The Front of the Freeway (6 page)

My face is starting to feel hot under my massive black sunglasses as I wade to the register through a baby-proofed swamp of plush décor, my fingers twitching in my pocket as I wait behind the old woman with the roller-coaster spine, trying to look casual while holding a little black missile silo in my pocket.

“For my daughter,” she sighs, her voice as wispy thin as her hair. “And her daughter. But you sell them so big now, how am I supposed to carry this thing?” She coughs dustily from two leathery lips, shielding her mouth with one skeleton hand and patting an oversized baby car-seat with the other. Then suddenly, expectedly, she spins, and hooks two foggy grey eyes to mine. She smiles, tilts her head, and now the cashier is staring at me, too. They’d have to be deaf not to hear my heart bouncing off my ribs like a pinball. “Would you mind?”

Yes, yes I would, I’m trying to rob you, and I’m not sticking around to play box boy. I unclench my jaw to stutter, but before I breathe a word Tony’s smile flashes into view and swallows their gaze.

“Can I take that from you, ma’am?” he offers, throwing me a wink, flashing the girls a smile. “It looks pretty heavy.” Soon the elephant box is dragging Tony to the parking lot while a little wrinkled mouth chirps anxiously after him, leaving me with the cashier, a pretty young brunette buttoned to a red and white
Hi, my name is Amber
tag, and suddenly I’m standing alone with Amber’s soft stare and Tony’s heavy gun.

“Can I help you?” For a second I wait for the paralyzing chemicals, the stomach-knotting adrenaline to grip my bones and take over and make this all so easy. But, somehow, everything’s the same—it’s malleable, it’s all real, and it’s nothing like I imagined in Tony’s car or in the schizophrenic slideshows in my head. It’s a lot harder now, and Amber’s just waiting.

“Yeah,” I start, surprised by the steady confidence in my voice. “I’d like to make a withdrawal.”

“Thou shalt not steal.”

—God

“Huh?”

The clerk’s waxed eyebrows pinch to a cautious arch above her nose. Now two coffee brown eyes scan my face, searching for meaning. Finding none, they fall to the pistol jutting from my closed fist across the table.

“I said open the register.”

The waxed arch straightens across her forehead, frozen above two wide fawn eyes screaming for her silent, clenched lips. I look nervously to the display windows and find Tony waiting patiently behind the wheel of our getaway. Tony gives me a thumbs-up.

“Please don’t kill me,” the clerk whispers, trembling lips cracking her frozen stare.

Jesus Christ.
“Look, I’m not going to kill you, just open the register.” The trembling of her mouth ripples down to her shaking hands, whipping a nervous tremor into her fingers as they dance across the register in slow, seizured precision.

“Oh, God. Oh, God…please, just don’t kill me.”

“I said I’m not going to kill you. Just hurry up!” All of a sudden this is taking far too long, and every second feels like a little eternity I know I can’t afford. The heat is back in my cheeks, flushing my face and pricking at my ears. She needs to hurry up, and if the pistol doesn’t give her a little sense of urgency, maybe cocking it will.

Whir. Click.

The clerk squeaks, and, with a mechanical cough, the register yields, sticking out a wide metal tongue lush with green paper bills. I lunge across the counter and plunge my free hand into the paper pond, tearing bill after bill from their tin coffins. I clear the drawer and take a look at my clenched green fist—a knot of ones and fives. What is this, thirteen dollars?

And then, somewhere in the distance, the penetrating whine of a blue and red police siren penetrates the store.

“What the fuck is this?” Now I’m shaking a wad of stripper bills in Amber’s face, and a hot sweat is breaking down my neck. The car seat must have cost a hundred, at least.

“That’s all there is… I’m sorry. That’s everything. Please, just take it!” I rocket my open hand back onto the metal tongue but it only knocks against the empty tin trey. Suddenly, Tony’s gun is flush against Amber’s temple, and I’m no longer in control.

“Don’t fuck with me, Amber! Where’s the rest of it?” The dams in Amber’s eyes burst, and tears pour down her cheeks. She’s sorry, she doesn’t know, oh God, oh God, oh God. My ears jump at a panicked roar from the parking lot, and Tony’s waving me in, engine humming.

Amber’s useless now. Whimpering and shaking, her eyes follow her tears down to the register.

Anxiously, subtly—to the register.

I throw my hand at the machine one more time, this time tearing up at the rigged tray itself, and to the relief of my knotted stomach, the trey gives. I fling the tin table aside and grope at another green pond; twenty, fifty, and hundred dollar bills all jump into my pocket. I’m shaking as much as Amber now as the banshee sirens choke the air, a swarm of howling bees crying louder and louder around my head.

Pockets jammed, eyes stung with sweat, I bolt for the car. I tear through the thin glass door, across pavement, and into Tony’s growling taxi, giving myself to the lurching weight of the car as it jolts desperately from the lot. My head flies back onto the headrest, and I shut my eyes tight against the piercing, hunting siren, panting hard while Tony yanks the car around the corner.

And then in the mirror two colored lights swirl from a flashing, orca striped LAPD rounding the corner behind us.

“Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.”

—Frederick Douglass

Tony’s not pulling over. A single, whining cop car is stalking us up King, and Tony’s cruising at about 25. You think he’d turn the radio down.

“Tony, what the hell are we doing?”

“We’re driving, man, just relax. Breathe a little.” Breathe a little? We’re about to finish this ride in the back of a squad car and he wants me to breath? I rip off my seat belt…no, that’s not right, I shove it back in the buckle and wipe my palms on the seat. Are there drugs in the car? With the wave of his hand, Tony brushes the turn signal and brings the car’s ticking heartbeat to life. Jake follows the leader around the corner and into a dusty, stucco district. “You ever draw out of the lines when you were a kid, JT?” I just blink. We’re looking at five to ten, and he’s talking about coloring books.

“What are you talking about?”

“Come on, JT, did you ever connect the dots how you wanted? Ever fuck up the numbers and just paint?”

“Where are we, Tony?” Tony breaks a smile, and after a week I’ve known him long enough to worry.

“See? Now that’s what I’m talking about—always got to know ‘Tony, where
are we
?’ and ‘Tony, what’re
we doing
?’”

This can’t be good.

“Well, I’ll tell you what we’re doing, boss. We’re coloring just a little bit outside the lines.” Tony stretches across my lap with a long right arm, and guiding the wheel with a blind left hand, grabs the pistol from the passenger floor. He rests the gun under his left leg and eases the car to the curb, and something in me wishes he would just keep on driving forever.

The black-and-white pulls tightly in behind us and immediately begins barking orders in a muffled, mechanical monotone.

“Put your hands…wheel…don’t move.”
Tony cocks his head and squints at the steering wheel, and to my surprise, turns down the radio. He turns to look at the officer, shouting over two humming motors,

“What?”

“Put your hands on the steering wheel and don’t move.”
In the rear-view mirror young Officer Mumbles steps out of the car, flashlight raised, creeping slowly towards the driver’s side door. Tony slides his hands casually over the wheel and waits.

“Don’t move, keep your hands on the wheel.” The officer edges towards Tony, flashlight at the ready, forgetting academy protocol with every step. Hands shaking, check. Palm on the driver’s door, check. “Get out of the fucking car,” check. Tony tosses me a bored look and turns to the trembling blue jacket at his window.

“Officer, you and I both know that I can’t open this door with my hands on the wheel.”

God damn it, Tony.

Tony looks unimpressed with the blinding white eye staring back at him through the driver window, quivering in the officer’s young hand. He tears the door open with his free arm and yells through two sweat-beaded lips. “Out of the fucking car!” Tony raises his hands to his cheeks, and takes one last, soft, verbal jab.

“Should I get my own seatbelt then? I only have two hands, officer.” The furious uniform stretches across Tony’s lap, knocking Tony’s chin with the base of the light as the other hand grabs for the seatbelt. Tony spits blood against the back seat, but in an instant I realize that, with the grace and ease of a ballroom dancer, Tony’s maneuvered his body perfectly with his partner’s, together, in time. In the brief, hanging moment that the officer’s eyes fix to the buckle, his long, blue torso stretched across Tony’s, Tony draws the gun from beneath his leg, presses its nose into the soft exposed underbelly before him, and squeezes the trigger.

A hot, wet blister bursts red on the officer’s back, and blood coats the ceiling like a canvas. The heavy blue mass slouches to Tony’s lap, screaming and gasping, a red eye dilating across his back, both hands clutching a bubbling, dark sore on his stomach. Drenched in thick, painted blood, Tony rolls the shaking body from his lap to the street and slams the door shut. With a sudden lurch, we’re hurling through side streets in a painted red taxi, scampering around concrete and back onto King. Tony pinballs through traffic, bouncing between lanes in a scared metal rabbit. Up Jefferson, down Central—I fix my eyes to the street, bracing for a siren as my body runs numb.

The growling motor fills the red cabin like a fog, smearing the passing streets and Tony and the blood into a single passing nightmare. It’s just a dream. I look around at the blood-freckled window and the painted ceiling, and then at Tony, his dark brow flexed to a knot above his eyes, glaring through the window without a shadow of his typical warmth. It’s all too real. I can feel everything—the sweat on my shirt, my obnoxiously heavy breath—all under the steady roar of Tony’s engine. I sink into the heavy, tense silence, and watch every mundane, tangible thing pass by the window. I’m not going to wake up. Another right, another left. Another stucco neighborhood another mile from home and Tony stops again, a quick turn into a steep driveway. We roll into a cluttered one-car garage, a squat wood frame with the legroom of a coffin, and Tony kills the engine and hurries to shut the garage door. In the rear-view I watch him grab at the ceiling and draw a metal curtain closed, and with the clatter of steel against concrete, we’re alone again, tucked away in the quiet dark of Tony’s garage.

“I merely suggested that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right…that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to…step over certain obstacles…”

—Fyodor Dostoevsky

This isn’t anything like TV. I’m supposed to have a flashback now, or something important to say, or anything to say at all. Instead, I’m sitting in the heavy quiet of Tony’s garage, and all I have is a hole in my gut the size of a tire, like I used to get when I was a kid and I got in trouble at recess. I can’t stop sweating or thinking about a blue and red body sagging across Tony’s lap. Oh God, he probably had a family. I can hear the principal now—“young man, what have you gotten yourself into?”

Action Jackson’s an efficient blur scurrying around the garage, locking doors, pulling blinds. Then my driver’s side door is open, and Tony sounds as cool as he ever did behind the sandwich station.

“Come on, let’s go, JT.”

I’m following him up three narrow steps to a tall white door, more out of habit than anything. I can’t feel my legs, and part of me doesn’t want to know where we’re going, not now. But I followed him this far, and I don’t know where else to go. All of the sudden the door’s closed, and Tony’s opening a shiny metal refrigerator in a polished metal kitchen, calm as ever. My hands are shaking.

“Take a seat man, relax.” Tony’s space is comfortable. A lot of smooth white walls and dark oak furniture, and bright oil paintings of monkeys wearing headphones and reading books hung tactfully around the walls. But it’s all covered in blood, and I won’t sit still. I can feel a heat filling the hole in my stomach, and I can’t take the silence.

“Tony, what the fuck? What the fuck are we supposed to do now?” Tony’s pouring juice. He’s quiet, but every stiff, jolting movement looks like he’s back from a bad day at work. Maybe he doesn’t plan everything. Maybe he didn’t want this.

“Well, I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do, my man,” he mumbles from behind a tall glass of apple juice on his way out of the kitchen. “We are not going to freak out. We’re not going to run, we’re not going to hide under the bed, and we are definitely not going to call the police. We’re going to chill, and right now, we’re going to sit here and drink our juice.” I want to slap the juice right out of his mouth, but Tony knows it’s hard to argue with a man holding a smoking gun.

He sits across from me on a wide leather couch and sets the heavy pistol on the glass table between us, right between a green Ziploc sack and Darwin’s
Origin of Species
. Explains the monkeys, I guess. I try to argue, but my mouth’s too dry to talk, and now Tony’s staring right at me over the squat glass table. No, he’s staring
through
me. I never noticed that his eyes were the same color as his voice—a deep, intoxicating darkness, fixed to me like hooks, and they’re digging into me, daring me to move. But I can’t move at all, not between Tony’s stare and the hollow black eye glaring at me from the table. I was right, Tony doesn’t need to hold up a baby store for two hundred dollars. This was my test, my rite of passage, and I passed, but at what price? I know what he’s up to, and the puppet show is just making me sicker. Fuck this, I didn’t sign up for murder.

“I can’t do this, Tony. You said no one would get hurt… I’m not doing this.” The heat in my gut is twisting and pulling at my stomach, and a cold sweat is starting to break down my neck. Murder.
Murder
. “Tony, we killed him.”