She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  “Stop,” she said. “Stop the car, stop it, stop it please.”

  “We’re two minutes from the motel. Just hold the fuck on.”

  She felt whales roll inside her stomach.

  “Stop the car, stop the car!”

  “Polly—”

  A noise came from deep inside her, a burp and a moan all in one. She got the window down. She dumped her stomach out into the night. She painted the side of the car nacho-cheese orange. She fell back into her seat. Tears and snot and sick cooled on her face.

  “Don’t go back to the motel,” she said through tears. “You can’t go back. Please don’t go back. Please. Please don’t make me tell you why.”

  He turned the car onto a side street and parked on a dark spot of the road. He turned off the headlights. She wiped her face on her shirt. She fought for her breath.

  “Now you listen to me,” he said. “If there’s something I need to know, you got to tell me.”

  The confession came out of her the same speed her dinner had.

  “I called the police. While you were gone. There’s a policeman and he said he could help and I didn’t know what to do. I’m sorry. I don’t want you to go away again. I don’t want to be alone. I just got scared. Please, I’m sorry.”

  He wiped his face with his hands. He pressed his palms into his eyes. He kept them there while he talked.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing either,” he said. “Hell, a week ago I got told when to sleep and when to eat and when to piss. And now I’ve got the whole world in front of me with no map, and the only little part of it that don’t feel like it’s trying to kill me is you and that damn bear.”

  He took his hands off his eyes and looked at her. She held his gaze, though it made her heart beat all the way down to the roots of her teeth.

  “I never gave you a choice. You’re just a kid, but even a kid has to have a choice. So here it is. You want, I’ll let you off a block from the motel. You find the policeman, you tell them to keep you safe. Hell, maybe they can.”

  She opened her mouth to answer. He shushed her with his hand.

  “The other choice is you come with me. It could get scary. Even dangerous. But if you’re with me . . . well, at least you’ll be with me, and I’ll do what I can. And going with the cops, it might not be safe either. There’s folk who want us dead. And they’re not going to stop. Could be they could get to you in a group home, or juvenile, or even out on the street.

  “If it was up to me, you’d come along with me. We’ll get out of here for a while. Head over to L.A. Then we do something to make ourselves safe. I don’t want it to be up to me if you come or not. I want it to be up to you. So you got to choose.”

  She felt every inch of skin all over her body at once. She nodded like yes. Then she felt like that wasn’t good enough. For a thing like this you had to say it. So she did.

  “I want to stay with you.”

  He turned his face away from her. When he talked, his voice was rough and low.

  “Well all right then.”

  He put the car in gear. He pulled a U-turn. They headed west.

  14

  PARK

  MOUNT VERNON/ANTELOPE VALLEY

  Park drove to Carla’s house cop-fast. Passing headlights threw up weird shapes in his eyes. He saw the little girl in the shapes. The one who had called him. The one he’d let down.

  He’d missed her. He wouldn’t miss again.

  Park hit the apartment complex at speed. He stomped brakes, tires squealed. He left the car in the fire zone, fuck-you-I’m-a-cop style. He double-timed the stairs to Carla’s apartment. Bam bam bam on the door, fuck-you-I’m-a-cop style.

  Carla had sleep boogers and terror in her eyes.

  “Detective—”

  “Invite me in,” Park said. Cops were like vampires that way. They had to be invited in. She stepped aside. He came in. Her house was chaos. Everything was chaos right now.

  “You got a brother in Chino,” he said.

  “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “Nothing at all,” Park said, “except I can touch him, and that’s how I’m going to touch you.”

  “Is that blood?” she asked. Park looked down on his shirt. Blood spatter from when Park had broken the john’s nose at the motel. The one he thought was Nate McClusky.

  “Yeah,” he said to Carla. Saw the fear jolt in her. It jolted him back. The thing in his brain whispered chase it. He picked up a beer bottle from the table. He thought about the little girl. How scared she’d sounded. He threw the bottle against the wall. There was only a part of him that felt bad when Carla screamed.

  They’d been camped out at the motel for three hours when they caught the guy creeping in the bushes. When a uni radioed that a white guy had just crawled out the back window of one of the units, Park ran from his hiding spot. He hit the guy elbow first. He heard a crunch like celery snapping. He turned the guy over already knowing from the guy’s soft body that he wasn’t Nate. Just some dumb son of a bitch who had himself a fifty-dollar hooker in his room and saw one of the unis, thought it was a bust and went out the back window.

  Pretty soon after that Park knew it was a dead end. He called off the stakeout. They grabbed the manager and went into Nate’s motel room. They found luggage. They found fast food bags in the trash. Park left a plainclothes to sit on the place in case they came back. But Park knew they’d missed them.

  He should have gone home from there. He should have gone to sleep. He didn’t. The woman from the gas station had known something. He radioed in for Carla’s home address. He chewed nails while he drove to her.

  “Your brother,” he said once he’d given the apartment a once-over. “He’s an Aryan Steel wannabe up in Chino.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “I did a favor once,” Park said. “Guy named Joker. He runs Chino for La Eme. Now I know white people are used to running shit, so maybe you don’t know. In California the whiteboys are outnumbered six to one. Aryan Steel takes a backseat to La Eme. So if I call in my chit with Joker and tomorrow your brother is bunking with the carnales, it’s not gonna go well for him.”

  Carla moaned.

  “Nate McClusky,” he said. “You saw him. You saw his daughter.”

  Carla nodded yes. She was scared preverbal.

  “You ever live in Fontana, Carla?”

  She nodded yes.

  “You knew Nate from there?”

  Yes.

  “He was there to see you, wasn’t he?”

  Yes.

  “He was there with one of his buddies from lockup.”

  No.

  “The guy he fought with, he didn’t come with him?”

  No. Something pinned behind her eyes. Something she had her jaw latched shut to keep inside her. Something clawing and biting to get out.

  “Tell me,” he said, and watched her unlock.

  “I sold Nate out. They were going to hurt my brother if I didn’t.”

  “Who?”

  “The Steel. They’re the ones who killed Avis and her husband.”

  Park laughed, jagged, scaring Carla, scaring himself.

  “Nate McClusky killed Avis and Tom Huff.”

  Carla shook her head no.

  “Guy walks out of jail, kidnaps his daughter, the wife winds up dead and you want me to think he didn’t kill her?”

  She nodded that’s right.

  “Use your words, Carla.”

  “He took Polly ’cause he knew Avis was dead already. And Polly was next. He saved her life, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  Goddamn it.

  He believed her.

  That fucked up everything.

  15

  POLLY

  POMONA

  Lighter than blood, darker than pink. She chose the color herself. Her dad had wanted her to choose something dull, something brown. But she’d stood her ground. She wanted the red. After a while he’d nodded. “It’ll make you different enough, I
guess,” he said.

  It’ll make you different. That’s what she wanted.

  She put the jar of dye on the bathroom counter of the new hotel room. She picked up the scissors from next to the jar of dye. She took a fistful of dirty-blond hair in her left hand. The scissors chawed through the hank of hair. She heard the noise as much through her skull as through her ears. She dumped the fistful of shorn hair into the trash. She grabbed a second chunk. She stopped. Her eyes tear-blurred. She let the tears come. They weren’t sad, not this time. She couldn’t say just what they were. After a while the tears stopped. She started cutting again. When she was done with that, she rinsed her hair in the sink. The cold water stinging against her scalp told her how alive she was.

  She took some Vaseline and put a thin layer around her hairline. She put on the thin plastic gloves that came with the dye. She poured the red dye into her palms. She worked it into her hair. She wanted to look at herself in the mirror, but she didn’t yet. She counted seconds as the dye set in. Then she ran the shower until the water was luke. She stuck her head under it. The water ran red and then it ran pink and then it ran clear.

  She buried her head in a towel. She scrubbed, not just her hair, but her face too, the towel scratching, pressing it into the sockets of her eyes until she saw color galaxies be born and die in the dark behind her eyelids.

  She dropped the towel to the floor. She turned to the mirror. Her hair hung in chunks to the side of her head. It was the color of watermelon meat. It played against her eyes, bringing them out. Her face looked different now, something there now that hadn’t been there before, or maybe something that used to be there was gone. Her eyes seemed larger, or deeper, or something else, something more. She stared into them for a long time.

  Gunfighter eyes, no lie.

  Part II

  . . . And Cub

  Los Angeles

  16

  NATE

  LOS ANGELES

  When you walk into a liquor store with a gun in your hand and a mask over your face, you rip the lid off the world. Time does real Einstein shit. It stretches; it shrinks.

  One second through the door, before the first oh shit oh shit oh shit had passed through the clerk’s head, Nate had time to remember the night Polly had been born. He’d gotten a call from Avis, fear in her voice. She told him she was in labor. The baby was coming. Would Nate be there? Would he meet her at the hospital?

  And Nate said he’d be there. He’d hung up the phone. Looked over to Nick in the driver’s seat. Nick had the pistol in his hand, his ski mask in his lap. He had that devil’s smile.

  “Everything cool?” Nick had asked. And Nate hadn’t done a thing but nodded and slipped his own mask over his face.

  That whole memory flashed through him in the time it took him to walk from the door to the counter. Nate waved the pistol at the clerk. The clerk fell back against the high-end booze behind him. Nate barked something slow-mo through the ski mask. The clerk moved. Nate figured the silent alarm had been triggered. It didn’t matter either way. It would be over soon.

  The clerk popped open the register. He dumped the cash drawer on the counter. The loose change spilled down onto the chip rack. The clerk babbled some liquid language from god knows where. It was an intimate moment, this moment between robber and victim. A gun to the head made you naked.

  Nate put the gun to the man’s head. He said, “Safe.”

  The clerk pushed aside the boner-pill display. The safe revealed itself. The clerk keyed in the combination. He got it wrong. He keyed it in again. He got it wrong. One more wrong guess locked the thing for twenty-four hours. Nate lowered the pistol.

  “Take three deep breaths,” he said.

  The clerk gave him what-the-fuck eyes.

  “I said take three deep breaths and then try it again.”

  The clerk followed instructions. In through the nose, out through the mouth times three. The clerk punched in the code.

  Click.

  The safe door rolled open. Nate eyeballed the inside. He did cash stack calculations in his head. He called it two large. Worth it.

  You can’t say that yet. Not until it’s over.

  The clerk bagged the cash. Nate took it. Headed for the door. Time corrected itself as he hit night air. He came back to the city in all its heat and ugliness. Like any drug, the stickup rush had a major downside. It couldn’t last forever.

  He got into the car, turned to Polly in the shotgun seat as he shifted into reverse. Her eyes glistened with life.

  “That’s how you do it,” he said. She nodded. She smiled. Her smile scared him.

  17

  POLLY

  NORTH HOLLYWOOD

  When you stand in the hills over Los Angeles the world turns upside down. Above you the night sky is black dirt, and below you the million lights of the city glitter like a bowl full of stars. It felt right to Polly that they’d come to an upside-down world. She felt pretty upside down herself.

  Polly ate a chiliburger and looked at the stars below while sitting on the hood of the green monster, which was what she’d named the car they’d bought when they’d gotten to Los Angeles and dumped Magic’s car. It was the best chiliburger—maybe even the best food—she’d ever had. So good she made an mmmm when she took a big bite like somebody from a dumb commercial.

  Her dad smiled and went back to counting the money in his lap.

  “Tastes good, right?” he said. “Your uncle Nick said one time, stealing was the best sauce in the world. It’s ’cause you’re a little more alive than you used to be.”

  They’d just come from robbing a liquor store, which was a thought she could have only in an upside-down world. It seemed like stealing was a thing that should have bothered her. It didn’t. It turned out she liked it. In these first days in L.A., Polly felt like she was meeting this girl for the first time, this girl with watermelon hair and gunfighter eyes.

  Polly mock-fed the bear a dollop of chili. The bear waved farts away from his butt. The bear giggled silently. Her dad laughed through his own chiliburger. Polly and he laughed together, and it was like hearing a song she hadn’t heard in a long time.

  He’d explained everything to her on the fifty-mile ride to Los Angeles. About how the blue-thunderbolt bad guys were called Aryan Steel. How they wanted to kill the two of them. How they’d killed her mom and Tom.

  “There’s only one thing I’m good at,” he’d said as they’d driven in stop-and-go traffic into the behemoth of L.A. “That’s robbing. Now Aryan Steel, they’ve got a lot of businesses. Lots of cash. What I’m going to do is keep robbing them and robbing them until they want a truce.”

  “Won’t that just make them madder?”

  “At first,” he said. “But deep down, they’re businessmen. If I cost them enough, they’ll do whatever they can to stop me.”

  “Us,” she said, looking down at the corpse of a coyote on the side of the road. If you drive on the highways all day, she thought, you see a lot of dead things.

  “Huh?”

  “We’re going to rob them,” she said. “I’m going to help. That was the deal.”

  They’d found the apartment a few days ago. An old Thai woman who was happy to have cash for the rent and no questions. Furnished, with two bedrooms, but they hardly ever used them. They slept on the couches in the living room, the teevee going all night. Her dad liked noise when he slept. It turned out she did too.

  He woke in the morning and did his exercises. Polly and the bear watched. After, he sketched out what he knew about Aryan Steel. It turned into classes. Polly thought about school, her empty seat, if any of the kids missed her. Probably not, huh? But that was okay. She didn’t miss them either. She had her own school now. He sketched on paper, how different gangs worked, how they fit together. He had worse handwriting than Polly. Polly took over the sketches. He talked to her about Aryan Steel.

  “It’s jail people who run things on the outside,” he said.

  “Why?”


  “Because people on the outside come inside. All of them, once in a while, they all come inside. So sooner or later, the ones on the inside will get their hands on them.”

  He mapped the gangs down for her. Shot callers and associates. He had her put Crazy Craig at the top of the pyramid. He was the head. Below him, a couple of shot callers, lifers like him. One named Moonie, one named Despot. He told her about their tattoos, how they all told stories. There were the gangs with names like the Nazi Dope Boys and Peckerwood Nation. He told her how the gangs paid taxes to Aryan Steel. How it was all about money. She learned it all.

  “There’s lots of these folk in L.A.,” he said. “We just got to find them.”

  “What are we looking for?”

  “Dirty whiteboys,” he said. “The kind that does business with the Steel. We need a thread to pull. We find where the dirty whiteboys gather, we’ll be able to find our way in.”

  “And then what?”

  “We take the fight to them.”

  She woke the day after they’d robbed the liquor store to find him standing over her.

  “Get up,” he said. Something different in his voice, harder.

  “What?”

  “Up,” he said. She got up.

  “I want to see how many push-ups you can do.”

  “I’m not good at them.”

  “That’s what doing them is for. To get better.”

  Her arms burned after just a couple. Her breath grew burrs, scraping her throat. Nate sat back. He watched her. She did five. On six her arms burned. She let her face touch the cool of the floor.

  “One more,” he said.

  She pushed up with shaking arms. She made a noise. She did it. She rolled onto her back to look at him.