The inside of the old Camaro smelled like asphalt and desire, gasoline and dreams. Ronan sat behind the wheel, eyes on the midnight street. Streetlights fenced the asphalt, slashing reflections over the atomic orange hood. On either side of the road, the barren lots of car dealerships sprawled, eerie and silent.
He was as hungry as the night.
The color of the dash turned green-yellow-red under the traffic light above. In the cracked passenger-side mirror, Noah appeared anxious. He checked over his shoulder for cops. Ronan checked his teeth.
“Nice to see you, Noah,” he said. He could feel every pump of his heart, every surge through his veins. “Been a while.”
I did this, Ronan thought. The keys trembled against one another in the ignition. I made this happen.
Kavinsky was late, as always. Time, as he liked to say, was money, and though he had plenty of both, he enjoyed the thieving nonetheless.
“I’ve been trying,” Noah said. He added: “I don’t want to watch you die.”
Without answering, Ronan rubbed a thumb over the worn numbers on the gearshift. The engine pounded his shoes through the pedals. If anything about the Camaro had been built for comfort, those features had been worn away by forty years of use. The small of his back was sticky against the cracked vinyl seat. The clock didn’t work, but the tachometer did. The reluctant sigh of air through the vents was feeble, but the crash of the pistons was anything but. The engine was the loudest concert in the world, slowly thrashing itself to pieces under the hood. The speedometer was numbered all the way up to 140. That was insanity. The car felt dangerous, and it felt fast.
“I’ll get Gansey,” Noah threatened.
“I don’t think you can.”
“How long till Kavinsky gets here?”
“Noah,” Ronan said tenderly, placing his palm on top of Noah’s cold, seven-years-dead hand, “you’re starting to piss me off.”
Headlights sliced across the rearview mirror. Seventeen minutes after he was due, Kavinsky arrived.
In the rearview mirror, Ronan watched a white Mitsubishi slow as it pulled up. Its black mouth yawned; the gritty knife on the side was identical to Kavinsky’s previous car.
The Mitsubishi pulled up alongside the Camaro. The passenger window rolled down. Kavinsky wore his white-rimmed sunglasses.
“Lynch, you bastard,” he said, by way of greeting. He didn’t acknowledge Noah; he probably couldn’t see him. Ronan rolled his wrist to flip his middle finger at Kavinsky. Muscle memory.
Kavinsky appraised the Pig. “I’m impressed.”
I dreamt this. Ronan wanted to shout it.
But instead he jerked his chin at the Mitsubishi. It was hard to believe that it was real. He had just seen the last one burning from the inside out. Kavinsky must’ve run out and replaced it the very next morning. And the graphic? Maybe he’d done it himself, though it was hard to imagine Kavinsky really devoting time to anything that wasn’t powdered.
Ronan said, “That makes one of us.”
“Oh, this one’s got a bit more going on. You don’t like it?”
On the gearshift, Ronan’s hand shivered a little. More headlights glittered across the mirrors — Kavinsky’s pack of dogs. Their faces were anonymous behind dark-tinted windows, but Ronan knew the cars: Jiang’s Supra, Skov’s RX-7, Swan’s and Prokopenko’s matching Golfs. He’d beaten them all before.
“Brought the whole family,” Ronan observed. In a few minutes, they’d all disperse to look out for cops. First glimpse of a radar and Kavinsky would be warned off, gone before the asphalt had cooled.
“You know me,” Kavinsky said warmly. “I just hate to be alone. So, are you gonna fuck that old lady you’re in, or are you just gonna hold her hand?”
Ronan raised his eyebrow.
Noah said, “Ronan, don’t. Gansey’ll kill you. Ronan —”
Through the open window, Ronan asked evenly, “You gonna race with those shades on, you Bulgarian mobster Jersey trash piece of shit?”
Kavinsky nodded slowly through the question as if he agreed, scratching his wrist on the top of his steering wheel. He looked very tired or very bored as he replied, “What I can never figure out —” the traffic light flicked to red, turning his tinted lenses crimson “— is if you or Gansey is on top.”
Something black simmered inside Ronan, slow and ugly. His voice was cyanide and kerosene as he said, “What’s going to happen is I’m going to beat that car and then I’m going to get out of this car and then I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”
“Three-hundred-twenty horses say you’re wrong, man.” Kavinsky touched his neck. He wore a white tank, and his exposed shoulder was raw and beautiful as a corpse. “But keep dreaming.”
His window slid back up. Barely visible through the asphalt-black tint, Kavinsky tossed his sunglasses onto the passenger seat.
The whole world was now the traffic lights above the two cars.
“Ronan,” Noah said, “I have a super bad feeling.”
“It’s called being dead,” Ronan replied.
“That’s the sort of joke that’s only funny if you’re alive.”
“Good thing I am.”
“For now.”
Wait for the green. Ronan’s eyes were not on the traffic light overhead but on the light on the opposing street. When it turned yellow, he had two seconds to get off the line.
Ronan eased his foot off the clutch, pressed down on the gas, held the car in check. The tach quivered just below the red line. The engine was alive, snarling, rattling. The sound replaced Ronan’s pulse. Smoke from the rear tires crept from beneath the car and into the still-open windows. Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi was barely audible over the howl of the Pig.
For a single second, Ronan allowed himself to think of his father and the Barns and his dreams stretching out before him full of impossible things. He allowed himself to think of the part of himself that was a bomb, the wick burning fast and destructive, nearly gone.
The opposing light was still solid green. The traffic light overhead was red as a warning.
Want was eating him alive.
The opposing traffic light went yellow. One second. He slid his foot farther off the clutch. One second. The gearshift knob sweated beneath his palm.
Green.
The cars burst from the line. It was growl, growl, growl, and this, strangely audible: Kavinsky’s primal laugh.
Shift.
Immediately, the Mitsubishi was nearly a length ahead. On either side of the street, the streetlights flickered and flared, measuring out life in epileptic bursts of light: flash cracked asphalt flash Aglionby sticker on the dashboard flash Noah’s widened eyes They were bodies electric.
The Camaro caught the Mitsubishi in the second half, just as Ronan had expected. The engine raged at the top of second gear, and there it was. Crouched somewhere between second and third gear, somewhere between four thousand and five thousand RPMs, there was pure joy. Screaming along with the thousands of tiny explosions beneath the hood was a place where Ronan felt nothing but uncomplicated happiness, a dead and empty place in his heart where he needed nothing else.
Beside them, the Mitsubishi sagged. Kavinsky had buggered the shift from third to fourth. Like he always did.
Ronan did not.
Shift.
The engine roared anew. The car was Gansey’s religion, and Ronan found it a worthy god. Its slender hood nosed ahead of the Mitsubishi. Put a length between them. Another half. It was nothing but up from here.