She Rides Shotgun

by Jordan Harper

  “So she knows everything,” Polly said.

  “Yup.”

  “So she’s going to tell us where their treasure is,” Polly said. “And we’re going to take it.”

  “Smart girl. But it’s not easy like that. First she’s got to tell us.”

  “She’ll tell us,” Polly said. “Or you’ll make her tell us.”

  He scrunched his face, like she’d said something wrong. But it wasn’t wrong, was it?

  They did it the next day.

  He put a blanket in the backseat so Polly could hide and listen. She climbed back there, the bear in her arms, as they rolled back onto the woman’s block. She felt like a pirate climbing a rope ladder. She carried a ghost knife between her teeth.

  “Yo ho ho,” she said as she plopped into the backseat. Nate looked at her with a frown. But his eyes smiled.

  Polly slid down to the floorboard. She pulled the blanket over herself so she could hide when the time came. They’d timed it just right. The mailman was just pulling away from the curb when they got there.

  “Well all right,” her dad said, watching the mailman go. “If we got her pattern right, she’ll be out to fetch the mail in a minute. Be ready. It’ll happen damn fast when it happens.”

  Maybe it was a minute or maybe it was ten before the woman came out. She wore a too-big T-shirt and cutoff jeans. She put on makeup just to get the mail. Wild red lipstick that Polly liked.

  “Here we go,” he said. Polly had that juiced-up feeling, like someone had just poked air holes in the lid of her jar.

  “I’ll be back,” he said. “Something goes wrong, you run.”

  “I won’t leave you,” she said.

  “Fuck that noise,” he said. “You’ll run.”

  Polly watched from the backseat as he walked to the woman’s front door. He had a gun in his pocket. He reached the woman before she saw him coming. He put the gun against her. The woman looked like a person caught napping. Polly watched the woman’s face get angry. Not scared. He wrenched the woman to the car. Polly slid back down and pulled the blanket over herself and the bear. Giddy now, giggling. Under the blanket the bear lifted a paw like shush when the car doors opened.

  “What the hell is going on?” the woman asked. She didn’t sound too scared. Polly liked that.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Nate said. “Not unless you make me.”

  “Fuck you.” Polly liked her even more.

  The engine started.

  “All I want is some info.”

  A beat passed before the woman answered.

  “You’re not a cop.”

  “Didn’t say I was.”

  “You got any idea of who you’re fucking with?”

  “You’re plugged in with Aryan Steel,” Nate said.

  “Then you know you’re fucking dead, right?”

  “I’m already a goddamn zombie walking,” he said.

  Polly guessed the woman didn’t know what the hell to make of that.

  “They can only kill me once,” he finally said. “So I can’t be scared. Means I’m going to get what I came for. Why don’t you make it easy?”

  “Tell you what, cowboy. You let me go right now, go back to whatever fucking hole you climbed out of, and I won’t say a word to Dick.”

  “Who’s Dick?”

  “Bullshit. You come after me, you sure as hell know who Dick is.”

  “All I know is you’re a spider. You got a man inside. That who Dick is?”

  Polly scrunched her face at the bear like what are they talking about?

  “You know enough to know I’m not going to say a goddamn thing,” the woman said. “You can’t scare me any worse than I’m scared of them.”

  “We’ll see,” Nate said. The air under the blanket was getting hot. It was getting harder for Polly to feel like she was getting full breaths. She wondered if the woman would talk easy. She didn’t want the woman to talk. She wanted to see what her dad would do if the woman wouldn’t talk.

  “I need places,” he said. “Trap houses. Stashes. People moving product. Figure you ought to be able to draw me a map.”

  “Didn’t you hear me when I said ‘fuck you’?”

  Polly heard the pistol click.

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” the woman said. It sounded to Polly like maybe the woman was telling it to herself, hoping maybe she’d believe it if she heard it out loud.

  “Playtime’s over,” he said. That was the sign for Polly to plug her ears. That something ugly and mean might happen. She didn’t plug her ears. She raked her bottom lip with her teeth, harvesting strands of flesh.

  “I’m not some goddamn junkie looking for a fix,” he said. “They killed my ex-wife. They’re fixing to kill my daughter and me. So you better—”

  “You—you’re Nate McClusky?” the woman said. “The one everyone is looking for?”

  Polly pulled the blanket off her head before her front brain had even figured out what it meant. She sprang up behind the woman. The woman horror-movie screamed. The look on her face, the terror, made Polly feel like she could tear bricks in half with her hands. She got those monster hands into the woman’s hair, close to her skull so her knuckles scraped the woman’s scalp. She yanked the woman toward her. She opened her jaws like a girl raised by wolves. She leaned forward to take a bite of the woman’s face.

  “Polly, stop it,” Nate said. He got his hand between Polly and the woman. Polly’s teeth clicked hard as she bit air. Nate pushed her back into the seat. She came back to herself, a little.

  “What the fuck,” the woman said. Polly punched the back of the woman’s seat.

  “You’re one of them,” Polly said, her voice raspy and wet. “You’re one of them who helped kill my mom.”

  “You’re the little girl,” the woman said. “Oh my god. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  21

  CHARLOTTE

  HUNTINGTON BEACH

  The way Charlotte saw it now, free will was a crock. She hadn’t always thought so. She’d driven out to L.A. from Missouri at the age of twenty-two feeling wild and free, heading west like the old books said. The direction of freedom. She’d moved out to Huntington Beach, got a job as a waitress at one of those places where you wore low-cut tops and served chicken wings to guys who got handsier with each mug of beer. At least the tips were okay. She knew she was just treading water, but that beat drowning for sure.

  She’d been at the bar long enough to learn the names of all thirty beers when one of the other waitresses said she was spending her day off visiting her brother up in Lompoc. She asked if Charlotte wanted to go with her. Charlotte was about to say no when she remembered her AC. It was the middle of July and her landlord was dragging ass on getting her window unit fixed. Charlotte didn’t want to spend the day in a sweat lodge, so she’d told Vicki sure, why not?

  Later on she’d think what if the AC had waited one more week to go on the fritz? What if her landlord had had just one shred of human decency in him and had fixed it the day it broke? That goddamn little condenser unit in a window AC had changed Charlotte’s life forever. Who could contemplate a thing like that and then turn around and say it was free will that got her where she was?

  She and Vicki took a road trip up to Lompoc. It wasn’t until they got to the signs on the highway saying don’t pick up hitchhikers, jail nearby, that Charlotte started to understand how real it was.

  It got more real when they went through the metal detectors. A woman in a gray uniform and a dull gray face went through their purses. Then a guard pointed them down a hallway with only the words “no touching.” Then she walked into the visiting room and everything changed.

  Dick sat there in his prison blues, a man born for a broadsword and a horse, like the men on the covers of her brother’s Dungeons & Dragons books, sitting in the visiting room like he owned the whole world. He looked at her and it was the same thing, like he owned her, or, closer to the truth, like he was thinking of taking her a
nd the only question was was she worth taking? He didn’t speak to her during the visit, just to Vicki, but at the end of the visit he turned over to give her a look and he asked her if they could trade addresses, write letters. She said, “Sure, why not?”

  “A million reasons why not,” her brother Alan said later. His voice was tinny, beamed up from the Ozarks to some satellite and back down to California. Three words in and Charlotte remembered why they didn’t talk much, even times like now, times when she needed someone to talk to.

  “Literally a million,” he went on. “I could list them till Christ comes home. Let’s start with what he did to get locked up in the first place.”

  “Manslaughter,” she said. “It was a bar fight. Way he said it, he didn’t start the fight, he just finished it.”

  “Hellfire,” he said. “You already sound like one.”

  “One what?”

  “One of those women. Those crazy jailhouse women making excuses for her locked-up man.”

  Didn’t she know the type? Didn’t she love those true-crime paperbacks, the kind with black covers and red type, and the center section of black-and-white photos? Those books were full of dumb women writing forever love letters to the Night Stalker or Charles Manson. And hadn’t she read them and laughed and said just how hard up do you have to be?

  “Tell me you won’t write him,” her brother said.

  “Of course not.”

  And she hadn’t. But she didn’t forget him either, especially not at night when sleep wouldn’t come and her blood rose like the Nile in her veins. But she put him at the back of her skull, where he seemed happy to stay. Until she got his first letter.

  Later on when she had perspective, she understood it better. A man behind bars has nothing but time. They don’t have the Internet or smartphones, beer buddies or side pieces. They don’t have cable teevee binges, football parties, a career. When a man behind bars chose to focus on a woman, it was total focus. His first letter ran ten pages, the second one fifteen.

  The men around her started to seem washed out and frail. Doughy men who’d never withstood anything meaner than a tattoo needle or a Jägermeister hangover. Dick felt like a man from another time. Hell, even the name. What man went by Dick anymore? The audacity of it. Soon she was dreaming of him. He’d take her, put his hands on her like he couldn’t control himself, rip clothes from her, coax her with rough hands. The dreams came on her during the day, came on her like holy visions.

  She threw away her promise to Alan. She wrote Dick her own letter. She told him about herself. Her job at the bar. Her asshole managers with Russian hands and Roman fingers. The girls who stole from the till. That she wanted a new apartment, something closer to the beach.

  He wrote her back and told her to cut out the cocktail party bullshit. He didn’t want to know about soap opera crap. He wanted to know her. He wanted a piece of her she’d never given to anyone else.

  The letter pinned straight through her—a butterfly to a board.

  So she wrote him, eleven pages front and back written between hand cramps on a long Sunday. She wrote him about the worst thing she knew about herself. About 9/11. How she had felt bad the way everyone had felt bad, but that there was another thing mixed up with the sad. The thrill. How exciting it was to watch the towers fall, the clouds of dust enveloping the world, the geysers of flame jetting out of buildings, the bodies falling on camera, the thuds. She knew it was real and she knew it was a tragedy but it made her feel alive all the same. She’d been a junior at Kickapoo High School in Springfield, Missouri, and up until then, her life had been a gray blur, and when those towers came tumbling down it felt like maybe life wasn’t something that just happened in movies. She felt she’d been told a secret that day, something beyond what they teach you in school or that you learn from your parents. Something so terrible and bright inside her that she had to put a blanket on it or it would overwhelm everything. Her whole life—hell, the lives of everyone she’d ever met—was built around being safe, but first of all, safe was a lie, and anyhow there were better things in life than being safe. Maybe it was better to live in a world where towers fell.

  Telling him about that was her way of letting him know she was his. He got it. He claimed her for real the next visiting day. He put a hand on her leg. It was as rough as she’d dreamt. He let her taste danger by proxy. He told her about his business. That he was a lieutenant in a gang called Aryan Steel. That he had soldiers beneath him. Generals above. That he fought for them, and killed. She drove back down the 101 to L.A. in a dream while the sun sank hissing into the ocean to her right.

  A few visits after that, he told her he needed her help. That she was going to open a bank account. People were going to give her money. That she was going to buy a cell phone that couldn’t be traced. That people were going to call her on it.

  She drove home telling herself to cut him off. To go back to her life. She looked down the road of that life, how it was straight and narrow. That was the phrase they used, like it was a good thing. Straight and narrow.

  The next visiting day, she found herself there waiting for him with a bankbook in her hands.

  He brought her into his world. She didn’t like his world. She didn’t like the friends, the women dumb and vicious, the men with cruel eyes and meth stains on their hearts. By the time she thought to look back at the shore she’d swum away from, it had receded from view. She was stuck in the middle of the ocean.

  She’d passed hundreds of messages. Sometimes they came in coded letters. Sometimes they came in phone calls with a lot of “the guy with big eyes” and “the place by the other place” type language.

  The only one that ever stuck to her was the death warrant against Nate, Avis, and Polly. It had come to her straight from Dick’s mouth. He’d made her repeat it to him. The words were like bad milk in her mouth, but she’d said them all the same. She’d said them to Dick so he’d know she’d learned them, then she went home and she said the words to the cruel-eyed men and vicious women. She’d heard about the woman on the news a week or so later. It was like she’d flicked a domino and a week later a tower fell.

  And now, sitting next to the man, the little girl staring at her, she had to face that at least that one time, she hadn’t been made to do a thing. She’d made her choice. She’d passed the message along. This was on her.

  She looked at the gun. She looked at the girl. Her anger ebbed away. The fear too.

  “Tell me what you want to know,” she said.

  “Everything,” the man said. The girl didn’t say a thing. She had a teddy bear in her arms and murder in her eyes.

  22

  POLLY

  HUNTINGTON BEACH

  While her dad questioned Charlotte, Polly took notes with a pencil pebbled with tooth marks. She’d found the pencil at the bottom of her school bag, and the notebook too. She tore out the pages filled with division problems and facts about South America. She dropped them crumpled to the floor. She wrote aryan steel at the top of the page. She drew a line underneath it. She numbered the different places.

  Charlotte talked to Polly’s dad, sneaking peeks at Polly, looking away, touching the claw marks on her face where Polly had gone after her. Polly liked the way Charlotte looked at her, like Polly was a monster wearing little girl skin.

  Some of the words Charlotte used, Polly understood. Some she didn’t. She wrote them down anyway. She figured her dad knew or he’d ask. She wrote down things that seemed important. Like this:

  CHOP SHOP—mechanic on Alverado s. of McArthur park. Close to chicken place. Peckerwood Nation.

  She mouthed words to the bear as she wrote, not because she had to but because they were fun to say. Peckerwood chop shop peckerwood chop shop.

  She wrote about a trap house by the Hollywood In-N-Out. An Odin’s Bastards biker bar on the PCH. A Peckerwood Nation safe house in Venice Beach. A white power metal bar in Encino. The main stash house down in Sun Valley between the scrap yard and the garbage du
mp. This last one was the one that her dad asked the most about.

  “What kind of stash house?” her dad asked.

  “Crank,” Charlotte said, and Polly wrote it down even though she didn’t know what it meant. “The main stash for the Nazi Dope Boys.”

  Polly wrote quick as she could.

  “That might be the one,” her dad said.

  “You want to hurt them, that’s what I’d do,” Charlotte said.

  “You been there?” he asked.

  “Once,” Charlotte said.

  “You can draw it? The inside, I mean.”

  Charlotte nodded like I guess so. Polly handed her the notebook. She pulled herself up by the back of Charlotte’s seat to watch her draw. Polly kind of liked the fake-flower smell of her. She peeked over at her dad. He kept his eyes on Charlotte. Something in his eyes when he looked at the woman made Polly feel off balance.

  “Is that all?” she asked to break the heavy silence.

  “Who runs the operation?” he asked.

  “They call him A-Rod.”

  “That’s a baseball player,” Polly said.

  “Yeah. He’s a hitter,” her dad said. “It’s another word for killer.”

  Charlotte nodded like that’s right.

  “So he’s trouble,” he said.

  “No shit,” Charlotte shifted in her seat to look back at Polly. “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s okay, I can hear curse words,” Polly said. “He says them all the goddamn time.”

  “Polly . . .”

  The bear shook with silent laughter. He slapped his leg with his paw. Polly caught Charlotte clocking the bear, a look on her face like nutso alert. She fought the urge to put the bear away. What did she care if this woman thought she was nutso?

  “You’re really going to do it?” Charlotte asked. “You’re going to rob that place? These guys are killers—”

  “Think we don’t know that?” he asked. Charlotte turned away fast like the words had slapped her.