Racehead

by Daya Daniels

  RACEHEAD

  A ROMANCE NOVEL

  BY:

  DAYA DANIELS

  CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  QUOTE

  DEDICATION

  PLAYLIST

  INTAKE

  ONE

  TWO

  COMPRESSION

  THREE

  FOUR

  COMBUSTION

  FIVE

  SIX

  EXHAUST

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright@ 2018 by Daya Daniels

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any way, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or any other means without the explicit written permission of the author, except for brief quotations of the book when writing a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and even facts are the product of the author’s imagination. Wait a minute...especially facts. Any resemblance to actual people—alive, dead, or someplace in between—is completely by chance and likely in your head.

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. Holy hell, this is important. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Let’s not forget! All song titles in this book are the property of the sole copyright owners.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Hawkeye for proofreading this novel. As always, I appreciate you.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Dear Readers,

  Thank you so much for your support.

  You are my tribe.

  Without you, my stories would have no audience.

  Like every story I decide to write, initially I have an idea. Then quickly, as the words hit the page, it morphs into something way bigger than ever intended and with no bounds my imagination takes it from there.

  You are about to meet two of my favorite people.

  If you love speed and you love love, this story is for you.

  I hope you these two gals as much as I do.

  Yours truly,

  Daya

  xoxo

  “I am emotional about engines. If you hurt my car, you hurt my heart.”

  -Amit Kalantri

  For the nitrous addicts.

  PLAYLIST

  “Easy” — Son Lux

  “Da Art of Storytellin’” — Outkast

  “Under Your Spell” — Desire

  “Come Out and Play” — The Offspring

  “Eyes a Mess” — The Broods

  “Superstar” — Cypress Hill

  “U Can’t Touch This” — MC Hammer

  KALEO — “Way Down We Go”

  “Annie” — Anthonio

  “Drive” — The Cars

  “Sega Sunset” — Lorn

  “Under the Table” — Banks

  “Let It Happen” — Tame Impala

  “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore” — Phantogram

  “The Trip” — Still Corners

  “Man Down” — Rihanna

  “Drop the World” — Lil Wayne featuring Eminem

  “I Need You” — M83

  “I Think I Like It” — Fake Blood

  “Vital Signs” — Tame Impala

  “Acid Rain” — Lorn

  “Cruisin’ in my ‘64” — Eazy E

  The Broods— “Sleep Baby Sleep”

  “Bitch Better Have My Money” — Rihanna

  “Runways, Houses, Cities, Clouds” — Tame Impala

  “Black Out Days” — Phantogram

  “Bad Girls” — M.I.A

  “Anvil” — Lorn

  THE PROCESS OF A FOUR-STROKE ENGINE

  Otherwise known as:

  Suck. 2. Squeeze. 3. Bang. 4. Blow.

  Intake: The engine sucks in a mixture of fuel and air.

  Compression: The engine squeezes it all together, then it burns.

  Combustion: Then it all explodes with a bang.

  Exhaust: Finally, it blows out the exhaust.

  CHAPTER ONE

  San Jacinto

  “The Valley”

  Riverside County, California

  Nevada

  EVERY WOMAN SHOULD KNOW how to change a flat tire…

  At least that’s what my madre had told me when I was just a girl.

  Static flows through the two-way radio which hangs above where I sit in the driver’s seat—a little white noise to relax me.

  It’s ten o’clock in the morning.

  Despite that I’m tired as hell, I’m out here, as I am seven days a week.

  But today, especially, I appreciate that I’ve missed the wonderful opportunity of being mixed up in the horrendous morning traffic that’s usually heading into Los Angeles.

  Surprisingly, the roads are relatively clear with the exception of a white 1953 Buick Roadmaster that’s moving hella slow and blocking my flow.

  I switch lanes to get around it and peer at the double yellow lines in the road, quickly reminded that this county is the one responsible for why there are lane markings along the highways throughout this great old America. When I make it around the snailing vehicle, I peer into the driver’s side window and scoff.

  With big white hair, perched forward and peering out the windscreen with slits for eyes since she’s so focused on where she thinks she’s going is an old woman.

  Shaking my head, I stomp my boot down harder on the gas as this monster of a tow truck barrels down Interstate CA-60 West. The engine roars. The vibration sinks into all two hundred and six bones in my body and kills my eardrums but it doesn’t matter.

  Carefully making sure this truck doesn’t hit the magic triple digits, I keep my eyes on the speedometer and the minty green signs along the highway every few feet which tell me what speed zone I need to stay in.

  And it’s constantly changing like Syd’s mood.

  Around here the speed limit is fifty-five miles per hour. In other places it’s sixty-five. Right now, it’s seventy. After dark and out near The Badlands, the speed limit is whatever the fuck I want it to be.

  I focus on the speedometer. Syd said we can’t afford any more tickets on this thing from my overzealous excursions. And that my driving record is affecting her business of which I am an honest and loyal employee.

  What could I say?

  I agreed and promised that I would stay at the legal limit since the last thing I want to do is mess with Syd’s money stream which in turn impacts my cash flow…

  Then I get stuck eating Ramen noodles instead of steak.

  Anyways, you get the gist.

  The last few speeding tickets had cost Syd over two grand—a debt I’m still in the midst of repaying—and I ended up with a whole bunch of points against my license.

  Yeah, that thing…

  Come to think of it I have no clue where it is.

  Haven’t seen it in a while.

  I figure I don’t need it.

  Never did care much for it.

  Up ahead to my left and parked on the shoulder is a patrol car. The radar is secured to the open door. The cop who flexes inside it sips his coffee, and I shit you not, there’s a frosty donut in his hand which he’s chomping on.

  With a groan, I ease off the gas and then before I know it I’m speeding again.

  It’s as if there’s a rock in my boot…like all-the-time.

  A smile touches my lips.

  Outkast’s “Da Art of Storytellin’” floats from the radio.

  I turn the music up
much, much higher, bob my head to the beat and sing along to the melody. Cars and trucks of all sizes whizz by. Then, a ninja bike.

  ZOOOOOM.

  It leaves my ears ringing and my pulse in my throat when it passes. “Oh, man.” Laughing out loud, I slap the steering wheel a few times and whistle. “I need to get me one of those!”

  With a heavy boot, I press down harder on the gas, forcing this old bastard of a diesel engine to scream.

  It’s something I dragged out of Syd’s junk yard, stripped down and made purty again. Saved Syd like five grand for the work, so she gave me a few hundred. Then I dumped that mula into my other extra-curricular activity which I’ll tell you about a little later.

  I’m always flipping money.

  The money I make goes into making more money and so forth and so forth.

  It must be that way, because as you know, scared money don’t make no money.

  And every single coin I’ve earned in the last year has gone into one thing…

  I don’t drink. I say no to drugs…just like Barbara Bush told me to do. I don’t smoke. Hate the stuff actually, especially since Madre died of lung cancer when I was just a girl. I was eight years old when they told me she wasn’t coming back. Ever since then, I’ve been living with Syd.

  I don’t party. I barely hang out. And I try my very best to stay out of trouble.

  Speed is my vice.

  It’s the only bad thing about a girl like me.

  Rapidity.

  If you look up the word in the Urban Dictionary, it will tell you speed is: an amphetamine, a stimulating drug that triggers the brain’s reward system giving the user feelings of pleasure.

  I so agree!

  A smile skitters across my lips.

  But, in this case, I’m referring to speed, being a scalar quantity, which falls within the field of physics. As in the distance traveled per unit of time. Or how fast an object is moving. It is ignorant of direction. Velocity is a vector quantity and is the rate which the position changes. Nevada translation—I just want to go fast. It doesn’t matter which direction I’m headed in!

  Speed.

  It’s an addiction.

  Something I can’t shake.

  It’s like a woman I can’t seem to break up with.

  We’re in a life-long love affair.

  I laugh to myself.

  Often, I swear if they sliced open my veins, you’d find nitrous in them instead of warm red blood. I live, breathe and sleep cars—driving them, fixing them, building them.

  It’s-who-I-am.

  At the age of seven I wanted to be a race car driver. I wished to one day find myself on a professional NASCAR track or on the Formula 1 circuit. I dreamt of racing dune buggies out in Baha. I imagined hopping in a stock car and taking it for a spin around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It didn’t matter where or what track or on what circuit I had to drive one. I just knew I wanted to race and that I wanted to go F…A…S…T.

  I was going to be Janet Guthrie but not in every way.

  I wasn’t going to be forced into retirement. I wasn’t going to be denied corporate sponsorship because I’m a woman. I wasn’t going to be undermined in a male dominated sport because of my gender.

  I was going to drive though, just like Janet had, no doubt.

  Way back then, when I was just a girl fan who followed the sport of racing religiously, of course, most of the race car drivers were men. The managers were men. The bodies in the crew pit were men. And the majority of the fans we’re all men.

  A girl can only dream…and did I ever keep my hopes up.

  In fact, I even wrote a story about it in grade school as an English assignment.

  The assistant teacher, Mrs. Beaver, told me it was a ridiculous story. She cackled in front of the entire class while she held my paper with its scribbled improperly spelled words on it between her fingertips. Mrs. Beaver told me I was better off becoming a teacher, like her. Or maybe even a nurse. “Something more feminine,” she’d said way back then would be more suitable for a girl like me. Maybe not realizing that a girl like me would rather play in the dirt than sit around fetching coffee every millisecond for Mr. Ray, the real teacher.

  My heart was crushed after Mrs. Beaver shit on my dream.

  I ran home to Madre and told her what had happened.

  Madre cupped my face with her hands and told me that, Mrs. Beaver, that “puta who wasn’t even a real teacher yet” had no clue about what she was spewing out of her pie hole and that I could be anything I wanted to be.

  But that’s what every grown adult with a half decent heart tells a child with a dream, right?

  Doesn’t mean it’s realistic.

  Over the years, as I grew into a teenager, I knew getting a sponsor was near to impossible even if I was any good. And I was good. I’m still good.

  Honestly, I am the fucking best!

  A beast.

  A goddamn outlaw.

  A twenty-one-year-old monster in the car who runs on gasoline and pulls no fucking brake on the corners. I’m not a scared driver. I’m not beyond taking risks. I’m not even afraid to get in a wreck if that’s what it’s going to cost me to win. I’m skilled enough to turn pro and everyone on these hot streets knows it. Syd thinks I should go to college in case none of this ever works out. Makes sense. But I’m not really for the whole school thing and once I graduated from Riverside Poly I was done. It felt more like prison in there anyways. And you know once you get out of prison, you usually don’t want to go back.

  I want to race.

  Still, without a boatload of money and knowing the right people, my wild hopes about speed anywhere, in any sort of legal way, were just pipe dreams.

  So, these days, I pour my talent into the next best thing…

  My mind drifts for a moment and then I’m focused on the road again.

  Apparently, I’m moving faster…

  Where did the time go?

  And with each vehicle I pass with the speed I’m doing, it draws the vehicles in the other lane into the wrecker’s orbit. The pull of this monster against the wind sure as fuck rocks them when I pass.

  ZOOM. ZOOM. ZOOM. ZOOM. ZOOM.

  One by one, I barrel past all the vehicles in the next lane and gun this rusty old thing along the highway straight to Hell.

  The warm July air flows in and rushes through my hair. It does nothing to cool my hot skin. It’s about three hundred degrees today. Boiling. Hot enough to kill a human.

  I suck in the Cali air and smile at view of the city I’ve been living in all my life.

  Riverside.

  The desert.

  Home to the Joshua Tree National Park—best place to stargaze at night.

  Riverside is almost a perfect rectangle on a map. Smack right in the middle of Southern California where people say “brah” all the time and smoke too much ganja. It’s where all the bad drivers in Cali roam and where every single soul is terrified of the rain. Riverside includes a large piece of the great city of Los Angeles too and goes almost all the way to the Arizona border. And I mustn’t forget, this place is home to some of the best ma pa tofu and rogan josh I’ve ever filled my belly with.

  Population here is around two million souls.

  It’s home of the remarkable Santa Ana River—a place where I spent a lot of time as a child on the weekends with Madre. We’d walk the Santa Ana trail and eat sandwiches next to the river under the sun. Syd used to come along with us sometimes. We’d fish even, catch trout and pike and barbeque it all up until it got that nice flaky crust on the outside. Then we’d chow down in front of the fire and talk about nothing. The coyotes would howl and the owls wood hoot. The stars in the sky twinkled. I would count them and stare at the moon which always seemed to be full and white and bright on our trips out there.

  Madre would tell stories about her days as young girl growing up in Jalisco in Mexico. She’d tell me about how she snuck right through the border then made her home right here in Riverside as an i
llegal immigrant and never left.

  Those were the days…

  I bite my lip thinking about that and slam my foot down on the pedal harder.

  Up ahead is the car I’m looking for—a I-don’t-what-gross-shade-that-is 1987 Mazda 626.

  I snarl when the color of gangrene smacks me in the face.

  Jesus Christ on a racehorse, the vehicle is hideous. Needs a spray job badly. And just when I hook a left and pull this wheel-lift wrecker into the emergency lane, I can see why the car up ahead decided to die. I’d been told it’s only a flat tire but the steam billowing up to the sky from the hood of the old jalopy with its crappy tinted window job seems to scream otherwise to the universe.

  The wrecker’s engine idles for a few seconds, then I pull the brake up.

  Glancing in the rear-view mirror, I bite my lip when a woman steps out of the vehicle. My stomach does all sorts of weird things that have nothing to do with the quesadilla I ate for breakfast this morning and the Red Bull I chugged down right before leaving the house.

  My eyes narrow on the female who lingers next to the broke down car.

  She’s medium height, like me.

  But that’s about it for appearances which we have in common.

  The squints against the burning sun and brushes her long dark hair which hits the middle of her back away from her eyes. Her skin is the hue of the cappuccino I drank yesterday that had my heart pumping all sorts of crazy and when she smiles, it’s all just intriguing. Perfect. Even though the smile is weak and distressed, I guess because of the dead car and all, but I suppose it’s still pleasant. I’m gifted with a mouthful of white straight teeth and a little dimple in her left cheek.

  This must be her.

  The desperate sweet voice who called Syd an hour ago.

  The woman wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and who has a rose vine tatt crawling up her toned thigh in the shorts she’s wearing.