I was speeding and nobody got hurt. I understand you’ve got to charge me, and I understand that you had to arrest me. Why, though, are you reading a list of charges longer than what they had on John Gotti?”
“If it makes you feel any better,” the officer says, “I’m pretty sure his charges would have been a lot more severe.” He cackles like a hyena and walks off.
$1,000. I know in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a prohibitive amount of money, but it’s a lot more than I have on me.
I just sit here on this bench, but after a little while, they decide it’s somehow important for them to move me into a holding cell where I sit on a similar bench, only I’m now alone in the locked cell.
Maybe I’m not cut out for this stuff. I still think pulling over was the smart thing for me in that moment, but in the end, I’m not sure how great a difference that actually made.
I know I’m just feeling sorry for myself, but this is the way it always goes with me. Everyone else does something and gets away with it. Then I give it a shot and I’m immediately busted.
Obviously, I wasn’t keeping my eyes open the way Eli told me to, but what are the chances I’d get picked up so soon?
The metal door to my holding cell buzzes loudly and unlatches. The door opens.
“Chavez, you made bail,” a blonde officer tells me.
“What?”
“Come on,” she says. “You’re outta here. Watch your speed and show up for court.”
I nod and get to my feet, rubbing my arms from the pervasive cold of the building. The adrenaline’s doing a bette
r job, though.
The only people I know who’d be connected enough to know I’m in here are Mom and Dad. Every election cycle, they hold at least one fundraiser for the mayor. There’s no other way.
I follow the blonde officer out of the cell and down a hallway. We get to a big metal door and she hold up her id badge to it, unlocking it.
We’re in a little airlock-like space and she opens the next door, saying, “I hope you learned something. Get out of here.”
My pulse is thick in my veins as I take a step forward and then another. When I come up far enough to see Eli waiting for me, I run over to him, throwing my arms around his neck and repeating the words, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
He embraces me, one hand cradling the back of my head. He says, “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Chapter Ten
Dynamics of Power
Eli
“Hey, could you pass me that flathead?” Mick asks, holding his hand out from under the hood of my Galaxie we’re trying to get running again.
I hand him the screwdriver and lean against the car, saying, “I still can’t believe you lost your first race.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to talk about it?”
“I’d imagine quite a few,” I answer. “Did you even place?”
“I came in second, thank you very much,” Mick says. “Could you pass me the wrench?”
I pass him a crescent wrench and continue, saying, “How far off the lead car?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. “Why are you even here right now? You’re not scheduled.”
“I thought I’d come in and mock you while also being helpful around the shop,” I tell him. “So, are we talking you got beat by a few car lengths, or is it more like you may as well have stopped halfway through because they’d already finished?”
“I don’t know, man,” he says, his voice sharpening. “It was probably somewhere in between.”
“That’s embarrassing.”
“Pass me the aluminum cylinder, would you?”
I walk over to the shop’s mini-fridge and pull out a soda, then hand it to Mick.
Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) Page 11
