A Bad Day for Voodoo

by Jeff Strand

  I quickly took my cell phone out of my pocket and tossed it on the floor. Fine. No problem. Happy to do it. If I wasn’t willing to slam my foot on the accelerator, I certainly wasn’t going to take the time to dial 911 with a gun in my face.

  I heard the thumps as Kelley and Adam tossed their phones on the floor as well. (So if Adam had fainted, it was only briefly.)

  “Now get out of the car,” he said.

  Aw, crap.

  “Get out!” he repeated, kicking the door.

  For a fraction of a second I thought the wisest thing to do would be to duck down, floor the accelerator, and hope for the best. But that essentially meant that I’d be ducking out of the way so that Kelley could get shot. I’ve admitted to a lot of dumb and/or selfish and/or cowardly things so far (see pretty much this entire book), but I wasn’t going to let my girlfriend get shot.

  Granted, if we both could have ducked at the same time, that would have been pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of any way to communicate to her that she should duck except for shouting, “Duck!” which probably would have given our plan away.

  So I opened the door and got out of the car.

  The carjacker kept the gun pointed at me. He was one twitchy guy. “Just stay calm,” I told him, as if that piece of homespun advice might change his behavior.

  “Both of you! Out!” he shouted, pointing the gun at Kelley and then at Adam. They both got out and put their hands in the air, even though the hands part hadn’t been specifically requested.

  Where were the other cars? Where were the helpful pedestrians? If I survived the night, I was definitely leaving a one-star review for that brand of GPS.

  “Sir, I really need to get something out of the trunk,” I said.

  “No, you need to step out of the way before I put a bullet in your mouth.”

  “Please, it has no value. I just need—”

  The guy pushed me out of the way. He got into the car, slammed the door shut, and sped off.

  “Quick! Get the license plate!” Adam shouted.

  “License plate? It’s my car!”

  This was beyond insane. My parents were going to absolutely freak. And the doll.what was going to happen to the doll? I didn’t know much about the carjacking business, but I was pretty sure my mom’s beloved automobile was headed for a chop shop. They could have a car taken apart in minutes.

  Or what if he drove it into a lake? Would I drown?

  What was I supposed to do? Find a pay phone, call the cops, and hope that nobody took an interest in the box with the weird symbols in the trunk?

  And of course, I had oh- so-cleverly let the guy know that there was something important in there.

  I had no choice. If I didn’t want to, y’know, die, I had to get that doll back, no matter what.

  “Come on!” I said as I began to chase after the car on foot.

  CHAPTER 8

  “What are you doing?” Kelley called after me.

  “I have to catch him!”

  “Are you crazy?”

  I was probably at least a little. But I simply couldn’t see a scenario in which the authorities handled this situation before somebody messed with the doll. I could just hear the carjacker: “My, what an interesting doll. Let me see if its legs can touch its head.”

  I guess there was also the possibility that he’d say, “Oh, look, a present for my darling daughter, who treats all of her possessions with the utmost of care,” but I was leaning more toward the idea that really bad stuff would happen to the doll if I let it out of my sight.

  The car turned the corner, leaving my sight.

  I picked up my pace.

  “Tyler!” Kelley shouted, running behind me. “For God’s sake, stop it!”

  “Don’t come with me!” I shouted back. If the guy decided to point the gun out the window and start shooting, I didn’t want either of them to get hit. (I was more concerned about Kelley’s safety than Adam’s.)

  I was a good runner. I could catch it.

  I could totally delude myself too.

  No, no, just because he was a morally bankrupt carjacker didn’t mean he wouldn’t obey traffic laws. A really long red light, and I’d catch him.

  I didn’t have any specific plans for what I’d do if I actually caught up with him. Maybe he’d be so impressed with my dedication that he’d change his mind and give me the car back. “You’re a feisty one! I like that. Here, have the keys. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

  At the end of the second block, I had a sudden moment of clarity, where the mysteries of the world were revealed to me, and my role in the universe was explained to me with six simple words: You can’t outrun a car, dumbass.

  I stopped.

  I cursed. (S-word, f-word, s-word, d-word, s-word times three, f-word, and a z-word that I made up on the spot.)

  I kicked a brick wall.

  I said the z-word again in response to the pain that came from kicking a brick wall.

  Kelley and Adam caught up to me. “What’s the matter with you?” Kelley demanded. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “I’m trying to make myself not get killed!”

  “By chasing a man with a gun?”

  “He’s got the doll!”

  “I know that! It doesn’t mean you should go chasing after him like a lunatic!”

  “What if they decide to torture the doll?”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know! He could give it to one of those rotten kids who wreck their dolls like in Toy Story! He could start burning off fingers!” I was starting to hyperventilate, so I forced myself to take slow, deep breaths to calm down. I tried to think of happy images that did not involve each of my fingers blistering, blackening, and falling off.

  “I’m going to die,” I said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “I am! There’s no way they won’t look in the trunk! There’s a voodoo doll in there, and the lady who made it includes free pins, and they’re probably going to poke it!”

  “Why would they poke it? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Because it’s clearly a voodoo doll!”

  “Nobody believes in voodoo!”

  “If you found a voodoo doll, wouldn’t you stick pins in it just for fun?”

  “No.”

  “Adam?”

  Adam nodded. “Yeah, I probably would.”

  “Nobody is going to stick pins in the doll,” Kelley said. “What if they just throw it away? What if it gets crushed in the back of a garbage truck? That’s way worse than getting shot!” “Depends where you got shot,” said Adam. “If you got shot in the stomach, it would probably be better to just be crushed in a garbage truck.”

  “I don’t want to die,” I said, my voice cracking. “Not at all. I really don’t want that.”

  “Well, we’re not going to be able to catch him on foot, so we have to be reasonable about this,” said Kelley. “We just have to find a phone and call the police.”

  Adam looked at her in horror. “I’m not going to jail!”

  “I’m not reporting you! I’m reporting the stolen car! I know we’re all freaked out about the voodoo doll, but do you really think we have a better way of getting it back?”

  One block ahead, the just-stolen car came around the corner. We all stood there and stared as the carjacker drove up right next to us and stopped.

  “Your mom called,” said the guy, holding up my phone. “She sounded worried. I told her you were dead.” He laughed and tossed the phone into the backseat. “Seeya!”

  He sped off again.

  I couldn’t believe this. “He just—t can’t—what the—how could—did you see—he just—”

  Neither Kelley nor Adam had a response to this.

  “I’m chasing him,” I said, and I took off running again. Somebody who would cheerfully tell a teenager’s mother that her child was dead would certainly poke a voodoo doll.

  Much like your average dog, I st
ill hadn’t completely worked out what I was going to do if I succeeded in catching the car. But my adrenaline was pumping and my mind was racing and I felt like I could just yank his carjacking butt out of the vehicle, and toss him into a crosswalk signal. I knew that was unlikely to be the way this situation played itself out, but I simply wasn’t willing to allow myself to become a pile of body parts.

  Kelley shouted at me, but I kept going.

  Nothing in the world was going to stop me from catching up with that car. Nothing.

  Well, except for the microscopic patch of dirt that I tripped on, causing me to tumble forward and smash onto the ground. Though I was able to break my fall with my hands, saving myself from pulping my face against the cement, it still hurt.

  Kelley and Adam ran up behind me and helped me to my feet. My palms were all scraped up, and my left knee stung.

  “Please don’t run anymore,” Kelley requested.

  She was right. Or maybe she wasn’t right. One of those. Either way, it was clear that I was not going to suddenly become a superhuman crime fighter, which was very disappointing.

  “It’ll all be okay,” said Kelley, giving me a hug. “I promise.”

  This weirded me out, because Kelley was not one to offer “things are gonna be just fine” sentiment in situations where things could be significantly less than fine. She pretty much called them as she saw them. I don’t mean in a cruel “yes, the cancer is going to kill your grandmother” way, but if you said that you thought you weren’t going to win at a swim meet, and she sized up the competition and agreed that you probably weren’t going to win at the swim meet, she’d say that you probably weren’t going to win at the swim meet, even though most other people would tell you that they thought you were going to win at the swim meet even if they didn’t believe it.

  For her to resort to “It’ll all be okay, I promise,” she had to be seriously stressed out.

  Why did my elbow suddenly itch?

  It was nothing. Phantom itch.

  Another car turned onto the street, which was nice because it proved that we weren’t in some sort of postapocalyptic wasteland.

  A cab!

  “Hey!” I shouted, waving my hands over my head. “Hey!”

  As the cab approached us, Kelley and Adam joined in on the hand waving and hey shouting. The cab didn’t seem to be slowing down, so I stepped out into the street in front of it. (It was half a block away, not inches. I wasn’t going to go through all of this only to be hit by a taxi.)

  The cab stopped, and the three of us rushed to the passenger- side door. I threw it open and leaned inside. The driver was a really muscular dude who looked about thirty, with long black hair that flowed over his shoulders. He could have passed for a romance novel cover model except that he was wearing a shirt.

  “I’m not in service,” he said.

  “We really need your help,” I insisted.

  He shook his head. “I’m off duty! I’m gonna party!”

  “Please! I’ll double your fare!”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “Where’re you going?”

  “We need you to try to follow a car.”

  “Car chase? Hell yeah! Get in!”

  I hurriedly got in the front seat while Kelley and Adam got in the back. The cab shot forward before we’d even closed the doors.

  “Which way did it go?”

  I pointed ahead. “He turned right one block ahead.”

  The driver floored the gas pedal. I noticed a large number of aluminum cans on the floor.

  “Fan of Red Bull?”

  “Man, I chug that stuff like cold water in the desert! Woo! Woo!”

  He spun around the corner so quickly that I was thrown against the door and Kelley was thrown against Adam, which I’m sure she didn’t appreciate.

  “What color car are we following? Blue? Red? Green? White? Taupe?”

  “Silver.”

  “Silver! I love silver cars! Two door? Four door?”

  “Four door.”

  “Hell yeah, four door! Oh, we’ll find that silver four-door! We’ll find it! Woo! Woo!”

  I wished this cab came with a second seat belt. Or a shoulder bar like you’d get on a roller coaster.

  “You look that way,” said the driver, pointing out my window. “Girl in back, you look to the left. Guy in back, you look behind us. I’ll just spin my head three-sixty and watch everywhere.” He laughed way too loudly for the quality of the joke.

  “Do you have a phone I could borrow?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “I want to call the police.”

  “You wanna call the cops on me? Bite me.”

  “No, the guy who stole my car.”

  “You gonna let the cops ruin our fun? There’s no party when the cops are around! Party! Woo! Woo! Woo!”

  Getting in the cab, never the wisest course of action, was seeming like an even worse idea.

  “It’s really important that I get the car back,” I said. “I just want a backup plan in case this car chase doesn’t work.”

  “Oh, this is gonna work,” said the driver. “When I’ve had this many Red Bulls, I get all extrasensory and stuff.”

  He sped through a red light. The camera flash went off.

  “My bad,” he said with a chuckle.

  A couple of people were standing on the corner, looking like they might—I swear—be conducting some sort of illegal transaction involving ferrets. Maybe they were fake ferrets. I don’t know. But a couple of ferrets were exchanged for an envelope. Then they watched us race by, looking at me as if there was something wrong with being in a speeding cab with a caffeine- overdosed driver.

  “We’re all going to die!” Adam predicted.

  The cab ran over something small, but I am 97 percent sure it was not alive.

  “Is that your car?” the cabbie asked, taking both hands off the wheel to point.

  It was! My mom’s car was about six blocks ahead, stopped at a red light.

  “Yes! That’s it! You’re a genius!”

  “Then hold on,” he said. “I’m gonna run that thieving bastard right off the road!”

  CHAPTER 9

  There was a great deal of screaming after he said that.

  Our driver clutched the steering wheel as if it were a struggling tiger, and though I can’t prove it, I think he actually growled. I know for a fact that his eyes didn’t really glow red, but if there were ever a time at which somebody’s eyes would glow red, this was it.

  Time once again seemed to move in slow motion. “IIIIIIII doooooonnnnnn’t thiiiiiinnnnnk yooooooouuuuuu shouuuuuuuuld doooooooo thiiiiiissssss!” I said.

  The distance between the cab and my mom’s car closed from six blocks to three blocks in about, oh, a quarter of a second.

  “Nonononononononononono!” shouted Kelley and Adam at the same time, as if they’d rehearsed it.

  Two blocks.

  “Bad!” I screamed. “Badness!”

  One block.

  Then the cabbie slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched, and the cab spun into the opposite lane at a forty-five degree angle, and we all screamed some more.

  “I decided I probably shouldn’t do that,” the driver explained.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’ll just follow him at a reasonable pace.”

  He got back into the correct lane and proceeded to follow the car, which was going fast but not recklessly disregarding the law.

  “Can I please borrow your phone?” I asked again. “I promise I won’t call the police. My mom thinks I’m dead, and I need to tell her that I’m not.”

  “You’re the third person today to say that.”

  “Seriously?”

  “No. Gullible!” He punched me on the shoulder, then handed me his phone. “Here. Make it quick.”

  I stared at the phone for a moment.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m used to only picking her name from my contacts list. I’m trying to reme
mber her actual number.”

  “Well, just scroll through recent calls. I’ve probably got your mom on there.” He punched me in the arm again. “Kidding! Kidding! Gullible!”

  My mom’s car turned to the right and he followed, staying about a block behind.

  The ten digits flashed into my mind. (I’m not going to share them here, because, no offense, you might be into prank calls.) I quickly dialed.

  “Hello?” Mom answered, sounding frantic.

  “Mom, it’s me!”

  “Tyler!”

  “I’ve got to go, but everything’s okay. I promise you I’m not dead.” I hung up.

  “Were you disappointed that I didn’t ram him?” asked the driver.

  “Not at all,” I assured him.

  “I can still make it happen.”

  “No, no. Just keep following him.”

  “He won’t get away,” said the driver. “Do you know what my vision is? Guess what my vision is.”

  “Twenty-twenty?”

  “Not that good. I mean, I’m not a robot. But I can read pretty much any street sign. Go on, point to a street sign and see if I can read it.”

  “That’s not necessary,” I assured him. “Just follow the car.”

  “Are you being condescending?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. Just checking.”

  I didn’t bother to look back at Kelley and Adam to gauge their expressions. I knew they were not smiling.

  We continued the relatively low-speed chase for another couple of blocks, and then the carjacker stopped. A large metal sliding door opened to his right, he pulled into the garage, and the door closed behind him.

  The cabbie drove up next to the door and stopped. I was surprised that he didn’t ask if he should ram it.

  I stared at the garage door, trying to figure out exactly what I should do.

  “Did I ever tell you why I became a cabdriver?” asked the cabbie. “It’s a long story but a fascinating one.”

  “I don’t think we have time,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you the short version. When I was three, my dad bought me a Matchbox car—”

  “We really are kind of distracted right now.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Figuring out how to get my car back.”