Black Oil, Red Blood

Chapter 20



“Where are we going?” Miles asked groggily.

We were all exhausted. Only Lucy was perky and excited to get to ride in the car, no matter what time of night it was.

“To find Cameron, ASAP,” Nash said.

I entered Cameron’s address into my GPS and filled Miles in on what had just gone down, omitting the part about my personal conversation with Nash.

“Girl, you better be kidding me,” Miles said. “You took down a cop?”

“Technically, Nash took down the cop, not me,” I said.

“Wow,” Miles told Nash. “I am totally going to have to change my definition of who I think you are.”

“Well, that makes two of us,” Nash said.

We were about forty miles outside of Dallas. I was starting to worry that Chief Scott might have had a line on where we were headed, since he had bothered to put out an APB that extended this far north. I voiced my concerns to Nash.

“He probably just issued a state-wide alert,” Nash said. “Even if he knows we’re looking for a guy named Cameron Gilbert, he won’t be able to get the address unless he calls the FBI—and I don’t think he’s going to call the FBI because he knows they’re the white hats in this situation. He won’t want to stir up anything that could come back to bite him.”

I wasn’t so sure, but I was too tired to argue with Nash.

Driving up I-35 as we neared Dallas, I could see the shifting lights that decorated the Reunion Tower ball and the green quasi-neon glow of the Bank of America building. I had so many memories here. High school, law school, Dorian. Under any other circumstances, I’d feel relieved to be back.

Nearer to downtown, I started to realize I didn’t really care for the direction in which we were headed. We exited I-35 just south of downtown and took a right into the hood, into an area of town I never, ever went—especially at night—and was wholly unfamiliar with.

There were no gas stations here. No grocery stores. Only boarded up buildings about twenty-five years overdue for new windows and fresh paint. Structures that passed for homes were scattered around what used to be commercial real estate and warehouses. It was like the zoning commission had completely ignored this area when planning the city. Occasionally, we’d drive past some guys who were out walking around for probably no good reason at this hour. They stared suspiciously at my shiny black Lexus. Lexus owners didn’t usually drive around in this neighborhood, and especially not in the middle of the night.

“This doesn’t feel right,” Nash said.

“You’re telling me. This place scares me more than Kettle.”

My GPS dinged. “You have arrived,” it said.

Nash pulled to a stop in front of an old, abandoned garage. Rusted-out cars littered the parking lot, and scrap metal was strewn about like post-modern confetti. “Guns out. You two stay here. I’ll go check it out. Try to cover me, okay?”

I didn’t feel good about it, but reluctantly agreed. I would have felt a lot better calling for backup or something, which of course, was out of the question under the circumstances. Not that I didn’t trust Nash. It’s just that he was only one man backed up by a chick in high heels and a gay guy who was apparently allergic to steel.

Nash left the keys in the ignition. I shut the car off and rolled down the windows so I could better hear what was happening in there, if anything. Then I took my gun and propped it gingerly on the window sill, careful to keep my fingers away from the trigger. I did press the laser sight button though, just to make sure I wasn’t aiming the thing at Nash accidentally. I settled for pointing it well to Nash’s right and held still, alert.

Miles refused to touch his. “It’s all you, baby,” he said, leaving his gun on the car seat beside him.

Lucy poked her head out the window and sniffed the air.

Nash crept towards the half-open sliding garage door. He was crouched low, a gun in each hand, wrists crossed. He swiveled back and forth as he moved in, covering himself as best he could. It was pretty clear that he didn’t really trust us to do the job.

Beside me, Lucy stiffened and let out a low growl. I tried to soothe her by stroking her head with my free hand. “Shhhh, baby. Shhhh. It’s okay.”

Her growl got progressively louder. She refused to calm down. I followed her gaze to a stack of old tires off to the left of the garage and readjusted my laser sight in that direction, just in case.

Lucy started barking immediately before the shots rang out. Not mine. Someone else’s. Behind me, Miles swore and ducked low in the back seat. I pulled Lucy down from the window, hunkered down, and hesitantly fired off a couple return shots at the tire stack. On the one hand, I didn’t want to shoot anyone. On the other hand, I really didn’t want to get shot. If I had to choose the lesser of two evils, I would choose the one that kept me alive every time.

I peered at the tire stacks and still didn’t see anyone. The shots had stopped.

Nash had his back pressed against an inside wall, out of the line of sight of the tire stack. Edging his head around the corner, he saw my laser sight pointed at the tire stack and gave me a thumbs up.

A bullet from another direction slammed into the wall next to Nash’s head, and he dropped to the ground and rolled out of sight. There was more than one shooter, and they apparently had us surrounded.

“Miles!” I yelled. “They’re on both sides! Cover the right! I’ll take the tire stack to the left!”

Miles picked up his gun, pointed it out the window, shut his eyes, and fired off three rounds. He squinted one eye open. “Did I hit anything?” he asked?

“I don’t think so.”

Lucy was in the floorboard growling up a storm. I could barely keep her down.

Another gunshot from the tire stacks distracted me. Lucy took advantage of my momentary lack of vigilance, leapt over me, and jumped out the window. She ran straight toward the tires.

“Lucy! No! Nooooooooooooooo!”

I didn’t even think. My protective instincts kicked in, and I jumped out of the car and ran straight for her, shooting at the tires the whole time. Miles remained in the car, screaming.

Lucy rounded the tire stack and pounced on a man. In the glow of the headlights, I could see that he was Hispanic and wore black pants and a black t-shirt. Lucy looked like she was about to rip the tendons out of his gun arm.

I lunged to get her away from him.

The man tried to grab me and simultaneously fight off Lucy at the same time. I resisted him. In the scuffle, my gun went off, and he went down with a sickening thud. I watched, horrified, as he stopped breathing.

Realizing that I’d just killed a man, my body went cold and my muscles went slack. I felt a wave of nausea. Oh no. This was bad, bad, bad! But there wasn’t enough time for the emotional repercussions to really sink in. Lucy, who was still growling, whirled and leapt out of my arms at someone behind me.

Before I could see who she was growling at this time, a hand came down hard on my arm and my gun went flying. A muscular arm wrapped around my throat. My hands were powerless to dislodge it.

The man shook Lucy off. She hit the ground with a squeal and ran away. I couldn’t turn my head to see where to. I prayed she wasn’t badly hurt, but the fact that she’d given up on attacking this guy didn’t bode well.

In the parking lot, Miles must have scrambled into the front seat and fired up the engine. Tires peeled and screeched on the concrete as he floored the car and sped toward us, hand out the window holding his weapon.

Now he was going to use his gun? To shoot the guy behind me, who had his arm around my throat and was using me as a human shield?

“Don’t shoot!” I screamed. “Are you crazy? You’ll hit me!”

Miles withdrew his gun arm and floored it, speeding toward me and my captor in the ultimate game of chicken.

The guy bought it.

He let me go and dove left as I flew right. Miles hit the brakes and fishtailed in front of me. “Get in!”

It nearly killed me to get in the car not knowing what had happened to Lucy, but I did anyway, praying I could save myself and find her later.

I dove through the window and Miles took off, but not before my attacker jumped on the hood.

For the first time, I was able to get a good look at the guy. He was white, skinny, lightly tanned, clean-shaven, and wore the same black pants and t-shirt as the other guy. I might have thought he was a cologne-ad model if I’d met him in the daylight under different circumstances.

“What do I do? What do I do?” Miles asked, clearly panicked.

“Keep driving!”

Right about this time, fatigue caught up with me and I started to shake. . . this on top of the nausea wracking my body as a reaction to the accidental killing of a few seconds ago. If I took time to think about what might be happening to Lucy and Nash, I would vomit, for sure.

We sped away from the broken down garage, desperately trying to figure out how to shake the guy off the hood.

Miles glanced over at me. “You don’t look so good.”

“I think I just killed a guy,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

Miles rolled down my window. The opportunity was all I needed to put me over the edge. I leaned out and lost my breakfast.

“Chloe, you had to,” Miles said. “If you hadn’t killed him, he would have killed you first.”

“It was an accident,” I said, wiping my face. “I don’t know. Maybe I could have gotten away.”

Our current attacker had a grip on the top of the hood just below the windshield wipers, and he was muscling his way up to get whatever kind of foothold he could. To me, it looked like his black sneakers were getting pretty good traction on my paint job.

“What about this guy? How are we going to get away from him?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Try to shake him off!”

I reached over and flipped on the brights. Immediately, I spotted a mini skateboard ramp on the sidewalk ahead. “The ramp! Hit the ramp!”

Miles swerved, and the left front wheel bounced up on the sidewalk and hit the ramp. The ramp, instead of putting air between my ground and the wheels, just splintered beneath the weight of the car.

The guy inched over to the driver’s side, putting himself directly in Miles’s line of vision.

“I can’t see!” he yelled, and slammed on the brakes.

“No! You have to keep driving!” I grabbed the steering wheel. “Hit the gas! I’ll steer!”

I yanked the wheel back and forth, trying to shake the guy off while Miles leaned out the window, trying to loosen his grip.

No luck. He held on like a leech, or one of those particularly disgusting suckerfishes.

The guy’s hand jumped from the hood and grasped the side of Miles’ window. His fingers curled inside.

“Roll up the window!”

Miles did, but the smooth electronic close was way too slow to catch the guy’s fingers. His hand flew loose. For a minute, I thought he’d fall. But he caught himself again and held on with two hands on the neck of the hood.

I circled back around towards the garage. After all, we couldn’t just leave Nash and Lucy there. Maybe Nash would see us coming and shoot this guy off my car. Better him than me. I didn’t want another body on my conscience.

“More gas,” I told Miles.

Miles put a little more foot into it, hands over his face, eyes closed. I gripped the wheel and steered for my life.

“Do something!” Miles said. “I can’t hold him anymore!”

The garage loomed ahead. I didn’t see Nash, but I had a plan.

I adjusted the steering wheel and aimed the car straight for the tire stack.

I just wanted to shake the guy off. Maybe the tires would cushion his landing.

The tire stack seemed to grow ever larger as I careened toward it. We were approaching way too fast.

“Less gas! Foot off the pedal!”

Miles didn’t appear to hear me. The car didn’t slow down.

I fought the urge to close my eyes. If I was about to kill myself, I wanted to see what the end of my life looked like. On the other hand, if I was about to kill another guy, I also didn’t want to watch. I settled for shutting one eye and squinting the other one half open.

The car crashed into the tires, and I saw an explosion of white as the airbags deployed.

The man’s body flipped backwards. He sailed over the sea of tires rolling away in every direction and landed on the cement with a crack.

A rogue tire rolled up over his arm, did a little spin, and came to rest, doughnuting his head.

In the dim light, I could barely make him out. But it was bright enough to spot a small pool of blood oozing out from underneath the tire.

I felt woozy. I had never so much as punched a man before, let alone killed one. And here I had killed two guys in the space of five minutes. I wasn’t too worried about legal repercussions, assuming I ever got out of this alive. Clearly it was self defense. But the sense of permanent destruction, of having done something so intense and so final, something that could never be taken back, had already started to haunt me.

But even stronger than the urge to stop the violence was the urge to protect myself and find Lucy and Nash. I grabbed another gun from the back seat and got out of the car, positioning myself between an old, rusted-out Buick and my Lexus. Miles did the same. We hunkered down behind it waiting, watching for more shots.

After a minute or two, I decided the coast was clear. We were sitting ducks in the middle of the garage lot. If anyone was out there, they’d surely be shooting at us by now.

“Lucy!” I called. “Nash?”

Silence.

Nothing moved. I heard no sounds.

Not good. If Lucy were around, surely she’d have come running. I held on to one small hope. Lucy was afraid of loud noises. Sometimes, if it thundered, or if I set off the smoke detector while cooking, she’d run and hide and wouldn’t come out no matter how much I called her. I could only hope that the gunfire and the car crash had scared her into hiding, where she’d be safe.

I was anxious for Nash, but less worried about him than Lucy. He had a gun, after all, and he knew how to use it.

I called out again. We waited for what seemed like ages.

A light popped on inside the garage.

Through the gaping front door, I saw a silhouette emerge. Nash.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God! He was okay!

Nash walked slowly forward. He looked anxious, like maybe he was worried about us.

I rushed toward him to tell him we were all right.

Not until I crossed the threshold did I see the barrel of the gun pointed at his head. Too late.