Going Nowhere Fast

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  "But you've committed a murder. A murder they didn't sanction. Surely they won't continue to protect you after this."

  "You don't think so, huh? Wake up and smell the coffee, Mrs. Loudermilk. The FBI and I made a deal. And if there's one thing the fucking Feds are good for, it's holding up their end of a deal. Any deal. They're sort of like Boy Scouts in that respect. Very loyal. Very dependable." He turned to take a look at the road, and his eyes flew open like they'd seen a ghost: "Look out!"

  Somebody had dropped the jagged remains of a rusted tail pipe in the middle of our lane, and I rolled right over it. I'd had my eyes on Gottifucci instead of where we were going, and I hadn't seen it coming. I tried to steer around it when he screamed, but I knew better than to try too hard; yank the wheel too fast with eight thousand pounds of trailer tied to your flank, and you'll both end up doing more flips across the highway than an Olympic gymnast might do during floor exercises. In the end, all I was able to do was spare Lucille; she straddled the serrated metal snake perfectly and was never touched. But our pickup had taken the twisted metal husk head-on, and lost; the sound of at least one of its tires blowing had been nearly deafening.

  "I oughta kill you for that," Gottifucci snapped as I brought the limping Ford and Lucille to a stop on the highway's shoulder. "I told you to keep an eye on the road!"

  "It was an accident!" I said, watching and waiting for the gun in his hand to fire.

  He didn't say anything for a long time, trying to decide what to do. Finally, he brushed a few wayward strands of hair from his face with his free hand and said, "All right, out. This way." He opened the door on his side to back slowly out of the truck, and I followed after him. Once outside, he pulled me close, stuck the gun up against my hip, and together we surveyed the damage: one flat and shredded tire, passenger side rear.

  "Shit," Gottifucci said.

  "What the hell happened?" Big Joe suddenly demanded. He had thrown Lucille's door open and jumped down out of the trailer, and now he was moving toward us. Bad Dog was right behind him, matching him step for step.

  "Nothing! Get the hell back in there, now!" Gottifucci cried, turning me around so my husband could get a good look at the gun pressed hard against my side.

  "I ran over something in the road and blew a tire, baby, that's all," I said.

  "A tire? Where?"

  "I thought I told you to get back inside!" Gottifucci screamed.

  "On the truck," I said to Joe. "This one over here, in the rear."

  ''I'm gonna give you five seconds, Mr. Loudermilk," Gottifucci said. "One—"

  "Okay, okay," Joe said, holding his hands up in a placating manner. "You don't want that tire changed, fine. State trooper'll be along in a minute or two, you can ask him to do it for you."

  "To hell with that. Your wife'll change it."

  "Oh no I won't," I said. "I can't!"

  "What do you mean, you can't?"

  "She means that in order to change a flat on the rear end of that truck, this trailer's gotta be unhitched first," Joe said. "And she doesn't know the first thing about doing that. Do you, baby?"

  I shook my head.

  "What about him?" Gottifucci asked, referring to Bad Dog.

  Dog shook his head.

  "Look. It's real simple," Joe said. "You want that tire changed, you're gonna have to let me unhitch this trailer. Fast. Otherwise, we're gonna be here awhile. Just asking for company. Is that what you want?"

  Gottifucci fell silent, thinking. I could hear his breathing change rhythm as he watched the cars whiz by us on both sides of the highway—waiting, I supposed, for one of them to be the state trooper sedan that Joe had so deftly placed in his mind.

  "Okay. Go ahead," Gottifucci said in time. "Do what you have to do, and get it over with. But remember one thing: You try anything smart, and your wife is dead. You hear me?"

  Joe nodded his head solemnly. "I hear you."

  As Joe went quickly to work, Bad Dog approached Gottifucci and asked, "Okay if I watch?" He sounded like a six-year-old asking his mother if he could lick the cake spoon.

  "Knock yourself out," Gottifucci said.

  And that was how it went, Joe laboring while the rest of us watched, four actors in a little sideshow playing along the southbound shoulder of Interstate 17. As Bad Dog knelt beside his father, Gottifucci and I stood nearby, dividing our attention between Joe and the flow of traffic that kept threatening to blow us off our feet. We were looking for state trooper patrol cars, though neither one of us wanted to see one—Gottifucci for obvious reasons, and me because I didn't think I'd care for Gottifucci's reaction to one. His gun, though invisible to anyone on the highway, was still being jammed firmly into my side, a constant reminder that death was only as far away as he chose to hold it.

  Fifteen minutes crawled by, and Gottifucci was getting crazy. Big Joe had Lucille unhitched, but he was just now positioning the jack under the rear end of our pickup.

  "Hurry it up!" Gottifucci snapped at him.

  ''I'm doing the best I can," Joe said.

  And then we all heard it: the distinct sound of gravel popping. The four of us turned toward it just in time to see the red Chevy truck slide to a halt along the shoulder of the road, right behind Lucille.

  "Oh my God," I said.

  There was an Airstream trailer hitched to the rear of the Chevy; an old twenty-six-foot International, from the looks of it. Sunlight was flashing off its silver skin like white lightning.

  "Friends of yours?" Gottifucci asked me, as the driver's side door of the Chevy swung open.

  "I don't think so. But it's hard to tell from here."

  "Doesn't matter." He glanced over at Joe and Dog as they stepped up alongside us to see who our visitor was. "You're gonna get rid of 'em. Whoever they are. Fast. Otherwise, it's shoot-'em-up time." He gave them a fresh but discreet look at the gun he had pressed to my back.

  "You don't know what these people are like," I said. "They see another Airstreamer in trouble—"

  It was all I had time to say, for the Chevy's driver, a red-bearded bear of a man in a green plaid shirt and faded denim pants, was suddenly upon us. He didn't look the least bit familiar to me, but he was smiling at all four of us as if we were old friends.

  "Howdy, folks. Havin' a little trouble, are you?"

  I waited to see if Gottifucci wanted to answer that, but he didn't, so I said, "We just had a flat. My husband's taking care of it."

  "I see." He turned to Joe. "Anything I can do to help? The wife an' I are always ready to lend a hand, we see another Airstreamer pulled up lame."

  "No thanks," Joe said, stone-faced and emotionless.

  "You sure? Anything you need, we'd be glad to help. How about some cold drinks for the ladies here? We've got plenty in the truck." He was looking right at Gottifucci and me now, trying to be charming. If he could see through Gottifucci's disguise, his face didn't betray it; if anything, in fact, he looked rather enamored of him.

  "Thank you, no," I said.

  "All right. My name's Rick Glanville, by the way. But my friends call me Rusty." He held out his hand for Joe to shake, and my husband took it grudgingly. "That's my wife, Kitty, in the truck back there. I don't know if you can see her too well from here, though."

  "Look, Mr. Glanville—" I started to say.

  "So. How do you like your Excella? Or is that a stupid question?" Glanville was giving Lucille the once-over, his lust for her written all over his face.

  "It's a load of crap," Big Joe said sharply, and my eyes nearly rolled up into my head.

  "How's that again?" Glanville asked, turning.

  "I said, it's a load of crap. A pile of junk. Worst excuse for a trailer on the road."

  "You mean you got a lemon?"

  "I mean that I should've bought a Winnebago. That's what I mean."

  "A Winnebago?"

  "You heard me. I wouldn't buy another Airstream if my life depended on it."

  Glanville couldn't believe his ears. "Now, wa
itaminute, partner…" he said.

  "Waitaminute, nothin'. They're junk, all of 'em, and anybody dumb enough to own one deserves all the grief they get. Now, if you don't mind, we've got work to do, like my wife said. But thanks for stoppin' by."

  Glanville was furious; not a trace of his down-home good humor was left to be seen on his face. "Okay," he said to Joe, nodding his head up and down. "I don't know what your problem is, buddy, but if that's how you want it, I'm gone. But you better know one little thing before go—" He pointed an angry finger directly at my husband's nose. 'The Wally Byam Caravan Club is gonna hear about this, and when they do, you folks better never, ever let anybody catch you at one of our rallies. You got that?"

  Calm as you please, Joe took three giant steps forward to bring himself within an inch of Glanville's freckled face. "Wally Byam was a punk," he said, poking his right index finger into the large man's chest to accentuate the word "punk."

  Then he ducked.

  The punch Glanville threw with his right hand hit Gottifucci flush on the nose, hard, and Gottifucci had never for a moment seen it coming. Joe had positioned himself perfectly to ensure that he wouldn't. I heard the blow connect, and afterward felt, more than saw, the oddly dressed man behind me crumple to the ground, falling as if someone had tossed him a medicine ball before cutting him down at the knees. Somewhere on the way down, he and his wig parted ways, so that Glanville had a big surprise coming when he peered down at the body to assess the damage he had done.

  "Aw, hell," was all he said.

  12

  "We let things get out of control. I'm sorry," Agent Medavoy said.

  It wasn't the first time he had said it. Ever since his arrival at the tiny sheriff's office in Bumble Bee, Arizona, where we had all been taken to issue our statements, he had been offering the same apology. To me, to Joe, even to Bad Dog. It seemed genuine enough, but that didn't mean it was worth anything; maybe a cup of coffee, at the most.

  Gottifucci had implied that the FBI was committed to covering for him, no matter how many bodies he piled up in the interests of "self-preservation," but Medavoy denied it. He said the Bureau would have stepped in themselves to save us from Gottifucci had they only known where to find him. I wanted to believe that, but I wasn't sure I could.

  "We could have been killed," I'd say to Medavoy.

  "Yes ma'am," he'd say to me. "But if you'd been honest with us…"

  And so it went, around and around and around. The truth was, we had all messed up, playing our games of secrets and lies, and it was only by the grace of God that our foolishness had not resulted in anyone's untimely demise. Or incarceration. We all knew good and well that Medavoy had the option of tossing us in jail and throwing away the key, so numerous were the charges he could have leveled against us, but that would have made for a very noisy end to the Gottifucci episode, from his vantage point, and noise was not generally what the FBI liked best. What they liked was quiet, especially when the alternative would almost certainly bring them considerable public embarrassment. It was no wonder, then, that Medavoy ultimately offered us a deal that we anxiously accepted: our silence for his forgiveness.

  Freedom of expression wasn't much to give up when you were just glad to be alive, and we were only alive, Bad Dog and I knew, because of Big Joe. To save our bacon, he had gone the extra mile, saying terrible, unthinkable things about his beloved Airstream brand so that a prideful Rusty Glanville might take a poke at him. It had been quick thinking on Joe's part, and everyone had told him so, even Danny Gottifucci before they led him away. Joe didn't want to hear it, but I told him he had only proved all over again that he still had it, that "Inspector Loudermilk" magic. Once a cop, always a cop, is the way Bad Dog put it.

  Joe told him to shut up.

  We spent that Saturday night at a Comfort Inn in Phoenix, but not before Joe and Rusty Glanville had swapped a few war stories over a six-pack of beer and threatened to be friends for life. Two men with absolutely nothing in common save for their unyielding infatuation with Airstreams. Glanville's wife, Kitty, and I both knew that would be more than enough to bond them together forever; we'd each seen it happen before, time and time again. Kitty said if Churchill and Hitler had owned Airstreams, there would have never been a Second World War. I told her I didn't doubt it for a minute.

  I put Joe to bed early that night, and tried to do the same for myself, but sleep just wouldn't find me. Too much had happened too fast over the last five days, and now that it was over, closing my eyes only brought it all rushing back to me, one bad scene after another. Giving up somewhere shortly after nine, I left the bedroom to see if Dog had any interest in playing a few games of gin rummy, but he was gone. The foldout bed we had left him in at the front of our hotel room was empty; the TV was on, but the sound had been muted.

  Our last night together, and he was out fooling around.

  At least, that was my first thought, until my maternal instincts took over and I began to worry about him in earnest. Not for his safety, mind you, but for his emotional well-being. His soul, his spirit. His heart.

  You'd have to be a mother to understand.

  Mothers know things. They can sense things. And nine times out of ten, they can find their missing children in the first place they look, just as I found my son less than a half hour later: out in the hotel parking lot, inside Lucille. Asleep.

  "How'd you know I was out here?" he asked me when I stirred him awake. He'd been stretched out on our bed, shoes all over the bedspread.

  Rather than work the Powers of Mom angle on him, I just said, "Your father's keys were missing."

  "Oh." He rubbed his eyes with both hands.

  "Theodore, what are you doing out here?"

  "I don't know." He shrugged. "I just… wanted to spend a little time in here, I guess. Before I leave, I mean." He looked up into my face, searching for the right words. "It's like, this is your home now, Moms. Right? This is my parents' home. And…" He shrugged again. "It feels good to be here, that's all. It feels good. So, I thought I'd hang out a little, while I could. While there's still time."

  He threw himself into my arms. "I love you, Moms. Pops too."

  It was one of those moments your kids count on to purchase them a little absolution. They think they can bribe you with five minutes of genuine emotion, one thin little sliver of remorse and/or gratitude, and all the grief they've ever laid at your doorstep will be erased from the ledger like a mere accountant's error. They think if they show you the babies you once held in your arms for just one fleeting moment, you'll forget what those babies have become and lay down your life for them, again and again and again.

  They are so right.

  "We love you, too, Theodore," I said.

  And then we played some cards.

  * * * *

  The next day, Sunday, we didn't leave our room to take Dog to the Greyhound station until well after checkout time. I'll bet you'd never guess why.

  Final score: Los Angeles Raiders 24, Pittsburgh Steelers 13. Dozer Meadows didn't play, as expected, but he could be seen on TV waving a towel on the Raider sideline every time the Silver and Black did something right, which was apparently often.

  Yeah, I know, girls. I was thinking the same thing the entire game.

  Jeez Looweez.

  GAR ANTHONY HAYWOOD is the Shamus and Anthony Award-winning author of twelve crime novels. Haywood's first of six mysteries featuring African-American private investigator Aaron Gunner, FEAR OF THE DARK, won the Private Eye Writers of America's Shamus award for Best First Novel of 1989, and his short fiction has been included in the Best American Mystery Stories anthologies. Booklist has called him "a writer who has always belonged in the upper echelon of American crime fiction."

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Cha
pter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author