Police Officer #1: You need to answer some questions for us first, young man.
Me: If I don’t get to Esmeralda’s House ofJewelry in the next twenty minutes, somebody will die!
Police Officer #2: Oh no! It’s our job to stop people from dying! Hop into our police car, and we’ll drive you right where you need to go, siren wailing and red-and-blue lights flashing! We’ll get you there in time!
Me: Is there any chance that I could move something from the taxi’s trunk to your trunk without you watching?
Police Officer #1: Probably not.
Me: What if I said I needed to bring along the body of that teacher who died today, and you could see the inside of his head?
Police Officer #2: We would take you into custody immediately.
Police Officer #1: And then we’d take you into an interrogation room and shine a bright light into your face, and one of us would pretend to be nice and the other one would pretend to be mean, and we’d ask you if you knew how much trouble you were in.
Police Officer #2: Then we’d break your fingers, one by one, until you talked.
Police Officer #1 [to Officer #2]: No, we wouldn’t.
Police Officer #2: Well, don’t tell him that!
Police Officer #1: Broken fingers or not, I assure you that if you involve your parents and the authorities, it would be extremely difficult to get permission to bring Mr. Click’s body to the voodoo shop, and you wouldn’t be able to convince us to let you drive the cab with a police escort either, because why would it be so important that you drive that specific cab? Doesn’t make sense. Not gonna happen.
The front door of my house flew open, and Adam came running out, followed by my mom.
“Drive! Drive! Drive!”
CHAPTER 28
[Email address withheld.]
Hi, Tyler! It's your friendly editor here! I just read Chapter 28 of your book, and all I can say is, WOW!!! The whole time I was reading the book, I was thinking, “How in the world is he going to top the awesome stuff that's happened before?" but you went and did it!
Amazing. Best car chase ever.
Honestly, if I didn't know that this story was completely true, I'm not sure I'd believe it. You've got Adam running out of your house with your parents and two police officers following, and then right in the middle of this pulse-pounding action, there was that moment where you see the tears in your mother's eyes and...oh, the amount of emotion you packed into just twelve paragraphs was unbelievable!
Then that whole chase, where Adam can't get into the car but jumps up onto the hood, and then your mom almost gets the back door open so you had to speed off. I kept saying out loud, “Oh my God! Oh my God!" My husband kept asking what was wrong, and I kept reading him parts of the book, and then he started saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!" If you don't win the Pulitzer Prize for this, then the Pulitzer committee should all go drown themselves in a swimming pool with extra chlorine. That's all I've got to say about that.
(Don't tell the Pulitzer committee I said that! LOL!)
So then you're speeding off, and the cops rush back to their cars, and I'm thinking, “Oh, no way is Tyler ever going to get away with this! He's only sixteen! How can a sixteen-year-old beat two trained cops in a high-speed chase?" Yeah, the two cops were in the same vehicle, but still!
Wow! Did I say wow already? Wow! The excitement! The close calls! I thought Adam was dead for sure when you rolled down the window and he had to climb in at ninety miles per hour, and then that other car almost sideswiped you guys! How close did Adam come to getting crushed between the vehicles? Inches?
And then you swerved into the wrong lane against oncoming traffic! No, wait...that's part of my notes. I know this story is true, but it would be really cool if you swerved into the wrong lane against oncoming traffic and had to dodge a whole bunch of cars. Come on, one little exaggeration won't get you in trouble. Do it for me? Thanks! Love ya.
The roadblock scene. I don't want to be repetitious, but wow. Wow, wow, wow. That was crazy! My favorite part was how after not using actual profanity through the whole book, you went ahead and put the s-word in there. You managed to give the s-word its power again. Amazing.
Oh, and I loved how all of those cop cars got destroyed but no cops actually got hurt. I would have lost sympathy for you and Adam if you'd caused any police officers to die or be seriously injured. (They do have families after all). But no, it was just property destruction!
And then...how many cop cars were chasing you guys? Eight? I was on the edge of my seat, reading that. I mean, literally on the edge of my seat. My husband kept saying, “You're going to fall off the chair if you don't scoot back a little," and I kept saying, “I can't! I can't!"
I don't know about the part where the earth cracked open and you had to drive around the cracks. I looked it up, and apparently the earth did crack open like you said, but that's where you started to lose me a little. Maybe tone it down just a notch.
Also, the helicopter. That part was kind of dumb.
And there's a continuity error where you've been driving, but then suddenly Adam is driving with no explanation. Why did you guys change drivers? How did you do it when you were driving so fast? Clearly there's a logical explanation for this, but it's not in the book itself, so when I read that, I went, “Whoa! What's up with that?" and it kind of took me out of the story. Was the taxi almost out of fuel, so you had to quickly pull into a gas station, and maybe Adam scooted over into the driver's seat while you pumped the gas? Again, I don't want you to lie about anything, but gas station scene = potential for huge explosion. Think about it.
Oh, but I did like how we then found out that Adam had told the cops where Kelley was before he ran out of your house. That was nice, because during the whole car chase, I was thinking, “This is really exciting, but they should have said something to the cops so they could send an ambulance over to help that poor girl." What if you moved that piece a little earlier? Otherwise the reader is going, “Why should I care about this awesome six- car pileup when Kelley is bleeding to death?"
And then you turned onto Duncan Street, and your stomach started to hurt...almost like it was burning. Wow.
That was the best final action sequence I've ever read in a book. I was stunned. If you were dangling from a cliff, and William Shakespeare was dangling from the same cliff, and I only had time to save one of you, it would be, “Sorry, Bill, looks like you're plummeting to your death!"
Everybody in the office agreed that you deserve twice as much money for this book. Check your PayPal account!
Anyway, the reason I'm writing is that I accidentally deleted the file with Chapter 28, and I know you'd mentioned that you were having computer problems, so hopefully you had a backup.
Ciao!
Love, Mindy
[Email address withheld.]
Dear Mindy,
Crap.
Sincerely, Tyler
CHAPTER 29
I grimaced.
“What’s wrong?” Adam asked.
“My stomach hurts all of a sudden.”
“Like how? Like you ate a jalapeno?”
“Way worse than that. It’s like a battery acid capsule just broke in there.”
“That’s not good. So it’s an incineration-from-within kind of feeling?”
“Yeah. Ow! Crap!My stomach is sizzling!”
Adam floored the accelerator, driving even faster than he had when we outran all of those police cars.
“Please hurry,” I said. “I don’t wanna burn!”
“You’re not gonna burn. Just stay with me. Be a rock. We’re almost there. Life is good. Stay happy. Almost there. Almost there. Keep being a rock. Almost there. Damn, just passed it. Backing up.”