The Sidewinders were a beautiful way to fly. Weightless in a state without worry or meaning. Timeless. Streetlights, cars, buses, storefronts became long rainbows, and soon the city was lost to bands of light.
“What the fuck do you want?” Walter asked. “Who the fuck are you?”
I focused on him. Patterns danced across his face, reflected bands of light, maybe? Or shifting emotions made visible to me by the magic pills. I saw anger, that’s for sure.
I kept the gun pointed at him.
“Never mind me,” I replied. My voice was slow, too, and slurring. “Just drive.”
“I have money,” Walter said.
“You think you can buy me? I’m a child of light and I ain’t for sale,” I told him, but I look back now and see it was indignant booze and drugs talking. I was in that car because I’d sold my soul. I was no child of light.
He was on edge and watched the gun nervously.
Some of you might be wondering how I planned to get away with murder with my DNA in the car. Raised on CSI, you might believe in the all-knowing cop, but let me clue you in on something. For a while, I shared a cell with a man who’d murdered his entire family and driven from New York to Chicago covered in their blood. He’d disappeared, raised two new kids with his new wife, and was caught only when he beat a man to death in a bar fight and confessed to his old crimes, figuring he might as well go down for five murders as for one. Eighteen years he lived free and clear without Forensics coming to knock on his door. Gloves and clothes would be disposed of. DNA wouldn’t matter much unless I tore my gloves or I bled on the seats, and I had no intention of doing either.
“… family…”
The word invaded my thinking.
“I can’t let you into my house,” he said. “I have a family.”
I couldn’t say he sounded afraid. More resigned, but it was hard to be sure through the static of the pills.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
A family?
Killing Walter was all right. I would make bank for my daughter, stop a gangster from gangstering, and get him back for the wrongs he’d perpetrated against me. But shooting a family was bad karma no amount of booze or drugs or holy contrition could undo. I was an opportunist, not an assassin. And certainly not a spree killer. Who did this guy think he was, making that kind of accusation?
“You don’t know me, man,” I found myself saying. “You think I’m a loser, but I’m not. I was like you. Not a thug, but a stand-up guy. I had money and a family.”
Was I crying? Maybe. Slurring? Definitely.
“I want to help you,” Walter replied. “I know people who can.”
The gunshot came out of nowhere. Even the fog of booze and drugs didn’t blunt it.
The sound startled me and set my heart pounding, and the car veered right and crashed into something solid.
I hadn’t meant to shoot him, I swear. Not now. Not in the car at least. Certainly not when he’d been offering me kindness.
The gun had come alive and made the decision for me.
Looking back with a clear head, I realize I must have pulled the trigger by accident, but at the time, the smoking beast seemed to smile at me as my dazed eyes peered down at it.
Fuck.
We were stationary, buried in some crumpled parked cars.
Walter growled and turned on me. I had shot him in the head, but the bullet had grazed his ear and only made him mad. He punched me in the face and tried to grab the living, spitting gun.
Crack.
Crack.
Crack.
I saw the words burst into life and color and linger in the air after each bullet.
Walter stopped fighting and fell back against the driver’s door, bloody craters on the side of his head.
I nudged his face with the hot muzzle of the gun, but his eyes were unfocused and still. I thought they seemed sad, as though his last memory was of all his cruelties. I shared his sadness. Speaking plainly, I had planned to kill him, but not like this.
This wasn’t one of the scenarios I’d visualized, but some part of me managed to cut through the transcendent high. I reached into his jacket pocket for his wallet and removed his watch. A staged carjacking and robbery would work.
I got out of the car and saw we were in a deserted residential neighborhood. His SUV—it was a BMW—was smoking as it nestled in the wreckage of a couple of other cars.
I had no idea where he’d brought me, but I could see a well-lit, busy road in the distance, so I stumbled in the other direction toward darkness.