“I am!” Isaiah said.
The Explorer veered offline. Isaiah cranked the wheel but overcorrected, the back end swinging to the side and banging into a dumpster. The cop is coming.
“Straighten out!” Dodson said.
“Shut up!” Isaiah said. He cranked the wheel the other way, overcorrecting again and shearing the side mirror off on a telephone pole. He spun the wheel back and forth, trying to center the car, but the back end was wagging wildly, banging into walls, the glove box popping open, stuff crashing around in the back. The cop is coming.
“Straighten out! Straighten out!”
The car skidded completely sideways and lurched backward before Isaiah could shift out of reverse.
“The fuck you doing, Isaiah?” Dodson shouted.
Isaiah stomped on the brakes but it was too late. The car rammed into something solid, their heads thrown forward and back into the headrests. They sat there stunned. Isaiah turned the ignition off. The car was in a parking area, the alley in front of it now, the rear bumper smashed into the loading dock of a produce market. There was a building on either side. If the cop hadn’t seen them already he couldn’t see them now. Headlight beams crossed in front of them. The cop was in the alley.
“Did he see us?” Dodson said.
“I don’t think so,” Isaiah said, “but he might have heard the crash.”
The beams got brighter. Would the cop stop at the bicycle shop or keep coming and find two seventeen-year-old boys in fishing clothes and ski masks hiding in a dead man’s car? They waited, the windows fogging up. The beams stopped. Isaiah’s chin dropped to his chest, sweat dripping into his lap. “That was close,” he said.
Dodson was staring blankly, his mouth hanging open like the firing squad had emptied their rifles at him and missed. “Could we get the fuck outta here, please?”
On the trip back to Long Beach, Isaiah was as still as a person can be and still drive a car. Dodson pulled his S&W .38 Special from under his fishing shirt. It was a revolver, lighter than a Glock, the barrel two inches long. The fellas preferred semiautos but Dodson liked pulling the hammer back and hearing it click. Just the sound of it scared the shit out of people. He flipped open the gun’s cylinder, pushed the ejector rod, the bullets falling into his palm. “Safety first,” he said. He put the bullets in his pocket and tucked the gun away. “Whatever you got to say, say it.”
“You were really going to shoot me? Shoot a cop?”
“Maybe, but I know I wasn’t going to jail.”
“I told you no guns.”
“I know what you told me, nigga, but I don’t give a shit. I took enough orders from my old man and I ain’t taking no more from you or anybody else.”
“They’re not orders, they’re just—you’re messing everything up, you know that, don’t you?”
“You the one messing shit up. I’m telling you, Isaiah, y’all better get your boot up off my neck or some shit gonna happen.”
“Like what?” Isaiah said, angry now. Dodson threatening him with a gun. Threatening to take his life away the way life had taken Marcus. “What are you gonna do? What? Tell me. Because whatever it is, stop trying to intimidate me and do it.”
“Don’t push me. We get into it I’ll fuck you up.”
“And wreck the whole thing? End it? You won’t, I know you won’t. You need this too much.”
“Yeah, but you need it worse than me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“I figure it like this. I need the money. You just need it.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
You Can Make Anything Run
July 2013
Skip parked the Speedy Appliance Repair van and put on his Kenmore cap. The kids playing football in the street were too busy arguing about the out-of-bounds line to notice him getting out of the van with a duffel bag full of tools and walking across the street to Q Fuck’s house. He rang the bell even though he knew nobody was home. He took his time, ambling down the driveway toward the garage and backyard. Since when do repairmen hurry? Music was coming from the neighbor’s house. A good thing. He checked the kitchen door but the locks were indestructible.