Hess pulled his arm free as they walked. He stopped at a woman he did not know who was standing beside a guy who was drinking a Schlitz. The woman had a pocked face and a peroxide streak in her hair. Hess gave her a kiss. Her back was to a wall and she dropped her arms helplessly to her sides. Hess jammed his tongue in her mouth and licked her lips for good measure as he pulled away.
“Hey,” said the guy she was with, stepping forward.
“Hay is for horses,
The man did nothing and said nothing else. A bouncer named Dale, a friend to Stewart and Hess, came quickly from around the stick. He went straight to the guy who had defended the girl and put him up against the wall. Dale’s left hand held his shirt collar and pinned him there. He smashed his right fist into the guy’s nose. The nose caved, and blood ran down the guy’s upper lip and into his mouth. He dropped his bottle and his eyes rolled to white. Dale hit him again. The people in the bar tipped their heads back to finish their beers.
Hess left the place cackling, followed by Stewart and Martini. All lit smokes on the way to Hess’s car.
They drove up 14th, all three drunker than shit. Stewart fucked with the radio dial and found a Marvin and Tammi single he liked. He turned it up. Hess double-clutched coming up a rise and the surge pushed Martini back against his seat.
“Slow down,” said Martini.
“Slow down,” said Hess in a girlish way. He gave the Ford more gas.
“I’m not kiddin’ around,” said Martini.
“Shut your cocksucker,” said Hess.
Over the rise, on a residential strip of 14th somewhere between Park and Arkansas, they saw a young black man walking the sidewalk a block or so south of their car. Hess eased his foot off the gas, looked in the rearview, looked ahead, and saw no one else driving the street. Except for the black man, there was no pedestrian traffic. Hess cut the headlights and slowed to a crawl.
“Buzz,” said Martini, “tell him to knock this shit off.”
Hess and Stewart kept their eyes down the road. The black man looked over his shoulder and slightly quickened his pace.
“He heard us,” said Stewart.
“Course he did,” said Hess, “loud as you’re playin’ that boofer music.”
“It’s the exhaust system in this piece of shit that’s makin’ all the noise.”
“If you call purrin’ noise.” Hess squinted. “How come he ain’t runnin’, though?”
“They don’t never run no more,
“I should peg that nigger, Stubie.”
“Scare him some,” said Stewart. “Go ahead.”
“Don’t,” said Martini, the word barely making a sound against the music coming from the radio.
Hess found a break in the line of parked cars, carefully drove over the curb, and got the Ford up on the sidewalk. He cruised slowly down the hill. The black man turned his head again, double-taked, and ran. Hess laughed and hit the gas.
“How many points?” said Hess.
“Make it ten.”
They closed in on him quickly. The black man leaped off the sidewalk and hit the street.
“Look at him go,” said Hess.
“Like he seen an alligator,” said Stewart.
Hess tore up turf as he jumped the curb and got back onto the street. He downshifted, rubber crying as the tires struggled for purchase on the asphalt. He pinned the gas pedal and narrowed the distance between man and car. In the backseat, Martini’s fingers dented black vinyl.
The young man suddenly cut right and headed for the space between two parked cars, a purple Chevy and a white Dodge. Hess followed. The Ford fishtailed, then found its feet again.
Stewart looked over at his friend. “Hey, Shorty.”
They were on the young man startlingly fast. Hess jammed the middle pedal to the floor, but the speed was too much for the brakes, and the Ford went into a skid. The young man’s head turned. Stewart thinking, Damn, his eyes are wider than shit, as the Galaxie lifted the young man and took him into the front quarter of the white Dodge. At the point of impact, all the occupants of the Ford were thrown forward. Stewart and Hess jacked into the dash; Martini’s head bounced off the bench. They sat there dazed, the world spinning slightly, the blare of the radio and something else ringing in their ears.
Hess swallowed blood. His mouth had hit the wheel violently and the collision had split his upper lip. Stewart touched a deep gash on his brow, felt wetness there, pulled back a finger smudged with red. With a shaking right hand he cut the radio off.
They cleared the dizziness from their heads. They looked through the windshield. They saw the young man, arms twisted, torso misshapen, lying at an unnatural angle on the hood in a quickly spreading pool of liquid, pinned to the Dodge. Lights came on in row houses that had been dark moments ago.
“We need to get ourselves gone, Shorty,” said Stewart, seeing Hess working the shifter through the gears but doing nothing else.
“What?”
The young man’s body slid off the hood as Hess put the Ford into reverse and flipped on its lights. A single beam shot out from the front of the car. They pulled back, and a fine spray of blood erupted from the young man’s mouth as he rolled onto his side in the street. One hand reached up as if to grab at something. The hand dropped. The body moved in spasm and then didn’t move at all.
Hess hit it. He drove up 14th as sirens gathered in the distance. Martini closed his eyes. Stewart put a Marlboro between his lips and pushed the lighter into the dash. Hess goosed the gas and shifted for speed, muttering all the while. He was wondering just how bad he’d fucked up his car.
VAUGHN WAS COMING up 16th Street in his unmarked, freshly fucked and relaxed from his last highball, listening to his dash radio, his two-way turned down low, when he heard the news about LBJ’s decision. The newsman on WWDC said that local reaction to the announcement had been swift.
“Christ,” said Vaughn. He only hoped his son wasn’t among the celebrants. Way his hair was hitting his collar, he’d fit right in.
A call came in from the station. Vaughn pulled the mic from its cradle and responded. It was a hit-and-run on a residential block of a two-syllable cross street on 14th. He hit the gas. By the time he got there, uniforms, ME suits, and a meat wagon had already arrived.
In the flashbulb light of an MPD photographer, amid the strobe of the cherry tops, Vaughn saw the twisted body lying in a slick of blood on the street. The young man, Vernon Wilson, age seventeen, had been IDed by the contents of his wallet. Uniforms had begun to canvass the residents, but as of yet no one claimed to have seen a thing, though one man said that, through his screen windows, he had heard the squeal of tires, loud music, and a collision. Headlight glass, bits of a grille, and a Ford insignia were found near the body. The light of a flashlight revealed red paint on the dented portion of the white Dodge where the crime had taken place.
Vaughn walked up and down the block and examined the general area. Tomorrow he’d try to determine the make of the Ford by having his lab man, who was good with cars, study the grillwork, logo, and shards of glass. Vaughn would put the word out at the usual body shops to look out for damage to the fender,
