Stolen van, stolen drugs

July 18, 2009

There was a hollow jolt, and then I was staring at Shorty who's eyes had just shot open like two headlights flashing on in an instant. There was a droning honk blasting from our left side, and Shorty was snapping his head about, eyes wide and wild like a bear with its forepaw suddenly mangled in a steel toothed trap.

"Did you just fucking hit somebody?" I spat.

We were riding down the interstate heading back toward Longbeach at about 80 miles an hour in an eight cylinder Dodge mini van. Sweat was gleaming off Shorty's forehead, glistening devilishly over the red horn tattoos that tracked up the crown of his brow and back onto his bare scalp. His knuckles were white and he was still straightening out the van with sharp ticks of the wheel. The car was still honking loudly from somewhere behind us.

"For fuck sake! Pull over somewhere and let me drive! What are you, nodding out?!"

"I got this," he said stiff lipped, his teeth locked together. He was staring into the rearview mirror now.

Seconds ago I had been off in space somewhere, staring at the bare shrubbery blazing by us at the edge of the interstate. Everything was buzzing now, all of my senses tingling and the whole world screeching through my pores and straight into my belly with that awful anxiety and that crystal, prickling clarity. The car was still honking; Shorty pressed the gas pedal to the floor.

"Hold on," he hissed, leaning into the steering wheel and staring wide eyed, his shoulders tense and rolled forward.

"Bad fucking idea man," I started, grabbing onto the handle above the passenger side door with my heart beating a million times a second and lodged just under my tonsils.

The Dodge was stolen and there was two pounds of dope on the floor. An image of my parents house on the other side of the country flashed in the back of my mind for a half second. The homely, above ground pool, the flowers and vegetables still and lazy in the wet heat. My stomach sank, and suddenly I couldn't believe that this was actually me, that I was actually here. The van plunged into the back of a little black Honda Civic, and I slammed my head into the passenger side window.

"Shorty what the fuck! Do you have any idea what kind of fucking mess we're in right now! What the fuck are you doing!?" My voice came loud and dry so that it hurt my throat.

Shorty rocketed both his hands in the air, slamming them into the gray upholstered roof and tossing the van into another lane. He paused for the tiniest moment, his face screwed tight and contempt spilling over his features, his eyes on fire and the veins in his temple looking about the size of my little finger. He choked on his first word, his face crimson in an instant.

"Will you shut the fuck up! I need to fucking concentrate!" He snapped his hands back on the wheel the way you'd grab someone before punching them and the van screeched back into the right lane, slamming full broadside into a tan Sedan. The woman driving jerked her car back into the lane from the shoulder, and stared up at me with an open mouth full of horror and black, terrible fear. I pressed my palms into my face hard, feeling the warm sweat and then sliding them down slowly. Cars were honking on every side of us, a wretched cacophony that suddenly seemed like it'd been going on forever.

Shorty was still leaning forward, gripping the steering wheel tight and shooting his eyes ferociously at the rear-view mirror. I took a deep breath, forcing that panic as deep down as I could. I could feel the drugs, and I could see them on Shorty's face, twisting and twitching and doing everything they could to land me in prison for twenty years.

"Shorty," I said slow, taking control of my voice, "you have to get us off this interstate man, or we're going to fucking prison."

I was staring at the side of his head, watching that pinky sized vein clinch and seize like a poisoned dog retching its guts out. He was staring at the rear-view now, not even looking at the road in front of him. Suddenly, I wondered if we were going to die. Just slam into an exit sign or something and go rocketing out the windshield like those crash test dummies you see in commercials. I buckled my seat-belt and swallowed, then followed his stare to the rear-view mirror.

"Cops," he said quiet between his teeth. If I didn't die, I was going to prison.

The van lurched to the right, a parade of honking on all sides of us, and careened off an exit ramp at somewhere around ninety miles an hour. Then the sirens, from every direction. I couldn't tell if they'd just started or if they'd been there all along. All the mirrors were slammed full of police lights, weaving and snaking behind us. The van was speeding up, and I realized I was holding onto that handle by the window with both hands.

Shorty started banging on the wheel with his right hand, slow at first then pounding it like he was in an epileptic fit. He started screaming.

"We're not fucking stopping!" He shouted, slamming his open hand into the steering wheel, "you open that fucking door when I say and you leap out of this motherfucker! You fucking hear me!? We fucking leap!"

"Shorty!" I screamed hoarsely, pushing all the air out of my lungs in one breath. "We're doing a hundred fucking miles an hour! We die if we leap you stupid fuck!"

He slammed his right hand right into his temple, and faced me screaming.

"I'm gonna slow down!" He shouted, his eyes widening and his face slacking like the idea just hit him. We were flying around the bend of the exit, barely staying on the ground. The sirens sounded close, and suddenly I was looking at the mirrors. It didn't look they were gaining too fast, but I wasn't about to feel a shred of hope. I pressed my palms into my face again.

Shorty smiled with scared eyes, and in a pleading, childish little voice he started chanting "OK, ok, ok, ok," over and over, looking at me nervously between glances back at the road. We were sailing down to a red light at the base of the exit, and Shorty wasn't slowing down. When I saw it I held my breath. I'd never been that close to a red light going that fast, and there was cross traffic whizzing by at short intervals.

"Red light Shorty! Fucking red light!" I screamed at him, angry and choking and with my arms shaking with strain.

"We gotta do it man!" He said it fast but with that same child voice. My whole body dropped through the soles of my feet, like water out of a balloon that's been pricked with a needle. I felt scared. Hollow, sad and very, very scared. We were thirty yards from the light, the closest cop some couple hundred yards behind us, lights flashing and sirens wailing.

Ten yards from the light, and still pushing eighty or ninety. Shorty screamed high and fast and I stared at his tattooed horns, those veins on his head and on his neck thinking it was a terrible, terrible thing to look at right before I died.

We whooshed right through the intersection, untouched, something like ten horns blasting wildly to a background of screeching tires and smashing metal. Shorty smiled a twitching smile, his lips wide and loose and his crackled teeth hanging out dumbfounded. There was a mess in the rear-view. The mirrors were shaking and it was hard to make it out, but there was definitely a pile of metal and those red and blue lights flashing just like hornets.

"We slow this van down and we fucking leap! You hear me?!" He was shouting like his old self again, that feeble little voice all dried up in an unexpected victory, "you grab the fucking dope, too!"

I didn't give two shits about the dope.

"Fuck you Shorty! Your shit, you take it! There's no way in hell I am touching that shit!"

He was slowing the van down violently, the speedometer was sinking fast towards the left side of the dial. He stared at me hard, setting his jaw and widening his eyes, then grabbing my throat with his right hand and squeezing. I was shocked at how fast I panicked, how fast the air just dried up in my lungs and my body started screaming for oxygen.

"If you don't take the dope and meet me back at the pad, I'll kill you." He said it slow, one word at a time and each one clear and mean. I scrambled for the dope with my hands, feeling around on the floor until my finger nudged it, then snatched it up and held it close to my chest. He let go and I gasped one then two short breaths. The van was doing about twenty now, decelerating rapidly so that we both slumped forward in the cabin. I heard a synchrony of plastic clicks, and all the door locks shot up. Shorty flung his door open suddenly and slid right out in a fleshy, thumpy sounding roll. There was nobody driving now. Without even thinking I followed suit, first unsnapping my seat-belt, then grabbing at the door handle and suddenly watching the world go spinning around me like I was a plane spiraling out of control.

When I jumped to my feet I saw the van slump into a car parked on the curb and heard the car alarm go blaring off. I turned around and saw that the cops were a solid ways back, I could see the lights but couldn't even hear the sirens. My pulse was racing and my palms and face were sweating something fierce. I wasn't dead, and I might not be going to prison. As I started running into an alley I realized I was gripping the dope to my chest mechanically, with white fingers that were raw and lifeless, like a mannequin or a cadaver.

"You're going to make it." I thought, running fast and breathing faster. "You're going to make it. If you can just sort this one out, you're going to call home."

Tags for this piece: fiction drugs city longbeach violence

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