Chapter 32
I watched the road ahead, looking for clues to our destination. "Is this where you tell me where we're going?"
"Call it a trip down memory lane," he said.
Considering his choice of car and his veiled comments about wanting to keep me safe, I should probably be been scared. But somehow, I wasn't.
It was like standing on the edge of some cliff and looking down, feeling the danger, but clinging to safety. I let my gaze shift to Lawton. He was sitting back in the driver's seat, one hand over the steering wheel as he navigated the afternoon traffic.
He was solid. And dangerous. I felt myself swallow. And that's when I knew. If this thing were a cliff, I was in big danger. Because so help me, I wanted to jump.
I turned sideways in the seat to face him. "C'mon, give me a hint," I said.
It wasn't quite the peak of rush hour, but it was getting close. We'd just made it out of the residential section and were pulling onto I-75. Lawton slid into traffic, and eased into the fast lane.
"You haven't guessed?" he said.
I had a rough idea of where he supposedly grew up. From the street signs, it was easy to see which direction we were heading. "Detroit?"
"Yup."
"Which part?"
As for me, I'd grown up in Hamtramck, a city almost completely surrounded by Detroit. But I'd been avoiding Detroit itself for years.
In high school, I used to spend a lot of time in Greektown or sometimes on the Riverwalk. And once, I spent an entire afternoon in the Institute of Arts, admiring the marble structure outside, and hundreds of paintings inside.
But after Kimberly Slotka, a girl from my American history class, got carjacked and pistol-whipped for her used Camaro, I guess I just stayed away from the whole area. Most of us did. Mostly we stuck to our own neighborhoods, or ventured out into the suburbs.
Downtown was supposedly on an upswing, with young professionals and hipsters moving in where others had left. In my few recent visits, I'd seen some of this firsthand. But then there were the parts I would never visit, places where pizza deliveries required an armed guard, if they delivered at all.
Today was a weekday, and it was still light out, so there were parts of the city that wouldn't be too bad. But other parts, they weren't good at any time.
The cars on the highway were an interesting mix. I saw late-model Cadillacs and even a couple of Lexuses, along with too many Fords and Chevys to count. Cars, trucks, SUVs. Some old, some new. Way too many were beat up or rusted around the wheels.
Motor City or not, Detroit was hard on cars. All of Michigan was. In the winter, rock salt fell in torrents from giant trucks that rumbled through snowstorms, dropping their payloads onto the slick pavement.
All winter long, the battle went on – the salt trucks on one side, snow and ice on the other. Caught in the crossfire were all those cars, screwed no matter who won. Either they'd slide, or they'd rust. Most did both.
It was early November. We'd see snow before the month's end. I was sure of it. My tires were bald, and my battery was iffy at best. If winter never came, I'd be a happy girl.
We spent a few minutes on Woodward, and then turned off on some side street, and then another, heading deeper into the guts of the city. I saw boarded up shops and burned-out buildings, and houses that looked like no one had lived there for decades.
"Welcome to Zombieland," Lawton said.
He had a point. I saw stately brick buildings with overgrown shrubbery and broken windows, burnt-out shells of others, and charred roofs falling over the brick-and-mortar remains of once-majestic structures.
The streets were nearly empty, with random, beat-up cars parked haphazardly along the curbs and almost no traffic at all. For such a large city, it was eerily quiet.
"Zombieland," I said. "Or a war zone."
"Yeah, and we lost."
I looked around. "Where is everyone?"
"Moved, holed up inside, still asleep. Hard to say."
The further we drove, the worse it got. I saw boarded up-buildings covered in graffiti interspersed with bare fields of tall, scraggly grass and scattered tires. Telephone poles leaned at odd angles, and vines crept into the missing windows of vacant buildings.
Then, it got worse. The large, majestic structures gave way to tiny homes, some burnt, some boarded up, and others missing patches of siding and their front doorknobs.
"Is this where you grew up?" I asked.
"Almost," he said. "It's a few blocks up." He gave me a sideways glance. "We're gonna stop. But don't roll down the window, and don’t open the door."
"Trust me," I said. "I wasn’t planning to."
When we rolled to a stop a few minutes later, we were in front of a narrow, two-story brick house with a covered front porch.
Lawton flicked his head toward it. "My Grandma's house."