She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  The teevee flickered to a picture of her mom and Tom, a selfie from Angels Stadium bleacher seats last year on Tom’s birthday. Her mom smiling the way she did with all her teeth and her eyes scrunched into extra smiles. Polly made a noise with her throat, all her air coming out of her at once.

  The picture changed to a lady reporter with lots of makeup, microphone in hand, standing in front of Polly’s house. There was yellow tape across her own front door like on cop shows. Seeing it on teevee made it feel more real than if she’d been standing there.

  The picture flickered to a black-and-white photo of her dad, a sign with numbers hanging under his chin, his eyes black pits.

  The news cut to an interview with an Asian man, thin, sharp cheekbones, bags under his eyes like he never slept. She guessed he was good looking. His lips moved. A name floated under him while he talked, detective john park.

  A phone number popped up on the screen. to help call floated over it. Polly said the number out loud. She said it again, and again, until it was stuck in her head.

  The teevee turned to a truck commercial. Polly shut it off. She sat in the dark. She’d been numb for a while and now she wasn’t. She didn’t have a mom anymore and she didn’t have a stepdad, and even though it snagged fishhooks in her throat when she thought it, she didn’t really have a dad either. Not for true.

  She hugged the bear to her chest. She knew he wasn’t real. To tell the truth, she was glad he wasn’t. It meant that he could never leave her. She hugged him so tight. Polly chanted the to help number to herself. Her voice stretched and cracked. The bear reached up to her face, petted her cheek. His paw came back wet.

  Polly put the bear down. She picked up the phone. She snorted back tear-watery snot. She said the to help number while she dialed it.

  8

  PARK

  ANTELOPE VALLEY

  Park knew why wolves howled when they hunted. He’d learned it his first night as a cop over in San Bernardino. He and Stutz, his training officer, had come across a street race in the warehouse district. Lines of cars on either side of the road, dozens of faces mouthing oh shit the cops. Stutz pulled a hard U and came back around. The racers gunned off the line, away from them. The spectators jumped in their own cars and sped off into the night.

  “Code three,” Stutz told Park. Park flipped the switch. The night turned blue and red. Stutz mashed the gas. Park felt acceleration press him like sideways gravity. The siren howled out into the night and something else was howling too and it took a second for Park to realize it was him.

  “Goddamn,” he said, and Stutz had laughed and said, “You’re goddamn right,” and pretty soon they were laughing together, laughing at how crazy good it all was. They drove fast as falling. They ran their quarry to the ground. On a skidding turn when the tire squeals joined the choir, Park’s skin went gooseflesh—hell, his soul went gooseflesh. The car they chased hit a bad turn, rolled and wrapped itself roof-first around the pole of a fast food sign. It made a sound like God clearing his throat, and Park felt something crest and break inside himself, something so strong he quick-checked the front of his trousers to make sure he hadn’t shot in his pants.

  The way he saw it, these were junkie times he was living in. Everybody hooked on something. Maybe dope or booze. Maybe pizza or half-gallon cups of soda or foods made up by guys in white coats. Maybe picking fights on the Internet or some game with electric jewels falling from the top of their phones. But everybody was a rat in a lab, everybody had something stuck in their skulls and a pedal to push that gave them a jolt. The best thing you could do in this world was find the thing that jolted you the most and killed you the least, and go after it hard. For him it was the chase. So he’d given himself up to it.

  He’d learned to use the thrill as a divining rod. He went where it told him to go. He pressed where the thrill told him to press.

  When the captain told him about the double murder, the buzz kicked in. When he learned the ex-husband was a fresh-sprung ex-con, the hairs on his arms stood at attention. And when the cop showed him the photo of the missing girl with the sad blue eyes, he knew he was hooked.

  And right now, in this gas station out in Antelope Valley, the buzz was telling him this woman behind the counter with the horseshit eyes knew something.

  Park had spent days since the captain threw the murder of Tom and Avis Huff to Major Crimes learning the ins and outs of Nate McClusky. He spent zero time on non-Nate avenues. A con walks out of jail, and twelve hours later his ex-wife is dead and his daughter is missing? One plus one equaled two last time Park checked.

  Tom had a pretty nice gun collection. Park got a list of the guns Tom had registered, compared it to the guns they found, and did a little more simple math. Whoever killed them—read Nate McClusky—had helped him or herself—read him—to a couple of pistols and a nice Ithaca pump shotgun.

  Park read up on Nate. He didn’t see anything that didn’t tag Nate as a pure knucklehead. Two armed-robbery convictions, small-time gas station shit. He got lucky with the first one by being white and nineteen. The judge gave him a break. The second one was pretty heavy time. He had served five years and should have been locked up for another five at least, but there was some sort of fuckup. Park scanned the appeal that had let Nate walk. It was pure legalese horseshit.

  Nate’s mother and father were dead. One sibling, a brother named Nick, also dead. Nick McClusky. The name poked out at Park. He ran the brother. He got back a heavy file. Nick had a few pro MMA fights. Then he beat a man to death in a bar fight when he was twenty-three. It got pled as manslaughter. Nick did a bit in Victorville. Came out scarier. He did muscle work for Aryan Steel. He’d died a few years back, crashed a stolen bike on the freeway during a high-speed chase. The guy had died live on the evening news.

  Park knew the odds were on Nate getting picked up on a traffic stop or doing another robbery. Odds were he’d get himself caught before Park would find him. Park chased the buzz and kept busy anyway.

  Park did the news circuit. He caught postnews phone tips. A Tacoma psychic said Polly’s body would be found near water. It was classic phony-psychic horseshit. Everyplace was near water one way or another. If they found her in a house in the high desert the psychic would take credit for guessing the faucet leaked.

  Park pulled police reports. He looked for white men with children. He checked 911 calls. He found something that felt like something. A man who had been buying lottery tickets at some Sun Valley gas station reporting a standoff, knife versus gun. A man with a gun, a girl about Polly’s age with him. Another man with a knife, shaved head, tattoos.

  A blue thunderbolt tattoo, in fact. Prison ink. Aryan Steel used blue thunderbolts to mark their members. One for each kill they committed for the club. The buzz upped itself. The buzz pointed Park this way. Nate was Aryan Steel connected through his brother. Maybe he was trying to get out of state on the whiteboy underground railroad. Maybe he just wanted a favor.

  It wasn’t a full-on buzz. But it was something. So he’d gone out to Antelope Valley. The woman behind the counter was the one who’d been working that day. Carla Knox, the sort of big hard woman that gets called a battle-ax by men who are scared of her. She’d clocked him as a cop the moment he walked through the door of the store. Park didn’t try to look like a cop, but he knew the world you live in every day stains you whether you like it or not.

  He badged her anyway. Her eyes went wider. The buzz kicked up in Park. He told it to settle down. Folk had all sorts of reasons for the cops to worry them. Maybe she had a baggie of something worth jail time in her pocket. Maybe she’d had a bad experience way back. Maybe she was just one of those people so soaked in guilt they see a cop and assume they’re going to jail, that they’re guilty of something, of everything.

  Or maybe she knew something.

  “Detective John Park,” he said, and watched her throat go spastic.

  Maybe she knew something.

  He talked to her, barely listening to
her answers, watching her body, the way her breath went in and out. He didn’t need to listen to her, because he knew from the moment she opened her mouth it was horseshit. She was lying, that much was clear. The question was why?

  His phone vibrated against his leg. He ignored it. He circled around for the kill. He leaned forward. He gave her the you’re-fucked smile.

  The phone started twitching again. He pulled out the phone. Saw it was from the precinct. He stepped away from Carla. He let the moment with Carla die.

  “This better be good.”

  “It’s Miller.” The Major Crimes officer he shared a desk with. “I got a call for you. Want me to patch it through?”

  “Take a fucking message.”

  “It’s a little girl. Says her name is Polly McClusky. Says she wants to talk to you.”

  Chest pains told Park he’d stopped breathing. He felt skin tingles. He wondered if this was what junkies felt like just before the OD sucked them under. He walked out of the store without even a look back to see Carla’s face.

  9

  NATE

  FONTANA

  Just don’t lie and say it’s about the girl.

  Magic’s house was right where Jake said it was. Nate sat in the dark in front of it. He did a pre-murder checklist. Means. Method. Escape route. Justification. That last part was easy. He just couldn’t lie to himself and say it was for the girl. This was something for him, something to make himself feel whole, or if not whole then at least patched. He couldn’t go on, do the things he had to do, knowing Magic was walking around having done what he did.

  The girl back at the motel needed him. He swore he would die to protect her. But all the same, this had to be done. Sure as gravity.

  Gray teevee light flickered from the front window. The house belonged to Chad Davidson, a man known as Magic. Nate had heard the name, late night in Susanville when the myths got spread. Magic had a cousin who’d died for the Steel in the Agua Dulce shoot-out. Agua Dulce was legendary. The OK Corral starring white power killers and meth heads. Some suckmouth marked for death took on a truckload of Steel killers in the middle of the high desert. It ended in a cattle stampede and wildfire. Magic’s cousin Carter caught a buckshot load in the face. Nobody ever found the suckmouth. Magic needed payback. Magic found the suckmouth’s old biker gang. Magic took thumbs as trophies. Can’t ride a chopper with no thumbs. Magic left a bunch of half-handed bastards pawning their bikes.

  Magic had got his vengeance. And maybe he thought he’d done it for his brother found half-headed and burned in the desert, but Nate knew he had not. He knew that vengeance was a dumb and selfish act, and he knew if it went wrong he would leave Polly exposed and alone. Nate would be a fuckup again, one last, worst time.

  But he was going to do it anyway. The ghost of his brother inside his head would have it no other way.

  Nate had been here an hour already. He knew Magic was inside. But he had a woman with him. They might be in there all night. But Nate doubted it. Magic didn’t seem the type to cuddle after. So he waited.

  He knew Magic was just the triggerman. Crazy Craig Hollington was the one who’d killed Avis and Tom. He was the one who put the greenlight on all of them. He was the only one who could lift it.

  So kill him too, the ghost of his brother hooted in his head. Easy for the dead to say. Crazy Craig was untouchable. He was locked down in Supermax. The guards said it was to protect the world from Crazy Craig. Nate wondered if the hacks were dumb enough to believe that. Being locked in the room with no view didn’t stop Crazy Craig. Ask Avis.

  Don’t lie and say it’s for Avis either.

  She wasn’t his woman, not when she died, and she’d never really been his anyway—one thing Nate knew for sure was that nobody belonged to anybody but themselves, not in the end. But so what? Nate could know it was bullshit and still know he had to do it. He was powerless against the thing inside him, the thing with the voice of his brother that said this had to be done. And he was glad he was powerless against it. This was a thing he could do. He could kill Magic. He could avenge Avis, at least partway, whether it helped her or not. And then? Since he couldn’t kill Crazy Craig, running was the only thing left. He guessed he and Polly would make like the suckmouth from the Agua Dulce shootout. Disappear. They could find someplace where Aryan Steel couldn’t touch them. South, down in Mexico. He’d heard whispers of a place called Perdido, down at the tip of Baja, a place you could stay forever.

  Don’t lie and say it’s about the girl.

  He couldn’t keep her. He was already poisoning her. Polly thought he hadn’t known she’d been there when he’d put Jake in the fire. He’d seen her, though, right as he’d put his knee on Jake’s belly and pressed him into the coals. He’d seen her eyes wild and alive watching his violence. He understood how she felt. It scared him all the more because he understood it, because it was the surest he’d ever been that she was his.

  The door to the house opened. The featherwood walked out. She had combat boots. She had the featherwood ’do—a skull shaved down to fuzz everywhere but her bangs, which hung in her face. She had black fingernails. She had crank jitters you could spot in the dark.

  He waited for her to get into her truck and drive away. Her brake lights lit up and the time was here and Nate felt his strength leave him.

  You got to feel weak to get strong. Nick said that, in the car outside what was to be Nate’s first liquor store. When he saw Nate’s hands shaking. You got to feel weak to get strong. Don’t run away from it.

  Nate closed his eyes. Took deep breaths the way Nick had taught him. Breathing was how you talked to the animal in you, Nick had taught him. Nick had talked to his animal a lot, and it had talked to him, and Nick had taught Nate about it, and now here he was. He opened the car door and slipped out into the night.

  Nate knocked light on the door, the way the woman would knock if she was coming back because she’d forgotten something.

  His blood like shook soda in his veins.

  He heard a man walk to the other side of the door. Nate swore he could see the man through the wood. Could feel him somehow lean against the door to peek out the eyehole.

  One more breath. In and out.

  He kicked the door. The door popped open. The door popped Magic in his face. Nate walked in. He got the pistol raised. Time slowed down.

  Magic had an old-school Mohawk. He had an iron cross on the bare scalp above his right ear. He had a dotted line tattoo across his throat that said cut here. His nose was a red smear from where the door had tagged him. Magic had four blue bolts on his arm. The bottom two were wet. Fresh.

  Two fresh bolts for two new kills. One was Avis, the other her man. Nate’s brain took the time to have that thought. That was a mistake. Thoughts moved too slow for fighting.

  Magic’s boot came up kicking. It moved slow, like the air was syrup. But time was fucked now and Nate was moving slow too. The boot crashed into his knee. Nate went down.

  Magic came on top of him, his eyes murder hot. He talked. The world moved too slow for Nate to decode the sounds.

  Magic got his hands around Nate’s throat about the time Nate noticed he didn’t have the gun anymore. Magic squeezed. Nate could still take sips of air. His vision didn’t blur at the edges. The volume of the world stayed the same. Magic didn’t know shit about chokes.

  Nate broke Magic’s grip. Magic fell on top of him. Magic felt Nate’s face. He fumbled for Nate’s eyes. Nate hugged him close. He pressed Magic’s face into his chest. Magic bit through Nate’s shirt. He broke skin. Nate rode the pain. He got a knee under Magic’s stomach. Nate kicked out, flipped the man over, landed on top. Magic kept searching for Nate’s eyes. Nate grabbed a wrist. He twisted it. Heard a pop. Heard a scream. Kept twisting. Magic rodeo-bucked him, knocked him off balance. Magic reached for something on the ground with his good arm. Nate saw the gun come up at him just in time to think oh shit—

  10

  PARK

  ANTELOPE VALLEY
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  Park started the car. The radio blared loud rock. He twisted the knob till it went away. He fired up headlights. He held the phone against his ear with his shoulder. He listened to clicks and pops on the phone. He prayed Miller had finally learned how to transfer a goddamn call.

  High-pitched whistling on the other end of the phone. Like a kid breathing through snot rockets.

  Could be a prank call. Could be a loony. Could be Polly.

  “This is Detective Park.”

  Don’t be a prank call. Don’t be a loony.

  “Hello?” He waited for an answer. Nothing but whistling, then a girl’s voice.

  “Hi.”

  “Polly? Are you Polly McClusky?”

  “Yeah.”

  It was her. The buzz told him so. The fear in her voice goosed him. All the sudden it wasn’t about the buzz anymore. Or anyway there was something real behind it. The fear in the little girl’s voice. Depth charges boomed in his chest. He put the car in gear. The car spit gravel as it pulled out of the lot. He pointed the car back toward the highway.

  “Is your father with you?”

  “He’s not here. He’s coming back.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Can you help me?”

  “That’s what I want to do.”

  The whistling double-timed.

  “I know.” The voice so tiny.

  “What do you know, Polly?”

  “She’s dead. They murdered her. Her and Tom too.”

  “They? Who is they?”

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be. Tell me where you are.”

  “Please don’t hurt him.” Something had broken in the girl now and she sobbed as she talked. “I just don’t want to be here anymore. But don’t hurt him please.”