"She had dropped out of sight and I was concerned," Uncle Vern said. He paused when something chimed on his dashboard. He tapped the brake as he approached a curve on Lee Bridge. Sure enough, a patrol car was squatting on the bicycle path.
"You have a fuzz buster?"
Marvin snorted. "It's the least illegal thing in this crate."
A kid's exaggeration, prompting me to take a closer look at him. Yeah, he was a kid. A twenty-something extended adolescent. Age-wise we were about the same, but I got the impression of gross immaturity on a par with Todd's. True, I had never been granted the privilege of being shot, so I couldn't claim physical suffering as an aid to maturity. But I had been poor all my life, and it is generally conceded that poverty puts you on the fast track to post-pubescence. My education was spotty, and I'm sadly lacking in the street-wise department—never possessed the genius to know at a glance who it was yanking my chain, and I can't begin to tell you the local connections. Want crack or an illegal streetsweeper? Don't come to me. A joint would have to fall in my lap before I knew where to find one. But I think you get my drift. By virtue of being poor I had a better grasp on the realities of life. Of course, the upper 1% would call me an idiot, but they're talking through their PGA Grand Tour visor hats.
And yet...this surveillance van must have cost a fortune. Even if it was tax deductible for some godawful reason, it represented substantial seed money. Marvin had grown up in the garden of Posh, where all the cucumbers are gold and even weeds were greenbacks. This was probably through the beneficence of Uncle Vern, who had that shiny look of someone who paid others to groom him and could afford to fund a geeky nephew's extravagant techo-tastes. Marvin was in possession of the kind of knowledge only money could buy and I was slightly nauseous with envy, and extremely nauseated by the idea I was really dumb. The only way to compete was to tear my share of the national treasure out of the nation and chalk up a reasonable education. It dawned on me at that moment that I wasn't a loser. In order to be a loser you had to lose something, and I had never had anything to lose. But somehow, somewhere, I must be somebody. I went giddy with hope.
Which did nothing to resolve my confusion. What part did Jeremy have in all this? Why were Uncle Vern and his mini-oaf going to the trouble of tracking him down? Jeremy had received a note from the ersatz Skunk, but while that might place him in the picture, that didn't make him the artist ('con' appended). Still, we all knew bits and pieces that the others were ignorant of. Even Barbara had had her share in the three-part password. What would make Jeremy's piece more important than mine...or Todd's?
Every time I risked a glance in my twin's direction I caught him risking a glance back. The police once had a program in which they videotaped drunks soon after their arrest, forcing them to watch themselves after they had sobered up. Their embarrassment at seeing themselves squirting invective and urine in equal proportions convinced more than one to go on the wagon. But the court put a stop to the practice, declaring it cruel and unusual. And I could see why. It's an invincible right for us to hide our dark side—from ourselves, most of all. Todd wasn't me, I wasn't Todd, but only a skinny minute divided our identities. Would I have behaved like him if the roles were reversed? I couldn't say 'yes' without risking the thought that I, too, would have missed a lifetime of opportunities.
"I —" he began.
"Shut up," I said.
"I was just going to say that," Todd griped.
"What I learned about brotherly love I learned in this van," Marvin chuckled meanly without taking his eyes from the screen. He gave a startled jump. "He's moving!"
Uncle Vern let out an oath that was, verbatim, as mild as they come, but text isn't everything and it sounded unprintable.
"Why would he move now?" he demanded of Marvin.
"Maybe the Congreves found him," the young man theorized.
"Then he wouldn't be moving anywhere." Uncle Vern pulled off the road and turned around in his seat. "Which way is he headed?"
"South," I said, beating Marvin to the punch as I watched DT blink across the screen. "And pretty fast, too. Maybe he's being chased."
"Yes, but by whom?"
"The freaking Congreve brothers, Uncle Vern," said a flustered Marvin, as if Vernon had gone prematurely goofy. "Who else?"
"Why, dear nephew, he could be following us."
"How would he know..." Marvin took a page out of the goof book and planted it on his nubbly face. "No, Uncle Vern, absolutely not."
"I thought you regularly swept this van for unwanted electronic devices," Uncle Vern said. He had a pompous streak that irritated the hell out of me. He continued: "You assured me—"
"You think we've been bugged?" There was a frantic tweak in Marvin's voice. "Who would plant a GPS on a surveillance van?"
"Anyone who wanted to keep track of our whereabouts, I presume."
Todd, who was still without a seat or stool, was cracking up on the floor. A big difference between us. I wasn't laughing. But he might not be laughing, either, if he had spent the last week having his ass geosychronized to death.
"He's stopped moving," Marvin announced smugly. "Now we've got him. He's just a couple miles up the road."
Uncle Vern pulled back onto Route 1 South. We had gone about a quarter of a mile when Marvin moaned.
"He's moving again?" Uncle Vern said. I looked at the screen and saw the Doubletalk label ticking ahead. Uncle Vern drove into a minimart parking lot. A minute later, the flashing Jeremy indicator stopped, too.
"I think we have our answer," Uncle Vern fumed.
"Coincidence," Marvin insisted, at which point I began laughing, too.
This did not sit well with either Vernon or Marvin, who seemed inclined to chuck us out the van door. I didn't know if we were here through their sufferance or sheer chance, but a cocked snoot seemed in order and Todd and I gave it to them with our raucous chittering.
"This is no laughing matter, you idiots," Uncle Vern said in a tight voice. "Barbara is safe for the moment, but Jeremy is out in the open. I tried calling but he doesn't answer. He doesn't know the Congreve brothers are after him."
"Why would they be after him?" Todd asked, interrupting his mirth.
We got our answer the next instant—when the rear window's opaque glass shattered.
The Congreve brothers weren't after Jeremy.
CHAPTER 25
You, who have seen and read so many chase scenes throughout the years...I guess you're jaded by now. Cars rocketing, space ships slamming asteroids, elves fleeing from giants.... How was it the ancient Greeks got by without at least one major bumper-jumper? Or maybe the old classics survived because, if they wanted a race, they had a race. With first-hand experience, there was no need to read about it, or have actors perform pallid imitations on stage. Real life or death chases ended with a sword thrust and somebody's intestinal goo splattered over those scenic hills and dales. No explosions, no grinding engine parts, no dangling off skyscrapers. Just yuck.
My point being the heart of the chase is pure Keystone, a modern invention re-invented from the old silents, where action was king. Modern chases are already old, and CGI is getting old fast. But when the devil's on your ass, you find yourself funneled down the same channel of clichés. A million people have had guns held on them, and I bet most of them thought: "Hey, this is different."
Being chased by a pair of armed maniacs was certainly new to me. I lassoed my sphincter to my throat, praying my terror would not be compounded by embarrassment. As Uncle Vern burned rubber out of the lot, I noticed Todd's eyes doing a jitterbug.
"Anyone hit?" Vern shouted at the windshield, too busy to turn around and look.
Marvin was convinced he had been drilled through and through. He being the only one among us who had ever been actually shot, we took him at his word. He only stopped his moaning after a cursory inspection revealed an excess of imagination. Uncle Vern began swearing at him.
"Do you mind, I'm focusing!" Marvin shot back, recovering quickly from his f
aux wound. I thought he was using some fussy contemporary patois until I realized he was maneuvering the periscope camera to focus on our pursuers.
I had forgotten how tasteless Nature had been when it formed the Congreve brothers. Strolling outside my house, they had looked little different from my old neighbors, with the contextual students making them look like zombies out of the Time Tunnel. But when Marvin zoomed in on them behind us I had a scientific epiphany: Homo neanderthalensis were not extinct. Not only that, not all of them had bothered merging their genes with the prevailing species. These numbskulls truly had numb skulls. You could hit them with a sledge hammer and be forced to buy a replacement from Lowe's.
They were careering after us in a giant bolus of metal, and for a moment I wondered if they had stolen my fat assed Impala. But this was puke green instead of puke blue, an old Grand Prix that had impaled a dozen hapless imports, its dents and dings festering with rust. It was a late 70's model, but with enough lead additive, its V8 could chow down almost any other car on the road. Hell, others cars were the lead additive.
"They're not very smart," said Marvin. I figured he was taking visual measurements of their heads.
"They don't have to be," said Todd as he searched for a handhold.
"They should have shot out a tire," Marvin reasoned, sounding a lot calmer than he had when he thought he was shot. I wondered if he had attention deficit disorder. Even imminent death couldn't occupy his mind for more than two seconds. "If they had done that, we'd be toast by now."
We gave a thrashing shout when the Grand Prix gave the van a rear-end bash.
"Looks like they're doing pretty well so far," Todd complained as he grabbed a stanchion and pulled himself to a seated position. I bet he felt helpless down there on the floor. Served him right for being me. Hackers don't know the first thing about real identity theft.
"How can they be so stupid!" Marvin cried out as his hand twitched on the joystick, sending the periscope camera in a twirl, giving us a sweeping vista of Southside that reminded me of the Omnimax's vomit-inducing panoramas. "If they kill us we can't tell them anything!"
"Maybe they already know," I said tightly.
"They don't want you telling anyone else," Todd added.
"And I'm getting the feeling that I'm the last to know," I plugged.
"Second to last," Todd amended.
We were becoming a regular tag team of malicious despair.
"No, no," said Marvin, steadying the camera lens on our pursuers, filling the monitor with what looked like two ugly fish in a bowl. "That doesn't make sense. I know stupid when I see it. Your father was a prize."
Maybe he was the one who had lured us into this mess with phony-if-convincing letters. So convincing that I still wasn't convinced Skunk was truly dead. If I had an unsuspected twin, maybe Skunk did, too, and that was who I had seen slabbed out at the morgue.
It only then dawned on me that this Marvin creep knew all the dirty McPherson secrets—like if Skunk came from the 2-fers basket at Family Dollar. But even worse, he knew (because the letter had mentioned it) that I was an unredeemable jerk-off when I was an adolescent. (We'll leave my current status blank, OK?) Masturbation can be inferred in any red-blooded male, but the details in the letter were damning. I had obviously not been as discreet as I thought I had been. Who else but Skunk would know about the pink dump cup so carefully hidden in a plastic shopping bag which was itself stashed in my closet? I washed it out at least once a week, so that at least some of the time (not often, granted) it could be converted back into a normal drinking cup. Skunk had somehow found out about it and had placed it at the disposal of these cretins. But these did not look like the type of people Skunk would know under any circumstances. Neither Marvin nor his uncle had the smug air of cops or the peculiar mincing approach of ex-cons on the make, the only two social groups with whom Skunk interacted off the Hill....
But I'm being negligent. All the while these things were tossing through my mind, we were racing down Route 1, running red lights to attract cops who magically refused to appear. For a while it seemed to me Uncle Vern was reasonably nifty at dodging the predators behind us. But after a sideswipe and near tipover I realized he had not graduated stunt driving 101 but from the plain old School of Fear. Judging from the stench of urine, he was either puddling in his seat, or the chemical toilet had barfed up its contents.
"That thing must eat a gallon of gas by the minute," Todd observed hopefully. "We can just keep going until he tanks."
"Uhmmm," said Uncle Vern, a succinct summary on our own reserve.
"So at least we won't be doing this all night," I said. I should have stayed mute.
"Dumb, dumb, dumb, just like your father," Marvin sneered. Maybe the tension was making him nastier than usual.
"I'm getting a little ticked off with you trashing Skunk so much," I said.
"Yeah," Todd agreed.
"Shut up," I said. "Why should you care? You didn't even know him."
"Ha!" said Marvin.
Uncle Vern must have sensed an upcoming outrage from his nephew and made a warning noise. Or maybe he was warning us to brace for another collision.
No...it was his nephew.
I was just about to ask Uncle Vern if he had a gun in this rig when Todd said:
"You have a gun on this rig?"
"I don't think we should start shooting," said our driver, his uncertainty compounded by a sharp swerve around some idiot going the speed limit.
"Hello," said Todd. "The shooting's already started."
I agreed. "A couple rounds in their windshield would shake their ass off our ass." Graphic poesy from the terrified.
Marvin slid open a metal drawer and pulled out a gun.
"Who wants to do the honors?"
Todd and I exchanged bug-eyes, a glance that fully conveyed our inexperience with firearms.
"Then I guess it'll be me," Marvin sighed, not all that reluctantly. He glanced up at the shattered rear window. "We already have a firing port."
"Marvin!" Uncle Vern shouted.
"You know how to use that thing?" I asked uneasily as Marvin signaled for me to lean forward so he could squeeze past.
"Sure," he said. "I killed your father with it."
"Marvin!" For a civilized kind of guy, Uncle Vern was doing a lot of shouting. It was my preconception that civilized people are sedate, almost comatose. That there are so many dead civilizations pretty much says it all.
"I was a hero!" Marvin exclaimed. "The Times Dispatch made of Correspondent of the Day, and I didn't even write to them!"
He was at an odd angle. It was easy to pluck the gun out his hand.
"Hey!" Marvin shouted, falling back into his swivel seat. "Give me that back!"
His actions belied his demand. He cringed, as though I was getting ready to plug him on the spot. Todd was just as fearful, seeing that if I missed Marvin I would probably hit him. Hmmm....
But I wasn't even aiming the gun. It was sideways in my hand at a useless angle that threatened the camera console but none of the passengers. Obviously, Marvin and my brother were focused on what I should do, instead of what I intended to do.
"What's going on back there?" Uncle Vern demanded.
"I'm thinking of shooting your nephew and my brother," I said. Okay, I enjoyed the moment. But the stark fear of my announced targets made me queasy. I'm not used to being believed. Well, I'm not used to saying anything worth believing. These chumps really thought I would blast them. The sensation was so unsettling that I moved to toss the gun out the back window.
"No you aren't," said Marvin.
"It's better than me shooting you."
"Not by much. You show those apes that we're unarmed, we won't have any chance left."
I edged up a few inches for a cautious look at the Grand Prix. The Congreve brothers saw me peeking and flung gestures out the window.
"They're pretty rude," I observed. My back was drilled by a 'no kidding' silence. "I could throw the
gun and bust their windshield."
"I don't think that would impress them," said Todd.
"They might even be relieved," Marvin added.
"Twits!" Uncle Vern shouted from the front of the van. "We're about to be killed, and all you can think to do is act like twits!"
It was true. Who would have thought that three individuals, raised in distinct spheres, would have coalesced into a clot of twits in the back of a van being chased in the direction of Antarctica? The odds leaned heavily against this particular coincidence. Yet here we were: three twits. Four, if you included the driver. Adding in the brothers behind me, there were a half dozen twits in the space of few dozen square yards. Synchronicity at its starkest. Ol' Carl Jung must have been chuckling in his grave.
But where were the official twits, the ones in uniform? We were drawing attention to ourselves like nobody's business. They should have been on us like monkeys on bananas. But that only goes to show where assumptions get you. I learned later that a movie was being filmed at the state capitol. The entire police force must have been up there, ogling the stars.
I heard a ping like a hotel deskbell. Turning, I saw a dent bulging in the wall inches from my head. A brief hope that surveillance vans were bulletproofed as a matter of course spiraled out of the realm of possibility. The shattered glass should have been enough proof, but we all know that hope springs eternal, or at least for a minute or so, in the moronic breast. To reinforce my moron credentials, I raised my head for another peek out the window. Butch Congreve was in the process of taking aim with a pistol out the passenger window. I ducked and a bullet zinged overhead, smashing into a panel above Marvin.
"There goes $10,000 plus tax," Marvin moaned.
"As if it was your money," Uncle Vern snarled.
If this all sounds like too much levity, I assure you it really happened and we really said those things. The fact of the matter was that, in spite of barreling down the road with the minimum of control, and being shot at in the process, none of us really believed we would die. It's the cinematic cretin instilled by years of comically tense dialogue imagined by screenwriters who think people yack instead of squawk when threatened with death. Sure enough, we were so saturated with this idiocy that we followed the script.
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