Crash!
A man in a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet with nails drilled through it from the inside out smashes the driver’s side window as his buddy in a zombified clown mask spray-paints the words DEATH TO SHEEP in two-foot-tall letters on the side of the dented white truck. A third guy wearing a Scream mask climbs up onto the hood and holds a crowbar over his head in a stabbing motion aimed at the windshield. All three of them have on black jackets with neon-orange skeleton bones spray-painted on them.
“Stop!” I scream, pushing through the exit door and waving my hands in the air. “Stop! Stop! Stop!”
My hands drop to my sides in relief when they actually do stop, but then my heart climbs into my throat as I look for an escape route when all three of their heads turn toward me like snakes spotting a mouse.
“Please,” I say, holding my hands up. “There’s a purse on the passenger seat. Take it. Take whatever you want, just … please leave the truck.”
Pinhead and the undead clown glance at each other with a chuckle, which turns into full-blown maniacal laughter as they turn and walk toward me in unison.
“Take whatever we want, huh?” the guy with the nails sticking out of his helmet asks with a snaggletooth sneer.
The rotting clown makes a slurping sound as he flicks his tongue in and out of the rubbery mouth hole on his mask.
I don’t even realize I’ve been walking backward until my heel hits one of the metal doors behind me.
“Whoa!” the guy in the Scream mask exclaims from somewhere near the truck.
His friends turn, and I watch as he pulls my dad’s Smith & Wesson revolver out of Agnes’s purse. She must have stashed it in there after she swiped it from me yesterday.
“Holy shit, bro!” Pinhead exclaims. “That looks like the gun from Dirty Harry!”
“Who the fuck carries a .44 Magnum?” The creepy clown chuckles. “Fuckin’ thing weighs, like, six pounds and only shoots six bullets!”
The guy holding the revolver lifts his mask to reveal the rounded baby face of a kid no older than Lamar. But these guys don’t treat him like a kid. They step aside so that he can approach me, eyes narrowed, gears turning.
“I know a dude who carries a gun just like this,” he says, lifting the revolver in his hand. “You know him?”
I don’t have to ask who he’s talking about. There’s a sadness in his tone, a fondness, a sense of loss that I recognize.
“Yeah.” I nod, this single ounce of compassion making my chest ache and my eyes sting.
“I saw him on TV today,” the kid says, softening his tone.
“Oh shit! The nerd?” Pinhead asks.
“No, dumbass,” the boy snaps back. “The dude from the sentencing. He was the one who used to come into the CVS all the time and pay me in hydro.”
“Ohhhh, that guy. Yeah, he cool.”
“That’s …” I clear my throat, hoping they won’t hear my voice shaking. “That’s why I need the truck. I’m gonna go to the capitol, and … I don’t know … try to …” I can’t even say it out loud. It sounds so stupid. It is stupid.
But it wouldn’t be if I had help.
“Hey … you guys could come too.” I try to smile, but it feels like a grimace. “Since you knew him. Know him, I mean. You could help me—”
The zombified clown snorts into his rubber mask as his helmeted buddy erupts into hysterics.
“Do we look like muhfuckin’ customer service to you?” The clown chuckles.
“Yeah,” Pinhead blurts out through his hyena-like laughter, clicking his heels together and giving me a salute. “Do we look like fuckin’ Captain America and shit?”
As his friends keel over, laughing, the kid shakes his head and levels me with a sympathetic stare. “Listen, I’m sorry your man caught a case, but we ain’t exactly in the helpin’ business.”
“We in the stayin’ the fuck alive bidness, and bidness is gooood.” The clown flicks his tongue at me again.
“Tell you what … I keep the bag, you keep the truck, and if anybody fucks with you”—the kid sets the purse and the gun on the hood of the GMC and picks up a can of orange spray paint one of them had tossed aside—“just tell ’em you’re reppin’ Pritchard Park.”
I stand, petrified by a potent mixture of fear and shock and gratitude, as this Bony kid spray-paints stripes across my chest and down my arms to match his.
Dropping the can to the ground, the boy grabs Mrs. Renshaw’s purse and climbs onto a motorcycle parked in front of the truck. He slides his Scream mask back into place and motions with his head for the two guys who had to be twice his age to follow.
“Dude”—the clown elbows Pinhead, and they walk over to their bikes—“did you see somebody spray-painted the highway sign to say Bitch-Ass Park?”
“Fuck yeah! I did that shit, man.”
As the Bonys cackle and pull out of the parking lot on squealing tires, I stand like a newly decorated Christmas tree and wait for Quint and Lamar to come out from their hiding places.
When the door beside me finally squeaks open, Lamar is the one who speaks first, “I just want you to know, we totally had your back, Rainy Lady.”
“A hundred percent,” Quint chimes in.
“Just shut up and get in the truck,” I snap.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Wes
The Green Mile. That’s what Officer MacArthur called it when he came to get Doug for his execution a few hours ago. After he sobbed all over his shitty fucking beef Wellington.
“Time to walk the Green Mile, buddy.”
Who says that? Heartless motherfucker. That must be why they sent him instead of Hoyt or Elliott. Those two still have some shred of humanity left. But Mac? He’s older. Harder. His tightly cropped gray hair tells me he’s probably ex-military, and the trench-deep lines around his eyes and mouth tell
