No one behind me had said anything in minutes. At first, I was all screaming and cursing. Tunnel vision blocked out everything but escape and the road in front of me. The ail of sirens behind us. Then someone coughed or choked. Cody, I hoped. Let it be Cody, that sonofabitch . . .
I had no choice, I had to focus on the road, tap into that gyroscope in my head to guide us through this mess. I was doing seventy, eighty fifteen seconds out of the parking lot. Any moron can do eighty on the highway. In-town driving, never mind cops chasing you—well, that’s a different story.
The whole thing was a bad dream, a noir film from the fifties—only Richard Widmark’s or Robert Mitchum’s agent would have told his client to take a hard pass on the offer to take my part. Nobody identifies with the loser, not even the losers of the world.
I swung the Shelby hard on Mary Street Hill doing eighty-five. Taking the sharp corner at the top of the hill at this speed guaranteed a wipeout. But speed was essential to get to the freeway and leave the city cops in the dust. By the time the state troopers got the call in their barracks near Interstate 90, I could be flying too far ahead of them and their stopsticks and those big Charger engines—the only means of catching me at this speed. My GT500 was the fastest Shelby sold between ’13 and ’14. I’d dogged it out at 205 mph years back on Route 11 coming home from a Cannons concert in Youngstown at three in the morning. There wasn’t much between me and my hometown but barren farmland, stunted trees and rusted-out, barbed-wire fences. I had Michelle joy’s lyrics still in my head from their last set when the circular on-ramp off the 680 loop spun me onto Route 11, an arrow-straight freeway deadheading at Lake Erie. Restless and jittery from all the second-hand smoke at the concert, I put the pedal down as soon as I left the on-ramp. In two seconds I was doing sixty-five and passing a semi carrying steel coil; three seconds after that, I blitzed past an SUV doing about seventy to my one-eighty. I remember the third semi I passed a mile after that. I laughed when I passed him. He seemed to be standing still. My speedometer had topped at two-hundred before I spotted his hi-beams ahead of me. I had an urge to shut off my headlights and feel the rush of flying through dark; it was like being in a rocket ship in deep space—
Asshole, Steve. You motherfucker, Darrisaw . . .
“Easy, babe,” Leesa said behind me, soothing the wounded bastard. She was hurt, too. How bad, I didn’t know. As I said, it was crazy town: cop cruisers rolling up with screeching tires, shouts, and then the gun shots. Glass shattering, bullets ricocheting off metal, brick, cutting so close past my ear I could hear the sizzle of air burning. When I shoved her into the car, I had sparks flying off my shoes I was moving so fast. I’ve never been so scared in my life.
More gurgling, whimpers from the backseat as I took the corner. The Shelby damned near high-skied on two tires off the shoulder.
Kill you . . . Darrisaw—
“Easy, honey.”
Honey. Babe. The prick was introduced to me two days ago by Leesa as her “brother from California.”
I couldn’t think of that now. Not him, not her. Not what a four-star, revolving asshole of a fool I turned into in less than forty-eight hours. What’s the word? Kismet? Something like destiny was behind it because it was at a different Cannons concert that I first saw Leesa. That time, it wasn’t Michelle Joy at the mic that drew my eyes but a blonde in the front of the stage weaving to the music . . .
Two Days Earlier
I was like one of those poor dogs you see in the shitty sections of any town in the Midwest. Their white-trash owners keep them out back on six feet of chain, cooped up in their doghouses all day, every kind of weather, never visited. That was me. The fact that I’d just been released from Lorain Correctional two weeks ago for stealing schedule-1 drugs for my wife, a junkie nurse, meant I was still adjusting to my freedom after fourteen months of being kept in a steel cage. I remember stopping in front of doors in my own house a couple times, waiting for someone to open them.
Fourteen months in a medium-security prison because I thought I was helping my wife so that her hospital wouldn’t get wind of her addiction. She was stealing from the locked drug cabinet near surgery where the potent stuff for surgeries was kept. I never expected Nikki to throw me under the bus. The shortages finally caught up with me. Gabapentin handled her dope sickness for a while but she demanded stronger drugs.
I told Nikki to testify against me in the criminal trial to save her career, but the blame fell hard on me. The judge refused to consider first-time offender program or a pre-trial diversion deal. I got nailed with two years at Lorain Correctional, a medium-security facility with a bunch of reclassified felons with murder and assault convictions.
Pittsburgh, back to that moment when I first spotted her near the stage, weaving, high from dope or music. You’re so golden: the slender blonde in a split gown of glitter leaning into the microphone with a sweet voice lamenting some broken-heart ballad. The butterfly tattoo on Leesa’s shoulder caught my eye amid the crowd jammed down front while the clichés of love wafted out of the mic on stage. A little scruffy in her tacky clothes, Leesa seemed lost as well as mesmerized by the on-stage singer, maybe identifying with her the way people do at live concerts.
I wormed my way through the crush of bodies to get close to her. Leesa turned her head to look at me. Up close, the butter-blonde a bad dye job. She smiled, though. I couldn’t believe my luck. The anger from my wrecked career and marriage, my lost reputation and months in prison I could never get back, everything but the Shelby, fell away to nothing when Leesa looked back at me in that moment.
We talked briefly between sets. She said to call her. I invited her into my home two days later. Leesa and her vulture of a lawyer threatening me with eviction with an order from the Sheriff’s office if I wasn’t gone in three days. I wasn’t just horny as a dog. My intentions toward Leesa were as obvious as a dog’s balls. I figured, one day is all I need. I’ll make up some bullshit and we’ll find a B& B in town, spend some time drinking in the bars on Bridge Street, get to know each other better. But first, I had to get laid no matter what it took.
Little did I know that, while I was playing her, she was playing me. Enter Shithead, stage right. Brother Cody. Only he was no more her brother than I was.
What’s the story with this guy Cody?
Just a friend, Steve. Don’t worry about it.
You said a day or two. Then he’d leave. Remember?
Just a day or two more, hon. He wants to talk to you about a way to make money. We’ll need it, won’t we, Steve? I mean, you’re leaving all this to her—
I want him gone. Leesa, you liar . . .
My mind wouldn’t stop beating me up with snatches of conversation, coming back to me, condemning me for my stupidity. I banished other thoughts, viscous and red like a spilled syrup when it came to imagining what they did in the house behind my back when I left to find a new place for us to stay.
I flew down that on-ramp to the freeway and punched it to get to I 90 six miles away before the state boys got word from the city police. They had to know where I was heading. Lake Road going east was blocked from last winter’s erosion and still wasn’t open.
Tose big Challenger engines of the state cops could come up on us fast. Even my Shelby couldn’t lose them. The wind whistled through the shattered glass as I picked up speed; the speedometer needle arced past one-fifty, -sixty, -seventy in seconds. The wind blocked any noise coming from the back seat, although I’d heard nothing but Cody’s mumbled curses and groans for the last few minutes.
The steering wheel vibrated in my hands. That fusillade of bullets from the parking lot must have nicked a tire. A clusterfuck times ten. I was dying to know how bad Leesa was hurt. I shouted behind me several times but she refused to answer me—or, worse, couldn’t answer me. I didn’t know whether my hatred for Cody was as fierce as my fear of losing her for good.
Three Days Earlier . . .
I sat in the kitchen of a house I wouldn’t be living in much longer talking to my sister. Rhonda came over to pick up the dog after I lost him in the court decree too. Rhonda told me she tried to stop Nikki from filing so soon after my sentence. She told her she was afraid for my morale, worried I might hang myself in my cell with a sheet like some made-for-TV movie. She told me she heard from a paralegal friend downtown that my wife’s divorce lawyer was bragging to his associates before the hearing that he intended to leave me “filleted to the bone and living in the gutter.”
“What’s the point of telling me that now, Rhonda?”
Rhonda answered my question with her own. “Do you think it’s a good idea to invite a strange woman into your life you just met at a concert?”
Her lawyer was as good as his threat—almost. My yellow Shelby was the only thing Nikki didn’t get in the divorce. She was awarded full custody of our two children, Max and Sarah, the house, everything in it, which included the pool out back, half our savings, three-quarters of our credit union account, and the Escalade. Now Timkin, our black Lab was hers, too.
“He’s Nikki’s dog anyway,” Rhonda, said rubbing the salt in the wound. “Timkin never liked you, Steve. You were always gone.”
“Sorry for making a living.”
I used to joke with the techs at work after one of those marathon weekend sessions at the pharmacy that I was worried Timkin might forget who I was when I came home and bite me in the ass.
Rhonda was younger by two years but she had the sensibilities of a middle-aged woman even when she was a teenager.
“Where is your hooker upstairs?”
“I told you her name, Rhonda. I think I hear your kids calling you.”
Rhonda met her second husband on a dating app but found it bizarre that I met Leesa at a rock concert.
I knew she was right to be suspicious. I just got out of jail and had no prospects of ever practicing my profession again. I was bitter, angry at my ex, pissed off at the sentence I served instead of getting probation, still dealing with the throes convicts call the “the short and shitties,” meaning the closer you got to your release date, the more agitated you got, the more your stomach revolted at the starchy food they served, the worse your nerves became at every sound at night with all the clanging bars and shouting. Guys will try to incite you into fights in the chow line or chest-bump you in the yard to provoke a fight to get you more time. Convict fun.
My sister lived on Facebook and bombed me with religious or sappy sayings right up to the day I had to report to prison and the day I walked out to see her waiting in the visitor parking lot to drive me back to Northtown.
“So what are you going to do now?”
“Take it easy,” I said. “Catch up on Netflix.”
“You idiot,” Rhonda said. “Get rid of her. You think you’re in love but this is rebound dating after a divorce. You got dumped.”
She whistled for the dog. I watched from the kitchen while he jumped into the backseat of her SUV. My intuition told me I’d never see her or the dog again. I wish it had told me something about Cody.
Cody was a piece of work from the day he arrived with his duffel bag. He sat around the living room in front of my flat-screen TV in his boxers, scratching his balls on the couch, or adjusting his cock from one side to the other to get more comfortable. I caught Leesa eyeing him with a smirk. Fresh out of the slammer, and I was chasing my losses like a desperate gambler, hoping this crackpot scheme of Cody’s was going to free me from a past life that had come tumbling down around my ears.
One Hour Earlier . . .
“Stop sweating, jailbird,” Cody barked at me. “You walk in looking like a deer in the headlights, they’ll know some bad shit is about to happen.”
“Screw you,” I replied. “When this is over, I don’t want to see you again.”
Cody never admitted it but he was an ex-con. He had all the alpha male mannerisms that made life a living hell for me in the joint. Leesa and I had a fight at breakfast over him. I called him a shitbird and said he was like the guys I’d been surrounded with night and day for months on end: hopeless losers destined to come right back to prison.
“Call my brother a loser again, Steve, and I’m walking out of here right now.”
“He’s going to get me sent right back there, God damn it!”
Stupid, stupid . . .
The Present . . .
I snapped out of that regret faster than the miles ticking away beneath the Shelby’s chassis as we approached the turn to the on-ramp. I remember a stream of cars we passed and weaving into the slow lane to avoid rear-ending the clowns driving in the passing lane. One old man doing sixty whipped his head toward us as we smoked him going by. My neocortex took a snapshot of him: his face looked like one of those withered dolls they sell in Amish country stores made from dried apples. His mouth hung open like some ancient singer in a tragic opera. I wasn’t going so fast that I couldn’t hear that hellish chorus of sirens when they erupted behind me. The Doppler echoing of sound waves booming toward the Shelby told me better than my eyes in the rearview they were coming up fast.
The staccato thumps every time we hit a pavement seam jerked the steering wheel harder and made me tighten my grip. The flashing lights in the rearview were getting brighter, closer. I couldn’t squeeze another r.p.m. out of the engine. I had seconds to decide before that trooper ahead threw down his tire spikes. The Shelby, like an exhausted horse, had given me everything it had and now struggled to maintain speed. The shimmy was spreading from the steering wheel to my hands and arms, shaking the undercarriage. One blown tire at this speed and we were all dead. Maybe a better ending in a blackened ruin than disgrace and the rest of my life rotting in a maximum-security prison.
A gargling noise behind me: Leesa or Cody?
“ . . . say, Steve?”
“I said we’re gonna make it, Leesa. Hang on.”
“Cody . . . hurt bad . . .”
“Fuck him, I can’t do anything for him right now!”
I had to shout to be heard.
The speedometer stuck at 110 m.p.h. The steering wheel vibration was so bad by then my knuckles had turned white like a boxer’s hands.
The big Chargers were Dobermans on a barn hunt. Leesa hadn’t said another word since asking about Cody.
Just another mile to the exit ramp. I couldn’t press the pedal any harder, the engine screamed like an animal in pain. Black, oily smoke curled from the tailpipe. My shot-up classic car, two passengers bleeding out. I’m driving a hearse.
In the rearview, I can see the top of Leesa’s head canted to one side. Air blew through the shattered glass from the bullet holes lifted tufts of her hair. I risked a look behind me. She stared at me with glassy eyes. Before I turned my head away, I saw the blood streaming through her fingers pressed to her abdomen. Blood not crimson but dark, almost black. I didn’t need ten years as a pharmacist to know her wound was fatal.
I tried squeezing out the memory of Cody and me bursting through the doors of that cash advance place on Prospect like clowns tumbling out of a circus Volkswagen. Leesa waiting in the car as lookout. Flash forward: Cody emptying the tills for chump change, screaming at the terrified owner to “get the money, get the money, get the money.” Running to the doors at the front. It seemed as long as the Holland Tunnel. The look on Leesa’s face when she saw us—and the armed guard, a rent-a-cop coming out of nowhere behind us raising his automatic to shoot. Cody whipped around and put a round into the boy’s forehead . He dropped to the sidewalk.
The memories flashed and worsened: the guard lying on the sidewalk with a hole in his forehead and blood drooling out. The sizzle of a bullet channel next to my ear as cops began firing. The whole thing a disaster from start to finish, nothing went as planned. They roared up from a silent alarm the owner must have tripped. I can’t stop the film replaying in my head like my grandparents’ old movie projector with the film jumping in the sprockets.
That parking lot was the true end of my shimmering fantasy life with Leesa—a mirage concocted out of thin air as corrupt as the whited sepulcher my bible class teacher used to preach to us children about. I had just slammed the Shelby into first gear when Cody took the shot that spattered the back of my head with a spray of Cody’s blood.
Bullets tore up the Shelby’s windows and cut the air all around me while Leesa and I tugged at Cody to get him all the way inside. Then she was hit. Cops behind cruisers blasting away like it’s an historic reenactment of the Battle of the Alamo. Chaos in every direction. My mind going dark at the edges as tunnel vision swept in and my limbic brain kicked in, took over. Time juddered down to a molasses speed. Only one thought in my head amid the chaos swirling around: Get the fuck out of there . . .
But there was no escape. I was stupid to think there could be. The troopers swooped closer, but the fastest overshot the Shelby when I swung into his lane to head him off, forced him to rear-end us or dodge. If he’d planned a pit maneuver, he missed the moment by a split-second. I see the black vehicle slide into the shoulder, whack the guard rail, and send a shower of sparks upward in a rooster tail.
One trooper I never saw by the roadside was out of his cruiser on the other side of the highway. My mind took a screenshot of his outflung arm like some wedding guest tossing rice at a happy couple. Only not rice. Stop sticks. He threw the belt of spikes and caught part of my right rear tire. The blast of air from the puncture and the instantaneous wobble seized up the steering wheel. I lost all control of the skid.
In the rearview, another mental screenshot: his gun out, muzzle flash. He fired as he ran to the other side to throw a striped pantleg over the guardrail to check on his colleague who slid downhill after missing us.
Time was taffy. The Shelby slewed over uncut grass in a clunky slalom. I could not straighten out by steering into the slide with that bad wheel. Gravity did the rest. I remembered nothing but a blurry kaleidoscope of images as we rolled upside down and tumbled inside like a barrel going over Niagara Falls. Leesa and he flew past each other, body parts colliding. Heads just missing impact by inches.
The Shelby rolled on its back through the whipping dockweed and underbrush to the bottom of the slope. I saw everything over the deployed air bag that felt like a bomb going off in my ears and through the top of the shattered windshield.
I must have been knocked out for a moment. Greasy smoke flooded my nostrils, my lungs couldn’t get enough air. I brushed tiny chunks of broken glass out of my hair. Still dazed from the impact, I heard a clock ticking somewhere close. Not a clock. Hot oil sizzled against the oil pan.
Then I was up, out, stumbling, and running for the woods. Nerve endings from all over my body recorded pain from a dozen directions. Cody had been flung out the door—a ragdoll with twisted arms and legs. I gave him a passing malediction: Hope you’re dead, bastard.
Then running, running . . . covered in black muck, exhausted, bruised and bleeding from dozens of briar thorns, I found a rotted stump in brackish water up to my ankles. I choke on my sobs. My right eye puffed shut, although I don’t remember being hit in the face. Maybe a twig lashing. I listen for dogs in the distance. I don’t hear any baying of hounds. That mournful sound like trains at night. My grandfather raised Belgian Malinois, great hunting dogs who can sniff out cancer as well as track a man on the run, told me the best dogs, the trackers and bloodhounds on the scent don’t bark because they’re busy with their noses to the ground sucking in hundreds of thousands of scent particles.
The End of the Day . . .
I’m going to sit on this log like a damaged version of Rodin’s Thinker and backtrack through this disaster. No escaping my doom. Crows have already discovered me; their shooting out caws to lead the hunters closer. They don’t want me around. The woods belong to them; they patrol the skies. All around me is a creepy silence and pungent marsh odors of rot and decay. I can’t get Leesa out of my mind even now.
I’m shivering. Time that was elastic has sped up somehow. Colors are changing fast or else my vision is affected by the turbulence of my mind. My body aches and I haven’t eaten since yesterday. My stomach wouldn’t hold food once the time approached to leave the house for the crime I let myself be talked into. One old con in the joint told me the day before I left to be careful the first few days I after I got out. I smiled and thanked him but said I’d be fine and not to worry about me.
“Guys always say that,” he replied. “Then I see them back here a year, two years later. They always say it was somebody else who fucked them up and got them jugged again.”
I had to vomit into the toilet bowl from fear before we left the house. Nothing but a rope of yellow bile came out. I looked in the bathroom mirror. I remember the words I said to my reflection, too: Fool, what are you doing with your life?
The crescent moon is overhead above the canopy of trees. Scraggly pine, some birch but mainly tall maples and oaks. They’re coming. I hear them in the distance. No dog howls or yips. Just voices that carry at night. The search party’s flashlights poke holes in the blackness, bounce as the men pick up the pace: the dogs have found me. Like an invisible conductor with a baton, the light beams are no longer random but moving in a single direction now.
Three motherfucking days for my entire life to unspool. Everything gone in one moronic, lust-induced spasm of lust-at-first-sight. Leesa’s hooks in me were like the barbs of a crossbow arrow, they have to go through the wound, not out and back the way they came into flesh.
Shaking from cold and dehydrated, I want to speak to my sister Rhonda again to explain: Look, Sis, you don’t understand how it was . . .
Who am I kidding? I can’t explain it any better than Leesa could explain Cody.
Letting her psycho lover talk me into robbing a cash-advance outfits that charged a mob bookie’s vigorish was even dumber than stealing from my own pharmacy.
. . . We walk in, we walk out. Easy money, right, Stevie? Don’t be a chickenshit. My sister won’t go to work as a motel maid until you get back on your feet . . .
After Nikki’s lawyer did his number on me, I had nothing to lose.
Leesa, the golden snake consuming its own tail: me.
Louder now, much closer—the men, not the dogs. Maybe it’s a myth that hunting dogs on the scent don’t bark like the movies. My grandfather told me a lot of stories. The beams are breaking through the thicker trees and dotting the ground as though they can pick out my footprints. I’m sitting here, a broken man on a log in a stinking swamp, waiting for the climax. Keep sitting or exit stage right, chased by dogs.
A better idea: I feel around in mud as soft as baby shit. I grasp a slimy stick. It will do fine. In the dark, it’s a gun for all they can see or know. I’ll wait right here. I’ll close my eyes and think of us at the concert back in Pittsburgh surrounded in a golden aura before the red dots light me up.
[Image Credit : Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash]
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