Graffiti Creek

by Matt Coleman

  When she woke up, voices swirled outside. Male and angry. The trunk lay open and light attacked her like bees. The screwdriver had slumped down into her lap, and she moved to hold it with stealthy-steady hands.

  One voice was Reynard. The voice she would never forget. He said, “I got here as fast as I could. They’re all up at the Dollar General. Nobody’s nosing around here.”

  The other voice was heavier, more authoritative. “Well, they will, won’t they, Reytard? Now, pull the bitch out of the trunk.”

  Johnna tensed. A familiar, calloused, hairy hand clutched her and tugged. She tumbled out onto the dirt and rocks face first, smashing her nose and mouth. Consciousness toyed with her again. Blood pooled up and trailed off in a stream through the dirt.

  A third voice coughed out. “What the fuck?”

  Reynard whined, “What? Afraid I’ll damage the merchandise?”

  The authoritative voice barked, “No, you moron. Dead girls don’t bleed.”

  Reynard’s tone changed. “What?”

  “You didn’t kill her, you idiot.”

  Johnna fought to let the alarm bells of their conversation wake her up. The screwdriver. She had to come up hard with the screwdriver. Loafered feet made their way toward her. The third voice said, “Get out of my way.”

  She came up hard and made it just above his knee. The screwdriver went in deep—to the handle. And he bellowed. The pained cry of a full-grown man. Johnna scrambled to her feet. Turning, she hit a man in a suit. The material smelled like mothballs and his protruding stomach did not give. The impact sent her rolling back to the loafers. She sprawled out on her back, looking up at the man as he pulled the length of the screwdriver from his leg. He glowered at Johnna as he did it—his eyes steeled against the pain. He held the bloody tool there, dripping onto her face.

  Johnna tried to croak out, “Please. No.” But no sound made it to the air.

  The man came straight down with the screwdriver and drove into Johnna’s chest.

  Pain erupted through to her back. Adrenaline pulsed to each end of her body. Before realizing what had happened, Johnna vaulted to her feet, rushing past the guy in the cheap suit toward a bridge. The screwdriver bounced and dangled out of her chest. She gasped and sucked for air. Tripping over her heels, she kept on, running. In her mind. But not really. She stumbled in a slow zombie walk.

  Johnna kept moving toward the bridge, with its blurry mesh of colors. She pulled at the screwdriver until it came loose and something warm coated her stomach and her crotch. She stopped and fell to her knees, looking down, embarrassed, thinking she had urinated. One of her shoes had fallen off. She picked up her strappy heel and put the screwdriver inside it and threw them both toward the bridge. The momentum took her all the way to the ground, laid prostrate on her side.

  The men laughed behind her. Their voices sounded muffled, like they were talking with marshmallows in their mouth—a game she used to play with her sister. One of them said, “She ain’t getting up.” Johnna opened her mouth to correct him. She always hated that word: ain’t. Another said, “Let’s make sure. What do you say?” And he put a meaty knee over Johnna’s throat and chin. The last thing she ever saw. Some cheap-ass pants.

  Chapter 10

  The little Civic passed about four cop cars, lighting up the front seat with a disco of red and blue lights. Cary climbed up off of the floorboard, but she kept her head down as they passed. When she relaxed a bit she said, “I’m Cary.”

  The driver gave her an incredulous look. “I don’t want to know your name. I don’t want to know anything.”

  Cary closed her eyes and nodded. “I understand.”

  After a beat, he relented. “Marlowe.”

  Cary grinned at him. “Well, thank you, Marlowe.”

  He grunted.

  Cary pulled the burner phone out of her pocket, along with the minutes card. She waggled them at Marlowe. “Do you know how to activate this?”

  Marlowe clucked his tongue. “What? Because I’m black, I know how to activate a prepaid phone, huh?”

  Cary stammered and stuttered out an incoherent response.

  “Yeah, okay. I know how to activate a prepaid phone. All right? And it ain’t cause I deal drugs or some shit, either. My cousin cheated on his girl. So we got him a second phone. Which is a perfectly white reason to know how to do that.”

  Cary nodded. “Very white.”

  Marlowe sniffed. “Don’t patronize me.” He walked her through setting up the phone as he drove back into the city via a windy path. When the phone’s tinny speaker sang out its little activation song, Marlowe eyed Cary. “You have any numbers?”

  Cary stared at the phone, and then at him. “What?”

  He shrugged. “Nobody knows numbers anymore. Got ‘em all programmed in. Do you have anybody’s number to call?”

  Cary looked back at the phone and hung her head back, staring at the ceiling. “No.” Her eyes welled with tears. “I can’t even remember Johnna’s number. Does that make me a horrible person?”

  Marlowe shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know who Johnna is.”

  Cary flailed her arms out. “Ten numbers. The most important person in my life doesn’t merit me remembering ten numbers?” She shook the phone, glaring at it. “We all feel so connected, but it’s a fallacy. We’ve built ourselves a digital security blanket! I can’t even reach out to the one person I care about because I’ve let the world make me cold and broken and—”

  Marlowe laughed until Cary swore at him. He ducked and held a hand up in defense. “All right, all right. It’s not funny.” He forced a more solemn countenance. “I don’t mean to laugh. You just,” he trailed off, “you remind me a little of my brother, is all. Why don’t you tell me what happened? From the beginning.”

  As Marlowe continued to drive in a looping circle through the city, Cary recounted everything: the traffic stop, the taking of her phone, the attempted staged suicide, the bullet-filled chase through the woods. Before finishing, tears pushed at the edges of Cary’s eyes.

  Marlowe cleared his throat and spoke before those tears manifested. “So what now? I don’t guess you got another car, huh?”

  Cary chuckled. “No.” She shoved the phone back in her pocket and brightened. “I have another set of keys, though. At my house.” Her hand came back from her pocket with the stack of cash. “I can pay you. Please.”

  Marlowe cocked his head, eyeing the money. “All right, okay.” He frowned. “Put your money away, girl. I guess there’s a chance we beat them to your house.” He sucked at his teeth. “Less of a chance they left your car sitting out there unguarded.”

  “Turn left at the light.” Cary started directing him toward her house. “Not many options yet. I have to try. Unless you want me riding around with you all day.”

  “Didn’t look like you had that much money.”

  Cary smirked. “I thought you said put it away?”

  Marlowe nodded. “I said put it away. I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna take it.”

  Cary led Marlowe to an elementary school and told him to park out front in the visitor lot. He scanned the empty lot and scrunched his face up at her. “You live at a school?”

  “Turn off your headlights.” Cary leaned forward and stared out across the playground. She pointed, “No. I live over there.”

  Marlowe nodded. “Of course you do. Where the cop car is sitting?”

  Cary nodded. “Yep.”

  She started out of the car, and Marlowe grabbed her arm. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m going to try to sneak in and find my other keys.”

  Marlowe locked the doors. “The fuck you are. Are you crazy?”

  Cary unlocked the doors. “No. I’m desperate. I need to get my car back. I’m not asking you to go with me.”

  Marlowe locked the doors back. “Good. Because there ain’t no way I’m going in there. And there ain’t no way you’re going in there. If you get caught, I get caught.”

  C
ary unlocked the doors again and shook her head. “Not true. All you have to do is watch through the playground. If you see me get caught, drive away. If I make it back, drive me one more place and this is all over for you.”

  Marlowe locked the doors. “No. All I have to do is nothing. I picked you up outta Dollar General parking lot. I should be dropping you off at a Walmart and calling it an upgrade for your lifestyle.”

  Cary unlocked the doors and pulled out the stack of money and set it on the dashboard. “Here. All of it. If I get caught, you can have it all.”

  Marlowe locked the doors back. “Holy shit. How much money do you have?”

  Cary nodded at the stack, unlocking the doors again. “Three thousand. If I make it back, I can give you a hundred dollars. Two hundred. Three. I need one last thing. Please.” She locked the doors.

  Marlowe hit the button once more, unlocking the doors. “I don’t need your money, girl. I got money. But I can’t leave your ass either. Because I’m too goddamn nice.”

  Cary hopped out of the car and leaned back in. “Thanks, Marlowe. This means a lot.”

  Marlowe frowned back and forth between his door lock button and Cary. The door puffed shut and he side-eyed Cary slinking off across the darkened playground. He called out, “Five hundred!” And slid down in his seat to patrol.

  Cary slipped through an opening in the fence into the playground, bending over into a duck walk. She kept to the fence line and crouched behind the cover of monkey bars and slides and park benches. She knew a gate opened up to the street about a block from her house.

  The police cruiser sat in front of her rental house facing away from her. If she crossed the street, she could wind her away around to the back of the house and use a spare key under a flowerpot.

  Darkness enveloped the street, but Cary couldn’t cross at any point without risking the cop catching sight of her in his rearview mirror. After a minute of coming up blank, she caught a break. A car approached and would pass her before, a couple of seconds later, passing the police officer.

  She knelt into a crouch—a runner’s stance. Her only chance would come right as the car passed the cruiser. The cop would have to look closely, watching for Cary to drive by to check on her house. In that moment, she would have a brief window to cross the street.

  She waited for the car to pass, watching the street like a living game of Frogger. When it finally passed, her window of opportunity turned into a door slamming onto her thumb. The car turned out to be another police cruiser.

  Cary slid down into the shadow of a bush. “Balls.” She craned her neck to view the new cruiser passing the first cop. Instead, it pulled up alongside, and the two spoke through lowered windows. She just made out their mumbling voices from where she sat, hidden. She still caught a window. If they were talking to each other, they wouldn’t be watching their rearview mirrors. She muttered again to herself, “Balls.” After three quick breaths, she rolled to her feet and darted across the street.

  Once on the other side, she slid onto the far side of a neighbor’s porch that kept her hidden. After a beat of listening for any change, Cary reasoned with herself not to wait around now. She ran for the side of the house and started down the backyards of her neighbors. There were no dogs or tricky spots—all short fences and clear paths.

  She cleared three houses and cut through a back gate, taking the alley over the last two until she reached her own house. Privacy fencing ran along the front of most houses. She rarely noticed any of her neighbors milling around in their backyards. She only needed to worry about making too much noise or casting a shadow through a window once she was inside.

  The key lay under the flower pot where she hid it. Cary eased open her back door as quietly as possible. The urge to instinctively hit the light switch almost overwhelmed her. She entered through the kitchen, keeping to almost a crawl.

  Cary rented a small two-bedroom, two-story house. And what Cary needed sat shoved in an upstairs closet. In her closet were two things: a bowl with a spare set of car keys and an abandoned day planner. She got the planner for Christmas, and before casting it aside, she filled it with a handful of phone numbers. If she could retrieve those two things without being spotted, she would bolt out the back and run full-out back to the Civic.

  The kitchen opened up into a foyer and entryway leading in one direction to a frosted glass door and snaking around the other way to the stairs. Cary continued to stay low and tried to avoid being backlit against any windows. She eased around the corner and up the stairs. They were old and creaky. Every step sounded like a scream to her. When her feet found carpet, she sped up across her bedroom to the closet.

  She almost tripped over the contents of a drawer splayed out across the floor. Someone searched her house for whatever they thought she stole or took. The keys were under a pile of jewelry and loose change. The planner sat pushed to the back of a shelf, but easily retrieved. It wouldn’t fit in a jacket pocket, so she leafed through until she found the pages with contacts. On one page, she found several numbers, including Johnna’s. She tore out the page and tossed the planner on her nightstand on her way to the door.

  The lamp never crossed her mind. She pulled the old lamp from her grandmother’s estate sale. She always liked that lamp. It sat in the guest room where she slept as a child when she visited her grandmother. Her grandmother used the quirky little lamp, with its dusty looking bronze finish, to read to Cary before bed. Cary would sip hot cocoa, curled up in a horrid blanket her grandmother kept hiding in the closet. And her grandmother would curse the glitchy lamp for always switching on or off every time she dropped the book they were reading next to it.

  Which is exactly what the damn thing did when Cary flopped the day planner next to it. The room burst to life with the too-bright bulb Cary had stupidly forced into it. She panicked and froze, staring at the window like it might admonish her. She snapped alert and lunged for the lamp’s cord, pulling until it popped from the wall and everything went dark again. Her eyes crawled with electric gnats and she pushed her back against the side of her bed and listened. At first, nothing. The faint rumblings of a train drifted in from somewhere. But then, bump. And again, bump. Car doors.

  Cary struggled to her feet and hurried for the stairs. Her mind turned into a wasp’s nest of nasty thoughts. Like the one about how the two cops could split up and block both exits from the house. But when she hit the stairs, two flashlight beams twinkled through the frosted glass. Her first step sounded especially loud, moaning and cracking like alarm bells. The flashlight beams froze. She heard whispered voices. And the door—unlocked from when they came in the first time—opened. Cary backpedaled into her bedroom and whipped her head around wildly. Their footsteps crept in cautiously downstairs.

  Only one window overlooked the back of Cary’s house from upstairs. It opened from her bedroom onto a slanted roof sloping to the point of almost colliding with a decrepit storage shed out back. Her only shot at making it out of the house would be to roll off the shed and in a row of bushes underneath.

  She ran for the window and jerked it open. The screen stuck in one corner when she pushed, but it opened enough to fit through. Cary kicked out with both feet and let herself slide onto the roof before she could pause to think too much. This time she thanked empty calories for the extra padding on her ass. She hit the storage shed and rolled. Its shingles flaked and shifted with her weight, and the whole building sounded like it might not make it through the ordeal. But Cary managed to go careening off and into the bushes, which felt like landing in pile of elbows and cat claws. Her hands caught the worst. Tiny branches sliced through her palms. But she got to her feet and started to shake off the loss of equilibrium when she heard a voice yell, “Out back!”

  Again she froze, unsure of which direction to go, or, rather, not go. She studied the sides of the house. Simultaneously, from both sides, flashlight beams cut the darkness. They split up. Either way she went would involve a cop and gun.

  Cary l
ooked up and discovered the back door still open from when she came in. She didn’t hesitate. She covered the backyard and porch in four steps. On her way through the kitchen, she spied silhouettes out windows on both sides of the house. They left the front door standing open, so she never broke stride.

  Cary ran straight out, past the empty police cars. She burst through a gate into the playground across from the corner of her front yard. A stitch burned in her side by the time she reached the Civic, but she made it. Marlowe pulled out before she even shut the car door.

  Chapter 11

  Cary writhed in the seat, holding her side. Marlowe sped down side streets and swiveled back and forth, rattling incoherently, “Shit. Shit, girl. You got shot, didn’t you? I didn’t hear a shot. He shot you? What do I do?”

  Cary tried to catch her breath enough to interrupt him. “No. Not shot,” she panted. “Just out of shape.”

  Marlowe almost collapsed behind the wheel. “Jesus in a clown mask. I thought you’d been shot. You need to join a gym or something, girl.”

  “Am I being fat shamed during a car chase?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Girl, you know I like ‘em thick. I’m only shaming the fact that you can’t run across a playground without looking like you about to die.” He laughed but darted his eyes around behind him. “Wait, what? Are we in a car chase?”

  Cary sat up and buckled her seat belt. “No. I don’t think so. I’m hoping they didn’t see which way I went.”

  “Damn, girl. Stop scaring me. Shit.”

  Cary laughed. “Sorry.” She jangled her keys out of her pocket. “But you’re almost rid of me. If you can take me back out to my car, I’ll be on my way to live a life on the run or something.”

  Marlowe raised his eyebrows at her. “Right now?”

  Cary shrugged. “Yeah. I guess. Why not? Kind of the whole point of this shit, right?”