She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  Polly wanted to say no. But of course she didn’t.

  “Oh, you’re shy, huh, hon?”

  That was another one adults asked that Polly never knew what to say to.

  “Go get a soda or something,” her dad said to her. “Let me talk to Carla here.”

  Polly walked down the chip aisle toward the coolers in the back. She ran her fingers across the plastic bags of corn chips and pork rinds just to hear the rustle of them. The grown-ups pitched their voices low and urgent. Like what Mom and Tom would do when they didn’t want Polly to know they were arguing. She stopped halfway down the aisle, tried to listen to them talk over the haw of the air conditioner.

  “This ought to cover her for a while,” her dad said. “I’ll come for her when she’s safe.”

  “This dirty?”

  “What money ain’t? Shit, take it. I can get more.”

  “Where’s Avis, Nate?”

  Polly could smell something coppery. Maybe the hot dogs spinning on their rack, but she didn’t think that’s what it was.

  “Never you mind.”

  “Nate—”

  “You don’t want to be any deeper in this thing than you are right now,” he said. “Don’t ask me questions you don’t want the answer to.”

  “All right,” Carla said.

  “I got things to do and I can’t have a girl with me when I do them,” he said. “Now you said you’d take her to Stockton—”

  “I’ll take her,” Carla said. “Damn you, Nate, I’ll take her. But just settle down a minute. Let me get you some food or something.”

  Polly tried to get her machine-gun pulse under control. Tried to remember how to breathe. The something inside her that she was trying not to feel, it was growing, growing bigger even than her, and she looked over to the hot dogs with their skin split from overcooking and she felt like she was going to split open like that.

  Don’t ask me questions you don’t want the answer to.

  The man in the trucker hat reached out to close the cooler door. The sleeve of his T-shirt rode up. It showed off a tattoo on his shoulder, a blue zigzag like cartoon lightning.

  Blue lightning.

  The man walked past her and out the door, no beer or anything in his hands. He got into his car and started it, but didn’t leave. He got on his phone instead.

  She went to her dad and reached out to touch him. Her hand stopped just short of his arm but he saw her anyway.

  “Girl, thought I told you to leave us be.”

  She touched her bicep and said, “Blue lightning. On his arm. You said—”

  It happened so fast. Polly followed her dad’s eyes to Carla. Carla’s smile slid off her face. Carla bolted. Her dad grabbed Carla by the hair. The cowboy with the scratcher tickets said, “What the fuck?” He ran out the door. His scratchers floated to the floor behind him. Time must have been doing weird stuff, because Polly could follow every flutter and flip of the tickets as they headed for the floor. Her dad said, “Goddamn it.” He pulled the pistol out of his pocket. He said, “Who’d you tell?” He put the gun to Carla’s head.

  “Oh god, don’t kill me,” Carla said.

  Polly’s body ran without her telling it. The slap of her feet on the floor rocketed up her legs as she moved as fast as she could for the outside.

  “Polly—” he yelled after her.

  She hit the door bear first. Sun blindness squeezed her eyes closed. The man with the tattoo came out of nowhere.

  “Hey there, sugar.”

  Polly saw a glitter in his hand. Her brain screamed knife. Her muscles locked up on each other. The wind hissed in her ears. The light from the blade flashed. It danced, like how a cobra danced.

  A strong arm scooped her up from behind. Her father’s smell filled her nose. He held her in one arm. He pointed his pistol at the man with the other.

  Polly felt wet warmth in her pants. Behind the man with the knife, cars rolled past same as always. On the other side of the road poppies swayed in the breeze like the world hadn’t just shattered into a million pieces. Like somehow the world still made any kind of sense at all.

  “Drop it,” her dad said.

  The man raised his hands, dropped the knife onto the gravel.

  “Kick it,” her dad said, and the man kicked the knife out of reach.

  “Got a message for the Steel,” her dad said. “You tell them to stop coming.”

  “Heard we got your woman already,” the man said.

  Polly felt her dad’s legs give way a bit, felt him tighten the squeeze on her.

  “That’s one for one,” her dad said. “You tell them we’re even. Tell them to let it be.”

  “You think you can turn this around?” the man asked. “Hell, you’re already dead. You’re a goddamn zombie walking.”

  The man pointed at Polly.

  “You and her both.”

  For a second they all just hung in space as the rumble of faraway thunder on a clear day filled the air. Her dad cocked his head toward the sound.

  “You call in cavalry?” he asked.

  The guy smiled like damn right.

  “We won’t be here when they get here,” her dad said. “You tell ’em they’ll lose more than they’ll win.”

  “You’re the one with the gun, hoss,” the man said. “But you got the whole world after you. Can’t kill the world.”

  Her dad never turned his back on the man as he walked them back to the car. Polly kept her eyes on the smiling man until her dad shoved her into the car and she had to scramble to the passenger seat before he crushed her.

  They drove out heading back the way they came. The roar of clear-sky thunder grew louder. Four men on motorcycles came the other way, their skin dirty with ink and scars, black leather on their backs. Polly turned as they passed, saw their back patches, a bearded one-eyed man, the words odin’s bastards.

  Polly came back to herself enough to notice the damp patch at her crotch. She should have felt shame, she knew that, but that other thing, the thing she’d been stuffing down, was the only thing left in her anymore.

  Her brain looped the man’s voice. Heard we got your woman already. The voice mixed with everything else in her head. Her brain put it all together. It did not let her hide from what she already knew.

  “Did you kill my mom?” somebody inside her asked out loud.

  “No,” her dad said.

  “She’s dead, though,” somebody inside her said.

  The look he gave her was the only answer she needed, but he said it anyway.

  “Yeah. Polly, I’m sorry—”

  The thing inside her came out in a war cry. She grabbed the door handle. She popped it open. She looked out at the speed-blurred gravel. She jumped.

  5

  NATE

  ANTELOPE VALLEY

  The volume of the world turned up as Polly got her door open. Before he could even put together what she was doing she jumped feetfirst.

  Both Nate’s hands left the wheel on pure instinct before his brain could think anything other than holy shit. He leaned across the car. His hand snagged hair. The hair went taut as her bottom half left the car. Her shoes skipped against the asphalt. He yanked. She came halfway back inside. Nate got his left hand on the wheel. Looked up at the road. They’d drifted across the center line. A flatbed loaded with migrant workers rushed at them. Nate yanked Polly inside the car. She yelped with pain. He spun the wheel. That weird floating feeling in his gut and his balls as the car twisted. They headed toward the side of the road.

  The car coughed up gravel dust as they slid to a stop on the shoulder. Polly let loose another one of those animal sounds, something way past grief. The screams turned to tears. She wept so her whole body shook with electric-shock tremors. They sat at the side of the road as Polly wrung herself dry. Nate watched her weep, knowing he should reach out to her, hold her. But he didn’t know how. It wasn’t the sort of thing Nick had taught him. So he just drove.

  After she’d emptied herself
she slept curled against the car door out of his reach. She held her bear death-grip tight, smearing tear-snot across the top of his head.

  He watched the girl from the corner of his eyes, like his full gaze might wake her. The only parts of himself he saw in her were her eyes and the buried rage she’d just shown him.

  He didn’t know if the old cowboy had called the cops, or if the pack of Odin’s Bastards would come back down the road hunting him. All he knew was that he had only one thing left in his life, and that was keeping this girl safe. He saw now that sending her to Stockton couldn’t happen. She was no safer there than anywhere else. He couldn’t drop her off with the law, and not just because the ghost of his brother in his head would never allow it. Group homes and orphanages were no safer than the streets. They were cages full of predators and Polly was prey.

  Nate knew how dangerous cages could be. He’d done five years with his head down. The sharks knew his brother. Nick the stickup king. Nick the killer. The name bought Nate safe haven, even after Nick died. His reputation was so good it left background radiation. Later on, Nate figured that the safe passage had fucked him. He’d never had to fight, so it looked like he couldn’t. If he’d let the anger out even once in those first five years, maybe Chuck Hollington never would have made his move.

  Like a lot of the bad news in Nate’s life, it started out looking like good news. An appeal his court-appointed lawyer had filed, an appeal Nate hadn’t even paid mind to, had sprung fruit. Misdated statements, a prosecutor willing to take a time-served plea-down to preserve his conviction rate. Nate only cared about the bottom line: freedom suddenly loomed. He thought about getting a job. Maybe at a gym. He’d helped Nick train for his fights. Maybe that was something he could do.

  Now, with Polly sleeping next to him, he wanted to lie to himself, to say he had planned that once he was free he was going to make things right and get to know this little girl. But he hadn’t. He had barely thought of her at all until he read the death warrants.

  A week before Nate was set to walk free, Ground Chuck Hollington found him taking a mop break behind the boilers. Chuck had a smile that would make a kid scream. A soda-bottle meth cooker had blown up in his face a few years back, leaving his left cheek pink raw hamburger. That’s when “Ground” got added to the Chuck. Chuck had two blue thunderbolt tats on his left bicep. Aryan Steel soldiers got a blue bolt for each kill they made for the gang. Chuck was brother to Crazy Craig Hollington, president of Aryan Steel, the man who ruled the whiteboy world from his isolation cell in Pelican Bay. He hadn’t said boo to Nate in the past five years. Now he stood next to him behind the boiler, an inked hand raised for a fist bump. Nate gave it to him.

  “What’s good?” Nate asked.

  “Heard you’re short-timing.”

  “A week.” The conversation was like a walk across a rotten wooden bridge. Nate could feel the wood wanting to break, each word a step.

  “You hooked up? Someone on the street gonna set you right?”

  “I got some shit cooking,” Nate lied.

  “You know about the garage?” Chuck asked him.

  Nate knew about the garage. Susanville had an auto shop. Convicts worked it. Prison employees got a discount. They patronized it exclusively. Chuck had noticed. He’d had a brainstorm. When a hack made an appointment for an oil change, the Aryan Steel hanger-on who worked the garage desk sent word down the line. The night before the appointment, an outside man went to the hack’s house, found his car, taped a bag of dope or whatever to the inside of the hack’s wheel well. The hack drove his car into the shop. A convict-mechanic would take off the bag while changing the oil. The scam turned the hacks into mules.

  “Dude we had on the outside just got pinched,” Chuck said. “Pigs came into his house on a domestic, guess he’d tuned up his girl something proper, and the dumb motherfucker had left his pipe on the table. Pigs tossed the place and found a whole grip of shit.”

  Chuck let Nate do the math. They needed a new man on the outside. Nate was heading outside. Pretty simple math.

  Taking the job meant jumping from one prison right into another, one with invisible walls. Aryan Steel never paroled you, never let you loose with time served. It was a life sentence. Nate weighed his options, heard the creak of rotten wood in his head. He knew what the ghost of his brother would have him do. He put his weight down.

  “Know what, I’m good,” Nate said. “Think I’m going to see what the world has to offer me.”

  Chuck changed posture, stepped his left foot forward, turned his body so his side faced Nate. Unconscious things a fighting man does when he thinks blood is coming. Nate mirrored him. Fight-flight jet fuel made muscles twitch at random. He took three deep breaths, the way Nick taught him. The air felt hot down his throat, but it settled him.

  “Dude, I don’t know what made you think I was asking,” Chuck said. “I’m telling you what’s going to go down.”

  That’s when he heard the words. Heard them like Nick wasn’t dead, like he was right there in Nate’s skull. Nate let them come out his mouth knowing how stupid it was.

  “Fuck you, bitch.” He popped a middle finger in Chuck’s face.

  The shank came out of nowhere. Nate grabbed the knife-wrist. His other hand grabbed Chuck’s billy-goat beard. He put his foot behind Chuck’s. He twisted his hips. He slammed Chuck onto the floor. Chuck’s skull thocked against the concrete. He followed Chuck down. He drove his knee into Chuck’s liver. He bent Chuck’s arm at the elbow. He pressed the shank point at the hollow of Chuck’s throat. Flesh dimpled at the shank’s point. One drop of blood bloomed.

  Nate knew the smart thing was to let Chuck go. Leave him alive, dodge Aryan Steel for a week, and walk out a free man. He thought that was the smart play, kept thinking it even as he pushed the blade down into Chuck.

  The shank went through the neck. Shock waves bounced back into Nate’s arm as the shank point bounced off concrete. Chuck died with scared eyes and a mouth full of blood foam. The last thing he saw was Nate’s middle finger.

  Nate took three deep breaths. He took in what he’d done. He had never killed before. Like a lot of things in life, it didn’t feel as big as you thought it would. He washed his hands in his mop bucket. He headed back into the hallway. Nobody around. He finished his mopping and was back in his cell by the time they found the body and locked the prison down.

  That night he studied the roof of his cell. He couldn’t tell if the bridge had collapsed under him or if he’d made it to the other side. He didn’t know if he was floating or falling. He figured he wouldn’t know until he hit the bottom.

  Investigations happened, plural. DOC Special Services detectives with bad sports coats and paunches came through first. They locked the place down for a full week. They questioned everyone. Cons snitched to their own advantage. They snitched drug-turf rivals. They snitched cons they owed big money to. They snitched on the guy in the next cell with the screaming meemie night terrors just to get a good night’s sleep. The hacks made zero progress. They weren’t the ones ruining Nate’s sleep anyway.

  Aryan Steel did their own investigation. Word came down from Pelican Bay. News had reached the isolation cells of Supermax. Crazy Craig had learned his brother had been killed. He ordered the knifeman found. A peckerwood killer named Dog—four blue bolts on his arm, an Othala rune above his heart, a long and jagged thumbnail on his left hand—took Chuck’s crown in Susanville with Crazy Craig’s blessing. Nate heard about Dog’s investigation one night around the card table. Dog knew a Black Guerilla Family soldier named Cocaine who had squabbled with Chuck. Dog used his long thumbnail to gouge out Cocaine’s eye. Cocaine confessed to the kill—of course he did. Dog got Cocaine to tell it again. Cocaine got his facts wrong. Dog knew a phony confession when he heard one. It’s the ones who get the details right, even when you hurt them close to death, that are the guilty ones. They left Cocaine bleeding and half blind, bringing another lockdown prison-wide.

  Nate counted d
ays, wondered if he’d gotten away clean. When he got to the day before his release, he figured he’d made it out clear. Then it all came crashing down. A kid named Lewis, a nineteen-year-old nobody—the kind of scared whiteboy who swam by the side of Aryan Steel like pilot fish by a shark—gave Nate the warning that saved his life. Nate was never sure why. Maybe it was how Nate always gave the kid his dessert when Nate was eating clean. Something small like that. He came to Nate in his cell. He pressed a piece of paper into Nate’s hand.

  “Don’t come out till you read it,” he whispered.

  It was a photocopied kite. Nate read it, each word ratcheting up his heartbeat.

  to all solid soldiers on the block

  or in the streets

  open season on the race traitor

  who got my brother

  I here his name is Nate McClusky

  he is getting sprung soon

  full greenlight on the knifeman

  he has a daughter named Polly

  he has a woman named Avis

  I here they are in Fontana

  full greenlight on his woman

  full greenlight on their seed

  they should die by blade

  salt the earth

  all who refuse to help are added to the greenlight

  membership guaranteed for those who complete it

  franchise guaranteed for those who complete it

  crazy craig, president

  steel forever, forever steel

  He didn’t know how they knew. He didn’t know why Lewis had warned him. But those were questions that didn’t matter, and Nate only had time now for things that mattered very much.

  he has a daughter

  Nate stayed in his cell, his back to the wall. He spent that night waiting for the kill to come. Every step on the walkway outside his cell shook through him like electric shocks.

  Around midnight a voice bounced in from someplace in the cellblock.