The occasional truck in the oncoming lane, pushing its blast of air.
“It’s getting light,” said Walter. “If you see something that’s open, let’s get some paint.”
They rolled by one large discount store in a shopping plaza, a thousand parking spaces deep. The letters were stripped off the concrete fa?ade. Given up for dead.
“I gotta take a leak, man,” said Ty. “Gas station right up here, man, please.”
“You might want to park a way off,” said Walter.
“We need gas anyway,” East observed.
Maybe they’d been lucky. Maybe they should have expected to be stopped long ago. East walked into the little station shop and found a roll of red tape for broken taillights. FOR TEMPORARY USE, the package said. The cashier wore a red sweater the color of Christmas and a strange thing on her head. It appeared to be a pair of stuffed antlers. She was a big lady, big diamond ring, somebody’s mom.
“You got any paint?”
The lady shook her head. “The new ordinance.”
“What new ordinance?”
“When certain people,” she said loudly, as if it were a rehearsed speech, “spray paint all over the middle school? They won’t find it quite so easy next time.”
East looked away then. He paid for the tape.
“Thank you anyway, ma’am,” he said, his best manners.
The lady put the tape in a useless plastic bag. “You’re welcome, hon.”
Outside, the only person was Ty, standing in the cold in his socks. It was as if the cold and the van had driven something into him, because his eyes were big, and he quivered slightly, the way a cat does watching a yard mouse. The moment East saw him, Ty took the gun out. A car was pulling in, a low white sedan, Infiniti. Ty stepped right into its path and brought the gun up.
The tires chirped, and the sedan stopped short.
What? thought East. Helplessly. For, he saw now, agreeing on a plan, he and Walter, meant nothing to Ty.
Nothing he said or did meant anything in Ty’s mad story of the world.
He wanted to deny it, to return to the starting block and start over. No. In the station’s noisy light, the Glock was a dark fact. The runners weren’t stopping. Ty circled, taking aim on the driver, hollering, “Man! Get the fuck out the car!”
14.
The boy wearing dirty socks yanked the driver out of the car. He thrust the gun against the man’s face until the man was up against the pumps, teetering.
“What are you doing, man?” the older boy demanded, one eye a bruise, the other wild.
The younger boy ducked inside the car to look. No wife. No babies. Just this early businessman in his buttons and tie. Unlucky. The boy popped the trunk release and stood up. He gestured with the gun arm. “Get in the trunk.”
A gold tie. Gold with a pattern of bright blue pearls.
“Oh, no,” the man said. Low and collected, even indignant. “I’m not going in there.”
“Give me the keys,” said the younger boy, “and get in.” He leveled the gun again.
“No,” gulped the man. He appealed to the taller boy, to the cashier inside, with his eyes, one raised hand.
The younger boy raised the gun up and shot one hole through the canopy. The echo bounced down, metallic.
“We can’t do it like this,” the older boy said. “It’s crazy. You need to chill out. We can’t come with you like this.”
“Think I need you?” said the younger one. “You ain’t fit for nothing but standing yard.” To the man he said, “I’m a say it just once. To me you’re just one more bullet.”
The older boy thrust in then between the young one and his prey and shoved, made the gunner bounce off the car, nearly fall. The younger one found his footing and turned. The businessman pressed himself hard behind the gas pump.
“Oh,” said the younger one. “So now we see.”
He raised his gun, and the older boy, a gun in his hand though it hadn’t been there until then, shot the younger in the chest. The younger boy uttered a short cry, and he fell. In a flash the older boy was on him, pinning the arm and taking the gun, rifling the pockets, taking a cache of bullets bunched carefully in a greasy wrapping. Opening the boy’s pants and taking a fold of twenties out of the vent in the underwear. As if he’d known it would be there. He stood again and shut his eyes.
“Jesus,” prayed the businessman. “Sweet Jesus.”
“Shut up,” the older boy said. He turned. Then something overtook him. He bent over the young boy’s body, put something back inside the boy’s pants. He buttoned them and stood again, looking down. The boy on the ground opened his mouth, rolled his head back. The muscles of his neck quivered in the night glare.
A fat boy in a van behind sat stricken at the wheel.
In the floodlights’ glare, the older boy’s face was a mask, angles of hardening bone, the eyes shadowy holes. He faced the man with the golden tie. “Run, God damn you,” he said.
“Sweet Jesus,” the businessman pleaded. In the station the woman with an antler headdress held her phone and stared, holding, holding.
15.