This Saturday night it was just Johnny and Mikey on board and they spent the entire trip riding the handles. Johnny’s foot slipped several times but he hung on. It was a rush. Afterwards, the boys were walking home still pumped up, still ready for some action. It was three o’clock in the morning.
“Hey, look at this!” Mikey called Johnny over to a little red Mustang convertible that was parked on the avenue. “The keys are in there.” He waited for Johnny to come over to look, waited for Johnny to make the suggestion. Johnny hesitated. It was a wild idea, but he was afraid. Mikey was still waiting. What the hell, Johnny thought.
“Whaddya say, Mikey, let’s go for a spin.” Mikey didn’t hear the commitment he was looking for. He decided to stall until he got it.
“I don’t know. It’s dangerous.”
“We’ll bring it back. Park it right back here. Nobody’s around. Nobody’ll ever know it was gone.”
“Are you gonna drive?” Mikey goaded him.
“Sure, I’ll drive.” Johnny had never driven a car before in his life.
The first few blocks were the roughest as the Mustang lurched forward and stopped, lurched forward and stopped. Finally, when he realized there was a very real possibility that he might go flying through the windshield, Mikey took over.
“Pull over here slowly. Put it in park. Easy.” Johnny took one last shot at killing them both before slamming on the brakes and easing the car into park.
“I’ll drive,” Mikey told him as he opened the passenger side door and got out. Mikey had driven a car many times on his uncle’s farm in Patchogue.
Pretty soon they were gliding down Lexington Avenue with the convertible top down and the stereo blaring. There were no other cars on the road at that hour, so the boys had the limelight to themselves.
The patrolman spotted them at the corner of Forty-fifth and Lex as they flew by. The speed wouldn’t have woken him but the music sure did. He also noticed that one of the headlights was out.
In the Mustang, the Stones were singing “Satisfaction” as loud as the radio could play it when Mikey just happened to glance in the mirror and saw the flashing lights-no way could he hear the siren. He wondered for a moment what he was doing wrong. He wasn’t speeding-maybe a few miles over the limit but that was supposed to be okay. Then reality set in: He was in a stolen car! There was probably an APB out! No time for rational thinking. Mikey gunned the engine.
Johnny was sitting in the passenger seat playing his imaginary drums as Mick wailed, oblivious to the crisis, until he was almost propelled into the back seat.
“What’s goin’ on?” he yelled at Mikey. The speedometer was rising: seventy, eighty. Suddenly Mikey lurched the car to the right and sped up Thirty-first Street to Park Avenue, where he made another right on two wheels and headed uptown. Johnny was in shock! What the hell was going on? Mikey hadn’t answered him. He was too intent on his driving. After a few seconds, Johnny looked behind. He counted four sets of flashing lights about three blocks back.
“Holy shit, Mikey!”
“How far back?” Mikey shouted.
“Three blocks but they’re gaining.”
“We gotta do something.” That sounded like a good idea to Johnny. They were doing ninety and the terror that eluded them on the back of Cuz’s truck had finally caught up with Johnny. “Get ready,” Mikey yelled over the still-blaring radio. “I’m gonna slam on the brakes. Then get out and run. Find an alley.”
As soon as he touched the brakes the back end started to fishtail. Mikey let up and stayed off the gas. When the car slowed up some he hit the brakes again and threw the shift into park. The car actually started to hop onto the sidewalk, sounding as if it was choking to death.
Johnny jumped out while the car was still in its death throes. He ran as fast as he could, heading east on Thirty-fifth, flew down some cellar stairs and then was out in the alley, with no sign of anyone behind him. He’d made it.
Mikey was not so lucky. He tried to jump out as the car was lurching but slipped and fell, slamming his shoulder into the pavement. The pain was almost unbearable. He struggled to get up, but the cops were already on him, guns drawn.
“Up against the wall, punk, hands over your head.”
“I can’t. I think my shoulder’s dislocated.”
“Don’t give me that shit,” one cop snarled as he grabbed Mikey’s left arm and yanked it over his head. Mikey let out a scream and passed out on the spot.
“Weren’t there two of them?” another officer asked as they waited for the ambulance.
“Not likely. We’d at least have seen the other one running away.”
Mikey was eighteen at the time, an adult legally, and was charged with the crime of grand theft auto. His lawyer convinced him and his parents to accept a plea of three to five years in prison. “He’ll be out in one, two at the max,” the lawyer told them.
Johnny’s name was never mentioned. He talked to Mikey a few times before the plea bargain but the conversation was always strained and awkward. Mikey was taking the rap for both of them-what else was there to say?
Twenty
Tracey had one more card to play before she filed her Motion to Withdraw. She sent Clay Evans a letter, attaching Joaquin Sanchez’s report on his conversation with Pablo Gonzalez.
You can see from this interview that the real killer is this Geronimo person. Find out who he is, check out his record-maybe he’s in prison somewhere right now-and you will find your killer. The boy you are holding right now is innocent and we both know it.
Release the boy or at least delay the trial until we can jointly investigate who and where this Geronimo person is. Let us work together to see that justice is accomplished.
Sincerely,
Tracey James
Tracey waited two weeks after that, hoping that Clay or Elena would call her. If Elena hadn’t just gotten up and walked out of their meeting, she might have relented and taken the five thousand, or at least that’s what she told herself. She might still take the five, she didn’t know, but Elena needed to call.
Elena had no intention of calling Tracey James. And Clay Evans-he had a good laugh over her letter. He was about to toss it but decided to take a walk over to Wesley Brume’s office first. He wanted to make sure that Brume didn’t have any information about this Geronimo character that he had conveniently forgotten to mention. Clay was still bristling from Brume’s lapses of memory at the suppression hearing. When Brume scoffed at the letter, Clay felt comfortable shredding it.
Tracey attached her written agreement with Elena, which spelled out the terms of her representation, to her Motion to Withdraw. The motion was granted by Judge Richardson, the new judge on the case, after a short hearing that Elena chose not to attend. Rudy’s life was now in the hands of Charley Peterson, the public defender.