“OK,” I said, wary. “What’s the bad news?” The way I was talking, it sounded more like Wazzabanooze?
“The bad news is the trip through the windshield broke your nose. I was hoping when you came to that you’d be able to muddle through as is, but to be honest, you don’t sound so good. Which means I’m gonna hafta straighten it —and that is gonna smart like hell.”
“Then what the hell’s the good news?”
“The good news is, you ain’t gonna be conscious long to feel it.”
Before I could reply, he grabbed my head in both hands, his thumbs on either side of my nose. Then he jerked them to one side. I heard a sickening crunch, and let out a wail. Then, for a while, I didn’t hear anything at all.
When I next came to, the sun was getting high overhead, and I was surprised to find myself peering through an unmarred windshield at a good acre of gleaming candy-apple red. A quick look around, and I realized I was sitting in the passenger seat of a classic Cadillac convertible —’58 or ’59, I think —complete with red leather interior, sparkly paint-job, and chromed-out tailfins. The ragtop was down, but the old girl wasn’t going anywhere; she was just sitting in what, apparently, was a mostly empty strip club parking lot. (Sorry, gentleman’s club, according to the awning over the front door —though if the airbrushed mural of a pair of legs extending outward on either side of the entryway was any indication, it didn’t look like the sort of place in which a gentleman had ever actually set foot.) Gio was trying his best to rectify that —he’d popped the steering column with the Fiesta’s tire iron, and was currently trying to strip a couple wires with his teeth. The mangled heap of the Fiesta sat beneath the strip club’s darkened neon sign a good twenty spots to my right. Every once and a while, Gio glanced over at it, as one might toward a jungle cat on the verge of pouncing.
“Gio,” I said, noting as I did that my voice had lost some of its thick, wet quality of earlier this morning, “you want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”
“What’s it look like I’m doing? When you had your little tangle with the bug monster, the Fiesta took a fucking beating. Now, that don’t really bother me none, on account of she ain’t mine, and she was a piece of shit to begin with. But if I had to guess, I’d say our good pal Ethan’s probably reported her stolen by now, which means we gotta steer clear of any legal entanglements —and it seems to me a giant fucking hole in our windshield is the sort of thing the five-oh might notice. Bottom line is, you wanna make it to Las Cruces, you and me are gonna need another ride.”
“Yeah,” I said, eyeing the Caddy’s sparkle and shine and eye-catching lines, “it’d suck to attract any undue attention to ourselves.”
“Look, make your smart-ass jokes all you want. But it’s almost nine in the morning, and this place’s been closed for hours. Which means whoever owns this beauty was drunk enough he probably cabbed it home. I bet he spends half the day sleeping off his hangover. That gives us plenty of time to get the hell outta Dodge ’fore he wakes up. By the time he realizes this baby’s missing, we ain’t even gonna be in the same state. And you gotta admit, Sam —this Caddy is a work of art. We’d be nuts not to take it.”
“Gio, no. This car’s too damn pretty not to be missed, and too rare not to be noticed. Pick something else —like maybe that nice, nondescript Civic over there.”
“Hey, you got to pick the last one, remember? And if you got a thing for penny racers, that’s your deal. But I barely fit into that fucking thing, so there’s no way I’m gonna help you steal another one exactly like it —not when there’s a ride this cherry just sittin’ here waiting to be picked.”
“Seriously, Gio —stop this, now.”
But Gio didn’t listen. He just glanced over at the Fiesta yet again, and redoubled his efforts to get the Caddy running.
“Did you hear me? You are not to boost this car!”
“Damn it, Sam, I ain’t your fucking sidekick, OK? Truth is, you need me, and I say this Caddy is ours! The way I see it, any douchebag who’ll leave a ride this fine sitting in a strip club parking lot is askin’ to be taken down a peg. And it ain’t like it’s gonna kill you to loosen up and live a little —hell, you’re the one who told me I should enjoy what little time I had left. So if you want my help on this little revenge-trip of yours, you’re gonna hafta shut up a sec so I can concentrate!”
“I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship,” I said, unintentionally echoing the creature’s words to me last night. I opened the Caddy’s massive door and stepped unsteadily out onto the blacktop of the parking lot. “You don’t get to call the shots. You want to go it alone, maybe steal yourself a shiny ride, hole up somewhere, and wait to see if hell forgets to hunt you down, that’s your business —and I promise you it won’t end well. But if you want to come with me and make the guy who killed you pay, you’ll do as I say and pick another fucking car.”
I leveled my gaze at Gio, trying to imbue it with as much bad-ass as I could muster. At the time, I was pretty pleased with the result, because he was staring back at me in wide-eyed terror. Of course, I didn’t realize it then, but that terror had nothing whatsoever to do with me.
“Look, Sam, I get what you’re saying —really, I do. But this really ain’t the time to discuss it. How ’bout you get in the car, and we can talk about it on the road?”
“Are you even listening to me? That’s the last place we’re going to talk about it! Get it through your fucking head —I am not leaving this parking lot until you pick another car!”
“You won’t be saying that in a minute,” he mumbled, more to himself than to me.
Something clicked with me then. His jangled nerves. His furtive glances. His sudden desire to leave. At first, I’d chalked it up to the rush of stealing such a cherry ride, but it was something more than that.
“Gio,” I said, “what’d you do?”
“Look, can we just go?”
“Not until you tell me what you did.”
“Well, I figured we can’t ditch the Fiesta without people taking notice —it’s all beat to hell and fulla blood. The cops are bound to think some serious shit went down, and we don’t need that kind of attention. So I handled it.”
“Handled it? Handled it how?”
But before Gio could answer, the morning calm was torn apart by an explosion that set the Fiesta soaring skyward, and threw me ass-over-teakettle into the waiting Cadillac. I wound up wedged headfirst into the passenger-side footwell, my torso pinned between the seat and dash. It was hell on my ribs, but at least it kept my face from scraping against the floor mat. I tried in vain to catch my breath, but the force of the blast had knocked the wind from my chest and left me gasping like a fish on a trawler’s deck. I must’ve been flopping like one too, as I struggled to right myself —but at that, at least, I had some success. After a moment’s thrashing about, I wound up sitting sideways across the bench seat, one foot braced against Gio’s pudgy face, and my back against the passenger door. You’d think a shoe against your cheek is the kind of thing you might take notice of, but if Gio did, he didn’t show it. He was too busy staring at the pillar of thick black smoke that spiraled skyward from the twisted remains of Ethan’s Fiesta.
Charred bits of scrap and glass rained down upon us from above, but still, Gio just sat there, stunned. Through sheer force of will, I drew a breath —as hot and thick as tar —and barked a single, desperate syllable.