Drive Like Hell: A Novel Read online

  The chain rattled from the other side, and the door opened a crack. Reggie peeked out through the narrow shaft of darkness.

  “Did you say GBI?”

  I didn’t wait for his brain to click into gear. I kicked the shit out of the door and went in after him. I threw my forearm into his chest, knocking him back onto the bed. I whipped out the pistol and aimed it right at his melon.

  Reggie was shaking. He held his hands up in front of his face and started pleading with me. “Oh, Jesus. Don’t kill me. Please, don’t kill me. I don’t wanna die.” His legs were quaking like he was having a seizure.

  “Shut up and be still!”

  I reached back and slammed the door. The room smelled like fried chicken and wet carpet. It was littered with pilfered goods: three TVs in one corner, a pile of car stereos in another. He even had a stack of toasters on the dresser.

  “You planning on making some toast?”

  Reggie gazed over at the dresser. “I could, if you’d like.” His voice was high and sincere, just like a choirboy’s.

  Suddenly, he looked down in shame. “Of course, I don’t have any bread right now.”

  “Shut the fuck up!” I swung the gun back in his direction. He covered his face again and hiked up his legs like a dog playing dead.

  “You’re lucky I don’t stick your goddamn hand in one of these things.” I held up one of the toasters in a sinister way. Now, I was just showing off. I couldn’t help myself.

  I checked out the TVs. None of them was ours, but I did spot a nice Sony Trinitron: a twenty-three-inch model with a remote. It was a major step up from the RCA. I walked back over to Reggie. He was still splayed across the bed in his jeans and tank top, too scared to move.

  “I’m looking for a nineteen-inch RCA.”

  He lowered his hands just a little. “I had one,” he said, “but not anymore.” He pointed to the stash in the corner. “You’re welcome to one of those, if you’d like.”

  I considered the Trinitron again. A remote control was not to be taken lightly in those days. When I turned back to Reggie, he appeared to be studying me.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  I pressed the gun right up to his forehead. Reggie bunched up the muscles in his face until it looked like he was trying to pass a kidney stone.

  “You don’t wanna know me, motherfucker. I’m bad fucking news.”

  “Are you really GBI?” he asked.

  “I told you I was, didn’t I?”

  “Well, why are you wearing a mask?”

  “Because I like to wear a goddamn mask! You got a problem with that?” I burrowed the gun into his skull.

  “No, sir. It’s a pretty mask.”

  “All right, then.” I stepped back and plotted my escape. There was no way I could carry the Sony without using both arms. So I wanted to make sure that Reggie was too scared to try anything once I’d slipped the shooting wedge back into my jeans.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  “Do you believe in Jesus?”

  Reggie nodded. All of the color had run out of his face. A faint, animal whimper slipped from between his lips.

  “You ready to meet him?”

  A sob burst out of him, but he caught himself as best he could. He clamped his hand over his mouth and tried to get his shit together.

  “Not right now,” he said. “Oh, Lord, I’m not ready.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He thought long and hard on the matter. His legs began to shake again. When he finally answered, he sounded unsure of himself.

  “Because I wanna do better?”

  “You’re goddamn right, you do. And does that mean no more stealing TVs?”

  “It sure does.”

  “What about those car stereos?”

  “I’ll put them all back, if you’d like.”

  “And the toasters?”

  “I don’t even like toast.” He wiped the tears from his eyes and smiled.

  “Then I think we’ve got this settled. Now what I want you to do is turn over and lie facedown. Once you’ve done that, I want you to start singing ‘Blessed Assurance,’ and don’t get up until you’ve finished all three verses. Do you think you can handle that?”

  “I sure can.”

  “Roll on over, then.” I waggled the pistol like I was giving a command to a retriever, and Reggie eagerly complied. He started singing with conviction. I could tell he meant every word of it. I stuffed the pistol in the back of my jeans, grabbed the Trinitron, and made haste for the Maverick. Blessed assurance, the Sony was mine.

  I couldn’t see Mrs. Dees missing her car right away. Plus, Claudia wouldn’t be back from working until late in the afternoon. So I decided to take a little drive around the lake. It made sense at the time. I’d just smoked my second joint of the morning. I had a license, flimsy though it might have been. The ink was dry, and the sun climbed ever higher. I didn’t need any more excuses than that.

  I drove over to my and Lyndell’s old stomping grounds on Green Lake Road. It just felt like the natural thing to do, like a dog returning to his favorite pissing spot. I’d been on that road hundreds of times since Lyndell had let me drive it, riding shotgun with Claudia, Nick, or one of my friends. It was still familiar to me: the curves and dips and potholes and the one long, quarter-mile run. I could have driven that road with my eyes closed.

  Of course, the Maverick felt nothing like the Chevelle. It was sluggish on the straights and squirrelly in the curves. But I soon found myself in a groove, just driving and thinking and listening to the radio in case something good came on. The day was rebounding. The sun was still high, casting its net over the sailboats on the lake.

  I braked for a curve, then stepped on the gas, unwinding, heading into a straight patch, my thoughts wandering ever farther down the road, to the day when I’d be driving my own car and heading for the track on a Saturday night. I could even see a new address for myself. It just hit me, all of the sudden—a trailer near the water, like Rockford’s. I’d never thought about it before, but he had the perfect setup, living there in the restaurant parking lot with surf-fishing out his back door. It was everything you needed, and all within a few steps. Food. Fishing. A place to park your wheels. Those television writers were brilliant. All I had to do was figure out how I might swing that sort of arrangement. Selling weed, like Nick, maybe. People coming and going from my place, always having a party. There’d be music playing and a pair of blue panties hanging on the corner of the television.

  I don’t think I could have been much happier, just driving and daydreaming and considering the notion of another joint. The only thing wrong at the moment was the music. WPND, the Green Lake rock station, was in the midst of a Foghat superset. But there was hope on that front as well, seeing how the DJ had promised to play the Stones next. I had this feeling it was going to be something good, maybe from Exile on Main Street.

  And then I saw the blue light in the rearview mirror. My heart snapped like a big rubber band. I looked for somewhere to go, a street to turn down, or a cave to drive into, but the road wasn’t offering any of those options. The wide, sparkling lake sat off to my right side and a thick strand of pines to my left.

  Even in my panic, there was no mistaking the long face behind the police car’s windshield. It belonged to the singing deputy, Wade Briggs.

  I was practically standing on the gas when Wade pulled alongside me in his Crown Vic. I checked the speedometer and observed the needle to be just under the 70-mile-per-hour line. It was a sad commentary on the state of automobiles in those days.

  The sun shone across Wade’s rake-shell face. His hair was dark and wavy, and his blue eyes gazed solemnly from cavelike sockets. He waved for me to pull over, doing a double-take in the process. His face lit up with recognition, and then he mouthed my name as if it were a question.

  I tried not to look at him. I just kept on driving, hoping that some sort of plan might take root in my
skull. That wasn’t happening, though, thanks to my overindulgence in Nick’s product line. And the situation quickly took a turn for the worse. Panicked, stoned, and distracted, I was a little slow reacting to a bend in the road. The tires caught the shoulder. Before I could correct the car’s path, it was rat-tat-tatting its way down the bank of the lake, headed straight for the drink. I slammed on the brakes, but they were fighting a losing battle against momentum, mud, and pine straw. I was bracing for splash-down when the fat trunk of a water oak intervened. Next thing I knew, my head was hurting real bad.

  “Luke Fulmer? Is that you?”

  Wade had opened the car door. His big head floated above me, his eyes studying my forehead with some measure of concern.

  I was sprawled across the front seat, trying to pull Wade’s face into sharper focus. My eyes were swimming in murky water, and I couldn’t break the surface. The car was quiet, except for the radio. Of course, it wasn’t the Stones. The Eagles were singing “Life in the Fast Lane.” I hated that song. Those fucking lying DJs. I reached over and turned it off.

  Suddenly, I could hear the water lapping at the shore, and I knew I had better start explaining some things to Wade.

  “Mrs. Dees asked me to put some gas in the car for her.”

  That was the best I could come up with under the circumstances.

  “Mrs. Dees reported her car stolen about an hour ago, Luke.”

  I stared down at the wheel.

  Wade patted me on the shoulder in a kind way, just before something on the floorboard caught his eye. He reached down and grabbed the two nickel bags, one of which had been severely depleted. He held them up in the air and considered me as though he were expecting some sort of explanation.

  I dug as deep as I could. “Mrs. Dees doesn’t look like the type, does she?”

  Wade sighed and stuffed the bags in his pants pocket. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

  “There’s a TV in the trunk,” I said. “It might be stolen.”

  Wade nodded and gazed out the rear window. He had his arm draped across the steering wheel, and he seemed to be considering his options for handling the matter. I was still lying there, staring at the car’s ceiling.

  “Luke, do you know how serious this is?”

  “I’m guessing it’s pretty serious.”

  “You’re damn right it is.” He’d only raised his voice a little, but it felt like an ice pick stabbing my brain. I grabbed my temples, but that only made things worse.

  “You’ve got auto theft, possession of contraband, possession of stolen property, not to mention evading an officer.” He ticked off the offenses on the fingers of his hand. The only thing left was a thumb.

  That’s when I remembered the pistol. I slid it out of my jeans and handed it to him.

  “Good Lord, Luke. What were you thinking?”

  My mouth had gone dry. I licked my lips and tried to explain. “It’s just a BB gun. I was trying to get our TV back.”

  I blinked hard, but Wade’s head just wouldn’t be still. It was hovering over me, bobbing and weaving like a bumblebee. All of that motion kept launching these big waves of nausea across my stomach.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “Claudia’s gonna be broken up about this. She just doesn’t deserve to be put through such an ordeal.”

  I held up my hand and laid it on Wade’s cool forehead. “Could you be still?” I asked. “You’re moving all over the damn place.”

  Wade leaned in close and looked right into my eyes. “I think you might have a concussion,” he said. “I better call an ambulance.”

  I finally gave up on trying to look at anything. I shut my eyes and let myself drift, the water from the lake sweeping over me, luring me down into the dark where the big catfish swam, slapping their whiskers against my arms and my face. I was sinking, clutching my TV, trying to forget what went wrong.

  2

  Mrs. Dees’s daughter wanted to press full charges against me for taking the Maverick. She even threatened to have us evicted from the house. But Claudia took a walk across the street and spoke to Mrs. Dees herself. The old lady said she understood, that she’d had a couple boys of her own who’d caused her some trouble, though nothing as bad as stealing a car. That comment sort of pissed Claudia off, but she bit her tongue and worked out a deal. Mrs. Dees agreed not to press charges if I would pay for the $600 worth of repair work to “Millie,” which is what she called the Maverick.

  Wade Briggs had been kind enough to take care of the marijuana and the BB pistol while I was passed out on the front seat of the Maverick. That left me facing one count each of possessing stolen property, evading an officer, and driving in a reckless manner. Wade told Claudia that I needed to face some consequences. Naturally, she agreed with him. Despite the trouble I’d caused her, I think she enjoyed having an excuse to get to know Wade a little better.

  The charges bought me a date with one Judge Dot Knox at the Green Lake County Justice and Administration Building. I never expected the judge would be a woman, and it eased my fears when I first laid eyes on her. She was slight, middle-aged, with short, graying hair and spectacles. At first glance, it would have been easy to picture her baking cookies in a TV commercial.

  Claudia and I met Knox in her office. She sat behind a huge desk with her nose stuck in a file that had my name on it. She didn’t even bother to say “hello” or “eat shit” when we walked in.

  “When did you turn sixteen, Luke Fulmer?” She clipped off her words in a sharp manner that belied her gracious appearance, and she refused to look up at me.

  “March seventeenth,” I answered.

  “And you just couldn’t wait to get out on the road and endanger the lives of others?”

  I knew better than to touch that one.

  “Do you think you’re special, Mr. Fulmer? Do you think you deserve privileges others are not afforded?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, based on your record, I’d say that you pretty much believe you can do whatever you want. Steal a car. Steal a TV. Drive like hell.”

  “Actually, ma’am, I didn’t know the TV was stolen.”

  She peered over the tops of her reading specs, allowing me a glimpse of her eyes. Slate gray, like the bars on prison cells. I knew right then and there that the woman was not planning to bake me any cookies.

  She wagged a bony finger at me. “Don’t you ma’am me, Mr. Fulmer. If you think you can win me over by saying ma’am, you are dead wrong. When was the last time you even said ma’am? I bet you can’t remember.”

  I shook my head and gazed down at my work boots. They looked stupid with the baggy suit that I was wearing. It was a gray pinstripe number, a hand-me-down from Nick. He’d worn it during his first drug-trafficking trial. So far, it was 0-and-1 against the criminal justice system.

  “I bet you never even say it to your mother, do you?”

  Claudia was standing beside me. She shook her head, hanging me out to dry.

  “Mrs. Fulmer,” the judge said, “will you allow me to be blunt with your son?”

  Claudia nodded firmly, the way that people nod during a hard-preached church sermon. She was wearing a navy suit, tailored close to her body. She looked smart in it, maybe a little too smart, as I saw it. She was starting to act like one of Knox’s prosecutors.

  “I’m going to tell it to him like it is,” Knox said. “He’s not going to like it much, and you might not like it either.”

  “That’s okay, Judge. You say whatever you feel is necessary.”

  Knox cast her gaze my way. She’d taken off her glasses and was holding them up like they were an important piece of evidence.

  “Do you know what recidivism is?”

  I shook my head again. I’d just about decided she wasn’t going to ask me any questions that I could answer in the affirmative.

  “It’s when I get to know somebody on a first-name basis. Because they keep committing crimes, usually the same ones, over and ove
r again. It used to surprise me. Somebody would come in here, say a young man like yourself, first offense, something that was forgivable. So I’d pop his hand and send him on his merry way, thinking he’d learned his lesson. And then, not two months later, he’d be back in this room again. Now, I’m not against giving second, or even third, chances. But let me tell you something, friend. If I ever see you in here again, then you better bring your damn toothbrush and a clean pair of underwear. Because your little fanny’s going straight to the youth correctional institute in Alto, Georgia. And if you think I’m bluffing, just try me.”

  Her voice had gotten loud by the end. I was still having headaches from the concussion. Plus, I hadn’t smoked any dope that morning. My heart was flapping around like a bream in a bucket. She’d succeded in getting my attention.

  I tried to appear chastised. Gazing downward, my eyes landed on the nameplate atop the judge’s desk. I suddenly realized the similarity between the name Dot Knox and Don Knotts.

  Knox turned to Claudia again. “Mrs. Fulmer, seventy-five percent of the kids in juvenile hall are repeat offenders. And that’s my main concern. Stopping this kind of behavior before a pattern develops. That’s what I mean by recidivism.”

  Claudia frowned. “Well, I’m afraid that might run in our family, Judge.”

  “I’ve heard about your other son,” Knox said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t nip it in the bud with this one. And from what I’ve seen, the best way to do that is with some hard-nosed discipline. That’s why I’d have no qualms whatsoever about sending him to Alto for twelve months. I’d start him off in the ninety-day boot camp program. I think it’d do him a world of good.”

  I looked at Claudia, hoping she’d protest on my behalf. But she appeared to be about as scared as I was. I don’t believe she blinked a single time while I was staring at her.

  “Tell me, Mrs. Fulmer. Does your son have a job? Any chores or duties around the house?”

  “No, ma’am,” Claudia said.