by Scott Frank
They all piled into her Honda Fit. Shake sat up front beside her while Truck and Science squeezed into the backseat, Truck looking around and saying, “Nice hoop,” which set him and Science off laughing. Both of them in the backseat just losing it. Completely checking out.
Science could see Laura Klein’s smiling but confused face in the rearview mirror. She looked hurt in a way that made his heart hammer.
She asked, “Where am I going?”
He told her to take the next left.
Truck looked at the back of Shake’s head and said, “My nig, put on some tunes.”
Shake looked at Laura Klein.
Truck hit him in the ear. “You hear me?”
“Motherfucker—”
“Just do it.”
It was Laura Klein who turned on the radio, already tuned to some “urban” station, which made Science and Truck start laughing all over again.
Science, nodding to the beat, said, “Righteous.”
He and Truck bumped fists and sat back as they all headed down Sherman Way, Laura glancing at Science in the mirror every so often. Stupidly looking for help there. Reading him wrong from the minute she sat down at the IHOP.
Well, she’ll see soon enough.
Somewhere near the 118, they passed a block-long building that was once a Lowe’s, but now sat empty, the folks out this way not so much do-it-yourselfers.
“Turn in there.”
“What for?”
Truck’s knife was at her neck. “Cuz I said so, a’ight?”
“What are you doing?”
“Research.”
More laughter from the backseat.
Shake turned around now.
“This ain’t cool,” he said, his voice unsteady now. “You both gotta be trippin’. We could get—”
Science jabbed him hard, felt Shake’s nose collapse under his own stinging knuckles. Shake cupped his face and fell back against the glove compartment as blood now roared through his fingers.
That got Laura Klein screaming.
Truck grabbed her hair. “Turn the motherfucking car,” he said, his voice quiet as he rubbed the blade of the knife against her sweater.
“Please,” Laura Klein was now saying. “You can take my money.”
Science turned to Truck. “Why they all of them think we want their fuckin’ money?”
—
They were parked behind the building, beneath a huge billboard advertising some personal injury lawyer, the sign situated so as to face the eastbound traffic on the 118. Science, standing beside the car after it was all over, Laura Klein’s sweater wrapped around his waist, could see an identical billboard on the other side of the highway, facing the other way. He could hear Shake, inside the car, saying, “Dude, she gotta go to a hospital.”
Science had just wanted to look at her. Wanted her to take off that sweater so that he could really see what she looked like.
“That’s all?” she asked. “Just my sweater and then you’ll let me go.”
“That’s all.”
And so Laura Klein pulled the sweater over her head. Just like that, didn’t look like she hardly even thought about it. She kept the pink bundle in her lap and stared out the window as they all gawked at her.
It wasn’t just the freckles on her chest, but that peach-colored bra that was too much for Science and he lost control pretty much the second he saw it. He hoped Truck didn’t know, was relieved to see that Cuz wasn’t paying attention to him, was too busy leaning forward in the seat, literally breathing down Laura Klein’s neck as he snapped the bra and said, “Take that shit off, too.”
“No.”
It didn’t really matter what she said, it was on, they were all pawing at her before she could react. She tried to open her door but Truck held on to her. Even Shake, the lower half of his face covered in blood from his crushed nose, was turning and reaching across the seat for her.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he cupped one of her breasts.
Laura struggled to get her door open but Truck put an arm around her neck, covered her mouth with one hand, and held her while he reached down and grabbed at her with his other hand. Laura Klein squirmed and kicked at the dash. She turned and Science saw her staring at him over the top of Truck’s filthy hand, the panic right there in her eyes.
Science reached out and touched one of her pale, pink nipples and for the second time in less than five minutes lost control. She was breathing hard and he thought that maybe some part of her was down for all this. He knew that she could read what happened on his face and that only made him more excited. He was reaching down to shove a hand between her legs, Truck’s other hand already there, when he felt her phone vibrate.
“Someone callin’ her.”
Truck reached into her pocket, took out her phone, and held it up for Science to see the screen that now contained Dr. Greg’s name and picture. Science could not believe what he was seeing. He looked at Laura and said, “Dr. Greg’s a black dude?”
They all pounded it out, laughing now, until Science held up his hand, said, “Shut the fuck up,” and answered:
“Laura’s phone,” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Who is this?” Absolutely no light in the voice.
Science said, “We Laura’s technical advisors.”
Truck and Shake found this fucking hilarious. Laura tried to scream but Truck kept his hand there and pulled her head back against the seat.
The voice said, “I’d like to speak to Laura, please.”
Science looked at Laura, her breathing becoming more and more rapid.
“I’m sorry, but she can’t come to the phone right now. We playing a little game with her. But she’ll call you back later.”
He hung up the phone, put it in his own pocket, and then watched as Laura, her eyes wide, began to hyperventilate.
They all froze.
“What the fuck?”
“She fakin’ it,” Truck said, and slapped her on the side of the face. “Cut that shit.”
But she only became more agitated.
Science knew something was wrong. His cousin, Keen, came back from Iraq and would have panic attacks all the time. He looked like Laura did now. Science had heard that the only way to help him was with oxygen tanks and some kind of special dope.
Laura was having trouble catching any air and Shake finally said they had to take her to the hospital. Truck looked at him like he might hit him again, but then bailed out of the car.
Science went after him, but he knew there was no getting him back. He stood there in the parking lot, watching Truck walk at a clip back to the street.
“C’mon, cuz,” Shake said. “We gotta go.”
Science saw Laura Klein’s sweater lying on the ground where it must have fallen from Truck’s lap when he bolted. Science picked it up and wrapped it around his damp jeans.
“Dude. She gotta go to a hospital.”
So the two of them carefully laid her down in the backseat and drove to Valley Presbyterian, keeping to the speed limit, making sure to stop at all the red lights seeing as neither of them had a driver’s license.
At one point along the way, Science looked in the rearview mirror to find Laura Klein still lying down, but now calm and watching him.
“You just stay down.”
She didn’t move, didn’t respond. Just kept looking at him.
“You understand,” he said. “You in bigger trouble than we are, right? You tell anybody about this, they gonna ask, do you know where the fuck you are? Why would you go off in a car fulla niggas? Whatever you say, nobody gonna believe you, right?”
She blinked, so he knew she was hearing him.
“But if pigs do come and knock on our door,” he held up her wallet, open to show her ID, “me and Truck are gonna come to Westwood and knock on your door, feel me?”
Shake turned to look at her. If he apologized again, Science was going to push him out of the moving car. But Shake wisely kept his mouth shut
.
“And just so you know,” Science went on, “if you move to another place, we’ll still find you. Be no thing at all on account of you got a head like fuckin’ Roman candle. You best just consider this an experience for your movie, which I look forward to seeing in the near future.”
And then, for whatever reason, he felt the need to add, “All that shit we gave you at the IHOP, you can have for free.”
They parked at the far edge of the parking lot, then called the ER from a pay phone. Told them someone was dead inside a car parked in space number 44, thinking that would get their attention.
They then watched from across the street as a nurse finally came out of the ER a full fifteen minutes later and found the car. Shake and Science didn’t see what happened next. They went to Wendy’s with the money they took from Laura Klein’s wallet and ate in silence, too tired to talk.
Shake got over Laura Klein pretty much right away, stopped working on his screenplay. Stopped talking about her altogether. “That bitch wasn’t all that,” he said the last time he brought her up. “Shit, she didn’t even know I was too young to take the damn SAT.”
Initially, the plan was to walk into the hospital, find Mr. Freeze, and shoot him with his own gun. But that idea had several obvious drawbacks. Numero uno being that shooting someone in a hospital would be a loud event and once they started shooting, they’d probably never make it back out the door.
Science didn’t mind this outcome as turning off the dude everyone thought was a hero would make him a ghetto star, a real soldier for sure, which is where he wanted to be. He’d go to jail, but he’d ride the beef and continue his gang education there, come out when he was eighteen, most likely a full-on general. From there Science could take the Vineland Boyz from a bunch of wannabe Jay Zs, all of them posing, fake hitting blunts on their YouTube videos, and turn them once more into a real army, take back the trade the fucking Mexicans had grabbed when they weren’t looking.
But Truck was closer to eighteen and not anywhere near down for getting caught on account of he’d most likely do life at San Quentin or Soledad, one of those places. Truck thought they should either strangle the dude with a cord from one of the machines they got in the room or cut his throat, play it by ear.
Things were weird from the get-go. First as they were walking into the hospital, some famous actor dude showed up with all this muscle. Science remembered the guy from the movie Zorro back when he was like three years old, assumed the man was here to visit Mr. Freeze, shake his hand or some bullshit. Science figured they follow him, they find their dude.
All the news guys with the movie star made Truck nervous, but Science thought their presence made it all that much easier. They walk in with the group, but then hide or hang back and wait for everyone to have their visit and leave—“Time for Mr. Freeze to rest”—and then they go in and make the man do just that.
It all began just fine. The movie star at first not so sure about them, but then inviting them onto the elevator with his boys. On the way up, Science heard someone call him “Mr. Mayor” and told him his moms had cancer. Just popped into his head, and the guy was like all of a sudden his boy. They even took a few pix together before they got off the elevator and their plan went to shit.
The instant they got off and started roaming around the corridor, a uniformed cop saw them, asked them what they were doing. Science fed him the cancer mom rap, but a nurse overheard and said the oncology ward was two floors up. This floor was all post-op. Then, as they were walking back to the elevator, they heard that Mr. Freeze had left.
Another cop was giving them a funny look, so they just took off and ran down the stairs, which, weirdly, started swaying the minute they hit them. They had to stop and hang on to the railing until the shaking passed. They then ran back through the lobby and out into the parking lot. And fuck it if in that very moment, they didn’t see Mr. Freeze crossing Sepulveda.
“Is that him?” Truck asked. “He looks different.”
“He’s in different clothes.”
He was walking slow, taking his time. Looked like he was limping. So it was easy to follow him from the other side of the street. He definitely had on different clothes. Science could see even from here that they didn’t fit him right. Fucker must have stole them from somebody. Where was he going? More importantly, who was he?
He was slick, that’s for sure. They followed him into a Big 5, watched as he walked around, putting on clothes from the racks. Watched as he bumped into and easily snaked a wallet from a young white dude waiting in line to pay for a snowboard. Thirty seconds later, they saw him pick up another wallet from a guy in a suit looking up at the mountain bikes hanging from the ceiling. He paid for a jacket and a duffel bag, no one noticing that the clothes he had on were all lifted, the security tags somehow, magically, gone.
He stayed on foot for a mile up Sepulveda, not ever running or trying to hide or ever once even looking back. He made his way east on Victory for another mile or so, before finally stopping in the middle of the parking lot of a Super 8 Motel on Laurel Canyon. He stood there staring at the building for what seemed like a full five minutes, and then went inside the office. They watched from across the street as he checked in, then went into a room on the second floor.
Science turned to Truck, could see that he was staring at the motel, thinking the same thing Science was.
Who the fuck was this guy?
Roy had just walked right on out of the hospital.
He had spent an hour coming up with some elaborate plan of escape when he got up and looked out the door, saw that the cop assigned to “protect” him was standing over at the nurses’ station, all of them singing Happy Birthday.
A few minutes earlier, Roy had pulled the curtain around his bed and checked the plastic bag on the chair containing his clothes. Between the holes and the blood, none of it was wearable. So he stepped out from behind the curtain, looked at the bed next to him. A guy who looked to be near eighty and probably weighed just about the same number was lying there watching television.
Roy hadn’t even realized this guy was in the room with him. He was even more surprised, then, to find a third bed, this one occupied by a dark-skinned man around forty, sound asleep with his hands folded across his chest. Well, one hand anyway. Where the right one was supposed to be was a giant, bandaged stump the size of a football.
Roy found the man’s clothing in a duffel bag in the bathroom and grabbed it, along with some pain meds he saw in a cup, and brought it all back to his bed.
The clothing smelled like gasoline and cut grass, was a little big, but worked well enough for now. The shirt was wet and bloody at the cuff. The undershirt was sweat-stained, but otherwise okay. The man’s boots were at least a size too big, but Roy pulled them on anyway, quickly laced them up, and went out the door.
The first person he saw was the nurse, G. RODRIGUEZ (call me Genie, sweetface), maybe fifty feet down the hall. Roy turned and walked the other way. He made the stairs and started down. He could feel a few stitches ripping as he went, but kept going, reached deep into one of the pockets and found a wallet with some cash and a Discover card.
Enough to get started. By the end of the day he’d have whatever he needed. Clothes. Cash. A place to stay. This wasn’t the first time he had to start from nothing.
—
He picked up the two bangers the minute he stepped out the door into the parking lot. They were on the other side of the street, no doubt thinking Roy hadn’t seen them. It was the pretty one, Science, and the killer. What was his name? Truck. Roy would have to kill him first. Talk to Science about what he did with Roy’s gun. Hopefully he hadn’t tossed it. Roy was pretty sure that this kid would have kept it. He got the feeling he liked it.
Either way, Roy was astounded by this bit of luck. Clearly the two of them wanted to finish what they started the other night. Roy was a witness, after all. And, to be fair, it’s what Roy would have done. To be more fair, it’s what Roy was goin
g to do. They were also witnesses. The little bangers were probably going to get caught. That lady cop would get them talking. And with Martin Shine rotting on the floor a few blocks away, one of the first things they’d talk about is where that old gun came from.
Roy made it in and out of the Big 5 in less than twenty minutes. He and Albert had once strafed a Sears in Kansas City in ten minutes and walked out with a half dozen wallets and two complete wardrobes. But they were both in their twenties at the time and Roy had slowed down some since.
He grabbed a room at the first motel he came to, knowing he wasn’t going to stay anywhere long. He drank about a gallon of water from the tap, then took a shower, redressed the hole in his side, and put on his new clothes. He took the pain pills he’d lifted from the hospital, lay down on the bed, and felt good for the first time in days.
He turned on the TV, watched the news hoping for something on The Kid. He was pitching at home against the Brewers before the team came out to L.A. for a series with the Dodgers. If The Kid shut out Milwaukee, he’d be going for the record here. Roy planned on being at that game, the irony not lost on him that if he hadn’t gotten into this little predicament, he would have already been back in New York and missed it.
But right now Roy was wondering why no one had kicked his door down or made any kind of move.
He got up and looked out the window. He saw the two bangers standing down in the parking lot, shifting from foot to foot, passing a joint back and forth. They knew what Roy was. Maybe not specifically, but they had an idea as to what he might do if given the chance. Roy had been careful to let them see that. Yet there they were, laughing and smoking, right out in the open. Not a care in the world.
Roy thought, No wonder they don’t live long.
—
“I’m thinking this earthquake was like maybe a good thing.”
Science was bent, which always set him philosophizing. Truck let him, content to be just budding out as the sun went down. Gave him time to think on this Mr. Freeze, what he might be up to. He knew Science wanted to lay him down all by himself, but Truck had some concerns. So he had himself a deep drag on the blunt and thought about that while Science went on.
