by Mike Cooper
I parked to one side. Dave came out from the shop, a sponge in one hand.
“Hiya, Silas!”
“Hey.”
Funny thing—he looked less like me every time I saw his face. Increasingly I saw the individual personality engraved there: the laugh lines and a crease above his nose and a faint scar on one cheekbone.
“Putting a shine on the Charger,” he said. “Don’t mind if I finish up, do you? I need to get the wax on.”
“Want help?”
“No! No, that’s okay.”
The hood was closed today, whatever tuning he’d done yesterday complete. Swirls of light-colored wax covered most of the car’s exterior, everything except the driver’s-side panels. Dave knelt, dipped the sponge in a bucket of water, then the can, and gently wiped more on.
“I like the old-fashioned paint,” he said. “There’s a shop over in Uniontown did this for me. But it needs waxing regular.”
I remembered buffing my folks’ car in high school—Saturday afternoon, warm in the bright sun, baseball on the radio. For a year or two there I cared a lot about what I drove and how I looked in it.
Bouncing around in Humvees and MRAPs, the vehicles constantly getting shot and blown up and breaking down, somehow ended that simple pleasure. Cars were just dull machines to me now.
Not that I’d say so to Dave. “Looks real nice.”
“Needs to sit an hour.” He wrung the sponge out, put it to dry on a shelf and carried the bucket to spill out the water on the gravel. “Want a beer?”
“Nope. Too early.”
“Beer’s pretty much all I drink.”
So much for a quick goodbye.
We sat in the same spot, next to a workbench in the first bay. The refrigerator was close to hand, a battered wooden chair and two stools were available and an old CRT television sat on a pass-through counter into the office. That room was smaller and just as cluttered as the shop, albeit more with stacks of grimy paper than metal parts and tools.
“I been thinking,” he said.
“Uh-huh.” I hadn’t known Dave long, but he seemed to start a lot of conversations that way.
“What I was saying yesterday, about the scrap and the casinos and all, you know I was messing, right? All that petty-ass lawbreaking—only a fuckwad would do that.” He drank some Rock Green Light. “I mean, more than once.”
“Hard to disagree.”
“Right. Because you go to jail, and listen—I know—jail’s fucked up. You do not want to be there.”
In my career I’d come to see that, no, some people did want to be in jail, but of course that only strengthened Dave’s point.
“So why aren’t the bankers behind bars?” he asked. “I figure you can explain this to me. Those assholes on Wall Street pretty much destroyed the world economy, right after they sent all our jobs to China. And what happens?—they keep getting, like, million-dollar bonuses at Christmas. And buying yachts and shit, going skiing in France.”
It was almost poignant how limited Dave’s imagination was. I’ve spent some time in the plutocracy. As a mere hired hand, of course, somewhere between the pool boy and the first footman, but I’ve seen some of the estates. Private islands, castles on the Rhine, Connecticut-sized cattle “ranches.”
Not to mention that a million dollars was more or less cafeteria change. Real bonuses, the kind the managing directors hand themselves, can run ten or a hundred times that.
“It’s not complicated,” I said. “They run the game. The house always wins.”
“And the politicians—?”
“Owned. Everyone knows that.”
“Yeah.” Dave tipped his chair back. “Well, that ain’t right.”
I almost laughed. “Who are you, Wyatt Earp?”
“No. But why not? Town needs a sheriff.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I guess it’s not what you do, huh?”
“No.” I felt a pang of . . . something. Embarrassment? Disappointment? “No, I can’t say I’m righting wrongs.”
“Does make you wonder why nobody’s taken a rocket launcher into Goldman Sachs, though.” He put his bottle down and looked over at me, kind of thoughtful. “Maybe you can help me out instead.”
A shadow crossed the sun. Or maybe I just felt the first inkling of what family could mean.
“Well, I don’t—”
“See, I owe some money.”
“So does everyone else in America.”
“It’s a problem,” he said. “A big problem.”
But we never got to discuss it.
Engine noise outside. We both looked up, just as a familiar, dark blue car squealed off the road and bounced into the lot. Doors on both sides sprang open. Behind it, an older, beat-up vehicle roared in from the other direction, skidding to a halt so hard its nose practically scraped the dirt.
Three men came out of the cars holding assault rifles. One was very tall.
“Down!” I yelled, diving off the chair. “Down, down!”
Bullets slammed into the walls, the doors, the bench, smashing tools and ricocheting off loose metal everywhere. Auto parts crashed to the floor, adding to the din and dust and smoke. I crab crawled straight to the office, five feet away. Too much noise and adrenaline to hear anything, but I glimpsed Dave rolling the other direction, headed for the last bay.
The cinderblock walls were beautiful. Any other building material would have perforated like cardboard under the hail of firepower.
The office window blew in, shattered by a three-second burst. I ducked the shards, swept all the crap off Dave’s metal desk, and peeked through the frame.
We were totally boxed. Two men remained at the blue Nissan, one crouched behind the hood and one behind the trunk, sweeping their weapons across the shop’s front. Another guy sprinted for the adjacent field, holding his rifle like he’d done this many, many times before. In a few seconds he landed behind the tractor Dave had left out there—perfect sightlines across the shop’s rear.
We wouldn’t be leaving through the back door.
On the other hand, I now had my own weapon out. Ten rounds available, and one spare magazine. I ducked to the other side of the window frame, counted two, and raised up long enough to fire three times.
Nobody got hurt, but it kept them in place for a moment. Silence returned abruptly as everyone stopped shooting.
“Silas!” Dave called from the opposite end of the shop. “Silas!”
“I’m okay!” I yelled as loud as I could. “I found the M16. Where’s the box of frag grenades?”
“What?” But our assailants began firing again, cutting him off.
Of course they’d figure out I was bluffing soon enough. Bullets slapped the wall behind me and the ceiling—the two at the Nissan were firing slightly upward from their position, through the window. Chunks of asbestos rained down from shredded ceiling tiles.
I moved to the side window, now also broken, and put a round into the hood cowling of the tractor in the field. Just to keep that asshole in place.
“Dave? You hurt?”
No answer. I returned to the front, and saw that we weren’t going to settle in for a siege: the men had gotten back into their car, and the driver backed it into the road. I was pretty sure they were the same two I’d confronted at the restaurant.
I fired twice, starring the windshield, but they must have been hunched down below the dashboard.
Anyway, good riddance. I stood up and gave them the finger through the window. “Yeah, fuck off, motherfuc—”
Oops, that was a little premature. The driver was only aligning the vehicle, making sure he was pointed directly at the office so the engine block would remain between me and them. He started forward, and the other guy held his rifle outside the window—impossible to aim very well like that, but on full auto all he had to do was pull the trigger in my general direction. I ducked back down as bullets slammed all around.
They were going to drive their improvised AP
C right into the bay, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.
Or—hang on. I went to the floor and looked around the frame of the door between the office and the bay. The Nissan was moving forward, halfway to the shop, and they didn’t see me immediately.
I steadied the Sig in two hands, aimed, and shot the welding gas tank Dave had left out there.
KA-WHUUUUMP!
They were right alongside. The fireball engulfed the entire side of the car as the tank exploded. Both left-side tires blew, and metal shards tore across the car’s panels. The driver yelled in pain.
At that exact instant, I heard an engine roar into life from the last bay. Tires screamed—and Dave’s Charger leaped out of the garage so fast it actually went airborne coming off the concrete pad. The car hit the gravel, spun left, and went into a long skid that somehow ended with Dave exactly centered on the blacktop. He fishtailed about one degree, rammed the accelerator all the way to the floor, and left a smoking trail of rubber on the pavement. A second later he was gone, disappearing around the curve at warp five.
Okay, well, I couldn’t really blame him.
The man in the field found his range and started putting rounds through the side window, irregularly spaced, keeping me on the floor. The Nissan wasn’t moving, but I could see motion. The passenger door opened, apparently kicked from inside. The driver must not have been hurt that bad, because he reached up over the dash and pushed out the windshield glass, knocking it onto the hood. The rifle came up next, naturally, and he fired a long burst at the garage’s concrete floor.
Which was smart, because the bullets hit and then traveled parallel to the ground, six inches above it. I’d already rolled back into the office, fortunately.
Options were diminishing rapidly. For nearly a minute I just lay there, curled up, listening to bullets crack over my head and into the walls. Plaster and furniture fell to pieces all around.
Then over the din, I heard a heavy truck on the road, downshifting with a BLAAAT from the airbrakes. The fusillade lightened, then stopped—and the truck’s engine roared, apparently accelerating. I hunched up to peek through the window frame.
Dave was in the cab of the flatbed I’d parked by earlier. The truck swung off the road at, Jesus, fifty miles an hour? I had a half second to think Fuck he’s going to crash right into the fucking BUILDING!—
—when Dave yanked the wheel around, throwing the entire truck out of control. It slewed left, but the momentum was far too much, and the vehicle went over on its side. Somehow this happened exactly alongside the Nissan. The stack of cinderblocks flew off the bed and hammered onto the car, pounding it into a pile of junk.
The truck continued to slide across the gravel, finally stopping when it smashed into my rented Malibu.
I couldn’t see how anyone might still be alive under that rockslide of bricks, but a moment later one of the men was shoving his door open and trying to crawl out. When his arm was mostly outside I fired, aiming for the elbow, and he pulled back. The guy over by the tractor yelled, the words meaningless.
Dave pushed up his own door, opening it like a tank hatch, and looked cautiously out. I waved him back down just as Tractor Boy fired a few rounds.
Then . . . nothing. Silence finally settled over the scene. I waited.
Thirty seconds. A full minute.
Well. That was fun.
I breathed a few times, nice and slow.
“Silas?” Dave’s voice came from inside the truck cab. “We good now?”
“Not yet,” I hollered back. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
Anything else.
Tractor Boy was suddenly up and running, sprinting for the squashed Nissan. I followed him with the pistol, but didn’t fire—I’m not good enough to hit a moving target with a handgun, and I had to think about conserving ammunition. He reached the door, yanked it all the way open, pulled out first one man and then the other. Out in the open, the big one must have been seven feet tall. All three glanced my way, rifles more or less at ready, but no one moving to shoot.
Apparently we were tabling our discussion. More resistance than they’d expected, perhaps.
They were alive and not even limping much, which was something, considering their car looked like it had gone through a junkyard crusher. Still staring my way, they backed up to the other vehicle. Five seconds later it peeled onto the road and took off.
Dave hopped out and I met him halfway, stepping over the remnants of the welding tank. Diesel pooled and gasoline fumes drifted across the war zone.
“Thought you’d gone,” I said.
“Come on.” He had keys in his hand. “Car’s up the road. We got to get out of here.”
“Just a minute.” The landslide of bricks had so deformed the Nissan’s rear bumper that the license plate had sprung off. I picked it up.
I could run it later, maybe find out who we were dealing with.
“Let’s go.” Dave was impatient. “We got to move.”
True enough. Traffic was awfully light, but civilians were sure to happen by any minute. My own car was trapped by the fallen truck. I nodded and we started to jog up the road.
“Why’d you come back?” I said as I holstered the Sig—a little awkward, while we ran.
Dave grinned over his shoulder. “Why? Why?” he said. “You’re my brother, man.”
CHAPTER TEN
Maybe I should drive,” I said, clutching the roll bar at the side pillar so hard my hand hurt.
“Don’t be stupid.” Dave slowed, took the Charger through the blinking-light intersection at about sixty, double-clutched down and accelerated back up to eighty. “You don’t know this car like I do.”
“No.” We passed a motorcycle, then feathered back into the lane just in front of an oncoming pickup. “But I know other things. For example, I know I’d like to live at least until—look out!”
Coming around an endless curve, trees down to the verge blocking all views, we were suddenly up the tail of a big brown UPS truck. Instead of steering left to pass, Dave yanked the wheel just enough right to throw the car into a skid—and we drifted into the passing lane anyway, tires screaming, all the way around and past the truck. At the last moment, before we exited the blacktop entirely, Dave touched the gas. The wheels bit again, and we were back in control, a hundred yards ahead of the stunned UPS man.
“You ain’t one to talk,” Dave said. “After getting my garage all shot to hell.”
There was that. “Would you just keep your eyes on the damn road?”
As we approached Clabbton, traffic increased, vehicles every few hundred yards in both directions. Small houses sat back from the street, with wide scraggly yards. We shot past a roadhouse, dark windows under a low roof, a faux neon sign in the shape of a naked woman, three Harleys parked out front.
“Maybe we should figure out where we’re going,” I said.
Dave glanced sideways. “How much ammo you got left in that gun?”
“Dunno.” Three rounds loaded and a spare magazine, but the very question made me not want to answer. “Why?”
“Didn’t you recognize that car?”
“What?”
“The Saturn. Long scratch on the left panel, crack in the windshield? Brendt, hell, he’s been driving that thing for years. I helped him overhaul the brakes a couple years ago.”
“Brendt? Your improvised-explosives buddy?”
Maybe the car had looked a little familiar.
“He was driving it yesterday, up at the mill. I can’t believe you didn’t see it right off. Hell, for a moment I was afraid Brendt was gonna be inside it.”
I tried to keep up. If Brendt was involved, the story changed completely. Much better this was some local hillbilly feud or something, rather than people looking for me.
Much, much better.
Though I couldn’t see how the Nissan could chase me two days ago and not be connected. “You think this was, I don’t know, a prank?”
“No, course not
.” He sounded offended. “I can’t say about your friends, but mine? They don’t generally try to blow the shit outta me.”
“So what—?”
“So maybe he let somebody use his car. Loaned it out.” Dave shook his head, not looking away from the road. “Brendt, well, he’s a few feathers short of a duck, you know? If someone came up and told him a story, he’d go right ahead and believe it.”
He accelerated again, the engine loud and road noise louder. We closed at frightening speed on more Sunday drivers ahead.
I decided I’d had enough.
“Pull over,” I yelled above the Charger’s roar.
“What?”
“Stop the car, damn it!”
Dave slowed abruptly, but only to avoid colliding with the pickup in front of us. The road rose into a long hill. Trees and dirt on one side, a long low school on the other. The parking lot was vast and empty.
“In there.” I whacked Dave’s shoulder and pointed. “We need to stop.”
He started to say something, then jerked the wheel in an irritated way, engaged the hand brake briefly and took us through the lot’s entrance in a long, graceful skid. He kept it going across half the acre of pavement, the car feeling completely out of control, rubber screaming. We finally slid to a stop dead in the middle, turned all the way around. After a moment Dave killed the engine.
Silence.
I breathed a few times.
“What’s wrong?” Dave shifted in his seat, flexing his muscles, twisting restlessly.
Combat adrenaline stops being your friend as soon as any immediate danger’s over. The worst mistakes in the field happen at the end of an engagement, when everyone’s still totally jacked and can’t stop shooting.
“At the moment, no one’s trying to kill us,” I said. “We need to take a break, calm down and think it through. No need to rush off. Last thing we want to do is stumble right into another assault.”
“They fucking obliterated my shop!”
“Yes, they did.”
“And almost killed me!”
“Me too, for that matter.”
“Shit!”
It took a few minutes, but he finally settled. As we sat quietly, I studied our surroundings. The school was single story, brick and aluminum, the way they built them in the sixties. Illegible graffiti wound around the walls in the back, poorly scrubbed off. An old Dodge Sportsman was parked at the rear corner, a stylized wolf’s head painted on its side—the team van, no doubt.
