The Front of the Freeway (11 page)

“You got anything you want to say, big man?” he asks, walking the pistol one final step closer to my sweat-beaded skull.

“Fuck you, Tony.” Even in the dark, Tony’s smile cuts the empty air, a sharp white crescent of ivory fangs hanging in the dense and heavy blackness. Slowly, he draws his thumb back across the hammer, his pointed finger resting anxiously on the trigger, and cocks the pistol with a sinister snap.

“Later, JT.”

Whir.

Click.

Punch.

“
If the single man plants himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abides, this huge world will come around to him.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tony’s right, we’re not the same. He never would have pulled over for that cop, or stayed to help his father, or taken the bullets out of that pistol before he went to see Cesar. He never would have done that, and maybe that’s why he never thought to check if the bullets were still there.

No more bodies.

As quickly as Tony’s eyes drop bewildered to the empty, clacking gun, I spin to my hands and feet on the concrete and lunge across the dusted floor, hurling the full weight of my body through his legs, wrapping my arms tight around his knees. With a shocked grunt, Tony gives to the impact and folds to the ground, the back of his head whipping hard against the cement with a sickening thud. In the dark we scamper blindly for control, a mass of pulling hands and heavy breathing as the blood rushing through my veins roars deafeningly in my ears. For all Tony’s charm, for all of his viciousness, his fledgling arms are useless under me. Still rabid with anger, I pin his arms out to one side and shift my hips behind him, wrapping my left arm tightly around his thin, writhing neck, my elbow pressed firmly beneath his pointed chin. As I clutch my shoulder and slowly tighten the vice, a desperate gasp of air breaks from Tony’s lips, his knotted fist beating frantically, and then meekly, at my hip. Finally, Tony’s hand slumps to his side as his thin frame wilts like a doll in my arms.

I could kill him, here. It wouldn’t take ten minutes to load the gun and leave a cocaine suicide for the police to clean up after, a thick pool of blood and powder caked like batter to the garage floor. I could be a ghost and vanish—Tony, Cesar, and two murders all behind me. But I won’t kill Tony. I can’t. And not because the police or my father or God can tell me not to, but because I’m playing by my rules now, and Tony and me, we’re not the same.

Still, this is a mess I’m going to have to clean up now. Tony, Cesar, and LAPD are all going to want their separate shots at me, and there’s too much blood on my hands to think any of this is going away. Quickly, I roll Tony’s sagging body to the cement and push myself to my feet, a swollen knot in my back still throbbing from Tony’s sharp heel. Hands stretched tentatively in front of me, I wade through the dense and hanging darkness, blindly groping for a light switch, softly gripping handfuls of dust and empty air. Then, jarringly, my knuckles crack against a thick plastic shell drilled into a sturdy wooden beam and, with a satisfying snap, gently tap the little plastic arm on.

Instantly, the room explodes into light, the thick and blanketing darkness dissolved by the fiery pulse of a faded orange sun hanging by a thin chain from the ceiling. The garage, the boxes, somehow they all seemed much bigger in the dark—more vast, infinite. Now, miniature stacks of wood and cardboard crates form a perfect half-circle around the garage, a shrunken metropolis of little brown and white skyscrapers wrapped fittingly around Tony’s lifeless body, sprawled face first in the dirt in the center of his little empire.

Behind the towers, a bizarre skyline of Tony and an old woman’s displaced possessions line the wooden walls. Vases, lamps, scales, and pipes all wrestle for a place on short and cramped workbenches, heaps of discarded novelties salvaged from a drug baron’s antique warehouse. I sidestep a shrink-wrapped brown high-rise and move for the low benches, tearing through the debris for any sort of tape or binding. Duct tape, bungee cords, rope—anything to keep Tony tied down for at least a couple of hours. I check back over my shoulder at the sagging body, still slumped uselessly between the arch of boxes, his back sighing slightly with the meek pulse of his breath. I don’t have much time. Hurriedly, I drag two tangled armfuls of tape, chains, and electrical cords across the crowded concrete, hanging string ends drawing faint trails in the powdered floor, and dump the mass of plastic and metal yarn beside Tony’s softly heaving body. His hands go first, bound tightly behind his back in a swollen globe of duct tape, and then his feet, legs, mouth and eyes. Then I pull his slumped body to a solid wood post near the back and tether him to it with the rest of the cord and rope, locking the whole knotted mess with an old, steel padlock.

The flour will have to go the same way it came in, one stack after another down the driveway on a tall aluminum dolly under a blanket. And my fingerprints, they’re not in a database anywhere, I don’t think, but the beer bottles are coming with me, and everything I touched will be wiped down. But Tony’s the last piece of the puzzle. I need him to make this all disappear, and after everything he’s taught me, I know he’s going to have to go, too.

With the garage nearly emptied out, save for the muffled, writhing mass of cords and tape kicking feebly in the center of the room, I lean against the thick, wooden post tied to Tony’s body and run my fingers thoughtfully over the light switch. There’s no remorse, no guilt. Tony would have done the same—tried to do the same—I just beat him to it. Hell, he’ll probably be proud of me. Still, there is some feeling, some immense weight holding me in place, keeping my fingers tapping hesitantly around the switch. But this is how he wanted it. His code, his rules. Darwin, monkeys. All that bullshit. I kneel down and place a hand on his sharp, sweat-stained shoulder, his skinny, lassoed head fixed securely to the front. Without a word, I grab the pistol and wipe down any prints I could have left, running my shirt over every black metal surface and crevice, and drop the heavy little cannon in his lap. His gun. His murder. His problem.

“Later, Tony.”

With the flick of a switch and a desperate, muffled plea, the crippling blackness swallows the room again, and I wade across a dark floor and out of Tony’s dark world for the last time. I lock the garage door for good measure and grab the empty Heinekens, a puzzled Darwin pinching his eyebrows at me from across the low table, his face still freckled with leafy green crumbs. Of course he’s confused. Chromosomes, replication, mitosis, meiosis, reproduction, competition, natural selection, natural elimination, killing, fucking, breeding, eating, dying. It’s all very simple, all very straightforward. Tony should be dead in the garage. But there has to be something else, there’s got to be. Something more human. I turn off the lights, one by one, and take one last look at Tony’s private empire. Then, with my hand wrapped in a green-and-white checkered dish towel, I grab his phone off the bar and jam my knuckle into the keypad three times. A curt ring, and then an equally brief response.

“9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

“Hey,” I breathe, keeping my voice as low and indistinct as possible, “I have some information on the murder of Officer Eddy Miller. You guys are going to want to see this.”

“Maybe the only way out of this is down, down and out through the bottom.”

—
Tony

Driving out from Los Angeles into the desert looks something like sinking into the dirt below the city. All the lights, the endless rows of flashing, shimmering specks that coat the city’s skin, they all move straight up into the lightless night sky. There’s no smog out here, no thick, dark veil draped over you like a blanket, and the further you get from the long fingers of light stretching out from the office buildings and the factories and the freeways, the more tiny, white buds burst into flame on the empty black canvas above. I probably shouldn’t be driving with my head over the wheel, eyes stuck to the sky, but the only stars I ever saw from my bedroom were welded to airplanes on the ends of long metal wings, so I give myself a minute to peer out from behind the pollution and enjoy the view.

There’s not much to look at on the I-15, anyway, just four hours of dirt, brush, and snake holes cut down the middle by a two-lane ribbon of tar occasionally bending right or left in the narrow frame of my headlights. Normally, I’d be done driving by now, but with almost thirty kilos of coke stashed under a few blankets and beach towels in the back I’m not in any hurry to give highway patrol an excuse to poke around the van, so the needle on the dashboard is glued to 63 mph while I admire the exquisite balance of a top of the line, charcoal-grey scale I lifted from Tony’s garage resting patiently in the passenger’s seat. I run my fingers across its flat metallic skull, and it’s eye flickers excitedly under my fingers.

Tony should be awake by now, grinding his teeth on a pillow in a holding cell downtown, staring at a blank stone wall and rooting through his memory for any clues where I might have gone. I’m sure he’ll let the detectives know all about me, how I attacked him and left him with the gun that killed that cop and ten grams of blow, enough to get the prosecutors thinking about intent to sell, but they won’t listen to him. All he knows is my first name and my old job, but the police know he was living rent-free in a dead woman’s house with more scales than you’d find at the gym. They’ll look for me, but they won’t look that hard. Cops are just like anyone else, my father taught me that much, and if the answer looks that easy they won’t try to make it hard. And my father—he should still be in bed, I think, vomiting mouthfuls of bile into a bucket on the floor with a headache like a split skull. I almost feel bad he won’t find any Aspirin in the bathroom, but I don’t think he’ll blame me. They don’t make medicine for embarrassment, anyway; he’ll have to figure that one out himself. They don’t make pills for regret or syrup for new perspective. He’ll have to learn how to deal with all of that on his own, but by now he should have found the thick, metal briefcase I left at the foot of his bed, and the $75,000 loan from Tony stacked neatly in crisp stacks of $100 bills inside. He should have counted the money, and he should have read the three lines scratched across a folded index card inside the case.

Here’s the win you needed.

Next one’s on you.

Love, Julian.

In the long columns of light stretching out from the nose of the car, the road begins to bend gently to the right, dipping out of sight and disappearing behind the faint silhouette of a high, dark hill. I follow the bend around the mountain, its massive black frame falling behind me into the sand and shadows, and far in front a thin band of light catches flame on the horizon, a glowing oasis of flashing white crystals blazing on the edge of the dark and empty desert floor. A pale bubble of light radiates from the shimmering stretch of sand, a perfect transparent arch pulsing all around the glittering city, as the meager desert highway climbs out of the dirt and brush and disappears into the heart of the brilliant, white flame. Suddenly, the coarse hum of static gently roaring in the car speakers jumps and hiccups, spouting a few seconds of misplaced phrases and broken melodies, and then, after a moment, the radio snaps to a woman’s voice, a soothing, gentle whisper calling from the shimmering mass ahead.

“Hello Nevada, and welcome to Las Vegas,” I hear her breathe, a soft touch of warmth against the back of my ear, a slow, crawling tremble down the back of my neck. “You’re free now, Julian.”

Free.

My drugs, my rules, my plans—my life. Tony can have L.A. I don’t need to take this city like he would, and I’m not willing to trade bodies for dollars; my humanity for power. I don’t need an empire. All I need is a spark, something to get ahead, and the heavy wood crates behind me are only a starting block. I’m starting over in a new desert, far from Tony, far from my father, and far away from everything they tried to build for me. This is going to be just what I make it: nothing more, nothing less.

The woman’s voice slowly fades into rhythm, eclipsed by a brooding bass pounding under a rolling snare drum, the whole melody washed over by the shrill whine of an artificial siren for effect. Instinctively, my eyes dart to the rear-view mirror, probing the empty, black road for a swirling red and blue light and the open jaws of a police bumper. But there’s no color in the lights behind me. A long, twisting line of pale headlights stretches back over the dark desert floor, crawling along the winding highway in a row of bright, glowing pairs. I didn’t notice it before, the slithering, flickering tail chasing me out of the valley, glinting in the dark like so many cats’ eyes stalking me up the broken gravel road. I turn my eyes to the street ahead of me and can’t help but smile, a short, satisfied grin in the private dark of my car. For the first time in my life, there’s no one there. Nobody’s in front of me, nothing between me and the blazing city but a flat stretch of road falling away under my tires, and that’s why, after everything, I still have to thank Tony. He’s back there, somewhere, behind the endless string of headlights chasing me over the narrow highway; that’s just how it had to be. But were it not for him, I never would have seen what it looks like up here in front of all the cars, not a brake light in sight, the whole world filed in line behind me up here at the front of the freeway. And they’re not going to catch me, not now, not ever.