Hard Case Crime: Choke Hold Read online

  The shooter put a wild stray bullet into the dessert case as the two of them went down hard. Vic’s kid had the shooter’s gun hand locked up and stretched away from his body while the shooter twisted and flailed, using his free hand to punch the kid repeatedly in the back of the head. There was a sudden crisp snap and the shooter screamed, his gun skittering away and sliding under a nearby booth.

  The tall, awkward kid had his own gun out by then, but he held it like a venomous reptile, one that might bite him if he wasn’t careful. The short, pissed-off guy was shouting and trying desperately to regain control over the rapidly deteriorating situation. He was clearly the brains of the operation, which didn’t bode well for whatever plans these three had made. Especially the part of the plan that involved bringing trouble into Duncan’s Diner.

  Duncan chose that moment to pop up in the pass with the Benelli semi-automatic shotgun he kept on hand for just such an occasion. Duncan Schenck was not a big guy, but he didn’t need to be. He was in his late fifties with a deep, permanent tan and a skinny frame that was just starting to go a little paunchy in the middle from too much of his own greasy cooking. Sharp gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and a thin, salt-and-pepper ponytail. Duncan was ex-military and often referred to as a gun nut, although he told me he preferred the term “firearms enthusiast.” I’d been fucking him for nearly two weeks, so I knew just how enthusiastic Duncan really was. There were more munitions in the concrete bunker under his old ’63 Airstream trailer than out at the nearby Yuma Proving Grounds.

  “Get down, Julie,” he said, voice as calm as if he were calling an order up.

  For a few near-fatal seconds that name “Julie” didn’t mean anything to me. I’d had too many different names in the past month and seeing Thick Vic again had thrown me, made me forget all about my latest half-assed identity.

  “Now,” Duncan added and that was enough.

  I flung the coffee carafe away and dropped down behind the counter as Duncan let loose with the shotgun. The sound of it was so loud I felt like I’d been hit by an auditory truck. The damp black rubber mat beneath my cheek smelled of ammonia and old food. There was a wilted piece of lettuce a few inches from my nose. I heard more shots above me and some shouting that sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher in my tortured, ringing ears, but I had no idea what was actually happening. I covered my head with my hands, sick from adrenaline and furious that this was happening now, when I had been so close to getting what I needed out of Duncan.

  There was a crash, stagger and thump and when I uncovered my head, I saw that Vic and his kid were behind the counter with me. The kid had Vic’s arm thrown over his shoulder and the two of them were wedged back against a stack of paper napkins. Vic was alive, but not happy about it. The kid was hyperventilating with too much white around the pretty golden-green irises of his eyes. After a long quiet minute, I risked a peek up over the counter. It didn’t look good. The tall awkward Mexican kid was sprawled on the linoleum in a spreading ocean of blood. He was dead or might as well have been. Duncan was hanging over the lip of the pass, also dead or might as well have been. The old man with the pie was dead too, but from my vantage point it was hard to tell if he’d been shot or just keeled over with a grabber from all the excitement. The short, aggro kid was having a tense, hissed-between-clenched-teeth argument with the original shooter, who was shaking his head vehemently, cradling an obviously broken arm and saying the same thing over and over.

  I noticed that the cheap Coca-Cola clock had fallen off the wall and landed face up a foot to my left. It was quarter after eleven. That meant the headlights I could see sweeping across the lot belonged to Highway Patrol Officer Norman Ketlin, who would be stopping in to refill his big thermal coffee cup one more time just like he did at eleven fifteen every other night of the week.

  Norm didn’t mess around. He didn’t say, “Freeze! Police!” or anything like that, he just left the engine running and came out shooting. I grabbed my go-bag from under the counter and slung it over one shoulder. If I had a chance to get gone, this was it. Then I looked back at Vic and his kid.

  The kid must’ve hit a mental wall. His handsome face was pale and blank with shock. If he had been conceived a few weeks earlier, he could have been my son. And Vic, that charming bastard, I’d already let him fuck up my life once. It would have been smarter to leave them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

  “Come on,” I whispered to the kid, throwing Vic’s other arm over my own shoulder and indicating the swinging door to the kitchen. “Help me get him out of here.”

  The kid turned to me, eyes still way too big.

  “They shot him,” he said, or something along those lines. My hearing was still pretty iffy at this point. He could have meant any number of our patrons or employees, but I figured he meant Vic.

  “They’re probably gonna shoot us too if we don’t get the hell out of here now,” I said.

  “Um, yeah okay,” the kid replied.

  Vic was still pretty skinny, but every pound hung limp and useless, dead weight between the two of us. I tried to keep Vic’s head low as we duck-walked towards the kitchen door. More shots and furious Spanglish and I could hear Norm’s deep, angry voice swearing, but didn’t want to stick around to watch the show. More importantly, I didn’t want to answer to anyone official. I had two shitty fake IDs and a halfway decent one, none of which would hold up to serious scrutiny.

  When we got into the kitchen, we moved low and quiet past Duncan’s body and the bloody, sizzling grill. Hannibal, our ex-con dishwasher, had cut and run the second the trouble started, leaving the back door wide open. He had the right idea.

  “Where’s your car?” I asked the kid, once we were outside.

  He looked at me with a dangerously unfocused glaze in his eyes.

  “Car!” I said as loudly as I dared. “Do you have one?”

  The kid seemed to sharpen up a little and shook his head.

  “I’ve got my bike,” he said, indicating with his head. “Around front.”

  I remembered the tough-guy motorcycle helmet I’d seen on the table back in the diner. A motorcycle just wasn’t gonna work. I didn’t relish the idea of going back into the kitchen to get the keys to Duncan’s truck out of his hip pocket but couldn’t think of any other option until Vic spoke up.

  “Angel,” he said. “...my car...”

  “Where are the keys?” I asked. “In your jacket?”

  “Yeah,” Vic said. “Brown ’75 Bonneville.”

  As we headed around the side of the diner, the action tumbled out the kitchen door behind us. First the two Mexican kids, the short, aggro blond ducking behind the dumpster and the shooter with the broken arm making a run for Duncan’s trailer. Norm came out fast on the shooter’s heels as the kid zigzagged like a bunny across the dusty lot and dove under the trailer.

  I’m not exactly sure what came next because it all happened so fast, but from my angle it looked like the bleach-blond kid popped up from behind the dumpster and took a shot at Norm just as he was bending down to grab the shooter’s ankle and haul him out of his hiding place. The bullet must have missed Norm by an inch and hit the large propane tank on the side of Duncan’s trailer. The subsequent series of explosions knocked us all to the ground and knocked any more wondering right out of my head.

  When I looked up again I saw two people on fire. One was running in a wobbly, decaying circle and the other lying face down in the dust. It was impossible to tell who was who under the flames.

  By the time I was able to look away, the kid had gotten his feet under him and lifted Vic across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I got up off my skinned knees and ran for the parking lot, motioning for the kid to follow.

  Out front was Norm’s prowler, an aging green Town Car, a souped-up riceburner and Vic’s beater Bonneville. At the far end of the lot was a candy apple Harley Shovelhead that sparkled like it had just rolled out of the showroom.

  We made it to the Bonneville and the kid let
Vic down beside the car, but Vic’s legs wouldn’t support his weight. He was still bleeding profusely, but his face was eerily calm.

  “I can’t...” Vic said. “You’d better...”

  The kid held him up under the armpits while I went through his pockets. Gum. Change. Phone. A matchbook from a strip club. A pen featuring a sexy pin-up girl whose bikini disappeared if held at a certain angle. A folded printout of Google directions to the diner from Los Angeles. Finally, keys.

  I unlocked the car, opened the passenger-side back door and then went around front and got behind the wheel. The engine coughed and spluttered as I fired it up and put it in gear. The kid laid Vic out in the back seat and then turned away, leaving the door open.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said over his shoulder, heading across the lot towards his motorcycle.

  I swore softly, gripping the wheel. There was a powerful stench of blood, bile and fresh shit inside the confined space of the car. The kid was fucking around with the fancy saddlebags on his bike and my foot was itching to hit the gas. I didn’t. I waited.

  “Talk to me, Vic,” I said, tilting the rearview so I could see his pallid, sweating face. “You’re not dead, are you?”

  “You wish,” he replied with ghost of a smirk on his bluish lips.

  That’s when the blond Mexican guy came around the corner of the diner and started shooting.

  3.

  Vic’s kid saw the angry blond with the gun and ducked down behind his bike. He grabbed a saddlebag and made a sprint for the Bonneville while the blond emptied his magazine into the side of the car. God bless old-school American steel. If we’d been in a Kia, that would have been the end of it right there.

  “Come on!” I called, gunning the engine.

  The kid dove in the back and I floored the gas pedal, wheels spitting gravel and dust. Momentum slammed the door as I tore out of the lot. The blond jumped into the riceburner and fired it up, hot on our heels.

  “Shit!” the kid said, looking out the back window. “Shit, he’s following us. What are we gonna do?”

  That was a good question. What the hell were we going to do? Or more specifically, what was I going to do?

  The riceburner was gaining on us and the Bonneville was in pretty sorry shape, the indisputable tortoise in this particular race. It complained noisily as I bullied it up into the low eighties. There was a faded old sweatshirt on the passenger seat and I scooped it up and tossed it over my shoulder into the back.

  “Use this to put pressure on the wound,” I said. “You need to try and stop the bleeding.”

  “He’s bleeding from the front and the back,” the kid said, his voice pinched and breaking. “It smells really bad.”

  “Just do what you can,” I said.

  “Turn,” the kid shouted. “Here, on the left!”

  I did as he ordered, fishtailing wildly and taking out a small church billboard in the process.

  “Watch it!” he said. “You’re knocking him around back here.”

  “Look, you want to drive?” I asked, more than half serious. I’ve never been a car chase kind of girl. I’ve got other talents.

  The turn put us on a long dark road through endless fields and farmland. Born and bred urbanite that I am, I never could get used to all that deep desert blackness. L.A. is never really dark at night. Neither is Chicago, where I grew up. Yuma is like the dark side of the moon. It spooked me a little, even when I didn’t have an armed and jacked-up teenage killer trying to run me off the road.

  “He’s puking,” the kid cried from the back seat. “He’s puking! Jesus fuck!”

  “Turn his head to the side,” I said, flashing back to scraping a shitfaced and spewing Vic up off the sidewalk outside Gazarri’s. “Don’t let him choke.”

  When the riceburner rear-ended me, I just about had a heart attack. The hit sounded louder than the shotgun and my forehead bounced off the steering wheel, scattering flaming pinwheels across my vision. I’m sure there were seatbelts somewhere in that old Buick, but I hadn’t bothered to look before I peeled out of the diner lot. I would have tried to find one then, but my hands were locked, white-knuckled, around the wheel.

  Vic’s kid was in the back freaking out, saying “fuck” a lot and being generally unhelpful. Vic had gone silent and could have been dead by then for all I knew. I had no idea where I was or which direction we were headed. With everything that I’d been through in the last few years, I had pretty much come to terms with the possibility of violent death, but this was different. It wasn’t just me in the car.

  The ricer hit again from the rear, more to the left this time, sending the Bonneville skidding off to the right. I wrestled the wheel, fighting to keep the old beast steady on the road, but the ricer came up close on the outside until we were neck and neck. I could see the blond in the driver’s seat, gun raised and trying to steady his aim while driving with one hand. His eye was on me, not the road.

  I wrenched the wheel to the left as hard as I could, the Bonneville chewing fiberglass as the shiny little ricer crumpled like a tissue box. The blond’s shot shattered the driver’s side window and buried itself in the foam padding of my seatback.

  The wind through the broken window whipped my hair into my eyes, making it even harder to see the dark road. Behind me, the ricer swerved across the shoulder, flattening a barbed wire fence and several rows of lettuce, plowing up a fountain of loose dirt and eventually bumping to a crooked stop. The cockeyed headlights quickly receded in the Bonneville’s rearview.

  Silence in the backseat as I took the next two turns at random. A right then a left. I still had no idea where I was and was about to ask when Vic’s kid spoke up between clenched teeth.

  “Pull over.”

  “What?” I frowned into the rearview.

  “I said pull over!”

  I pulled over and Vic’s kid tumbled out the door, tore off his bloody t-shirt like it was soaked in poison and then staggered away into the dry, tangled cotton field by the side of the road. I could hear the sound of vomiting. My hands were shaking as I peeled them off the wheel.

  “Hey Vic,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  I looked into the rearview but couldn’t see him. He must have been lying flat on the back seat.

  “How you doing?”

  “Well, you know...I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately,” he said. “What with the recession and global warming and all that. Thanks for asking.”

  I laughed before I could stop myself. Son of a bitch always knew how to make me laugh.

  “Come on, seriously.”

  “Well the good news is...I don’t feel any pain,” he said. “Bad news...I don’t feel anything at all from the nipples down. That’s really bad, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not good,” I said. “We need to get you to a hospital.”

  “Angel,” he said. “Could you...come back here...for a minute?”

  I didn’t want to, but I did. In the back seat, the stench was even worse. The vinyl seat was sticky with coagulating blood and other pungent fluids. I had to move Vic’s head so I could slide my legs in underneath it and that movement started the crater in his belly oozing again, something dark and foul that wasn’t just blood. It took everything I had to try and keep my expression neutral.

  “Sorry about the smell,” Vic said, trying for a smirk that came out more like a grimace. He paused, and I could see how scared he was underneath the wisecracks. He took my hand in his. His fingers were damp and cold.

  “Do you know those guys? The guy that shot you?” I asked.

  Vic shook his head.

  “Never seen them before.”

  “They seemed pretty high strung,” I said. “Meth, maybe?”

  “Coke,” Vic replied. “Not crank. I oughta know. But hey, I pissed off a lot of people in my twenty-year career as a professional fuck-up, so I suppose those kids could be connected to any number of disgruntled former business associates. Or not.”

  “But why
come after you in a public diner?” I asked. “Why not wait till you were alone?”

  “You know...I hate to interrupt your sleuthing, Nancy Fuckin’ Drew, but I’m on a ticking clock here,” Vic said. “And there’s really no way to say what I have to say so it don’t sound all sappy and cliché. So fuck it, I’m just gonna say it. I’m sorry Angel. For being a lousy boyfriend, for...everything I put you through.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, wishing I could think of something that didn’t sound so empty. It’s hard to make words like “it’s okay” mean anything when you’re covered in blood and shit, miles from the nearest hospital.

  “This isn’t some bullshit twelve-step lip service either. I mean it,” he said. “You were the only one that ever mattered. I just...”

  He trailed off and I could feel all the muscles in my neck and shoulders go tense and stiff with anxious anticipation. Vic may have driven me crazy a million different ways while we were together, but he understood me better than almost anyone. I knew he hadn’t forgotten how uncomfortable any kind of mushy love talk makes me feel. The truth is, I can take on six strangers at once without batting an eye, but as soon as someone starts making love noises at me, I start looking for the exit.

  There was an endless minute of heavy, loaded silence that felt as stifling and unbearable as the stench inside the car, then:

  “Look, I know I got no right asking for favors,” Vic said.

  I squeezed his hand.

  “Then don’t,” I said.

  “Christ, Angel, you’re still such a hard ass.” Another grimace. “Come on, one last favor...for a dying man.”

  “You’re not dying, for Christ’s sake,” I said. “And if you think I’m still gonna blow you after you shit your pants, you’re out of your fucking mind.”

  He laughed, a soft, breathless wheeze.

  “Nah. It’d be a waste of your legendary talent, since I wouldn’t be able to feel it anyway.”