Hailey's War

“I didn’t mean to, but I cut him off,” I said. “He pulled up alongside us, waving a gun. I accelerated to get away, but I guess that was the wrong thing to do. He started following us, and I guess it just got out of hand.”

“I guess,” he said. “Where were you headed?”

“To a doctor,” I said. “My friend is pregnant. She was having some abdominal pains, and I offered to take her and her boyfriend to the ER.”

Sure. Just a nice white girl, chauffeuring a vato and his girlfriend to the ER, pursued by a psychotic Mercedes driver. Who wouldn’t buy it?

“Am I going to get a ticket, Officer?” I said, trying for an abashed smile. “I swear, I was just trying to get away from that guy. Please, do you think we could just let this go?”

His eyes narrowed; he was looking down at my clothes. “Is that blood?”

Oh, hell. I’d abandoned the jacket we’d stained with stage blood, but in all the excitement, I hadn’t noticed getting that guy’s blood on me, though it had been practically inevitable. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “It’s, uh, hers. She had a nosebleed as well as the stomach-”

Too late, the patrolman wasn’t buying it. His voice froze over. “Miss, step out of the car. Now.”

That was when I heard the safety click on Payaso’s gun, and I felt the cold ring of the barrel pressed just below my ear. The young cop’s mouth dropped open.

“Officer,” Payaso said, “take your weapon out of your holster and drop it on the ground, or I promise, I’ll shoot her dead right now.”

Falling into my role as cowed carjacking victim, I put both hands on the wheel and tried to make them tremble. “Please,” I said. “Please, Officer, he’ll do it.”

I had to hand it to the kid: He was probably still a rookie, and in this part of the state, I doubted he’d dealt with much more than heavy sarcasm from speeders he’d stopped, but he had backbone. He didn’t immediately comply. Looking at Payaso, he said, “Sir, that’s not going to happen. Put down your weapon now, before you do something I think you really don’t want to.”

Then I heard the sound of a car approaching us, powerful engine rumbling.

“Orale,” Payaso whispered, looking through the windshield.

I thought first of Babyface, but it wasn’t the silver Mercedes. It was Payaso’s GTO, in the wrong lane, bearing down on us like a bull in a matador’s ring. Serena had arrived.

The patrolman looked up, too, and his mouth fell open. A minute ago, he’d thought his situation couldn’t get any worse, but now it had. I knew the feeling.

“Run,” I said.

He scrambled and dove behind the car. Serena blasted past us, so close I didn’t believe the side mirror would survive it, the Bronco shuddering in the wall of air the GTO displaced. Then Serena drifted into a beautiful sideways stop and wriggled up to sit sidesaddle in the driver’s window, watching the patrolman scramble up the hillside at the edge of the road. She braced her arms on the roof of the car, gun in her hands, and fired.

She was too far away to hit him with a handgun, which was why, for a minute, I didn’t call her off. I just wanted to do what Payaso and Nidia were doing, which was staring in awe. This was not Serena. This was Warchild.

She fired twice more, and the rounds made dirt fly up from the hillside, about eight feet from the cop. He was on his feet now, running in an evasive zigzag.

I threw open the Bronco’s door and leaned out. “Warchild!” I yelled. “Stand down! He’s running!”

She turned and looked at me.

“It’s okay!” I reiterated. The cop had gained the tree line and disappeared.

She nodded, understanding. I made the shape of a phone with my thumb and little finger against my cheek, then pulled myself back into the car and picked up the radio from between my feet.

“We gotta get out of here,” I told her, without preamble. “Here’s what we’ll do: Payaso’s gonna drive the cop’s car up the road a mile, so that the guy can’t get to his radio right away. Then I’ll pick him up again.” I looked at Payaso, who nodded assent. “Then we’ll follow you. Just get us off Highway One. Find us a back road out of the county.”

“Ten-four,” she said. “What if we see the enemigo?”

“I hope we won’t,” I said. “The Highway Patrol is gonna be looking for him; maybe they’ll find him and hang him up for a while.”

“But if we see him?”

“Shit, I don’t know. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

So Payaso got out of the car. In a minute, he was behind the wheel of the patrol car, heading south.

In the back of the car, Nidia was sniffling. I glanced backward and saw her fighting tears.

Shit. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, thinking hard. “Hey, don’t do that,” I said. “Really, the worst is over. You’re in good hands.”

She didn’t say anything to that or look reassured, and I couldn’t entirely blame her. I spent another second or two trying to think of something else to say, then gave up and pulled out onto the highway. My mood, whether it was warranted or not, was on the rise. In a moment I caught myself whistling and realized it was Simon and Garfunkel: “Feelin’ Groovy.”

thirty-eight

“We should’ve got a car from Chato instead,” Serena said for the third time.

The four of us were at a pizza restaurant. Payaso, who had taken instantly and seriously to his role as Nidia’s guardian, was at the salad bar with her, watching her select fresh vegetables and cottage cheese and pineapple chunks. Serena and I were at a table. I had just washed down a pair of Advil with Mountain Dew for my aching finger. It should have been healed by now, except that I’d reinjured it in the fight with Serena’s girls, my jumping-in. And now the scuffle with Skouras’s guy had aggravated it. At this rate, it’d never be healed up.

Serena’s face was dark, and I knew what she was going to say next.

“You spent nearly six thousand dollars on that SUV and now it’s gone,” she said. “You had it for what, a week and a half? What a waste.”

I agreed with her. I’d already said that I agreed with her. The Bronco was in a picturesque abandoned barn where no one would find it for months. Maybe years. Because unless the highway patrolman we traumatized hadn’t followed procedure, he’d radioed in the make, model, and license of our car before he’d gotten out and approached me. Given that a routine speeding stop had turned into an armed attack on a law-enforcement officer, the Bronco was now hot as hell, and I’d had to abandon it.

Now we were all riding in the GTO, which was safe. I doubted the highway patrolman even remembered the color of that car. In moments of trauma-like a speeding car bearing down on you-the mental videographer usually doesn’t capture many details.

Serena said, “If you’d had a stolen car, you wouldn’t be out any money when you had to dump it.”

I said, “I know. But I’ve been driving all over the damn state for ten days. If I’d had a stolen car all that time, some enterprising meter maid would have run the plate by now, and I’d be arrested, and then the mission would never have happened.”

She said, “Maybe you could have driven around and done the research and the reconnaissance in the SUV, but then taken a stolen ride to get Nidia.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

So this was leadership, being the goat when things went wrong, even small things. It wasn’t like our mission had failed, overall. But Serena was wound up, frustrated over what hadn’t gone well.

I said, “We’re hitting over five hundred, you know. We have Nidia.”

“Mmm,” she said, a noncommittal sound.

“What?”

She looked across the tables, toward Nidia and Payaso. “You’ve got a choice here,” she said. “You wanted to