Genuinely Dangerous

by Mike McCrary

  While Ruby was snuffing the life out of a man, Choke stormed out into the night with an axe.

  Boone followed him, grabbing a shotgun on the way out. They left about thirty seconds prior to Ruby giving that poor asshole’s neck a standing ovation. She’s now sitting on the floor with legs crossed, looking through what she pulled from the three dead bodies.

  Does she know who these people were?

  Is this an ongoing beef?

  A shotgun booms outside.

  Is it called a beef?

  Ruby sifts through some cash, a few burner cells, and a ChapStick. No idea who these guys are, who they are with, or what they want, but they knew enough to travel without any clues or evidence on them.

  Realizing I’m still filming her, I mull over my project. I never thought to work out the structure of this thing. Things have changed so much. In the back of my mind, I guess I always thought I’d dub in some voice-over during post, but now I’m thinking I’ll need significantly more VO to pull the connective tissue of the narrative together.

  Screams mixed in with gunfire echo from the dark woods.

  Of course I’ll have to fill in the gaps with VO in post, but maybe I can get some in-the-moment stuff. Some commentary or interviews during the jobs or, in this case, during the insanely intense sneak attack and the insanely intense violent response.

  “Do you know who these people are?” I ask Ruby.

  She nods.

  “Who are they?”

  “They are a nonissue at the moment,” she says.

  “Did you know they were coming?”

  From the corner of my eye, I see a shotgun blast burst, breaking up the darkness.

  Boone’s? Fucking hope so.

  She looks up at me with an expression that can only be interpreted as me having asked a really stupid question.

  I apologize.

  “Does this happen a lot?” I ask.

  “Happens enough,” she says. “Did you like it?”

  “What?”

  “Did you like what you saw? Was it fun? Interesting? Entertaining?”

  Wasn’t expecting to be answering any questions, and certainly don’t want to answer that one. Not on camera. Not the narrative you want to have to explain later.

  “Tell me,” she presses.

  “I was scared.”

  “Of course you were. So was I.”

  “Didn’t come across as scared—”

  Ruby stops me. “There’s no shame in being afraid, Jasper. It’s what you do after that fear’s gone away. That’s what counts. Do you become a lump of shit or a fire-eating murder machine? That’s the thing. The only thing that matters in this life. And you’re trying to capture that with your fancy-ass cameras.”

  I notice the gunfire outside has slowed.

  “There’s no magic in this,” Ruby says.

  That flash of her warm eyes is back. Is there a human being in there? And is that human, I don’t know, hitting on me? The eyes. The blowing of kisses. This is insane. I’m being drawn in by a woman I just watched crush the throat of another man, and the historically stupid male interpretation of the opposite sex has me attracted to her eyes, face, and yes, let’s just say it, her body.

  What was with her response to Harry’s death? Were they together?

  Stop.

  Irrelevant.

  The movie. Make the damn movie.

  Boone enters through the busted door. He mutters something that sounds like motherfuckers as he drops his shotgun. Can’t help but notice his hands are trembling as he takes a pull from a whiskey bottle. Something happened in those woods that shook him up bad. What the hell could rock Boone’s world?

  Choke walks in seconds later. He holds an axe covered in blood. The gunfire outside has ended. Only crickets. There’s something in his balled-up, bloodied fist. Choke lays the axe down on the table by Boone. He musses up Boone’s hair, like he’s trying to reassure him. Boone looks up at him and nods.

  I’m getting all of this, of course.

  Never guessed I’d get a human angle with this.

  Choke opens his fist, letting a stream of pulpy teeth fall to the table one after the other. Boone watches each fall and bounce from the table. He takes another whiskey pull. Choke has to pick the last one from his palm—it’s stuck, hanging by the bloody meat.

  He hands it to me.

  Call it a reflex, politeness, I don’t know, but I actually open my hand and let him drop the tooth into my waiting palm. He thumbs Boone toward the kitchen. Boone heads that way and begins mixing another drink.

  “They’re called Pink Rabbits,” Choke says.

  “What?” I ask, still looking at the tooth in my hand.

  “The drink I enjoy. They are called Pink Rabbits.”

  “Oh yeah, Ruby told me. They—they look good,” I say.

  “They are,” Choke says. “Ruby, don’t ever give this rancid abortion of a man any information about you, us, or anything else without proper clearance from me.”

  Ruby nods. It’s as if she knows she did wrong. “I’m sorry. Won’t happen again.”

  Boone hands Choke his cocktail. He takes this one down in three gulps then turns to me. He regards the camera and asks, “You get all that?”

  “Healthy amount of it, yeah,” I say.

  “Good. Now fucking turn it off so I can bury my son.”

  47

  Son?

  Harry was his son?

  Are the rest of them related?

  He must have started having kids when he was twelve. Not sure how old the man is, but he can’t be much older than me. I’m not young by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not old either. Harry had to be late twenties, or twenty-five at least.

  I’m back in the trunk now.

  Bouncing along, trying to work out the family tree of my new group of buddies. Still not sure how this all fits together, but if Harry was Ruby’s brother, that would explain Ruby’s emotional implosion when he was killed. Maybe they weren’t and I’m back to my original hypothesis they were lovers. At this point anything is possible. New plan. Expect the unexpected.

  We hit a pothole or something.

  I bite my tongue.

  I have no idea where we’re headed, but at least they didn’t put a bag over my head and tie me up. Also, I was allowed to get some fresh pants and underwear. Progress. Trust. These are building blocks to making this partnership work. Or that’s all bullshit and they are trying to make me think they trust me so they can pull some sneaky shit later on. I can almost feel my paranoia lather.

  Another hole, another chunk of tongue gone.

  At least I got some footage from inside the trunk. Maybe I can cut it in somewhere and make it work. Everything is filmable, no matter what Choke says. I need to push the edges and get it all on film. The audience demands it. Deserves it. They’ve worked hard for their entertainment dollar. Besides, I made it this far, and if death is going to be a constant possibility, might as well go big, boy-o.

  The trunk glows red. We are stopping. I hear a door open. I’m filming it all. The trunk opens and they are all there. The sun is blazing behind them. Boone offers a hand and pulls me from the trunk.

  We are in a city or the downtown of a decent-sized town. I don’t recognize it. Doesn’t matter. I grab a different camera, one fully charged and ready to roll, and secure it to my chest mount. I then pull on my Dodgers cap with another camera mounted on the brim. I thought about it and came to the conclusion this is the setup I will use primarily. Allows me to work two POV angles I can splice together as needed and have another camera I will use for handheld-specific shots. The combo of all three should give me what I need.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  They don’t answer. Each of them is scanning the area—up and down, side to side, foot by foot, inch by inch—all of it receiving an assessment.

  Choke nods toward the street. “We’re going to take that.”

  I peek around the car.

  There’s a
n armored car parked in front of a bank.

  “That work for you, Hollywood?” asks Boone.

  It’s perfect, actually. An armored-car takedown is the stuff of classic crime movie heists. From a film perspective, it is perfect. From the perspective of actually being a part of it, it’s terrifying. Looking around the street, it’s far from perfect. I swallow, hard. It’s the middle of the day, and there are people everywhere. Crowds of men, women, and children move up and down the streets of wherever we are. They have no idea what is about to happen, who these people are, or what they are capable of. How could they? I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of what these people can and/or will do.

  Without looking at me, Choke says, “My boy asked you a question.”

  Boy?

  He’s a son too?

  What is Ruby?

  I’m so confused.

  “Will this work for you?” Choke restates the question.

  “Yes, but I don’t want any of these people to get hurt.”

  Ruby whispers something in Boone’s ear. He nods then motions to something down the street. Boone shows Choke. He nods then points to something else. It’s as if they didn’t hear me.

  I say it again.

  Still nothing.

  I watch a pregnant woman holding hands with her husband.

  I say it again, louder, with more feeling.

  Boone seems agitated. Choke turns to him, lowers his chin with eyes up. Boone punches me in the face—the right eye, to be precise. I fall back into the trunk ass-first. My head is light, vision blurred, but I’m okay, able to shake it off. The rash of beatings I’ve taken lately must be toughening me up.

  I hear a buzz.

  A cell phone buzzing.

  Choke removes my phone from his pocket. Grinning big, he shows it to me and asks, “You know a Holly?”

  48

  Ruby’s head whips around. She wears an expression I can only describe as…jealousy?

  Rage?

  Heightened frustration brought on by emotional confusion?

  I really don’t know for sure, but she’s wearing a very convincing woman-scorned face at the moment.

  She came up as Unknown before. Is she trying to get ahold of me using an old number? Maybe she thought I was dodging an unknown number and she really wants to talk to me, so she switched to a known number. I feel Ruby’s death stare all over me. Trying to keep my face as blank as humanly possible, I say, “She’s just a woman I know, lives down the street. It’s probably nothing.” Keep in mind that I’m still in the trunk after taking a fist to the face.

  Choke touches END and pockets my phone without much fanfare.

  Ruby gets in my ear, whispers, “Did you fuck her?”

  “No,” I say. Which is the truth.

  Ruby stares me down, reading me, scanning me like the scariest lie detector on the planet. She finally lets it go, returning her attention to the world around her.

  “Let’s go,” says Choke.

  I lie down in the trunk, my special place. Choke snaps his fingers at me then points to the car. Boone pulls me out from the trunk. As I get out, he takes a swing at my face, stopping just short of connecting with my nose. I ball up my hands over my face like a complete pussy. This, of course, is exactly what Boone was going for. He laughs hysterically.

  As I look down the street at the guards and the armored trunk, I can’t help but hope they manage to put a bullet in Boone’s brain.

  If that makes me a bad person, I’m sorry.

  I’m almost certain that ship has sailed.

  49

  I sit bitch up front.

  Wedged between Boone, who’s behind the wheel, and Ruby sitting shotgun. Choke sits alone in the back as if being chauffeured to a gig at Madison Square Garden. I picked this spot in the front for filming purposes, explaining it would be hard to get good shots from the backseat. I didn’t get a lot of resistance. Again, hard to tell if that is trust building up or if they are only playing me for a fool. Only time will tell.

  Boone pulls down a black ski mask and starts the car. Ruby puts on her mask, and Choke does the same. Ruby hands me one. I have to adjust the Dodgers cap cam, so I take it off then pull the ski mask down over my face. I think about asking if I can cut a hole so I can use the mouth mount, but decide against it. Takes a second to get the eye holes right, but as I do, I see we are moving at an extremely high rate of speed.

  The world is blurring by, morphing into a montage of shapeless colors.

  The engine purrs. I grip the dashboard the only way I can, by my fingernails.

  We are plowing straight toward the guards standing in the street.

  50

  We hit the first guard.

  The grill slams into him, flipping his body end over end, clearing the top of the car.

  The second one dives clear as we scream headlong into the glass front doors of the bank. Our 1967 tank of a car blasts through the glass and metal like a cannon ball. My world slows. Through our windshield I see the people in the bank dive, roll, run, and crawl in every direction. Glass hangs in the air then tumbles down like rain. Over the roaring engine, I can make out the soft tinkle of metal and glass bouncing off marble tile.

  Boone locks the breaks. Tires screech, tearing us around in a circle. The front of this battleship is pointing back around where the once inviting entrance used to be. The one we eviscerated. A plant smashes to the floor. Not sure the last time I took a breath. No, wait, I am breathing. Breathing at an alarming rate. My heart beats against my ribs, pounding my chest. Fear has taken hold of my senses. My sight is reduced to white spheres with holes of vision punched through. I hear nothing.

  Ruby pulls me from the car.

  She has a gun. A big one.

  Ruby lays down a stream of bullets just over the heads of the few tellers who stand behind the counter. Boone is already out of the bank and into the street, apparently in a shootout with the remaining guard. Choke has a Glock in his gloved hand. Popping the trunk, he yells something about how much time they have.

  I get ahold of myself and pull out the handheld camera, trying to capture things my chest and cap cam are not. Amid the chaos, I’m able to calculate the sight lines of the lenses, as well as the blind spots of the coverage I’m missing. It’s crazy, but I keep the handheld aimed toward the street as I turn my body to Ruby. It’s as complete of a sweep as I can get—total coverage of the area is not a reality, but I’m close. Maybe it’s the compartmentalization of doing the movie that’s keeping me from dealing with the reality of what I’m in the middle of.

  Have I stumbled upon a new way of removing myself from the pale blue dot?

  Capturing chaos is my new Zen.

  Eye of the hurricane is my happy place.

  Ruby pulls stacks of cash from a young, skinny, scared-shitless teller. Choke shoves bank customers on the ground one after the other. Boone rockets back into the bank to help Ruby. He mans a position at the next window, hauling away stacks of cash. One of them says something about dye packs and alarms and don’t fucking do it and we’ll fucking shoot you in the fucking face. Standard stuff you hear in these types of films; nice to see they apply in the real world.

  Audiences take comfort in genre clichés.

  Boone and Ruby dump their cash stacks into the trunk. This work is all flowing so smoothly, just shy of effortless, and I’m getting it all. Brilliant. Visceral. The images I’m capturing will have moviegoers across the globe biting their nails, soiling their panties, and crying out for more. I’m so happy I could cry. This is best I could hope for.

  As I pan over to the car, I see the front grill.

  This is first time I’ve seen it.

  Blood.

  There’s blood. A ton of it. As if Boone collided with a trashcan of tomato soup. A scrap of skin caught in a net of clumped hair is stuck to the front hood. The trace remains from the guard Boone ran over. We ran over. A man only doing his job is now dead. Would he be alive if I hadn’t come along? Were Choke
and company going to do this with or without me? Did I kill this man? A man with a family, friends, debts, wins, loses, and all the rest, perhaps a house in the burbs.

  Perhaps a Lucy.

  He’s not going home today.

  I throw up. It just explodes out of me with no warning whatsoever. Not only did I capture that moment on film, but it’s also running down my chest cam. A bag gets thrown over my head, covering my cap cam and my vomit-coated face.

  Cut to black.

  Hands grab my shoulders.

  This time I’m tossed into the backseat.

  Progress.

  51

  No one speaks.

  Only the rhythms of the road can be heard. I tried to engage about a minute ago and was met with “shut the fuck up.” I can’t check my gear to see if I’m getting what’s going on. I guess it doesn’t matter. Technology hasn’t perfected a lens to penetrate vomit.

  Car stops.

  I’m grabbed again.

  Thrown into a new vehicle. Seems like a van or a large SUV. I feel space around me. Room to breath.

  Tires rip.

  We’re off again.

  I feel a sharp pain jam into my thigh. A burn spreads through my leg and up my body, spreading to all areas. Then a quick slip of that something being pulled from my leg. They’ve injected me with a needle. They are fucking drugging me.

  I attempt to question this.

  My mouth fails. As if filled with massive marbles and a tongue that’s getting fatter by the second.

  Brain closes for business.

  Fade to black.

  52

  Lucy called.

  I almost forgot.

  I’m crawling back into the world.

  Right before the bank, she did call, that much I remember. My head is a sloshy bucket of goo as I slide off whatever the fuck poison they injected me with. No idea what the date or time is, let alone where I am. But back to the topic at hand.

  Lucy called.

  Again.

  If I get out of this little project alive and without debilitating brain damage, I will call her. Hear her sweet voice, let her kindness in, and be what she needs me to be. If there is such a thing as a cathartic moment, like movies and television tell us, then this is it for me. Running with the devil, being semi-responsible for people’s deaths, being drugged, and possibly being hit on by a psychopathic woman with great eyes has me reevaluating my place in the world. Taking stock, as it were.