Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) (14 page)

A
s soon as
Tara got up to put her dishes away, I shot into the living room and took over the TV. When she came back, she gave me another of those funny looks. She couldn’t understand why I was so fascinated with television. She said it was like I just discovered we had one, and how come I never watched it before?

The Walking Dead
was on now. Technically a horror show, but I didn’t find it scary. To me it was simply a neat concept: civilization coming to an end, strangers banding together for survival.

“I thought you hated the whole zombie thing,” she said.

“Have you seen
The Walking Dead
?” I said.

If we’d had shows like that in the eighties, there’s no way we’d have put up with the
A-Team
shooting thousands of rounds a week and never hitting anybody. TV had crept slowly away from tame make-believe in the nineties to gritty realism in the early 2000s. But the things they were getting away with now…

“Can you imagine if something like that actually happened?” I said, pointing at the screen. “Zombies running loose everywhere?”

Tara looked at me strangely and left me alone on the couch.

About an hour later, something like a conscience reared its sheepish head, and I went looking for her. First the kitchen, then upstairs, but she was gone.

Maybe I was taking the whole “Tara hates me, yippee” thing too far. Scott and Tara were still married, whatever their problems were, and she was obviously still talking to him. Now that I thought about it, had all that laughing at my expense been malicious?

A person doesn’t go from marriage to breaking up and then suddenly start waltzing around the house acting like nothing is wrong. Bad relationships have minefields of treacherous politics in every tiny thing. Lower or raise the TV volume when someone enters the room and it means something: consideration for her, or lack thereof. Wash the dishes after breakfast? One less thing she has to do, and thank you very much Honey.

Scott could have been trying to fix things between them, and here I was not fixing things anymore. Or maybe he’d been walking around hating her, being a real ass about it, and now I was acting polite and nice and cruelly messing with her head.

And here I thought I’d caught an easy ride.

Sometime in the early afternoon, just when I felt it was safe to leave the house, I heard Scott’s phone ringing in the kitchen. I went in, picked it up, and checked for a picture on the front, but all I saw was a phone number. I answered it.

“Hello?” I said.

“Fuck you!” someone yelled. A woman, but not Tara. And not Pam from the mental clinic. Whoever she was, she hung up before I could put her in her place.

After a brief hesitation, I clicked and swiped until I figured out how to call her back and then did so. Nobody answered the first time, and nobody answered the second time, either. I went to put the phone in my pocket and it rang again. This time from a different number.

“You’re gonna fucking die, asshole,” a man’s voice said, and then he hung up. I was so shocked by the rudeness I forgot to put this guy in his place, too.

Both the man and the woman were angry, and anger makes people do reckless things. Reckless people worried me. That’s why, when I left the house for a drive, I noticed a silver sports car following me a little too closely. Whoever it was made sure to stay a few lengths behind.

I took a sudden turn after the bridge, hoping to lose him or her, but the silver car revved and squealed after me. I took another turn and it followed along easily, keeping pace. I would have turned again, but the sports car shot in front of me and slowed. Beer bottles flew from the driver’s side window landing on and around my car. One came crashing into the windshield, fracturing it with a lovely spider web of cracks that made it hard to see through.

The silver car angled across the narrow lane, blocking me in. The area looked beaten down and derelict and forgotten. With a chain link fence on one side and a hydrant poking out of the sidewalk on the other side, there was no way I could move forward. I put Scott’s car in reverse, already turning the wheel—and promptly bumped into something. When I looked back, I saw a big black Jeep blocking my way.

A young, muscular, Asian guy got out of the silver car waving his hands around and telling me to get out. I stole a glance behind me and saw a tubby white guy get out of the Jeep.

Curious, but unafraid, I got out too.

Casually, Jeep Guy reached in and pulled out a long hunting rifle with a glossy stock and a decorative fur strap.

“Where you think
you’re
going, dickwad?” he said.

Meanwhile, the Asian guy had gotten out his own weapon—an aluminum baseball bat.

“I told you to leave my sister alone, asshole,” he said with a flawless Midwest American accent.

He rushed me with the bat held low. I hid behind the still open door and crouched down for the first swing. It broke the side window and sent a shower of glass everywhere. I shoved the door hard with my back against the car and he gave a surprised yelp and fell over. As he was getting up, I came around and kicked him a glancing blow to the head, knocking him back down again.

Despite all that, I’m not Bruce Lee. I can’t fight ten people at a time, or even two people. Jeep Guy must have hit me with the butt of his rifle, because I saw stars and dropped to my knees, then my hands and knees, and then my face hit the asphalt.

Someone said, “You okay, Johnny?”

Someone else said, “Smashed my knee.”

My vision was blurry and the world seemed spinnier than I was used to. Someone dragged me up by my shirt and then slammed me against the car.

“He warned you once, and now I’m gonna shoot you,” Jeep Guy said.

“Let me do it,” Johnny said.

Johnny was maybe twenty-five, buzz cut, with a sculpted physique from too many hours in the gym. He would have been scary to someone who hadn’t died as many times as I had.

“I told you I’d kill you if you touched my sister again,” he said, getting in my face, angling his gaze back and forth like he was cornering me.

Then it dawned on me. “Melody’s brother?”

“Shut up!” Johnny said, and punched me in the stomach, causing me to double over in pain.

Somewhat comically, my lactose intolerance blared forth in what may have been a B flat tone, and the air filled with the noxious stench of indigestible milk sugar.

Johnny chuckled.

“Oh, Jesus,” Jeep Guy said, crinkling his nose. “Looks like you hit him too hard. So hey, you want me to shoot him now?”

“I don’t know, George,” Johnny said, pretending to think about it. “I wanna see him cry before we kill him.”

Now it was my turn to chuckle, though I had to force it out over the pain in my sour stomach and my stinging face.

“Hey look,” Jeep Guy George said. “He thinks we’re kidding. Hold him higher.”

Johnny grabbed my shirt and held me up. Then George unslung his expensive-looking hunting rifle and pointed it at my head.

“You want me to do it now?” he said.

Johnny opened his mouth to say something but I laughed again. Not because I wasn’t afraid of death, but because I didn’t think I was in any danger beyond the cooling trickle of blood from my nose.

“Think we won’t do it?” Johnny said. He grabbed my hair and jerked me ouchingly close to his face. “I told you … but you couldn’t leave her alone, could you? Why you wanna die?”

“He’s not going to kill me,” I said. “And you won’t either. Not here, not anywhere. He’s just some guy who likes hunting and country music. Probably has a big mouth, and that’s why you asked him to go on this little adventure. I get it, you love your sister and I’m bad news, and—oh
no
, who’s
that
?”

“What?” Johnny said, turning to see where I was looking, loosening his grip on my hair at the same time.

I twisted painfully from his grasp, losing some of Scott’s frizzy red hair in the process, and grabbed the barrel of the gun. Bracing my back against the car, I held on tightly and kicked George away. The rifle came out of his hands like a sword from a scabbard. I used it like a sword, bashing Johnny hard in his arm, and that brought a not-so-tough yelp out of him. Then I reversed the rifle and pointed it back and forth between Johnny and George, who was scrabbling backwards like a crab.

“Yeah right,” Johnny said, smiling evilly, waving the bat around like he was winding up. “You won’t shoot anyone. You’re gonna stand there while I beat the shit out of you.”

I aimed at the bat, following it carefully, affecting a look of supreme concentration.

“What are you doing?” Johnny said, still swinging the bat, though less fluidly, looking from me to his bat and back again.

“Nobody’ll get hurt,” I said, “if you hold perfectly still. I think I can shoot it out of your hands…”

Johnny’s eyes widened and he dropped the bat. “Don’t do it man!”

“I thought you said he was a pussy!” George screamed, and dove into his Jeep. Then, out the window, he yelled, “You better not mess up my gun!”

Ensconced in his shiny expensive-looking vehicle, George backed up to make room, then accelerated halfheartedly toward me, like he wanted to take me and the still-open car door for a ride. I didn’t bother moving. No way was he going to mess up his Jeep, and he didn’t.

Moments later, they were both gone.

This section of Toledo didn’t look like it got much traffic, so if they’d wanted to really hurt me I suppose they could have. I examined the rifle—a bolt-action, with the safety off. George couldn’t have been dumb enough to point a loaded weapon at me.

On a lark, I opened the breach.

“Seriously?” I said, and picked up the ejected round.

I
pulled
in behind Tony Packo’s and parked. After all the hoopla with Johnny and George, I felt like having the Greatest Hungarian Hotdog ever.

Tony Packo’s had been mentioned several times by Klinger in the TV series
M*A*S*H,
one of my all-time favorite shows. I’d only been there once before but the food had been good. Lots of memorabilia, and all those hotdog buns signed by celebrities. I’d always wanted to meet a real celebrity (Ernest Prescott didn’t count), and maybe today I would.

I’d gotten most of the blood off my face with half a bottle of water found on the floor under the passenger seat. I thought I looked fine, but the hostess gave me a suspicious once over.

“Table for one,” I said.

“You have blood on your shirt,” she said.

I glanced down. It looked like someone had dipped their hands in blood and then shaken them at me.

“Oh that’s just paint,” I said, laughing at the absurd misunderstanding.
These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

A look of relief washed over her face. “Right this way.”

The place had a lot of people in it. A tourist attraction of sorts, Tony Packo’s had been busy last time, too. Which was fine. It gave me time to ponder the craziness with the rifle and Johnny and his dumb bat.

Until I knew more about my ride, I couldn’t let anything happen to him. Not until I knew he’d done something warranting it. Rules were rules, even if I was the only one following them.

Thinking back, Scott’s portal in the Great Wherever hadn’t had that weird sense of … I don’t know what you’d call it. Like it was okay to take over, with limits. Like with Nate Cantrell, and later with Peter. Both those guys had ended up being relatively innocent. So what did that make Scott? Did it mean he was a butchering killer, like Ernest and Lana, or whatever Fred had been?

Eventually my waiter arrived. His name tag said his name was Troy. Troy-the-waiter was in his mid-twenties. He had enormous circle things in his stretchy earlobes, wide enough to poke a finger through, and his arms were sleeved in an indecipherable confusion of colorful tattoos. His eyes were wise beyond his physical age, and he was very, very cool.

He gave my bloody shirt a quick glance.

“Hello, welcome to Tony Packo’s,” he said in a reserved tone that was technically still polite.

“I know this is going to sound funny,” I said, “but have the Cubs won the World Series in the last, oh say, five years?”

I wasn’t that big of a baseball fan, but I was a little, and on those occasions when I missed the Series I always hoped to find the curse had been lifted. Also, I was trying to cheer myself up.

“You mean baseball?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Can’t say I follow baseball.”

“What’s your sport?” I said, happy to talk to anyone who didn’t hate me yet. “Football?”

He shook his head. “Not really.”

“Why not?”

Troy shrugged, turning his indifference into something cool and interesting and wise and no big deal all at the same time.

“Just the whole machismo thing, I guess. Objectification of women, male hegemony, strong is good, weak is bad, commercialism, big corporations and banks … you know, that kind of thing. Basically a microcosm of all that’s wrong with America.”

“Microcosms,” I said, shaking my head at the shame of it. “Those are the worst kind of cosms.”

Troy blinked, then threw me a sharp look.

“Whataya have?” he said, a few degrees cooler.

“You’re kidding, right? Hungarian dog. Fries too. But please, hold the American-
cheese-
mo—makes me fart. Thank you.”

“Right,” he said, pulling a thin smile before leaving.

On his way to the kitchen, he passed a waitress and said something. The girl snuck a glance at me and smirked, and the patron she was supposed to be helping sighed impatiently. I felt a little like that infamous butterfly flapping his wings and causing hurricanes around the world.

A different server brought me a drink, and somewhere in the restaurant a cell phone started playing Yakety Sax, the Benny Hill theme, which brought me back to the old days when Dad stayed up late to watch it when he thought Mom was asleep. Mom hated the show, called it
smut
, and one time over dinner she accused Dad of liking it because the women ran around in their underwear.

Dad’s deadpan response had been: “Sometimes they walk.” Then he smiled the classic Benny Hill mugging-for-the-camera face, and my sister and I took his side while Mom pretended to be offended.

Hotdogs and fries was normally a quick order, but my food hadn’t arrived yet.

Ok, why not…

I got out Scott’s phone, pecked-out a familiar number and wondered, as I always did, if someone would answer it this time. I always expected the number to have changed or been disconnected, but someone picked up after a few rings and said, “Hello?”

Her voice was a little rougher than when I’d called five years ago from Sandra’s house. Tired-sounding. More so than she deserved.

“Hello?” she said again.

My throat tightened and I swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

“Who is this?” she said.

“I mean I think I have the wrong number. Sorry.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “Who were you trying to reach?” There was a note of insistence in her voice, like she really wanted to know.

I faked a laugh and rattled off her phone number, with the last digit a seven instead of an eight.

“Funny how that happens,” she said. “We’ve had this number for thirty years, and though every telemarketer and charity group in the world seems to know it, we’ve never changed it.”

“Funny,” I said, stalling, hoping to hear more of her voice before it got too weird and I had to hang up. “Uh … why?”

“Twenty-one years ago we started getting calls every few months, then maybe once or twice a year. Different people, different places. Something about those calls always seemed odd. Whenever I asked who they were looking for, they said they hit seven and not eight, just like you did now.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes,” she said. “Then, about five years ago, the calls suddenly stopped.”

My mouth was dry, so I took a sip of water.

“And I don’t know why,” she said, “but I miss them. Those strange calls.”

Tears came to my eyes, unbidden, causing them to sting. I needed to hang up the phone and never call that number again.

Instead I said, “Does … um … your husband, or children … do they also miss those calls?”

Hang up now!

“Paul died four years ago,” she said softly. “Jane, my daughter, lives in Toledo. Same area code you’re calling from now, matter of fact.”

Cursing myself for being weak, I said, “Sorry, ma’am. For the wrong number. Small world, huh?”

I ended the call before I could say anything else.