Читать книгу White Hot Pistol - Eric Beetner - Страница 7

The meth addled gunman pushed the police cruiser over seventy and swore at the windshield and the black night outside.

“Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit.”

His plan had fallen apart, a throat cut for nothing, and the car wouldn’t seem to go fast enough. The needle passed ninety, but he felt like he was driving through molasses.

“You better fucking let me go, asshole,” Jacy said from the back seat. Her hips bruised on the hard fiberglass seats. No door handles to make an escape. The metal cage in front of her eyes made her feel like an animal while, at the same time, making the crazed shooter driving seem like his own species of dangerous carnivore.

“Shut the fuck up,” he said. “I gotta think.”

“You can’t think. Why the fuck do you think we’re in this mess?”

“Shut up!” He backhanded the metal grate between them and pulled back his hand with a hiss of pain. The speedometer nearing triple digits, he tried to open the shotgun rack next to him with one hand, but a lock held it in place. The car keys had been in the ignition, but he hadn’t thought to search the cop for any other keys. So no shotgun, not that he knew what he’d do with it anyhow.

A rodent of some sort blinked in the headlights an instant before it was crushed. The car lifted slightly on the right side, but otherwise powered on over the slow rises in the two lane highway, one headlight tinted slightly pink with the animal’s blood.

Jacy curled her back and tried to settle into a comfortable position on the seat. Any way she sat, her hands were awkwardly pinned against her back.

The gunman punched the roof three times, punctuating each one with a, “Fuck.”

Jacy tried a different tactic. She needed to calm him down.

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” His plans extended only as far as the lights could reach on the blacktop in front of him.

“You let me go, and you can have your money back.”

His foot came off the gas. “What?” He tried to meet her eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Your money. It’s in my car back there. You bring me back, and you can have it all.”

Jacy slid off the hard seat and slammed into the metal backing of the front seat as he smashed the brakes to the floor. She hit the backseat carpet, smelling faintly of vomit and piss from years of abuse by drunk drivers in custody and couldn’t be sure if the dizziness she felt was due to the whack of her forehead on the seat back or the fishtailing of the police car.

• • •

Nash felt his own warm blood mix with the blood already on the knife. He’d remembered the murder weapon as he aimlessly searched for a way out of the cuffs binding his wrists. Bending down to retrieve it from the pool of gore surrounding the dead man, he fought paranoid thoughts of blood borne diseases that the murdered man may have been carrying and tried to concentrate on the sawing motions as he cut away the flex cuffs.

The cuffs released their grip, and he brought his hand around in front of him and examined his self-inflicted wounds. Knicks and scrapes, nothing suicidal. He stood and sprinted to his Honda. He picked up Jacy’s purse from the ground and tossed it inside, then tore away in the direction he saw the police cruiser go.

He forgot what it was like to feel drowsy behind the wheel as he sped down the desolate highway, twin curtains of black on either side. He nervously chewed his lip and tried to scan the road far ahead when he could, searching for signs of the car. He wondered if the call had gotten to Brian yet.

He rounded a bend and on the horizon, saw dancing colors alternating blue and red. He drove for the light and found a one car roadblock. The cruiser angled across both lanes of road, doors open and no one inside.

Nash braked hard and got out, his feet touching down on the double yellow line. He listened. Nothing but a slow wind moving through to better places. A fine methane tang of cow in the air, some live and some fertilizer.

Jacy came out from behind the cruiser, pinned closely to the chest of the gunman who had the state trooper’s gun pressed to her temple. Nash saw a thin line of blood already running down from her scalp. His hands went up again like a reflex.

“I want the money,” the gunman said, his voice full of uncertain threats and desperate wishing.

“I haven’t got it,” Nash said.

“You do too,” Jacy said. “I put it in the car when you ran off.”

Nash defensively wanted to explain his strategy for ditching the maniac in the darkness, and that it had worked, but now was not the time.

“Get it, and she might live,” said the skeletal man.

Nash turned to the Honda and peered in the back seat. The crumpled canvas bag sat there.

“I got it. I got it,” he said. Please don’t shoot was implied. But Nash knew once the crazy man had the money – money he’d already killed for – there would be nothing stopping him from shooting Jacy and Nash. He thought of trying his same method twice – taking the bag of cash and sprinting off into the unplowed fields on the side of the road. Then he spotted Jacy’s purse.

Nash ducked into the car, put one hand on the handle of the canvas bag and plunged the other into Jacy’s purse again, mirroring his earlier hunt for a smoke. His hand searched for her defense-against-Brian gun but found nothing. He risked a quick glance down and saw the gun, dropped outside her purse by the cop when he got shot. Nash scooped up the gun and pulled back out of the car with the bag clearly visible and the gun held behind him.

Nash had shot before, but he was no marksman. The way Jacy was being employed as a human shield at the moment, any shot he got off would have a lottery ticket chance of hitting the gunman and a coin flip chance of hitting her. He walked forward and watched for his opening.

“Here you go. It’s all yours,” Nash said.

“Toss it over,” the gunman said.

“Let her go.”

“After I get the money.”

“No.”

The man pulled tighter on Jacy, pushed the gun harder into the bone of her skull.

“Jesus Christ, Nash,” she said.

“Put the fucking money–”

Nash cut him off. When he bounced at bars, he learned that you never let the drunk dictate the terms. The same went for a wiry dirt bag off his daily bump. Soft serve didn’t work with guys like him. They needed the hard stuff.

“Here’s how it’s gonna go. You let her go and send her over. We get in our car and I drop the bag out the window as I get the fuck away from here and never see you again.”

The man’s pinprick pupils shuddered back and forth in his wide open eyes.

“How about I shoot you both and take what’s mine?”

“If it was yours, I don’t think you’d have had to cut anyone’s throat to get it,” Nash said. Then, ignoring the lucky shots he’d landed in the trooper, he tried to sap some of the man’s confidence. “And we’ve already proven you can’t hit the acre of land you’re standing on with a gun. So let’s do it my way and we all walk away from this alive and well. And you a hell of a lot richer than us.”

“No, no, no, no. Fuck that,” he said. “Fuck you.”

Jacy’s tears glistened in the cruiser’s light show. “Nash, just give him the bag.”

An engine sound reached Nash’s ears before the headlights showed over the nearest rise. A truck, moving north.

“Time to make up your mind,” Nash said. Fuck if he was going to make it out of this place once only to get planted on the side of the road on his way out of town a second time. The ground of this whole damn state sat under an inch thick layer of last year’s cow shit and damned if that would be his final resting place.

“Toss the bag over here.”

“Let her go.”

“Throw me the fucking bag!”

Nash felt a slow drip of his own blood trickle down his wrist and onto the gun hidden behind his hip. “You want your money or not?”

The headlights crested the hill, lighting them for the main event. The semi trailer’s brakes hissed as he saw the police car blocking lanes and the standoff.

The gunman turned to the sound of the straining engine and hydraulic blast of brakes. Jacy pulled with her shoulder and tore away from him. She fell to the ground.

Nash dropped the bag with his left hand, raised Jacy’s pistol with his right, and fired. If the man hadn’t been so perfectly lit up by the semi truck’s headlights, he doubted he would have hit him. But both shots he squeezed off in a tight pair landed in the man’s chest. A spray of blood was backlit in the tractor trailer’s lights as the man fell.

Jacy ran to Nash, stumbling into his arms as the truck finally ground to a halt only feet from the stopped cop car. She started crying, and Nash thought he might too. The weird waking nightmare seemed to be over. Nash couldn’t wait to thank the truck driver who had unwillingly saved his life. But first, Nash brought the knife from his pocket and sawed through Jacy’s flex cuffs, careful not to cut her the way he’d done himself.

The door to the semi opened. A pot-bellied gut led the way for a sleeveless flannel shirt, mesh baseball hat, cowboy boots, and a rifle. The trucker stepped down from his cab and spoke in a redneck drawl that made Nash’s skin slimy, as if a snake slid by him while he was swimming in the lake.

“You just killed a cop,” the trucker said. Nash could understand how he might assume such a thing. He reasoned by the rifle barrel’s aim that he might not have time to explain himself. “I bring you in dead, and I still get my reward, motherfucker.”

The driver stalked forward with at least as much authority as his semi truck. And he was armed. He loaded a shell into the chamber with a metallic clack. “What have we here? A pair of thrill killers. One of ’em jailbait too. Jesus H. Christ, I thought them kind of stories was made up.”

The trucker kept on coming. He passed over the dead body in the road, kept his eyes and his aim on Nash and Jacy. He noticed the gun in Nash’s hand, the knife in the other. “Looks like I got me a clear case of self defense now.” He lifted the rifle to his shoulder, preparing to exercise his second amendment rights.

Nash put his hands out to make a plea. “Now, wait–”

The shot made Nash jump. Jacy gripped his shoulder tighter, but that was the only pain he felt. He watched as the trucker’s hat flew forward, a chunk of skull still inside it.

As the trucker fell away, his body going limp in slow motion as the folds of his fat were slow to catch up with the gravity pulling him down, Nash saw the gunman on the ground with the cop’s gun hanging loosely in his hand. Whether he meant to shoot the trucker, or simply wanted to kill someone else before he died, Nash couldn’t be sure. It may have been an errant shot aiming for Nash’s own skull. And he may have one more in the chamber with the same goal in mind.

To rectify his problem of not killing the man in the first place, Nash stepped forward and put two more bullets into him. He immediately grabbed his gut and felt like he might vomit.

The air settled again to stillness. The low grumble of the truck’s engine and the Honda’s harmonized like giant metal insects in the night. Nash looked at the two bodies glowing in the headlamp beams.

“Oh, holy shit,” he said.

“He was gonna shoot us,” Jacy said. “You had to.”

Nash’s nausea crested, but he held it down. Killing someone, even someone aiming a gun at you, was not easy. It brought him back to a night he wanted never to relive. He tamped down the thought like the bile in his throat and asked, “What now?”

“Well, we can’t stay here. That cop called for backup.”

“We can’t go back to Mom’s.”

As if the thought had just occurred to her, Jacy said, “Fuck, Nash. When Brian hears about this –”

“And he will. That cop radioed in our names.”

“Three, no, four dead bodies?”

“I know.”

They stood, killing time, breathing diesel fumes. “We can keep going,” Nash said.

“You don’t think they’ll be looking for us?”

“Yes, I do think that. You got a better idea?”

Jacy bit her lip, let it go. “I know someone we can stay with for a little while.”

“Where?”

“Back in Noirville.”

“You really think that’s the best idea?”

Jacy shrugged. “Like someone once said, you got a better idea?”

Nash pocketed the gun, turned back to look at his car. “What about the money?”

She kept her eyes on the bodies, a fine white mist rising off the trucker as the cool night stole his last remaining body heat. “We take that with us.”