Hailey's War (23 page)

“Oh,
fuck,”
I said.

“Who was that?” Payaso said.

“Enemigo,”
I said.

Maybe he didn't see. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he didn't
. Eyes glued to the rearview, I willed the Mercedes to keep going.

Its brake lights flashed red, and I knew it was going to turn around. I pushed the accelerator to the floor. With my right hand, I grabbed the radio. “Warchild,” I said, “we're being pursued. It's a silver Mercedes, California plates.”

“Insula, I'm two miles to Highway One. What's your twenty?”

“About five miles out,” I said. “Just stay clear of us, okay? I'll catch up with you when I can.”

He was gaining fast. I had less than a quarter mile on him when I gained Highway One, braked hard, and swung the Bronco into the southbound lane at about thirty miles an hour. That might not sound like a lot of speed, but it is for a right-angle turn, when you're carrying a pregnant woman. In the rearview, I saw Payaso wrap his arms protectively around Nidia.

I jammed the accelerator down again, picking up speed.

I should have listened to Serena. I should have gotten the fastest goddamned car CJ's money would buy. I was an idiot.

If I stopped, could we win in a shoot-out? Who was the other guy in the car? Was that guy armed? That Babyface was strapped was a given.

We were both doing 110 miles an hour, and I was glad that we were passing through a quiet stretch of Highway One. Peace, privacy, and not a lot of cross-traffic: convenient for those rare times when a white homegirl needs to blast through at a high rate of speed, pursued by a mobster's henchman in a Mercedes.

I wondered if I could lose Babyface just long enough to dump Nidia out somewhere. Not only would this mean she and her baby would be safe, but I'd also kind of decided that she was my bad-luck charm, because every time I was in a car with her, shit like this happened.

Then I was distracted by a blur of motion in the bushes off the road, a flash of red lights. It was a highway patrol car, all lights and siren, coming out of his speed trap.

Payaso cursed in Spanish, then apologized to Nidia.

The highway patrolman fell in behind Babyface, who at this point was right behind me. Neither of us was showing any sign of stopping.

After the first initial flash of anxiety, I was wondering if this couldn't work to our advantage. If I pulled over, Babyface almost certainly wouldn't. It wasn't like he could explain to the cops why he was chasing us. And if I complied and Babyface kept going, surely the patrolman would chase Babyface, wouldn't he? Maybe the cop had even decided that I was simply trying to outrun a nut job who was chasing me.

That was it, then. I would pull over like a nice white college girl, Babyface would keep going at a hundred miles per hour, the cop would chase the Mercedes, and I'd bang a U-turn and haul ass. Perfect.

I took my foot off the gas and hit my turn signal, showing my intent to pull over.

“What are you
doing?”
Payaso said.

“Trust me,” I said as the Bronco bumped onto the rough shoulder of the road.

Babyface raced around me and kept going. The patrol car did not pursue him. It was slowing, pulling over behind me.

Shit
. This was not going according to plan.

We'd both stopped, but the patrolman was still in his car. He had his hand to his mouth, and I thought he was talking on the radio, calling his buddies to chase Babyface. This would give me a moment to think.

I looked down at my hands. Unless I was very charming and very convincing right off the bat, this was going to go sour fast. We were carrying two guns, a switchblade, pepper spray, a ski mask, and duct tape. We couldn't afford a search.

A pickup truck rambled past, heading north, and I had time to notice the dog, a Dalmatian, that pressed its face against the glass as if curious about our situation. The cop was still inside his cruiser.

“Payaso,” I said, “whatever happens, we're not shooting a cop, okay? Worse comes to worst, if Nidia's in custody, she's safe, right?”

“Bullshit,” Payaso said. “La
jura
isn't going to protect her. The old man will send his lawyer to bail her out and that'll be that, he'll have her all over again. We'll never find her this time.”

“Payaso,”
I interrupted, meaning,
Stop scaring her
. “I'm going to talk our way out of this. Make sure your gun's not showing, okay?”

The patrolman was at my window. Young and blond and starched and ironed, nothing out of place. I smiled at him and rolled down the window.

“Thank God you came along,” I said, making my voice breathless and relieved. “That man was chasing us.”

“Yeah, the Mercedes, I noticed that,” he said. “Why?”

“I didn't mean to, but I cut him off,” I said. “He pulled up alongside us, waving a gun. I accelerated to get away, but I guess that was the wrong thing to do. He started following us, and I guess it just got out of hand.”

“I guess,” he said. “Where were you headed?”

“To a doctor,” I said. “My friend is pregnant. She was having some abdominal pains, and I offered to take her and her boyfriend to the ER.”

Sure. Just a nice white girl, chauffeuring a
vato
and his girlfriend to the ER, pursued by a psychotic Mercedes driver. Who
wouldn't
buy it?

“Am I going to get a ticket, Officer?” I said, trying for an abashed smile. “I swear, I was just trying to get away from that guy. Please, do you think we could just let this go?”

His eyes narrowed; he was looking down at my clothes. “Is that blood?”

Oh, hell
. I'd abandoned the jacket we'd stained with stage blood, but in all the excitement, I hadn't noticed getting that guy's blood on me, though it had been practically inevitable. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “It's, uh, hers. She had a nosebleed as well as the stomach—”

Too late, the patrolman wasn't buying it. His voice froze over. “Miss, step out of the car. Now.”

That was when I heard the safety click on Payaso's gun, and I felt the cold ring of the barrel pressed just below my ear. The young cop's mouth dropped open.

“Officer,” Payaso said, “take your weapon out of your holster and drop it on the ground, or I promise, I'll shoot her dead right now.”

Falling into my role as cowed carjacking victim, I put both hands on the wheel and tried to make them tremble. “Please,” I said. “Please, Officer, he'll do it.”

I had to hand it to the kid: He was probably still a rookie, and in this part of the state, I doubted he'd dealt with much more than heavy sarcasm from speeders he'd stopped, but he had backbone. He didn't immediately comply. Looking at Payaso, he said, “Sir, that's not going to happen. Put down your weapon now, before you do something I think you really don't want to.”

Then I heard the sound of a car approaching us, powerful engine rumbling.

“Orale,”
Payaso whispered, looking through the windshield.

I thought first of Babyface, but it wasn't the silver Mercedes. It was Payaso's GTO, in the wrong lane, bearing down on us like a bull in a matador's ring. Serena had arrived.

The patrolman looked up, too, and his mouth fell open. A minute ago, he'd thought his situation couldn't get any worse, but now it had. I knew the feeling.

“Run,” I said.

He scrambled and dove behind the car. Serena blasted past us, so close I didn't believe the side mirror would survive it, the Bronco shuddering in the wall of air the GTO displaced. Then Serena drifted into a beautiful sideways stop and wriggled up to sit sidesaddle in the driver's window, watching the patrolman scramble up the hillside at the edge of the road. She braced her arms on the roof of the car, gun in her hands, and fired.

She was too far away to hit him with a handgun, which was why, for a minute, I didn't call her off. I just wanted to do what Payaso and Nidia were doing, which was staring in awe. This was not Serena. This was Warchild.

She fired twice more, and the rounds made dirt fly up from the hillside, about eight feet from the cop. He was on his feet now, running in an evasive zigzag.

I threw open the Bronco's door and leaned out. “Warchild!” I yelled. “Stand down! He's running!”

She turned and looked at me.

“It's okay!” I reiterated. The cop had gained the tree line and disappeared.

She nodded, understanding. I made the shape of a phone with my thumb and little finger against my cheek, then pulled myself back into the car and picked up the radio from between my feet.

“We gotta get out of here,” I told her, without preamble. “Here's what we'll do: Payaso's gonna drive the cop's car up the road a mile, so that the guy can't get to his radio right away. Then I'll pick him up again.” I looked at Payaso, who nodded assent. “Then we'll follow you. Just get us off Highway One. Find us a back road out of the county.”

“Ten-four,” she said. “What if we see the
enemigo?”

“I hope we won't,” I said. “The Highway Patrol is gonna be looking for him; maybe they'll find him and hang him up for a while.”

“But if we see him?”

“Shit, I don't know. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.”

So Payaso got out of the car. In a minute, he was behind the wheel of the patrol car, heading south.

In the back of the car, Nidia was sniffling. I glanced backward and saw her fighting tears.

Shit
. I rubbed the bridge of my nose, thinking hard. “Hey, don't do that,” I said. “Really, the worst is over. You're in good hands.”

She didn't say anything to that or look reassured, and I couldn't entirely blame her. I spent another second or two trying to think of something else to say, then gave up and pulled out onto the highway. My mood, whether it was warranted or not, was on the rise. In a moment I caught myself whistling and realized it was Simon and Garfunkel: “Feelin' Groovy.”

“We should've got a car from Chato instead,” Serena said for the third time
.

The four of us were at a pizza restaurant. Payaso, who had taken instantly and seriously to his role as Nidia's guardian, was at the salad bar with her, watching her select fresh vegetables and cottage cheese and pineapple chunks. Serena and I were at a table. I had just washed down a pair of Advil with Mountain Dew for my aching finger. It should have been healed by now, except that I'd reinjured it in the fight with Serena's girls, my jumping-in. And now the scuffle with Skouras's guy had aggravated it. At this rate, it'd never be healed up.

Serena's face was dark, and I knew what she was going to say next.

“You spent nearly six thousand dollars on that SUV and now it's gone,” she said. “You had it for what, a week and a half? What a waste.”

I agreed with her. I'd already said that I agreed with her. The Bronco was in a picturesque abandoned barn where no one would find it for months. Maybe years. Because unless the highway patrolman we traumatized hadn't followed procedure, he'd radioed in the make, model, and license of our car before he'd gotten out and approached me. Given that a routine speeding stop had turned into an armed attack on a law-enforcement officer, the Bronco was now hot as hell, and I'd had to abandon it.

Now we were all riding in the GTO, which was safe. I doubted the highway patrolman even remembered the color of that car. In moments of trauma—like a speeding car bearing down on you—the mental videographer usually doesn't capture many details.

Serena said, “If you'd had a stolen car, you wouldn't be out any money when you had to dump it.”

I said, “I know. But I've been driving all over the damn state for ten days. If I'd had a stolen car all that time, some enterprising meter maid would have run the plate by now, and I'd be arrested, and then the mission would never have happened.”

She said, “Maybe you could have driven around and done the research and the reconnaissance in the SUV, but then taken a stolen ride to get Nidia.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

So this was leadership, being the goat when things went wrong, even small things. It wasn't like our mission had failed, overall. But Serena was wound up, frustrated over what hadn't gone well.

I said, “We're hitting over five hundred, you know. We have Nidia.”

“Mmm,” she said, a noncommittal sound.

“What?”

She looked across the tables, toward Nidia and Payaso. “You've got a choice here,” she said. “You wanted to rescue her and now she's rescued. Are you sure you want to keep babysitting her?”

I sipped a little of my Mountain Dew. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Skouras isn't going to say, ‘Win some, lose some,' about this. She can't handle this herself.” Then I said, “If you're not in—”

“I'm not saying that,” Serena said quickly. “I'm sorry,
prima
, I'm just nervous. It's just that we're out in the middle of nowhere, the old man and his crew are gonna be looking for us all over, and Jesus, I left
Trippy
in charge back at home.” She frowned. “We probably weren't even around the corner in the car before she rounded everyone up and started a war with Tenth Street. She hates their asses.”

I nodded in sympathy, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I looked over to where Nidia was, still slowly choosing from the salad bar.

In the shady confines of the old barn where we'd hidden the Bronco, Serena and I had done a short debriefing with Nidia. We'd sent Payaso away, outside, so she could speak freely, and then Serena
had begun firing questions at her, in rapid Spanish:
Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Touch you? Did they mess with your head?

Nidia had shaken her head, saying
no, no
. Serena hadn't seemed to believe her.
Are you sure?
she'd demanded.