Car Trouble

by Jeanne DuPrau

  Duff felt relaxed and contented. What a great day it had been! So many problems solved—the car problem, the Stu problem, the problem with Shirley’s computer, the problem of being too shy to talk to Bonnie. Even, probably, the problem of getting to his new job by Monday. He was incredibly pleased with himself. Everything was going to be fine. The only not-fine thing was that in the morning he and Stu would travel on alone, leaving Bonnie behind. But somehow, Duff figured, he would find a way to see her again.

  After a while, Aunt Shirley came into the room. She stood behind the couch silently until Bonnie stopped strumming and Duff looked up from the magazine. Then she smiled a chilly smile. “I really can’t have this,” she said.

  “Have what?” Bonnie asked.

  “This distracting environment,” said Aunt Shirley. “All this splashing and humming and talking.” She closed her eyes and shook her head, a tight little vibration as if this situation were giving her the shudders. “I need silence for concentration,” she said.

  “But it’s after eight,” said Bonnie. “Aren’t you finished working for the day?”

  “My fault,” said Aunt Shirley. “I haven’t yet told you my schedule, which you’ll need to know. I get up at eight, work from nine to two, nap from two to four, do my swimmercizing from four to five, eat dinner at six, and work from seven to ten. So you see”—she smiled again, thinly—“I really do require continuous quiet.”

  “Oh,” said Bonnie.

  “Since I’ve been interrupted anyhow,” Shirley said, “why don’t I take the opportunity to tell you a little more about how we do things here. I can see that you don’t remember.” She sat down on a lavender-colored armchair. Duff noticed that she placed her feet neatly together. She was wearing high heels made of transparent plastic, decorated with small daisies. Her toenails were pink. “First of all, quiet, as I’ve said. Second, tidiness. Everything has its place. No sweaters draped over chairs, no shoes left on the floor, no litter lying around. I really cannot operate in a mess.” She held up two fingers and looked at them. “Quiet. Tidiness. What else? Ah. Helpfulness. Of course I won’t be charging you anything to stay here, Bonnie. You’re a relative! I’d never do that. But I will expect some assistance around the house. Some cooking. Dishes, naturally. Laundry. Vacuuming. That sort of thing. It’s summer, after all, so you won’t have schoolwork. Let’s see. Anything else?” She cast her eyes toward the ceiling. “Well, no dogs in the house, of course. How long were you thinking of staying, dear?”

  “Actually,” said Bonnie, “I guess I didn’t make it clear.” She set her guitar carefully back in its case, closed the lid, and flipped the three latches. “I’m not actually going to be staying except for tonight. I’m actually going on to Los Angeles with Duff and Stu.”

  Duff’s heart did a high-jump. She’s coming with us! Wow, wow! He had a feeling, from the way she’d said “actually” three times, that she’d just decided this in the last minute. What a great decision! It would make everything easier and more fun. And obviously she couldn’t stay with Shirley. No point in her mother and herself both being in jail.

  Shirley looked surprised but not disappointed. “You’re leaving tomorrow?” she said. “I didn’t realize. When you asked if you could come and stay, I thought— Well.” She smiled, and this time it was a nice wide smile, very real-looking. “That will be a lovely adventure. You’ll stay with Amelia, then? In her funny little arrangement?”

  “Yes,” said Bonnie. “That’s what I’ll do.”

  At that moment, the sliding glass door opened, and Stu stepped into the living room. Water dripped from his shorts. His wet feet made footprints on the carpet. “Great pool!” he said. He shook his head vigorously, like a dog, and his hair whipped around, flinging droplets.

  “PLEASE!” shrieked Shirley, springing up from her chair. “Not in here!” She ran at him with her hands out. Stu staggered backward, blundered into a lawn chair, and flopped down on it so hard that it tipped over and pitched him onto the concrete, where he sprawled like a beached octopus while Shirley stood over him shouting about puddles on carpets and people who must have been brought up in pigsties.

  Bonnie laughed—one short snort and then a helpless giggle. Duff laughed, too. Laughter boiled up out of him like bubbles out of a shaken soda can, and once he started, he couldn’t stop. He doubled over and held on to his stomach. Bonnie laughed so hard she could hardly breathe. Tears rolled down her face. They were still laughing when Shirley came in, having banished Stu to the poolside cabana to change back into his clothes.

  “You think it’s funny,” Shirley said.

  Duff and Bonnie tried to look serious.

  “What if it were your valuable pastel rose carpet?”

  Duff made a choking sound at the idea of ever having a valuable pastel rose carpet. Bonnie snorted again and pressed her lips tight together.

  “I give up,” said Shirley. “I’m much too upset to work. Bonnie, you know where the guest room is. You boys may spread your sleeping bags outside on the lawn.”

  *

  Duff checked his email one more time that night before going to bed. He found this message:

  Dear Mr. Duffy Pringle,

  This is to let you know that Ping Crocker is no longer with Incredibility, Inc., and that the company will be ceasing to do business as of June 30. We regret that we must withdraw our offer of employment. We wish you the best of luck finding employment elsewhere. Yours sincerely,

  Beverly Winthrop

  Executive Assistant

  Duff stared at these words as if they were in a foreign language. He read them again. They seemed to be saying his job was gone. How could this be?

  He gazed out at the backyard, where Stu was laying his sleeping bag on the grass. Suddenly, the vision of the future he’d been holding in his mind—himself in a cubicle, writing code and making money, himself in a nice apartment with a swimming pool, himself rising to greatness in the entertainment software industry—was replaced by a giant blank. It was like stepping off a ladder, expecting your foot to touch the ground, and plummeting into a void instead. Duff was so shocked that he felt nothing. He simply sat there on Shirley’s couch with his mouth half open. He sat like that for a long time.

  Finally, he shut down his laptop and went outside. As he rolled out his sleeping bag, Stu mumbled a few words at him and then conked out completely and started to snore. Duff’s stunned mind was functioning just well enough to come up with an idea that would let him get some sleep and keep watch on Stu at the same time. It was tricky, but he thought he could do it. He unraveled a long thread from an inside seam of his shirt, and—very, very carefully, so as not to wake Stu by tickling him—he threaded one end of it through the loop of Stu’s earring and tied the other end to his own little finger. That way if Stu tried to sneak out in the night, Duff would know it as soon as he moved.

  Then Duff lay down on top of his sleeping bag—it was too warm to get inside—and stared up at the star-dotted sky. The shock of losing his job before he’d even started it was beginning to wear off, and a few feelings were making their way through the numbness. One was anger—he’d been tossed aside like a piece of trash. Another was terror, because he didn’t know what would happen next. And still another, totally unexpected, was a wisp of relief, a sense that the closing down of this door might somehow lead to the opening of others.

  Phone Call #7

  Sunday, June 30, 7:15 AM

  Rosalie: What.

  Rolf: We got the car.

  Rosalie: Good. So get on the road.

  Rolf: We didn’t find any money in it.

  Rosalie: Look harder. It’s under the floor of the trunk.

  Rolf: We looked there. We looked everywhere. No money.

  Rosalie: [Deadly silence.]

  Rolf: I said, No money.

  Rosalie: I heard you. One of them must have found it. You have to go get it.

  Rolf: But what if they—but how do we—

  Rosalie: That’s your
problem. Just do it.

  Chapter 16

  THE CHASE

  By seven fifteen the next morning, they were on the road. The Toyota wasn’t as spacious as the old Chevy, and it smelled a little like perfume, but it ran all right, and that was all that mattered. Duff was in the driver’s seat this morning, with Stu beside him and Bonnie and Moony in the back.

  Aunt Shirley had given them a breakfast of artificial eggs, white toast, and grapefruit juice, and then she’d hustled them out into the garage, waved as they backed the Toyota out, and turned to go into the house.

  “Wait!” Duff called through the window. “Where’s the freeway from here?”

  “That way,” said Shirley, pointing to the right. “Call when you get there, Bonnie,” she said, and she flapped her hand once or twice. Then she stepped back into the kitchen and closed the door.

  So Duff was now making his way to the right, through a maze of streets. Residential streets at first—rows of stucco houses, most of them with red-tile roofs. Then came commercial streets, lined with used-car lots, video stores, taco stands, gas stations, stores selling rubber swimming pools, Navajo rugs, cut-rate mattresses, plumbing supplies. Morning traffic made for slow going. Finally, up ahead, he spotted a sign for Interstate 40.

  Outside the city, the land stretched reddish and treeless on both sides of the road, dotted with scrubby bushes and rising here and there into sudden rocky ridges and flat-topped hills. The sky was immense and blue—an exhilarating sight. “Okay!” he said. “This is marathon day! Less than eight hundred miles to Los Angeles. We’ll be there by tonight.”

  Stu settled in. He turned on the radio, put his feet up on the dashboard, and opened the window just enough to riffle the hair on the top of his head. “Can’t wait,” he said. “Kind of sad, though. We’ll be splitting up when we get there.”

  “Don’t forget to give me the name of that friend,” said Bonnie from the backseat.

  “Friend?”

  “The one in the music business.”

  “Oh, yeah. Just remind me later. I’ll write it down for you.”

  Uh-huh, thought Duff. He had now decided that hardly anything Stu said was true.

  After a few minutes, Stu took his feet off the dashboard and twisted around to talk to Bonnie. He went on about the music world for a while and then started in on the surfing world—the beaches he’d heard of, the famous surfers he hoped to meet, the spectacular runs and wipeouts he himself had experienced. Duff tuned him out. He focused on the road, two lanes of blacktop in each direction, separated by a strip of bare ground. He hadn’t told anyone yet that his job had evaporated. Best to keep it to himself; he thought, until he had an alternative plan. He’d work on a plan while he drove.

  But a change in Stu’s tone startled him out of his thoughts.

  “Hey!” Stu exclaimed. He was looking through the rear window. “That guy back there is really riding our tail. And it looks like he’s waving at us. What’s up with him?”

  Duff glanced in the rearview mirror. Sure enough, right behind them, so close it looked like it was about to ram into the trunk, was a black car. A familiar-looking black car, with two familiar-looking people in it, one of them waving frantically.

  A horn honked—not just a friendly beep, but a long, loud blast.

  “What’s their problem?” cried Stu.

  Bonnie twisted around to look. “That’s Rolf and Burl!” she cried. “Following us!”

  Bonnie was right—the driver and his passenger were the two guys who’d come to Aunt Shirley’s door. “Why would they be following us?” Duff said.

  “I don’t know!” said Bonnie.

  “I don’t get it!” said Stu. “What’s happening? Who’s Rolfen Burl?”

  “It’s Rolf and Burl,” said Bonnie. “Two of them. They work with my mom. They came to get the Chevy, don’t you remember?”

  “He was in the garage,” said Duff.

  “What did they want with the Chevy?” Stu asked.

  “My mom wanted it back. Urgently.”

  There was a brief pause. “Oh,” said Stu.

  The horned blared again. Duff looked in the rearview mirror and saw Burl jabbing his finger toward the side of the road. “They want us to pull over,” he said.

  Bonnie leaned forward, gripping the back of Stu’s seat. “They were going to drive the Chevy back to St. Louis,” she said. “So how come they’re following us?”

  “They have a bad sense of direction?” said Stu. He was facing forward now, hunkering down low in his seat.

  “No,” Bonnie said. “It must be because of me. My mom must have told them to come after me for some reason. But why would she? She doesn’t want me home. I don’t understand it.”

  Duff understood it. Those guys had been sent to bring the money home, not Bonnie. They hadn’t found the money, so they were coming to get it.

  He sped up. He passed a big tanker truck to his left and moved over into the fast lane. In the rearview mirror, he saw the black car change into the fast lane, too, and pull up close behind them again. He didn’t like this. These guys were outlaws. They might do anything. Duff felt his neck and shoulders stiffening, as if to fend off a bullet.

  It was hard to think while he was driving fast and weaving in and out of traffic and fearing for his life, but he figured out this much: If Rolf and Burl managed to stop them, they’d find the money on Stu. They’d either keep it for Rosalie when she got out of jail, or they’d steal it for themselves. Either way, the bad guys would get it. Therefore, Duff concluded, as he stepped hard on the gas and streaked past a tour bus, he’d do his best to keep them from getting it. That way it would end up in Bonnie’s hands and maybe eventually in the hands of the people who’d been bilked out of it in the first place.

  Stu craned around and looked out the back window again. “They’re gaining on us, man,” he said. “Speed up.”

  Duff was already going nearly eighty. He had a terrible suspicion that Aunt Shirley’s old Toyota wasn’t happy at that speed. He could feel a tremor in the car’s skeleton. But he pressed on the gas just a little harder anyhow. He thought of car chase scenes he’d seen in movies, where the bad guys zoomed up beside the good guys and then edged over until either the good guys drove off the side of the road or crashed. That would be bad. But having your car shake itself to pieces when it hit ninety would be bad, too. Trickles of sweat ran down Duff’s ribs. He swerved into the slow lane, just ahead of a pickup with a horse trailer. A blurping sound came from the backseat, followed by a revolting smell. “Moony!” cried Bonnie. “Oh, poor baby, he’s carsick again!”

  “Aargh,” said Stu. “That’s all we need.” He opened his window, letting in a rush of air.

  “All over his cushion,” said Bonnie. “Yuck.”

  Duff had a sudden memory flash: Was it just last night he’d decided his problems were solved and everything would be easy from here on in? How wrong a person could be, he thought. How quickly the universe could turn on you.

  “But wait a second!” said Bonnie. “How do they even know I’m here? I didn’t decide to come till last night!”

  “Must have gone back to Shirley’s and asked,” Duff said. Letting Bonnie think she was their target was easier, for now, than explaining about the money.

  “Come on, man, hurry up,” said Stu, who was peering into the side-view mirror. “Those guys are trying to come up beside us.”

  Duff put on a desperate burst of speed, but it wasn’t enough. The black car, now in the fast lane, pulled up even with them, and the passenger-side window went down. The lightbulb face of Rolf appeared. He yelled something at them.

  “I don’t like this,” said Stu. He scrunched down in his seat. “Are those guys gangsters or what? Do they have guns?”

  Bonnie rolled down her window and screamed at Rolf. “Get away from us! Get away!”

  Instead, the black car edged closer.

  “They’re trying to push us off the road!” Bonnie cried. “Go faster, go faster!�
��

  “I can’t!” said Duff. He already had the accelerator to the floor. ‘Anyhow, we can’t go ninety all the way to Los Angeles! We’ve got to get off the highway and lose them.”

  “Good idea,” said Stu.

  “All right!” said Bonnie. “Next exit.”

  They sped along neck and neck with the black car for another harrowing few minutes, Rolf shouting and waving his fist at them the whole time, Burl inching the car dangerously close to theirs, Duff inching away dangerously close to the edge of the highway, until finally a green exit sign appeared.

  Duff veered off the highway. The black car, caught by surprise, rocketed onward in the fast lane, and for a second Duff thought they were safe.

  But Bonnie, who was now kneeling on the seat looking out the rear window, shouted, “Oh, no! They’re coming back!” And Duff saw in the rearview mirror that the black car had cut across the lanes, stopped with a squeal of brakes on the shoulder of the highway and was now racing backward to the exit, spraying gravel from its wheels. By the time they’d gone a few hundred yards down the road, Rolf and Burl were on their tail again.

  Duff had hoped to come to a town, where he could somehow zigzag around in the streets and confuse his pursuers. But he saw no sign of civilization. The road they were now on cut across the same barren landscape they’d been passing through all morning—dry earth, scrubby bushes, rocky hills. No cars, no people. And Rolf and Burl barreling up behind them.

  “We have to stop!” he said. “Or they’ll make us crash.”

  “Up there!” Stu cried. He was pointing ahead and to the left. “It’s a restaurant or something! Pull in there! There’ll be people! These guys won’t shoot us down in front of people!”

  Duff saw a small white building in the distance. He headed for it. “As soon as I stop,” he shouted, “we all get out and run inside!”

  He veered off the blacktop onto a rocky road, bumped along it, and screeched to a stop in the restaurant parking lot, which was empty except for weeds. All three of them jumped out of the car, and as soon as they did, they saw their mistake: this restaurant was not open for business. Its windows were boarded up. Its door was padlocked, and graffiti covered its walls.