The White Van

by Patrick Hoffman

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” said Benya.

  “Wait, she’ll come out.”

  “We need to go right now,” said Benya.

  “Wait.”

  The door of the bank crashed open and a uniformed security guard ran out. Benya thought the guard was coming for them. He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal and took off down Geary. “No!” screamed Sophia, but it was too late.

  “Turn right,” said Sophia. “Turn right and go around.”

  Benya was losing it. He turned right. “Use your signal,” said Sophia. “Drive normal, my God, slow down.”

  Sophia called Georgy on the phone. She was yelling at him in Russian, telling him to stay on her; that they couldn’t help it; that the cops were coming.

  Benya turned right again onto Euclid. There were people everywhere, heads were turning. “Drive normal,” Sophia said again. “Keep going. Go one more block, up there, to that street, Jordan, go right. Go back around. We’re dead,” she said in English. “We’re fucking dead.”

  They turned back onto Geary. Benya heard sirens wailing, but he couldn’t see them yet.

  He drove past the bank. He couldn’t stop. “Keep going,” said Sophia. She was talking on the phone with Georgy. “She’s up there, keep going,” she said. Benya stole a look in the rearview mirror at Sophia sitting in the seat behind him; she seemed smaller now, she seemed stunned and pale.

  Benya drove west down Geary. He saw the blue and red pops of sirens coming at him. He didn’t know what to do. “Drive,” said Sophia. Police cars were coming from all different directions. “Drive. Georgy’s on her. Get us out of here, you idiot.”

  Benya turned left. Cars slammed on their brakes and honked at him. A taxi driver flipped him off. Suddenly the street became clear of traffic, people, and cops. “Where should I go?”

  “Just keep moving. Drive slow. He’ll kill us.”

  Benya didn’t know who she was referring to. He was off Geary and away from the bank; for the moment that allowed him to breathe. Would his debt be forgiven, he wondered, if Emily escaped with the money?

  Sophia directed him into Golden Gate Park. She was hiding the computer under the backseat. “Take your hat off!” she yelled at him. Benya took the hat and glasses and threw them out of his window. “Why? Why? Why?” she repeated.

  Her phone rang.

  “Where?” she said into the phone. “No. Where? We’ll be right there.” She hung up. “He lost her,” she said to Benya. She seemed to almost have a smile on her lips. “Go that way.” She pointed Benya straight ahead. “Follow the road out of the park.”

  They followed Oak to Divisadero and then headed back to Geary; this put them a mile and a half from the bank. Benya looked at the other cars, at the people walking on the street; he looked at the bike riders and marveled at how free they were, how untroubled the rest of the world was.

  Georgy stood on the corner waiting for them. Before he got into the van he went to the front and back and removed the license plates. There were different plates underneath.

  “What happened?” asked Sophia when he got in. She seemed hysterical.

  “She got on the bus. It left before I could get on. I went to my car, but there were too many police. She’s on the bus, unconscious by now,” said Georgy. It was the most Benya had ever heard him say. Benya repressed a smile. Fuck these people, he thought. I’ll get a regular job and pay them back. This is absurd.

  “It’s your fault,” Georgy said quietly.

  “What do we do?” asked Sophia.

  “We wait for the bus to turn around and come back. She’s not going anywhere.”

  “We’ll go find it,” said Sophia.

  “There are hundreds of buses out there. She’ll come to us,” said Georgy.

  They parked at Geary and Fillmore. They were only twenty city blocks from the bank.

  “We should lose the van,” said Benya.

  “Don’t worry about the van,” said Georgy. “Worry about the girl and the money. Throw these into the trash,” he said to Benya, holding the two license plates out.

  They waited for the 38 Geary bus headed back downtown. Georgy figured it wouldn’t take more than thirty minutes for the bus to come back around.

  Benya had fallen asleep in the back of the van. He dreamed that Mr. Huang was trying to sell him a shipment of gum. In the dream he sampled the gum, and then tried to pull it out of his mouth, but it wouldn’t come out; there was too much of it. Mr. Huang stared at him like he was concerned and patted him on his back.

  “Wake up, dear,” said Sophia, patting him on the same part of his back. It was dark outside, and quiet and peaceful. Benya was so tired. He sat up.

  “Did he find her?”

  “No,” said Sophia. “We need you to drive to the beach.”

  Benya rolled his neck to stretch and stepped hunched over to the front of the van. Georgy was already sitting silently in the middle seat. Sophia got out the side door and went into the front passenger seat. The dome light hurt Benya’s eyes.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Benya. He felt older.

  “Just drive out to the beach,” said Georgy, pointing west.

  “Can you find her?” asked Benya.

  “We’ll find her,” said Sophia. “Don’t worry, just drive.”

  Everyone was calm. They made their way to Fulton and headed for the ocean. Traffic was light. Benya watched the park on his left as he drove. He didn’t like how quiet they were being, but he found himself unable to speak. His head hurt. He wanted water.

  “Where we going?” he asked in Russian.

  “We’re meeting someone,” said Georgy. “Don’t worry.”

  When they reached the Great Highway, Georgy leaned forward and pointed them into the long parking lot that borders Ocean Beach. There were a few scattered cars, but not many. Georgy directed him down the lot. Finally he said, “Up there, right there,” and pointed to a spot.

  Benya parked. He turned the engine off. The ocean, black in the distance and white where the waves were breaking, opened out like a valley. The moon was full and lit the beach. Wind blew in from the west. Benya wanted to look back at Georgy, but he was suddenly very scared. Sophia was sitting stone-faced in the passenger seat. She looked apoplectic.

  Benya sat up taller so he could see in the rearview mirror. Georgy had turned in his seat, and was looking back at the road behind them. There were cars passing. Benya’s eyes went back to the black ocean. A great sadness passed through his mind.

  Georgy moved hard from the back and dropped a leather belt over Benya’s head and around his neck. He pulled with all his force, leaning into the back of the driver’s seat.

  It took Benya a second to react. His knees hit the steering wheel. He tried to jam his fingers between the belt and his neck, but he couldn’t get any leverage. Georgy was pulling so hard he was grunting. Sophia jumped out of the van and ran away. Benya managed to open his own door, but he couldn’t move or call out. He waved his arm around feebly. He found the horn and pressed it. The noise blared. He felt like they were at a standstill, that surely Georgy would release him now. Georgy pulled harder. Benya’s vision started to blur. The grating noise in his ears grew to a loud hum. He punched backward at Georgy, but with no effect. His last thoughts before he died were of Emily and how small the van was.

  PART II

  4

  Emily woke up at dawn, freezing cold. She had no idea where she was. She saw wet leaves and dirt. Her head felt like it had been smashed with a metal pipe. She had experienced many bad mornings in her life, but this was the worst.

  She was in the woods. Dirt and woods and trees. The cold was painful, like cuts and burns. Every inch of her body hurt. She knew she was outdoors, but she didn’t know where. Her mind turned over images, trying to straighten things out; she tried to trace the night. How the fuck did I end up here? The Russian popped into her mind and stayed there like a picture. She remembered his face, she remembered him looking at her. And then
there was more.

  The hotel, the van, the wig, the redhead, the guard, the cops, the customers; all of these images slowly rolled through her mind. She didn’t feel panic yet, just guilt. She felt guilt inside her like she was filled with black tar. She was swimming in it. What have I done? She had pointed a gun, she’d stolen, she’d yelled—she had done all these things, including the drugs: the crack, the booze and the pills (what were the pills?). She had been made into a slave. She cursed herself in her head until the pain became overwhelming, at which point she cried. Her head pounded; her hands ached with cold. For a few seconds she sobbed into the side of the canvas bag, and then she realized what it was. Her chest tightened with panic. She opened the top of the bag with her cold fingers. It was like a postman’s sack: it had a tie on the top that cinched through five holes to keep it closed. She pulled the bag open. There were stacks of bundled money: hundred-dollar bills. She stopped crying.

  She got onto her knees and threw up violently. Where am I? She was deep in the bushes. Everything around her was still. The sky was beginning to turn a lighter shade of gray, but it looked green. The streetlights made orange circles in the sky. Her head hurt. She was dying of thirst. Her mouth tasted like battery acid.

  She patted the bag with her hand to get a sense of the size of it: it was large and full. Fuck me. Her face was bunched up in pain; she felt like she had overdosed. It hurt to breathe.

  There was another bag handcuffed to her left hand. She fumbled it open with her cold fingers and saw a black wig; under the wig she saw the bomb and the gun. The bomb was blinking red-green. She thought she could hear it ticking. Waves of fear washed through her. She tried to shake the bomb out of the bag, but it wouldn’t come out. She put her finger on the wires and was about to pull them, until she became paralyzed by the idea of the bomb exploding. She took the gun in her right hand and pulled the handcuff tight, laid the bag down on the ground so the chain was resting on the dirt, put the gun to the chain, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing. The safety was on. She switched it off and squeezed the trigger again. The gun fired, and her hand jerked back. She hadn’t thought about the noise. She held her hand up and the bag was still attached. She had missed. She repeated these actions again. This time she hit the chain, damaging but not breaking it. She was able to work it back and forth until it broke completely, leaving her with the metal bracelet of the handcuff and a few links hanging from her wrist. Her ears rang from the gunshots. She stumbled away from the bomb and the bag, wondering if she was going to die from the pain in her head.

  She hurt everywhere. She was covered in dirt and leaves; her clothes were wet. What fucking clothes am I wearing? Her memory was murky. Her stomach felt torn open, her legs hurt. With her hand holding the gun in place, she picked up the bag of money and limped out of the bushes toward the street.

  She walked along Clement Street toward downtown with the bag slung over her shoulder. Each step was a challenge. The park, where she’d fallen unconscious, was on her left; there were mansion-looking houses on the right. She had never been in this neighborhood. She wasn’t even sure she was in San Francisco. A man jogged past without looking at her. She felt like she looked homeless, like her face had finally become homeless looking. She couldn’t close her mouth. A childhood memory of three ugly boys yelling poor, poor, poor played through her mind.

  A few minutes earlier a DeSoto cab had driven past her and now it came back on its way downtown. She stood in the road waving at it. The driver squinted at her and pulled up. The sun had risen.

  “Where you going?” asked the driver, looking at her like he couldn’t decide if he should take her.

  “Take me to a hotel on Lombard,” she said. She needed to sleep some more. She needed to sleep and hide. She needed to die from her pain.

  The driver took her. He headed over to California Street. She looked at the banks as they passed by, a new kind of dread growing in her. The radio tortured her.

  The driver cut through the Presidio and took her to a nondescript motel. She squinted at it, then she bent over the bag and fished out a hundred dollars for the driver and two hundred for the motel. The driver sucked on his teeth and scrutinized the money. He gave her the change. It looked like he was trying to memorize her face.

  An Indian manager checked her in at the front desk. He didn’t seem to like her. He was hard of hearing and leaned in when she spoke, but away when she didn’t. She must have looked poor.

  The hotel room was plain, the walls were white, the carpet was blue, and the place smelled vaguely of disinfectant, cigarette smoke, and cinnamon spray. It wasn’t as nice as the one the Russians had used, but it was nicer than the one she lived in.

  She drank water straight from the tap in the bathroom and then lay down on the bed for ten minutes. A million voices spoke in her head; images came flying in her mind. Then she fell back asleep for another fourteen hours, waking only once to go through the money looking for GPS devices.

  When she woke up again it was dark outside. The pain in her head and in her body had gone down, but she still felt miserable. The sound of cars driving by hummed in the room. There was a high-pitched noise, but she couldn’t tell if it was electronic or imaginary.

  She made sure the blinds were closed and not see-through, then double-checked the lock on the door. She strained to listen for footsteps, but she could only hear the cars and the blood in her head. The money was under the bed; she had to lower herself down to the floor like an old woman to pull it out. She dumped the bag on the table.

  Thick stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She had never seen anything like it. It was like the movies. She counted it, then put it back in the bag and hid the bag under the bed: $882,600.

  After an hour she brought the bag with her into the bathroom and took a shower. Afterward she looked at herself in the mirror. Her head hurt. Her back hurt. Her gums hurt. Her mind was a train filled with bad memories: beatings, fights, and loneliness.

  The next five days were similar to her days at the hotel with the Russians, except instead of being drugged and brainwashed, she detoxed. She began to feel somewhat normal.

  She slept fifteen, sixteen hours a day. Each day the same nervous boy came and delivered food from the Dragon Sky restaurant. On the third day she gave him a twenty-dollar tip to go and get her some candy. He brought her bags of it. She drank water and slept. She stayed in bed and watched TV and ate candy.

  She thought about her life. She thought about being a child. She had grown up in Sacramento. Her birth mother had been a heroin addict. She had never known her father. She didn’t have any sisters or brothers. Her mother died when she was only six years old. She had been raised by a foster mother, a woman named Stacey, who had been a good foster mom; Emily knew she had been lucky that way, but Stacey had died of breast cancer eight years ago, and Emily had never felt any connection to Stacey’s husband. There were other foster kids in the house, sometimes as many as five at a time, but Emily didn’t feel particularly close to any of them. Not close enough to call and explain her current situation. In terms of family, she was alone.

  Emily tried to make sense of her time as a teenager. While she lay there in her hotel room, she tried to look over her years and come to an understanding of how she had ended up on drugs, how she had ended up in the Tenderloin, how she had ended up ripping and roaring all the time. She couldn’t find an answer. The feeling of being an outsider was all she could recall. The only feeling she could remember when she looked back at her childhood was pain mixed with boredom.

  She found drugs in middle school. First, just alcohol and weed, then mushrooms, acid, ecstasy, and by fifteen she was using heroin and crystal meth. The drugs helped her deal with the pain. By using drugs she made friends. Sacramento was a good place to be a drug-using teenager. She dropped out of high school her junior year. There was nothing there for her. She got a job at a 7-Eleven. She met a boy named Malik, and, when she was nineteen, they moved to San Francisco. He was the first of a string of boyf
riends who tried to pimp her out, but she didn’t go for it. She’d been in the Tenderloin ever since then. She moved from house to house, boyfriend to boyfriend, scam to scam. She joined sober programs and dropped out. She’d get arrested for petty charges, and would spend a few weeks in jail. Her entire existence had become centered around trying to get high, but as she lay in that hotel room, her mind looped through random memories: she used to go to the library in Sacramento and read horror stories; she used to draw embarrassing fashion sketches in a notebook; her friends once surprised her with a birthday cake; she had been in love with a girl named Astra; Astra had a dog that wore a handkerchief around his neck; Emily wanted the three of them to run away, but they never did.

  All these memories didn’t help her with her current problem. Emily dialed Pierre’s number every day from the phone in her hotel room. Each time a recording said: Metro PCS. The customer you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please try your call again later.

  She didn’t know why she was calling him. She told herself she was through with him. He was violent and vicious and selfish. He was a bad man. But at least he knew her. He knew who she was.

  She tried to make sense of the Russians. They had used her, that much was clear. She decided they had probably planned on either killing her or simply dropping her off unconscious on some street corner. They probably would have pushed her out of the van while it was moving. She figured she’d been given just enough drugs to get her through the bank, and then what? Did they want her to overdose? Had they wanted to kill her? She wasn’t sure. She was anxious; every little noise made her sit stone still and stare at the door like a mouse.