The Highway Kind

by Patrick Millikin

  “Get your hands up and nobody will get hurt!” the man wearing a Hulk mask yelled as he underscored his command by firing rounds from his MAC-10 into the bank’s ceiling.

  “Whatever happened to him?” the younger man asked the man he still called uncle, referring to the robber re-created on the program.

  The older one shook his head side to side, pulling on the joint. “Not sure. I know they never found that money he ganked. Eight hundred grand.”

  “Jimmy Moore liked to live large and dangerously,” a bass voice informed the viewers. There was a montage of the actor playing Moore in prison as the narration continued.

  “Inside, the former police officer was able to avoid confrontations with prison gangs, as he did the bulk of his time away from the general population. Indeed, he was something of a model prisoner who read, played chess now and then, and generally kept to himself. Moore never applied for parole because he never once gave a hint as to where he’d hidden the bank-job loot.”

  The prison images gave way to a 1964 Falcon Squire station wagon with the fake wood trim on its flanks and rear drop gate. The car drove along a scenic mountain highway as the narrator continued, “When James Moore got out of jail after serving nearly nine years, he was secretly followed by law enforcement, who believed he’d soon try to retrieve his ill-gotten. But Moore seemed to have anticipated this. He moved around from town to town, taking menial jobs such as washing dishes or doing janitorial work.”

  The uncle cocked his head, remembering something, as the Falcon on the screen crested a rise, the sun low on the horizon.

  “Authorities believe that he never retrieved the money, but they ultimately would lose track of Moore near Amarillo, Texas. He was last seen driving the restored Falcon station wagon that had belonged to his mother.”

  “That’s like your ex’s wagon,” the uncle remarked as the Ford went over the rise and the program faded out to a commercial. He grabbed some potato chips.

  “It sure is,” said the young man, having finished the joint.

  The older man glared at him, a handful of chips hanging before his mouth. “It might be more than that.”

  “What?” his nephew said.

  “That Falcon,” his uncle muttered. He sat back, staring off, slowly eating one chip at a time as an idea assembled itself.

  1989

  Overhead, the police chopper veered left from the northwest and swung back by the row of modest homes on Fifty-First Street between Main and Woodlawn in South Central LA. Its powerful searchlight cut through the warm, humid night, fixing on one specific house as the helicopter maintained a tight pattern above the dwelling with peeling stucco. Starkly shadowed forms moved just beyond the cone of the aircraft’s high-intensity beam. There were knots of people anticipating the rock-house raid, including the Secret Service, uniformed officers in riot gear, and several reporters from local TV news, the Los Angeles Times, and the Herald Examiner. The Sentinel, the black newsweekly, hadn’t been invited. Too often they’d been critical of the LAPD and the tactics they employed in this community.

  Police chief Daryl Gates jutted his jaw as he stood in his full regalia next to former First Lady Nancy Reagan. While he forced himself to keep his mind on the events happening before him, he couldn’t help but consider how clips from tonight might be woven into his first commercial should he announce his bid for the governor’s chair. He’d come a long way since he’d started out as Chief William Parker’s driver in the fifties. A long way indeed, the creator of SWAT reflected as the six-ton armored “mobile entry device,” as the vehicle was euphemistically known, goosed up the curb on its big tires and rumbled across the house’s dried lawn, churning up turf in its wake.

  “This is how we will cleanse our more disadvantaged neighborhoods of the scourge of drugs,” Gates said, nodding at Mrs. Reagan, who minutes before had been hunkered down with the chief in an RV parked nearby where they’d nibbled on fresh fruit salad with kiwi—she loved that fruit. The word had come via the two-way and as Gates went over his notes, she adjusted her makeup before they stepped out. The Establishment was plastered in flowing script alongside the RV they’d walked away from to make news this night.

  “We will return this community to its citizens, and take it out of the grip of the handkerchief-headed gang members and dope slingers glorified in this trash, this rap music misguiding the young people.”

  A fourteen-foot-long steel battering ram extended from the front of the armored vehicle, which was called the batterram in the community. There was a turret atop the squat four-wheeled, tank-like conveyance. A police officer’s head poked out of the turret in shock helmet and goggles. He pointed forward like General Patton at El Alamein. The machine climbed and destroyed the porch’s wooden steps, also taking out a low concrete wall. Photos were snapped and video cameras rolled.

  More officers were positioned out behind the house in case the occupants tried to bolt and spoil the show. Under a ratty plastic tarp at the end of the driveway leading to the detached garage was an old Falcon Squire station wagon that hadn’t moved in years. It sat on its rims. Back out front, the square, thick steel plate at the end of the battering-ram shaft was driven into the metal security screen door. The door buckled and puckered loose on its rust-covered hinges. There was more snapping of pictures and oohs and aahs from the gathered.

  Inside the house, Debra Hastings stood in the tidy living room, hands on her hips, shaking her head from side to side. “Oh, these motherfuckers,” she lamented. Light from the television crews’ cameras shone through the half-open curtains along with spill from the copter’s search beam. Sweat glistened on her smooth forehead.

  The armored vehicle backed up some and as the driver revved the diesel engine, the rear tires spun momentarily, then gained purchase and traction. The batterram surged forward again with urgency. This time the security screen and the regular door behind it gave, along with a good portion of one side of the house and the picture window, which also had security bars on it. Debra Hastings was all about safety. That’s why she’d participated in the neighborhood-watch program sponsored by the LAPD. This and other details would be revealed later after her successful suit brought by the ACLU and the coverage by the media.

  But right then, those outside witnessed the rending as hunks of stucco wall and the tar paper, chicken wire, and wood slats underneath broke away and glass burst from the windows. Into the breach rushed the police with batons and heavy mag flashlights in hand, barking orders. Several officers carried ten-pound sledgehammers.

  “Down! Get down on the ground! Don’t move, don’t you fuckin’ move a muscle! Who’s back there? Kitchen, clear the kitchen...move, move, move!”

  Soon four men and two women were marched out of the home with their hands cuffed behind their backs. One of the men was elderly and another had been in his boxers. But Gates had given orders to let the suspects at least get pants on, as he’d previously been lambasted for having his officers parade the arrested around in their skivvies and this was deemed humiliating. Each was made to kneel on the lawn, even the old man. Inside, plaster and lathe walls constructed in the 1930s were busted into by the sledgehammers, and furniture was destroyed in the pursuit of drug contraband.

  “Clearly,” Gates said into the glare of camera lights, microphones held before his grim face, “we’ve made another dint in the battle to save South Central. By taking down this known rock house from where large quantities of crack cocaine and misery originated, we’ve made a difference tonight.” He turned his head toward Mrs. Reagan.

  She blinked rapidly as if unclear on where she should focus her attention among the numerous camera lenses, but the former actress rallied and said, “I saw people on the floor, rooms that were unfurnished...all very depressing,” she intoned mournfully.

  Chief Gates added, “We thought she ought to see it for herself and she did. She is a very courageous woman.”

  It would be reported in a follow-up piece in the Times that in addition to
a handful of cassette tapes found in what was a homemade recording studio, complete with squares of foam padding tacked to the walls in a back bedroom, an ounce of rock cocaine had been confiscated from the home along with a half-smoked marijuana cigarette.

  Debra Hastings looked up from where her face had been pushed down onto the yellowed, scratchy grass. “These motherfuckers,” she muttered again.

  Present

  Sandra “Pebbles” Hastings ascended amid a scruff of wilted ice plants toward the hilltop parking lot. Post her morning shred, though a cold sun resided in the steel gray sky, she’d partially unzipped her wetsuit and tied the arms around her waist, her sports top underneath. She carried her surfboard under an arm, happy to have had a good session in her spot here between Manhattan Beach and El Segundo. Nearing the parking lot, she frowned at the sight of a man bent over the door lock of her boss little ’64 Falcon station wagon. She gaped not only because someone was trying to rip off her car but because the dude looked familiar.

  “Shit, Scotty, what the hell are you doing?” she called out, dropping her board and running.

  “Goddamn it,” swore Scott Waid. Quickly he produced a gun, bringing the caramel-hued surfer to a halt.

  “Keep back, Pebbles,” her former boyfriend warned.

  “The fuck, man?” Her hands rose and fell back to her sides.

  “Just stay where you are, I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  “Gee, thanks, Scotty. You just want to steal my car is all.” A car he helped her restore, she didn’t add.

  Alternately glancing at her and at the silver pick shaped like a surgeon’s scalpel inserted in the car’s lock, he got the door unlatched. He hurriedly transferred the tool to his gun hand. As this required a moment of adjustment, Hastings used the opportunity to cover the distance between them. Waid leveled his gun hand again, the tool falling away. Hastings launched her body in the air sideways and slammed against his torso. They both dropped onto the makeshift parking lot, Hastings on top.

  “Bastard,” she swore, throwing a punch at his face, which he evaded. Her knuckles scraped against gravel and he gut-punched her, which made her wince. Waid rolled, leveraging her body off of his. Like he was swimming across the gravel, Waid went toward his gun. But the woman had recovered quickly and scrambled as well, then straddled his back.

  “What are you doing, Scotty?” she seethed, landing a solid blow to the back of his head. Exhaling, he puffed gravel dust.

  “Get the fuck off me, Sandra.” This time instead of turning his body he got on all fours and bucked like a stallion. She got her arms around his neck. But Waid was tall, muscular in the shoulders and chest, and got to his feet with her attached. He tried to straighten but she reared back; they toppled against the car and slid part of the way down.

  “Hey, Pebbles, what going on?” a new voice rang out. “I’m guessing this ain’t what you and your friend here call foreplay.”

  “Shit,” Waid said while simultaneously flipping his ex over his shoulder like a GI Joe in those cartoons he watched as a kid.

  It was her turn to exhale hard as she landed on her butt on the gravel.

  Waid had the gun again, an old-fashioned snub-nose, and showed it to the newcomer, a blond man, also a surfer, with a goatee and in swim trunks despite the chilly morning. Hastings sat on the ground, making a face at her former squeeze.

  “Sorry, but it be’s like that sometimes.” He got in the Falcon station wagon and rolled down the window, keeping the gun pointed at the two while he jammed his pick into the ignition switch. Two cranks, and the rebuilt, retrofitted small-block V-8 caught and purred like a sewing machine. He put the three-speed clutch in reverse and backed up. He then righted the car and drove off as the sun got warmer.

  The blond surfer, Joaquin Ryan, helped Hastings to her feet. “What was that all about?”

  “Fuck if I know but I damn sure intend to find out,” she vowed.

  1997

  She was heavy in the hips and this only increased his ardor. He had a tumbler of scotch in one hand and his erect member in the other, flagpole proper sticking out of his boxers. As he sipped, slowly working his shaft as well, the woman in lacy underwear swayed closer. Over the JVC boom box, Biggie Smalls’s singsong voice rapped “Mo Money, Mo Problems.”

  “We gonna party good, baby,” she said, legs apart, working her hand inside her leopard-spotted panties and fingering herself.

  “That’s right,” he said, careful not to drink too much. No misfiring for him today, no sir.

  She stopped in front of where he sat in the corduroy-covered recliner with its thinning armrests. He rocked gently on the chair’s squeaky ball bearings, mesmerized by the considerable breasts before his face. It seemed to him they were barely restrained by the sheer material of her bra. She replaced her hand for his around his stiffening johnson and with her other hand stuck her moist index finger in his mouth. He suckled it joyously and murmured with pleasure and she smiled knowingly. Behind him the shades had been pulled down to half-mast. The second-story windows overlooked a street in harsh afternoon sun of similar modest dingbat apartments like this one in Lennox. Those panes made their own humming as a jet approached Los Angeles International Airport not too far away. The shadow of the plane moved across his Falcon station wagon parked at the curb. The car’s body had several dents, the fake wood trim was badly faded, and a slab of roughly sanded Bondo was smeared across a rear panel.

  The woman unhooked her bra and twirled it around her head, gyrating her substantial hips.

  “Yee-hah,” he enthused, wetting his lips and watching her freed breasts jiggle and shake.

  She then flung the garment onto the floor where the man had placed his drink.

  “Give me those titties, girl,” he implored. The man reached up and caressed her breasts and playfully bit on her wonderful, large, erect brown nipples as she leaned over him. He put his head between those marvelous sweaty mounds and worked it back and forth while she took them in hand and pressed the flesh on the sides of his face.

  He sat back, gasping. She went to her knees, pushing his farther apart. “I’m going to suck you dry,” she promised and he was as giddy as a mosquito in a nudist colony. The man closed his eyes as she expertly worked her tongue on his tip.

  “Oh, good sweet God.” Jimmy Moore shuddered, causing the recliner to wobble. Underneath the chair, he’d tucked away his badge clipped to his belt holster with his gun in it.

  She took him deeper in her mouth, building a rhythm matching the new song’s bass beats as Biggie rapped, “Dress up like ladies and burn them with dirty three-eighties” on “Niggas Bleed” on the CD. There was also a cassette tape in the machine. It was not engaged. Later today she would turn it on once she got him coked up and bragging like he liked to do. Then she would have the recording function turned on, but of course only she would be aware of this.

  Present

  “No, haven’t seen him around, Pebbles. Fact, haven’t seen Scotty for months, really.”

  “Well, okay, thanks, Carlos.”

  “I thought you two were quits anyway.”

  “We are. But something’s come up.” She realized that made it sound like she just found out she had an STD or was pregnant but whatever. Through a gap of the rear sliding door, she could see part of the tarp covering Carlos’s classic customized Honda Civic. He was a gearhead, a tuner, who street-raced his whip for money and prestige. She turned and started walking out of Furutani and Sons body shop on Marine in Gardena, a city in what was called the South Bay of LA County. She’d leaned her bike against the wall near the archway leading inside. She put on her helmet, checked her watch, and biked over to El Camino College, where she was a part-time tech in the environmental biology lab on campus. Today was grunt-work day, which included cleaning the lizard habitat and recalibrating instruments such as the atomic absorption spectrometer. This suited her just fine as she could do this work from muscle memory and ponder where to find Scott Waid. She’d gleefully p
ictured beating him with the aluminum bat she used on her softball team until he told her why he’d stolen her ride.

  “Where’s that sweet sled of yours, Pebbles?” Dr. Renku Murakama asked her at work. He was a fit surfing biologist in his midfifties who ran the lab and taught at the school.

  Hastings was cleaning the glass terrarium of an iguana named Butch who was currently resting on the back of her neck and shoulders. She told Murakama what happened.

  “Why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “What are they gonna do, Ren? Finding my wagon isn’t going to be a priority with them.” Too, she wanted the satisfaction of solving this matter herself.

  “He put a gat on you, homey.”

  “Yeah, an old-school revolver out of one of those ancient cop shows you like to watch.” She stared off into space. Butch flicked his forked tongue, watching a fly buzz around.

  “What?” Murakama said.

  “The gun,” she answered. “I’ve seen it before. Better, I’ve got an idea where that mufa took my car.”

  “Yeah, where?”

  The house was on a narrow street less than three miles from the Hollywood Park Casino, which had nothing to do with Tinseltown. Its official address was on Century Boulevard in Inglewood, a working- to middle-class municipality of changing demographics, as the urban expression went. The area had been majority black and was now majority Latino, though black folks were still most of the local electeds. Scott Waid’s Uncle Ro had a modest but well-cared-for home with an old maple tree out front. The tree offered shade under its boughs, rich with gold and green leaves spread like large petrified butterflies. Roland Weathers used to frequent the racetrack where now only the casino was left. He was something of a sporting man who had made money as a boxing promoter, nightclub owner, and gambler, among other ways. He’d even gotten into the top one hundred of the World Series of Poker twice.