Joe Ide - IQ

Boyd knew the black guy would run out of road soon. The bicycle path ended a half mile downriver at the Seaside Freeway overpass. He’d get stuck there and Boyd would be home free. A few more minutes to the Queensway Bridge, where the river widened and went past the fancy marinas, the lighthouse, and the Queen Mary and on into Long Beach Harbor and then through the buoy line and into the open ocean where the loudest scream in the world wouldn’t be heard by anything but the jellyfish. Boyd wasn’t worried when the black guy sped up and drove away. What could the guy do? Nothing. “Fuck you!” Boyd shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Fuck you, asshole!”

Boyd went down and took a look in the cabin. The girl was still out of it. Good. He didn’t want to chloroform her again. He wanted her awake. Wide awake. He grinned and rubbed his palms together. He imagined himself ripping the duct tape off her face and saying Wake up, you little bitch. You belong to me now.

Isaiah parked the Audi near the overpass abutment. He got out quickly, went around to the trunk, and opened it. The floor panel and spare tire had been removed making the compartment extra deep. Plastic storage boxes of various sizes were neatly arranged and labeled. HAND TOOLS, SOLDER/WELDER, RESTRAINTS, DRILL/CIRC SAW, PRY TOOLS. The WEAPONS boxes held, among other things, a stun gun, a taser, a rubber bullet gun, bear strength Mace, a fighting stick, and a sap cap. It looked like an ordinary cap except it had a secret compartment loaded with lead pellets. Smack somebody and you’d break every bone in their face. The Determinator was in its own yellow hard plastic case.

“What’s a Determinator?” Deronda said.

Boyd was bouncing on the balls of his feet when the Seaside overpass came into view. He threw up his hands like Rocky. “Yahooooo!” he yodeled. He started jiggling and shaking like he had to take a pee. “You did it, Boyd, you did it!!” And then his voice wound down and his face went dark. “What now?” he said. The black guy and a girl were climbing down the riprap to the shore, the girl holding her flip-flops and complaining. The black guy was carrying something. It was too short to be a rifle and too fat to be a pistol. It looked like a caulking gun. Boyd laughed. Good luck with that, you stupid idiot. He waved like he was meeting the black guy at the airport. “Shoot me! Shoot me, asshole! Shoot me!”

The Determinator HX Grenade Launcher was hard to aim. It weighed six pounds, had a pistol grip, and was two feet long with the stock extended. The barrel was as big around as a can of tennis balls. Isaiah loaded a grenade into the breech and snapped it shut. The flash-bang type was for law enforcement only but you could buy a fireworks grenade online. Isaiah calculated angles. The boat would pass right in front of him but it was going fast, bow up, pushing a wake to either shore. If he fired point-blank, the grenade would explode on the wraparound windshield. It would scare the man but that would be all. He’d have to let the boat go by just far enough to shoot the grenade into the back of the windshield.

The boat was getting closer, the engine screaming. The man was half turned around and had his pants down to his knees. He was wiggling his butt and yelling Shoot me, shoot me . Isaiah raised the launcher.

“Why aren’t you shooting me?” the man laughed as the boat sped by.

Isaiah fired. The grenade went over the man’s left shoulder and slammed into the back of the windshield. There was a huge explosion of red-and-white sparks. The guy let go of the wheel and staggered backward, hands over his eyes, his T-shirt on fire, his pants twisted around his ankles. He fell to the deck, hitting his face against a rod holder on the way down. The boat was going in a circle at full speed, sparks whirling out of it.

“It’s the Fourth of damn July,” Deronda said.

The man got to his feet and was immediately slung overboard. He splashed and floundered, choking on water poisoned by a million storm drains, submerging and coming up again until he found his footing and plodded toward shore, wiping the slime out of his eyes.

Isaiah went out to meet him with the collapsible baton. “The girl better be all right,” he said, thinking how much she must have suffered already. He hit the guy across the head with the baton hard enough to make Deronda wince. The guy fell over and went under. Isaiah thought about letting him drown but grabbed him by the collar and lifted his head out of the water. “She better be all right, do you hear me?” he said. “She better be just fine.”

Twenty minutes later, patrol cars and an ambulance were parked around the overpass, a helicopter whap-whapping overhead. Cops were standing around pointing at things and talking, Boyd’s boat tied up and webbed with yellow tape. The girl was on a stretcher, conscious but shaken and nauseous, a paramedic attending her.

“What’s your name, sweetheart?” the paramedic said.

“Teresa,” the girl said.

“You’re gonna be all right, Teresa. Now I’m going to put this oxygen mask over your face and I want you to breathe deep for me, okay?”

Teresa pushed the mask aside. “Where’s my phone?” she said.

An officer was taking Boyd to a patrol car. Boyd was cuffed, wet like a wet dog, no pants, his T-shirt in charred rags, burn marks on his face; he’d lost his other front tooth, his mouth a bloody hole. “I sidn’t soo anysing,” he said.

“You didn’t do anything to who?” the officer said. “The little girl you kidnapped and had tied up in your boat?”

Boyd thought about saying he was just showing her around but that sounded stupid even to him. “Whas abou suh guy who sot suh bomb ass me?” he said.

“You mean the guy that shot the bomb at you and saved the little girl you had kidnapped in your boat? Shut the fuck up and get in the car.”

Teresa’s dad, Néstor, arrived. Teresa told him she was walking near the store and somebody put something wet over her face and when she woke up she was in the boat and this black guy was asking her if she was okay.

“Did he do anything, you know,” Néstor said.

“No, Dad, you don’t understand. He wasn’t the guy that kidnapped me, he was like rescuing me. He was nice, I could tell.” Teresa told Néstor how the black guy carried her to shore, set her down, and told her to breathe deeply. After she could sit upright without holding on to him he said the police would be there soon. Then he got in his car with a girl and left.

“He just left?”

“That’s what I said, Dad.”

Néstor wondered why the guy didn’t stay and be a hero, get his picture in the paper, and be on TV. Néstor would have to find him and thank him personally. A black guy who shot grenades at people couldn’t be too hard to find. Néstor decided to let Teresa recover for a day or two before he asked her why she was near the store, which wasn’t on her way home, and if she was going to see that pendejo Ramón he’d take away her phone.

Isaiah carried Margaret across the lobby to the elevators, a group of people already waiting there. Nobody smiled or said anything. Too many crazies around these days, she might be his girlfriend.

Flaco was in physical therapy now. On the ride up, Isaiah decided to put Deronda together with Blasé. Maybe he could put her in a video and who knew, maybe she’d get discovered and be on TV. It was all luck anyway. Like the skinny girl walking past Beaumont’s as he was coming out. If he’d stayed inside another minute she would have suffered in ways he didn’t want to think about. She got lucky and maybe he did too. When you owed as much as he did you didn’t expect the coins to be put in your hand.

Isaiah had been to the hospital hundreds of times but always had a moment when he thought about coming back later or not at all but what would be the point? There was nowhere he could go, no road that went far enough or jet that flew fast enough to free him from his past. He wished he could be like Dodson, just go about his business like nothing had ever happened.