Alice & Dorothy (33 page)

“Hold on a sec,” Alice said. “Just give me a moment.” She had jammed the pistol into the gap between the seats, and now she scooped it up in her hands and slid it handle-up between her thighs. The metal was still warm, and it made her skin tickle at the thought of death being so close to her pussy.
Is that what it was like for that guy before I blew his head off?

“Alice!” Dorothy cried, looking up at her, “
What the hell do you think you’re doing?
”

“I told you to shut up,” Alice said.

“No!” Dorothy said. “That’s a
cop
out there, Alice! You can’t just shoot a cop!”

“
WHY NOT!
” Alice shouted, then snapped her mouth shut. Behind them, the officer was getting out of his car. He seemed to be in no hurry. His gun was unlatched but undrawn on his hip, and as he slammed his car door, he rested a lazy hand across the back end of it. So maybe they weren’t suspects. Not yet, anyway.
But soon enough
.

“You can’t just shoot everyone who gets in your way!” Dorothy said.

Alice looked down at her then back into her mirror. “You have snot on your face,” she said. Her voice was calm, like ice.
I’m cool as a cucumber. A fucking cool cucumber.

“I don’t care,” Dorothy huffed, but she buried her face in her dog.

The cop reached the back of the car, and as he came up on the driver’s side Alice rolled the window down all the way. Her right hand was buried in her crotch, covering any part of the gun.

“Where’s the fire?” he said, looking straight down the front of Alice’s shirt as he spoke. His badge said
Officer Reynolds
.

Alice laughed. She adjusted herself so he could get a better look.
Atta boy
.
Get a good long look. Keep your eyes on my tits and you just might live through this.

“What’s going on?” Reynolds said. “You’re missing your back window and you’re driving like a maniac.”

He leaned down so he could get a better look into the car. He looked across the car at Dorothy and then back to Alice. “What the hell is wrong with her?”

Alice’s hand moved fast, from her crotch, pulling up the gun toward his face.

“
SHE DOESN’T LIKE GUNS!
” The Hater screamed, and pulled the trigger.

The gun puffed smoke and fire up and out of the car, leaving behind a roar that echoed in their heads. Reynolds was already moving out of the way though, and he fell back on the asphalt and rolled away from the car, yelling
Jesus Christ Oh Jesus Oh Jesus
.

Alice popped the door open and got out, holding the weapon in front of her. The cop was in the process of rolling up to one knee. He had his weapon drawn but hadn’t set himself to shoot yet. Alice had.

She fired again, missed, and then she and Reynolds fired at nearly the same instant. He went down on his face screaming. Alice felt like she’d been punched in the shoulder. Or maybe she’d been stabbed with a white hot fire poker, and the force of the impact threw her back against the car and then she was bleeding everywhere at once.

Reynolds was still screaming as he crawled toward his car, one hand on a bleeding stomach wound and the other pointing his gun toward Alice. He fired again but missed; the next shot he took blew out the side window of the car and sent Dorothy into fits of hysterical sobbing.

Alice shot back and caught him in the side, either near or in his ribs, and half spun him around. He blasted a shot off wild; it went into a farmer’s field away from them. He popped the door open with the hand he’d been using to hold the blood in his stomach wound and left a long streak down the side of the car door. He collapsed half on his seat, reaching for the car radio. The gun was pointed out toward Alice, and as she came closer with her own gun trained on him, he fired and missed.

Alice ducked when the gun went off, a useless gesture. She knew enough about guns to know it was impossible to dodge a bullet unless you were Superman. The human body just didn’t move fast enough to get out of the way of something moving as fast as a bullet.

She looked up in time to see Rabbit in that silver behemoth on the other side of the road, driving slowly and watching the action. He must have found somewhere to turn around and was on his way back. Alice took a lazy aim and fired; a small black smudge appeared in the back door on the driver’s side and the window blew out. Rabbit hit the gas and the car fishtailed down the highway.

Officer Reynolds was convulsing where he lay, half in the car with his legs stretched out on the asphalt. As Alice came around the door and pointed the gun at his face.

He was gagging on vomit and blood. His gun hand convulsed in its own rhythm apart from the rest of his body; it caused the barrel of his gun to scrape against the road with a metallic
taptaptap
.

He looked up at Alice, standing over him with her gun pointed at him, but Alice didn’t think he was seeing her. His eyes had taken on a sluggish, glassy look. His jaw was working but he didn’t speak. Instead, he was softly stuttering F’s in rapid in and out breaths.

Alice placed the barrel of her gun against Reynolds forehead and pulled the trigger. The back of his head erupted like cherry pie, if her mother had ever made a cherry pie with chunks of raw steak and knots of hair instead of cherries. The hole in his forehead pissed blood into his half open eyes and his gasping mouth, but he was already much too far gone to taste it. His head rocked back against the seat and his feet twitched for a moment like a spider’s legs after it’s been crushed under heel, and then Reynolds was still.

Alice reached down and grabbed his gun off the pavement. Then she reached into his belt and pulled two more clips from a little pocket on his left side. The computer in the car was flashing and whistling at her, so Alice shot it until the gun ran dry. Then she dropped the clip on the ground and reloaded the weapon.

When she turned back to the Volkswagen, she could see Dorothy’s face peeking at her from behind the passenger seat. And then the world was swimming and Alice had to prop herself up on the squad car. She staggered between the two vehicles and fell hard against the back of the Volkswagen. She slid along the side until she got to Dorothy’s door. Then she popped it open. She fell again but caught herself before she landed on top of Dorothy. “You have to drive,” Alice said, pointing the gun at the empty driver’s seat. “
Fuh-hucker shot me
.”

Dorothy was holding her hands over her breasts. She turned at the sound of Alice’s voice, but when she opened her mouth to respond it was with blood, not words. She held her hands up to show Alice what had happened. There was a tight black hole in her chest, on the top of her left breast.

“Oh my god,” Alice breathed. “
Ohmygawdohmygawd
.” The sky flashed rainbow lightning; blues and pinks in vertigo brilliance. The engine of the car was ticking like a high speed clock. Alice took Dorothy’s hands in her own. She whispered a word:
No.

Alice fell to her knees. She dropped her head into Dorothy’s lap. Her grief was too big; she couldn’t get it out. The sky darkened and lightened around them as the sun rose and set a hundred times a minute. Someone was screaming
NO! NO! NO!
It was Alice. She sucked in Dorothy’s scent with every wailing sob. Snot and blood and tears mixed and dropped from her face into Dorothy’s jeans. Alice couldn’t breathe. She didn’t want to go on. She wanted to lay here and die beside her girl. She took a gasping breath and flowers of colour bloomed in her eyes. She coughed her tears out like they were broken glass.

Please come back. Please come back.

She was still holding Officer Reynolds’ pistol. She pulled the hammer back and slid the barrel in her mouth.

Good girl,
the Hater said in Rabbit’s voice.
Take it all. Take it to the fur.

This was it. The end. Alice was calm. She squeezed Dorothy’s fingers with her free hand.
I’ll see you soon, baby, I promise. I love you.

“
Wait.
”

The voice came from nowhere. It floated in on the wind and danced around Alice before settling over her heart. It flitted on her chest like a newborn butterfly. She looked up, the gun banging against her teeth.

Dorothy was smiling down at her. “I’m okay. Look.” She pulled her hand away from her chest. There was a lot of blood, but Alice could see it was stopping already.
A flesh wound. That’s all it is.

“Yeah,” Dorothy said, as thought reading her thoughts. “It must have bounced off something. It might not even be a bullet. It might be a piece of plastic from the dashboard or something.”

Alice dropped the gun in Dorothy’s lap. She reached up and kissed her hard on the mouth. She pressed their cheeks together tight and whispered
I love you
over and over again. Dorothy laughed, and it was the sweetest sound Alice had ever heard.

“Come on, my girl,” Dorothy said. “Everything is going to be fine. There’s a storm coming.”

“It’s already here,” Alice said, not looking at the sky but at her life. She staggered to her feet and made it to the driver’s side of the car where she fell behind the wheel in a heap. Her shoulder was screaming at her, and she was shaky and sweaty from pain and blood loss. She started the car and put it into gear, and then reached over and grabbed Dorothy’s hand.

Dorothy smiled back and rubbed Alice’s dirty hand on her cheek. She kissed it lightly.

Above them, the clouds were a black roiling mess; lightning crashed and the sky spit fat, stinging raindrops onto the road ahead of them. The air was filled with the smell of blood and rain and wet pavement. The yellow car picked up speed, but Alice didn’t think they’d ever go fast enough to escape the mess they’d created.

Rabbit was nervous about coming back toward the shit storm Alice had just dumped all over the road, but he was fresh out of options by this point. It didn’t matter to the people he owed money to how many cops Alice might kill before she finally went down. All they cared about was the money Rabbit owed them, and they considered it Rabbit’s
personal
debt. If Alice and her girlfriend took the drugs, well, no matter to them. They wouldn’t bother collecting from the girls. They’d take it out on Rabbit himself.

“
Drive slow
,” Wild eyed and alert, Devon leaned as far forward in his seat that his substantial girth would allow.

That was fine with Rabbit.
He was always the bumbler of the two,
he thought.
Devon was the brains. I guess that’s what happens when someone kills your best friend in front of you.

It was starting to rain. Ahead of them on the road they could see the flashing blues and reds of the cop car on the side of the road, its door hanging open and a man lying halfway out of it. The raindrops splashed the windshield of Eazy’s car and distorted the view, but it was easy to see the cop was dead. Rabbit slowed the vehicle down as they approached, and Devon rolled his window down to get a closer look.

“Fuck me,” he said. “Look at his fuckin head. You can see right through
dat
hole.”

Rabbit didn’t want to look at it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the sight of blood and death. God knew he had seen enough violence the past few days to last him a lifetime. No, he was fine looking through the release valve Alice had implanted in the cop’s head.
It’s not the blood,
he told himself.
It’s what all that blood means
. She was a cop killer now, and she’d be lucky if half the police in the state didn’t line up to take a shot at her. They always took that shit so personal. It made things more difficult on Rabbit and Devon. It meant they had to get to the girls, and soon, before the world exploded in red and blue lights and trigger-happy cops started raining down on them like this spring storm was about to. They were on a time limit now, of that there was no doubt.

“What’s that?” Devon said, pointing to a large bloodstain on the road, just a few feet from where the cop car. “
Looks like blood
.”

“Holy fuck,” Rabbit said. He stopped the car. It
was
blood on the road. A big puddle of it. There were streaks of red on the hood of the cop car as well, but none of it matched up with where the cop was laying. In fact, the streak patterns were coming
away
from the dead cop. “I think we just stumbled on some luck.”

“Huh
.
” Devon rubbed his hands together. “That cop shot her.”

“Looks like it,” Rabbit said. “And if she’s hit bad enough, she might be dead soon.”

“Then we
jes
worry about findin’ her.”

Rabbit smiled grimly. He hit the gas and the car roared away from the crime scene. Somewhere up ahead of them, Alice might slowly be losing her grip on life. If they were lucky, they might find the car on the side of the road and she’d be hanging on by threads. Then Rabbit had no qualms about collecting his heroin and dumping Eazy’s car in the river. They’d even give it a quick rubdown to cover their asses. He watched
C.S.I
.. If there was one thing Rabbit knew, it was covering his own ass.