She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  “I like it too,” she said. “Fuck that guy.”

  25

  NATE

  HUNTINGTON BEACH

  He acted like he didn’t know where he was driving. Like he was just out clearing his head. Like he didn’t know he was heading west.

  He knocked on the door. She opened it a crack. He could tell from the way she was standing she had her foot wedged behind the door. Already showing more smarts than that suckmouth had at the stash house.

  “I told you everything I know,” she said.

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “Why are you here then?”

  “We hit the stash house today.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “They’re going to be asking questions,” Nate said. “They’ll get around to asking you soon enough.”

  “Take your daughter and get the hell out of California.”

  “There’s no place safe for us,” he said. “That’s why we’re fighting.”

  Headlights lit them up as a car rolled down the street. Nate touched the gun in his hoodie pocket. She saw the move. And Nate saw how it scared her but that she liked it too.

  “You got to leave,” she said. “You’re crazy to be here.”

  “I know,” he said. “Can I come back?”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  He could see in her face that she did. That it wasn’t his imagination. She had wild eyes. Same as he did these days. He understood then how they’d got to her. How he’d got to her too. Then something in her—something smart, Nate had to admit—won out. She shook her head no.

  “Just find yourself somebody who doesn’t know who you are,” she said.

  “You already know my secret,” Nate says. “And I know yours.”

  “The hell you do.”

  “You’ve been living in a cage you built so slow you didn’t even notice when the door locked behind you. And you maybe even haven’t let yourself admit you want out.”

  “Please go,” she said.

  He stepped back from the door to say okay. He turned away. He knew he had to leave it up to her.

  “I’ll meet you someplace,” she said behind him. “Someplace nobody knows me.”

  26

  POLLY

  NORTH HOLLYWOOD/ENCINO/KOREATOWN/GLENDALE

  These next days were the best of them all, so good and wild that later on Polly could only remember them in choppy flashes all out of order.

  Food tasted different again, like a layer of dead skin had been scraped off her tongue. They kept eating Mexican food, lots of it. Soft tortillas with pork-fat warmth. Crisp pork, sour pickled onions. Sauces bursting red or green, fire on her tongue, fire down her throat. Her dad couldn’t handle the heat. It made him sweat and hiccup. But she loved it. “You get that from your mom,” he said, and it hurt to hear that but it helped too.

  She was growing; she could feel herself growing, her skin stretching, a dull ache in her nipples at night.

  They settled into a routine. She hadn’t realized how much she craved one. They woke, they did exercises. Push-ups, jumping jacks. Prison-yard exercises, he told her. He figured out how much to push her. She learned to like being pushed. To like misery.

  He taught her how to box. How to shoot out the jab like a cannon shot, how to bring it right back so she wouldn’t be open. How to raise the hands to keep herself safe.

  He taught her how to wrestle. How leverage turned into strength. She got the physics of it. Levers and fulcrums became chokes and wristlocks. Sometimes she dreamed of wrestling faceless people. Sometimes winning, sometimes losing.

  He taught her how to fight dirty. Thumbs in the eyes, fish hooks. She blushed when he taught her to kick a man in the crotch. How weird evolution was, she thought, to put that stuff there like a shut-off switch between a man’s legs.

  In the afternoons she read books they found in secondhand stores. She practiced chokes with the bear. Afterward they danced. They found out all three of them loved big loud hip-hop. The bear did the twist, the swim. He shook, he skanked. She made him dance song after song.

  There was a thing they never said to each other, a thing that ought to be said, dad to daughter and daughter to dad, but later on she’d know that even though they never said it, it was true, that she felt it with everything she had and that he had too, and surely that was good enough.

  At night, they hunted.

  Polly began to live for that time from the moment you started the job to the moment it ended. It was like stepping out of a rocket ship to take a space walk.

  They took down a white power club in the Valley. tonite steeltoe h8 on the sign above the door. Polly kept watch from the driver’s seat, her hand hovering over the horn to give the two-honk signal if something went wrong. Music bled out the windows of the building, low bass notes, drums like machine gun fire. She bobbed her head to the beat.

  Kids with shaved heads so fresh their scalps were ghost white, their swastika tattoos drawn on in markers, ran as her dad moved into the club with the sawed-off. He took the gate money while the Odin’s Bastards bouncer foamed at the mouth and swore vengeance. Later that night they bought steaks at the grocery store with white power money. They grilled them at midnight, gobbled them down rare. Pink juices on her chin, down her throat.

  There was a chop shop too, maybe before the club, maybe after. They broke in at two in the morning, Polly manic from robbery rush and no sleep. She giggled while he boosted her through a broken window. He passed her the gas cans and the Sterno bomb he’d built that afternoon. She doused the room. Gas fumes stung her eyes. She heard a bok-bok-bok and she wondered if gas fumes had driven her nutso. But no, there it was again. Even though her heart did crazy things she followed the clucking. She opened an office door. She found a rooster in a cage, black with a bright white Mohawk of feathers. She passed the cage over to her dad through the broken window before she lit the wick to burn the place down.

  “It’s a fighting cock,” he told her as they drove away from the garage, the bird squawking in the backseat.

  “I couldn’t let it burn,” she said. The bear put a friendly paw up to the cage. The rooster pecked it. It said fuck you in chicken.

  They let it go in MacArthur Park. They shooed it into the night. Her dad tried to chase it. It spread its wings. He kept his distance.

  “Are you chicken?” Polly asked. The bear knee-slapped.

  The night turned red and loud from fire truck sirens on the street below them. The rooster flapped into the dark. Now they were both laughing. Her dad put a hand on Polly’s shoulder and squeezed. She rested her hand on his as they watched the big fire engines roll past them.

  “Did we do that?” she asked. She knew the answer. She just wanted to hear him say it.

  “We did that,” he said. She leaned against him. Breathed him in. The flashing lights of the fire engines strobed against their faces.

  Tiny Tim was an Aryan Steel tax collector, and he was the biggest person Polly had ever seen. Her dad explained it to her. How all the whiteboy criminals in the state owed taxes to Aryan Steel. Ten percent. They called it the dime. Tiny Tim’s job was to collect the dime.

  Tiny Tim had to duck his head to avoid hitting it at the top of doorways. Sometimes he forgot. He finger-fished his nose and ate his catches every moment he didn’t think he was being watched. Polly and her dad, rolling behind him in the green monster, had to hold their laughter in like kids in church. Polly pressed her face against his shoulder to block out the hilarious sight of it.

  They followed Tiny Tim all day. He carried a backpack with him. It got heavier every stop. They followed him to a house in Little Armenia.

  “We’ll do it here,” her dad said. “You know what to do?”

  She nodded like yeah and asked, “What’s here?”

  “It’s a place men go,” he said.

  “There’s women in there,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Ladies of the
night,” Polly said. He laughed. “Shut up,” Polly said. “That’s what they’re called.”

  “Where’d you get that?” he asked.

  “I read,” she said. “Don’t laugh at me.”

  “Ladies of the night,” he said. “Here he comes.”

  Polly’s skin got all tingly, the way it did before their missions. She’d learned that the energy that flooded her body was fuel. Before, she’d been a rocket ship stuck in its docking even as its engines roared, burning itself. Now she flew.

  She looked up to see Tiny Tim thwack his head on the doorframe as he walked out the door. He rubbed his stubbly scalp as Polly slipped out of the car. She stood to face him as he reached the sidewalk. She tasted sweetness on the air and said, “Hey mister.” Tiny Tim turned to her. Her dad came up behind him. He kicked Tiny Tim behind his knee, and the knee crackled like burning wood as the big man dropped. His scream was higher pitched than she would have thought. Both his hands flew to his crushed knee. Polly grabbed the backpack. The two of them ran to the car. They burned rubber.

  She opened the backpack. It was stuffed with money almost to the rim.

  “Holy shit,” Polly said.

  Polly counted money. Thousands of dollars. They flapped in the wind like palm fronds.

  “We’re rich,” she said.

  “Not yet,” her dad said. “But we will be.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The next job,” he said. “I think it’s the last one. The one that will make them quit.”

  That should have made her feel free. Instead, she got that trapped-rat feeling she hadn’t felt in weeks. Like Venus was ascendant.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “The Steel’s bank,” he said. “That big dude was just one of the tax collectors they’ve got. There’s one for every part of L.A. that has whiteboy business. And when they’ve made their collections, they take them to this old warehouse in Chinatown. It’s where they hold the money before it’s shipped off to be laundered. We hit that, we can buy our way out of the greenlight.”

  “How’d you learn about the bank?” Polly asked. “Charlotte didn’t tell us about that place.”

  “She told me,” he said. All sorts of wrong notes in the music of his voice. The music of Venus ascendant.

  The car walls closing in on Polly. Her clothes tightening like a snake.

  “When?” she asked.

  “Last night,” he said. “I’ve been going to see her.”

  Polly threw a double-handful of cash out the window.

  “She’s one of them,” Polly said to the bear once they were back in the house.

  “Talk to me, not him,” her dad said.

  “She’s one of them,” she said. But what she meant was you lied to me.

  “She’s not like that,” her dad said. “She’s a kid who got confused. She’s helping us.”

  She’d never seen him look so weak before. Not even when he’d been shot. She turned away from him, not wanting to see his dumb face. She tried to shove the lid back on the pot inside her. Bad thoughts bubbled over anyway. Ruined, they chanted. We’re ruined.

  She spent hours training herself, sweating, punching pillows, rolling on the floor. Anything that kept her brain in the moment. She was choking out a pillow when he opened the door from the bathroom and called to her. She kept choking the pillow, going through the checklist in her head. Move hand here, squeeze here.

  “Polly,” he said again. “Come here. Stay pissed if you want, but you got to see this.”

  She walked into the bathroom. Nate had stripped off his jeans. He hiked up his boxer shorts to show her the place where he’d been shot. It had been getting better, almost healed up all the way. But now it was purple again. And at the center of it something hard and gray bloomed.

  “Is it infected?” she asked. The word hospital hospital hospital looped in her head.

  “No,” he said. “Touch that gray part.”

  She moved her hand to it, slow. Her fingers brushed hard metal.

  “It’s the bullet,” he said.

  “The bullet?”

  “I’ve heard about this,” he said. “My body’s rejecting it. It’ll keep crawling out my body until one day there’ll be enough of it for me to grab and just yank it like a big ol’ splinter.”

  And she could see by his eyes that he liked it. He thought it was cool. Polly didn’t. She didn’t believe in magic, not at all. But it felt like an omen. Like the gods’ way of saying nothing stays buried forever.

  Interlude

  Whale Ship Cannibals

  The High Desert

  LUIS

  HANGTREE

  It was the sort of hunger that turned whale ship sailors into cannibals. It had Luis fucked up bad. It racked his muscles. It chilled the Cali desert air until he shivered. It turned the faucet on in his nose. Call it junk hunger, aka dope sickness. It pushed everything else to the sides of his mind. The handcuffs biting into his wrists. The fact that he was in the backseat of a cop car headed to jail.

  The hunger came with a load of irony: Luis’s stomach was stuffed with the very thing he hungered for. His gut swelled under his T-shirt thanks to fifty capsules packed with the heroin he craved.

  Water, water everywhere.

  Luis had gagged the capsules down one at a time in the back room of a Tecate bar. A couple of chuntaro cartel badasses in polyester shirts and Jesus Malverde cowboy boots mimed it out for him: take a condom stuffed with capsules, dip it in oil, swallow it, sip water, repeat. They left him with some works—a spike, a spoon, a lighter for cooking, a cotton ball to filter the cooked junk—and a good shot’s worth of Mexican brown. It would have been enough to keep Luis on even keel until he was back in the arms of Frogtown Rifa, back to the carnales who would fix him up good. It would have been enough if everything hadn’t gone to hell.

  He’d been nailed thirty minutes past the border, just outside a shitkick Cali desert town called Hangtree. Hadn’t even been a speed trap. The cop car rolled out from a side street and pulled in behind him like it’d been waiting for him special. The cops ordered him out of the car without even putting on a show of running his driver’s license. They cuffed him and put him in the back of the squad car, leaving the car abandoned at the side of the road, the door still open.

  Not an arrest. A vanishing.

  The one with the badge that read sheriff houser had mirror shades for eyes, a gray bristle mustache, hands that could tear an apple in half. He gripped the wheel with scarred knuckles. The man made no wasted movements. He drove through red lights and stop signs like they were invisible.

  The cop sitting shotgun looked like something escaped from the bowels of the earth, fat and pink and nearly hairless. Houser called him Jimmy. When Jimmy took off his sunglasses, his tiny squint eyes told Luis that the man had been called pig way before he ever pinned a badge to his chest. Jimmy snuck looks back at Luis and flashed a clown’s smile. The smile made Luis’s balls want to crawl up in his belly. His belly told his balls, no room at the inn. No room for anything but dope-filled condoms and the hunger.

  The cruiser rolled through Hangtree, what town there was to roll through. The citizens stiffened as the cop car passed by—every soul in Hangtree looked to be riding dirty. Missing teeth. Tweaker eyes. The air that came through the car vents carried the rotten egg smell of meth brewing.

  The cop station loomed ahead. Luis pictured kicking cold turkey in a jail cell. His one hope: somebody—La Eme, those crazy Nazi bastards in Aryan Steel, hell, even the mayates in the Black Guerrilla Family—had a source in the lockup.

  The cruiser rolled past the cop station without slowing down. Maybe they were taking Luis straight to a hospital, get a doctor to stick a hose up his ass to wash the capsules right out of his intestines. But Luis’s junkie instincts said this whole deal was wrong—wrong far beyond getting pinched with class-A felony weight in his stomach.

  They drove up into the high desert. The road twisted. They passed throug
h some sort of encampment. Old concrete slabs set into the earth. Campers and homemade shacks set up on the slabs. The shacks and campers had chimneys. Spray-paint pentagrams. Green bottle glass shattered and set into concrete spelling out slabtown. A dead tree, its branches heavy with old shoes. The unmistakable smell of meth cooking overpowered everything. They passed a man naked but for a butcher’s apron, a surgical mask pushed down under his chin so he could smoke. He nodded at Houser like morning, boss. Houser touched the brim of his hat like howdy.

  They came out the other side of the village. Houser turned the car onto a dirt road up into the hills. The bad vibes turned seismic.

  “Where you taking me, man?” Luis asked.

  Jimmy giggled. He wiped sweat off his head with a crusty handkerchief. The car kicked up dirt clouds as it climbed. Gravel churned under the tires. The road leveled off. Ahead of them Luis saw a fence, chain link and razor wire, around a windowless cinder-block building with a rusted metal door. Luis’s stomach dumped acid—what-the-fuck piled on top of the dope sickness.

  “He’s not looking too good, boss.”

  Luis looked up to see Jimmy eyefucking him.

  “Reckon he’s got himself a thirst,” Houser said.

  “Never know how a man lets himself get that way,” Jimmy said.

  A pit dog—face scars, torn-off ears, death in its eyes—rounded the corner like something out of a detox nightmare. It came to the chain-link and stood man-height, huge paws poking through the chain-link.

  “Don’t you?” Houser asked. “A fellow does something makes him feel good, so he does it again. Same way we trained the dog.”

  “What the hell’s the dog got to do with it?”

  Houser shut off the car, pointed at the monster behind the fence.

  “Some folks dress their dogs in little outfits, talk to them, treat them like human beings. And some people point and laugh. They say dogs aren’t people. And they’re right. Dogs aren’t people.”