A Bad Day for Voodoo

by Jeff Strand

  “Oh, that car’s not coming back. I’ll tell you that right now. Anyway, it was a green Matchbox car, a Trans-Am, a kind of vehicle that you kids today don’t really appreciate but that in my time was quite the—”

  I tuned him out, which was not easy. What should I do? They were probably chop-shopping the car right now. At any moment the sadistic carjacker could find the box, and he would open it, and, okay, maybe he wouldn’t start unraveling the doll right away. (I could imagine my skin unraveling, a long thin strip of flesh winding off of my arm until it was just veins and muscles.) But what if he tossed it in a garbage can? What if eighty tons of other garbage got poured on top of the doll at the dump?

  I had to get the doll back. Now.

  Or maybe I could send Adam to get it. Bribe him with a Snickers.

  No, I had to do it.

  I opened the door.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Kelley asked.

  “Saving my life.” I got out of the cab.

  “No!” Kelley opened the back door and got out as well. “He’ll shoot you!”

  “No, he won’t.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Knock.”

  “Knock?”

  I nodded. “Knock.”

  “Uh, guys, don’t leave me here,” said Adam from the backseat. “I don’t have any money for the fare.”

  I gave Kelley a quick kiss on the lips. “I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “He has nothing to gain by shooting me. I can talk him out of it. Stay in the car. I’m going by myself.”

  “Don’t do this. You don’t have to.”

  I gave her another kiss. “Yes,” I said, “I do.” I have to admit that I said it in kind of a corny, melodramatic way, as if I were making some sort of noble sacrifice. Of course, I wasn’t being a hero or anything—I was only trying not to have my fingers burned off one by one. Still, for that one moment, I felt as if Daniel-Day Lewis could play me in an Academy Award-winning motion picture.

  “Get back in the cab,” I told Kelley. “Nobody is going to shoot anybody, but if you do hear bullets, I won’t be offended if you drive away.”

  Kelley let out an exasperated and heartsick sigh and then got back into the cab. She slammed the door shut. I suddenly decided that I could really use a hug before I went over to the garage door, but no.. .I’d wasted enough time already.

  Then Adam got out of the car. “I’m coming with you,” he said, his voice filled with bravery.

  “No.”

  “I won’t let you do this alone. Part of this is sort of my fault, and I’m going to stand by your side.”

  “Adam, my strategy involves talking. You’re not good at it.”

  He looked hurt. “I can talk.”

  “Seriously, stay in the cab. I need you to protect Kelley.”

  Of course, Adam knew that I wouldn’t put him in charge of protecting a bag of stale Cheetos, much less my girlfriend. He looked at the ground and shrugged. “All right. Shriek if you need me.”

  “I will. Get back in the car.”

  I walked over to the metal garage door. I was sick to my stomach, my head was pounding, at least eight different body parts were trembling, and I very much doubted that my bladder was going to operate at maximum efficiency. But what choice did I have?

  I stood there for a few seconds, gathering my courage, and then I knocked.

  This information comes from several different sources, mostly Wikipedia, which I know isn’t completely reliable, but it’s sure convenient.

  Throughout his childhood, Gary Sheck’s parents had said that one day he should open his own Italian restaurant. Nobody in the Sheck family was Italian, and in fact, the family had a long history of making fun of people with Italian accents, but nevertheless, that was the career path they encouraged. When he was sixteen, Gary took a job washing dishes at a local Italian restaurant, and that’s when he discovered that being a professional dishwasher absolutely sucked.

  Here’s how it works: A customer complains to the server that the chicken on his fettuccine Alfredo is overcooked. The server says, “Oh goodness, I’m so sorry. I’ll fix that right up, and it’ll be no problem at all.” The server goes back into the kitchen and informs the chef that the customer sent the chicken back because it was overcooked. Despite the server’s assurance to the customer that it’s no problem at all, it really is a problem, and the chef throws a minor temper tantrum. Of course, the chef can’t come out into the dining area and punch the customer in the face or dump a bowl of spaghetti sauce on his head, so he yells at the server. The server can’t yell at the chef or the customer, so to vent his or her frustration, the server yells at the dishwasher, who is entirely powerless and who had nothing to do with the overcooked chicken on the fettuccine Alfredo.

  Gary quickly decided that he didn’t like getting yelled at all day. He wanted to be the one yelling at people who weren’t responsible for what they were getting yelled at for.

  He vowed that he would work hard and rise through the ranks until he acquired the power he so desperately sought.

  On his second day, when a server named Tom yelled at him because the customer complained about the insufficient intensity of tomato flavor in the lasagna, Gary hit Tom in the face with a large metal spoon and stormed out of the building, never to return to the restaurant business again.

  Gary went to his parents and proposed the idea that instead of following the original plan of getting a job, he would pursue an alternate course of action where he did not get a job. Their counterproposal was a simple and straightforward scenario in which he did get a job immediately, perhaps something in retail.

  Gary Sheck did not enjoy working retail.

  On his second day, after an elderly woman waited until he’d completely rung up and bagged her purchases to reveal that she had a twenty-five-cents-off coupon, Gary raised his fist and was immediately fired. He walked home, unsure of whether he would have punched the old lady in the face or not.

  The unanswered question really bothered him, so he walked around until he found another old lady, and then he punched her in the face.

  That was infinitely more satisfying than owning an Italian restaurant.

  After a few days of soul searching, Gary realized that his opportunities for hurting more people would be greatly increased if he focused on doing jobs that were illegal. He started with petty crimes—a mugging here, a grand theft auto there—and then, on his eighteenth birthday, as a present to himself, he shot a man.

  It wasn’t as much fun as he had thought it was going to be. The man died too quickly.

  The next one took a lot longer. Gary was in a cheery mood for nearly three hours after that.

  He joined a gang called Autopsy Report. By age twenty-five, he was their leader. He decided that Autopsy Report sounded more like the name of a band than a gang and changed it to the Maulers. He got reports that people were confusing it with “the Mallers” and assuming that their turf of terror was limited to shopping malls, so he changed it to the Red Shredders.

  Gary knew that to instill fear in his enemies, he needed a trademark. So he became known for bashing his enemies to death with a brick. He was good at it.

  By the time Gary was thirty, the Red Shredders had disbanded, but Gary and his five most loyal members stuck together and continued to commit crimes. Gary preferred crimes that were violent or at least destructive, but sometimes he settled for profitable, as with his lucrative auto-theft operation.

  Gary was furious at the moment, because he’d told Scorp (the nickname for Scorpion, whose real name was Fred) not to bring in any more of these annoying, sensible, fuel-efficient cars. Scorp had apologized but didn’t seem to really mean it, and he giggled when he told Gary how he’d stolen it from a teenage kid, and the kid’s mom had called, and Scorp had told her the kid was dead.

  Gary had to admit that that was pretty funny. Still, Scorp had disobeyed an order, so Gary threw him to the ground and kicked him in the side a few times. />
  Then they went to work dismantling the car.

  “Hold up, hold up,” said Gary, waving for everybody to be quiet. “Did you hear that?”

  Shark (real name: Trevor), Blood Clot (Charles), Ribeye (also Charles) and Scorp all went silent.

  “Somebody’s knocking!”

  Shark hurried over to the garage door and looked through the peephole. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Is it the cops?” asked Blood Clot, who had never murdered a police officer but hoped to someday.

  “Naw,” said Shark. “It’s a teenage kid.”

  “For real?” asked Scorp. “Blond hair?”

  “Yeah.”

  Scorp let out a high-pitched laugh. “That’s the kid I stole it from! Can you believe that?”

  “You think that’s funny?” asked Gary. “You lead him right back here to us, and you think it’s something to laugh about? You gonna laugh in jail? Huh? You gonna have a nice big chuckle in jail?”

  Scorp had received three separate black eyes (not that he had three eyes; his right eye had been blackened once and his left twice) and a cracked rib from answering Gary’s rhetorical questions, so he said nothing.

  Gary took out his gun. Ribeye and Blood Clot did the same. “All right,” said Gary. “Let him in.”

  I didn’t know any of that when the garage door slid open. All I knew was that a big, frightening man grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside, and then the garage door slammed shut, and then I had five guns pointed at me.

  CHAPTER 10

  Before this moment, the most guns I’d ever had pointed at me was one, and that was during the carjacking a few minutes ago. I wouldn’t say that this was necessarily five times scarier, but it was at least three or four times scarier.

  None of the criminals looked happy to see me.

  I said the first thing that came to mind: “I’m not a cop!”

  For a few seconds, they all just stared at me. Then Gary (who I did not yet know was Gary—I simply thought of him as muscular guy with goatee, black hair, and cruel eyes) chuckled. Scorp chuckled right after that, and they were quickly followed by Blood Clot, Shark, and Ribeye. Their chuckles never quite reached full-fledged laughter, nothing like what you’d see in a movie where the bad guys are all having a nice big guffaw, but they were all clearly amused by my comment.

  “Not a cop, huh?” asked Gary. “They hiring a lot of terrified- looking teenage boys as cops these days?”

  “I’m just saying.. .I’m not, y’know, wearing a wire or anything.” “Well, good.” Gary patted me on the shoulder. “Good to

  know. Because I’ve gotta say, when you came in here, I thought they’d sent in the marines.”

  The other guys chuckled some more.

  I glanced over at my mom’s car. The tires had already been removed, as had both doors. These guys were scumbag thieves, but I had to admire their efficiency. The trunk remained intact. “What’s your name?” Gary asked.

  “Tyler.”

  “Tyler what?”

  “Tyler Churchill.”

  “Well, Tyler Churchill, would you mind explaining to me exactly why the hell you knocked on our door?”

  My mouth went completely dry, and it was difficult to speak. “You stole my mom’s car.”

  “I stole nothing of the sort. I’ve been here all evening. Do you know what I do to people who falsely accuse me of wrongdoing?” I shook my head.

  He pressed the barrel of the gun against my forehead. “You can make an educated guess, right?”

  I forced myself not to drop to my knees and start sobbing and begging for mercy. They hadn’t opened fire on me with all five guns the second I stepped into their chop shop, so he had to be willing to discuss things.

  I wondered if, possibly, this had been a bad idea.

  “I didn’t mean you,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. I halfpointed to Scorp. “He took the car. It’s.. .uh.. .right there.”

  “Oh, okay. You’re saying that my associate stole your car. That’s different. I agree with that. How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “You packin’?”

  “Heat?”

  Gary looked at me as if glowing waves of stupidity were emanating from my forehead. “Yes, heat. Are you packing heat? Are you in possession of a firearm containing bullets with which you might try to shoot somebody?”

  I vigorously shook my head.

  “Ribeye, pat him down.”

  Ribeye set down his gun on the roof of the car and then gave me a not-very-gentle pat down that I thought might leave bruises. “Kid’s clean,” he announced. He walked back to retrieve his gun. I wished I’d stomped on his foot and then done a double backflip over to the car, where I could have grabbed his gun and shot all five of them before they had had a chance to react, but the window of opportunity was now closed.

  “No gun, huh?” Gary asked me.

  “No.”

  “Why would you show up without a gun? That sounds stupid to me. Very, very stupid. And I have a problem understanding acts of stupidity. Isn’t that right, Blood Clot?”

  “Yep,” said Blood Clot. “You sure do.”

  “I’m always saying to myself, ‘Why did that person do something so stupid?’ And most of the time, I can’t get a good answer. Which is why I’m so happy to have you here, right in the middle of one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen somebody do. Explain it to me.” Now my mouth had gone so dry that I literally couldn’t speak. “Did you come in here thinking that my moral code would

  not let me shoot a teenager? Is that it? I hope so, because I love irony.” Gary grinned. “Don’t I love irony, Blood Clot?”

  “Oh yeah. You can’t get enough of that ironic stuff.”

  Gary winked at me. And then his grin vanished, and his cruel eyes went dead serious. “It’s extremely important that you don’t think I won’t kill you just because you’re a kid. I’ll kill a little girl and not lose a wink of sleep.”

  “I don’t think you won’t kill me,” I said, finding my voice again. That didn’t sound like what I’d actually wanted to say, but I wasn’t completely sure what I did want to say and didn’t correct myself. “You call the cops?” Gary asked.

  “No. He stole my phone.”

  “Your friends call the cops?”

  “He stole their phones too.”

  Gary shrugged. “Makes sense. However, since it’s no longer 1923, I’d guess that they wouldn’t find it too difficult to get in touch with the authorities. Time’s running out. Why are you here? Were you gonna steal your car back? It’s gonna be hard to drive right now.”

  “I need something out of the trunk,” I said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re here because you forgot something in your trunk?” “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you slow of mind?”

  “I don’t care what you do with the car. I mean, I do care— it’s my mom’s car, and she’s going to go absolutely berserk—but I’m not going to try to stop you. Not that I could stop you, but I mean, you know what I mean.”

  “Could somebody please shoot him to stop the babbling?” “No, no! All I’m saying is that if I could please have the box in the trunk, I’ll get out of your hair and you can go back to what you were doing.”

  “Must be valuable,” said Gary.

  “Only sentimental value.”

  “Uh-huh. There’s no sentimental value in the world worth getting shot over. Now you’ve gone and made me all curious. Scorp, open the trunk.”

  “We should clear out first,” said Scorp.

  “We’ll clear out when I say it’s time to clear out. That’s what the secret passage is for. It’ll be nice to get to use it again; it’s been too long. Get that trunk open.”

  Scorp took out my set of keys and unlocked the trunk. He popped the lid, revealing the small wooden box.

  “Nice box,” said Gary. “I like the symbols. Good tattoo ideas.” I wasn’t sure whether to thank hi
m for the compliment or not. I decided on not.

  As Scorp took the box out of the trunk, it occurred to me that a much better plan would have involved Kelley and Adam setting up some sort of distraction at a designated time. So Scorp would pick up the box, and he’d be juuuuust about to open it when a huge explosion knocked all five thugs off their feet. From there, it would be the aforementioned matter of acquiring one of the guns and shooting it five times. Then the taxi would plow right through the garage door. No problem.

  Gary picked up the box. “Pretty light for something full of cash.”

  “It’s not cash. It’s a doll.”

  “A doll?” Gary rattled the box.

  I gasped and literally clutched at my heart, which felt like it skipped a beat and then did six hundred beats in a half-second to compensate.

  “Whoa, whoa, what’s your problem?” Gary asked.

  “It’s fragile!”

  Gary set the box on the cement floor and then lifted the lid. “It is a doll.”

  “Right. Just a doll. My grandmother made it. On her deathbed.” “She made you a doll on her deathbed?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why it’s not a very well-made doll. It’s doesn’t have any actual value, not even on Antiques Roadshow, but my mom will be heartbroken if something happens to it.” “And you think I look like the kind of person who cares if your mother is heartbroken?”

  “There’s no reason not to give it back to me,” I said.

  Gary lifted the doll out of the box by its arm. “What’s inside it?” “Nothing.”

  “There’s something inside. I don’t care if your grandmother was the homemade meatloaf queen of the United States, you wouldn’t be doing this for a doll. Ribeye, get me a knife.” “Please!” I said. “Don’t cut it open.”

  “I ain’t got a knife,” said Ribeye.

  “Blood Clot, get me a knife.”

  “I don’t have one either,” Blood Clot admitted. “I’ve got a screwdriver.”

  “Screwdriver’s fine,” said Gary.

  Blood Clot tossed him a screwdriver. Gary moved his hand out of the way, and the tool clattered onto the floor.

  “Don’t throw it at me! Hand it to me! Do you want that thing to go right through my palm? What’s the matter with you?”