Chris Holm - The Wrong Goodbye

“Gio,” I said, noting as I did that my voice had lost some of its thick, wet quality of earlier this morning, “you want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing? When you had your little tangle with the bug monster, the Fiesta took a fucking beating. Now, that don’t really bother me none, on account of she ain’t mine, and she was a piece of shit to begin with. But if I had to guess, I’d say our good pal Ethan’s probably reported her stolen by now, which means we gotta steer clear of any legal entanglements —and it seems to me a giant fucking hole in our windshield is the sort of thing the five-oh might notice. Bottom line is, you wanna make it to Las Cruces, you and me are gonna need another ride.”

“Yeah,” I said, eyeing the Caddy’s sparkle and shine and eye-catching lines, “it’d suck to attract any undue attention to ourselves.”

“Look, make your smart-ass jokes all you want. But it’s almost nine in the morning, and this place’s been closed for hours. Which means whoever owns this beauty was drunk enough he probably cabbed it home. I bet he spends half the day sleeping off his hangover. That gives us plenty of time to get the hell outta Dodge ’fore he wakes up. By the time he realizes this baby’s missing, we ain’t even gonna be in the same state . And you gotta admit, Sam —this Caddy is a work of art. We’d be nuts not to take it.”

“Gio, no. This car’s too damn pretty not to be missed, and too rare not to be noticed. Pick something else —like maybe that nice, nondescript Civic over there.”

“Hey, you got to pick the last one, remember? And if you got a thing for penny racers, that’s your deal. But I barely fit into that fucking thing, so there’s no way I’m gonna help you steal another one exactly like it —not when there’s a ride this cherry just sittin’ here waiting to be picked.”

“Seriously, Gio —stop this, now.”

But Gio didn’t listen. He just glanced over at the Fiesta yet again, and redoubled his efforts to get the Caddy running.

“Did you hear me? You are not to boost this car!”

“Damn it, Sam, I ain’t your fucking sidekick, OK? Truth is, you need me, and I say this Caddy is ours! The way I see it, any douchebag who’ll leave a ride this fine sitting in a strip club parking lot is askin’ to be taken down a peg. And it ain’t like it’s gonna kill you to loosen up and live a little —hell, you’re the one who told me I should enjoy what little time I had left. So if you want my help on this little revenge-trip of yours, you’re gonna hafta shut up a sec so I can concentrate!”

“I think you misunderstand the nature of our relationship,” I said, unintentionally echoing the creature’s words to me last night. I opened the Caddy’s massive door and stepped unsteadily out onto the blacktop of the parking lot. “You don’t get to call the shots. You want to go it alone, maybe steal yourself a shiny ride, hole up somewhere, and wait to see if hell forgets to hunt you down, that’s your business —and I promise you it won’t end well. But if you want to come with me and make the guy who killed you pay, you’ll do as I say and pick another fucking car.”

I leveled my gaze at Gio, trying to imbue it with as much bad-ass as I could muster. At the time, I was pretty pleased with the result, because he was staring back at me in wide-eyed terror. Of course, I didn’t realize it then, but that terror had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

“Look, Sam, I get what you’re saying —really, I do. But this really ain’t the time to discuss it. How ’bout you get in the car, and we can talk about it on the road?”

“Are you even listening to me? That’s the last place we’re going to talk about it! Get it through your fucking head —I am not leaving this parking lot until you pick another car!”

“You won’t be saying that in a minute,” he mumbled, more to himself than to me.

Something clicked with me then. His jangled nerves. His furtive glances. His sudden desire to leave. At first, I’d chalked it up to the rush of stealing such a cherry ride, but it was something more than that.

“Gio,” I said, “what’d you do?”

“Look, can we just go?”

“Not until you tell me what you did.”

“Well, I figured we can’t ditch the Fiesta without people taking notice —it’s all beat to hell and fulla blood. The cops are bound to think some serious shit went down, and we don’t need that kind of attention. So I handled it.”

“Handled it? Handled it how?”

But before Gio could answer, the morning calm was torn apart by an explosion that set the Fiesta soaring skyward, and threw me ass-over-teakettle into the waiting Cadillac. I wound up wedged headfirst into the passenger-side footwell, my torso pinned between the seat and dash. It was hell on my ribs, but at least it kept my face from scraping against the floor mat. I tried in vain to catch my breath, but the force of the blast had knocked the wind from my chest and left me gasping like a fish on a trawler’s deck. I must’ve been flopping like one too, as I struggled to right myself —but at that, at least, I had some success. After a moment’s thrashing about, I wound up sitting sideways across the bench seat, one foot braced against Gio’s pudgy face, and my back against the passenger door. You’d think a shoe against your cheek is the kind of thing you might take notice of, but if Gio did, he didn’t show it. He was too busy staring at the pillar of thick black smoke that spiraled skyward from the twisted remains of Ethan’s Fiesta.

Charred bits of scrap and glass rained down upon us from above, but still, Gio just sat there, stunned. Through sheer force of will, I drew a breath —as hot and thick as tar —and barked a single, desperate syllable.

“ GO !”

My voice sounded tinny and far away to my ears, which still rang from the crack of the blast, but that single syllable was enough to goad Gio into action. He sparked the ignition to life and threw the Caddy into gear. Then he laid on the gas and we squealed out of the parking lot, the scent of our tires against the blacktop lost in the charred stench of the twisted wreck we left behind.

We were twenty minutes from Las Cruces when I realized we were not alone.

The strip club was a good half hour behind us, though between the heated bickering, the withering silences, and the bouts of justifiable paranoia that flared up with every speed trap that we’d passed, it felt like twice that long. It was a good thing Gio got the Caddy running when he did —a fire engine and a couple of squad cars went screaming past us in the oncoming lane before we’d gone four blocks from the strip club parking lot, and by the time we reached the highway, a column of smoke a mile high cleaved the morning sky and no doubt drew the attention of every law-enforcement type the city over.

I’ll admit, as near as I could tell from the passenger seat, the Cadillac handled like a dream, and as the sun crested overhead, sending the temperature into the seventies, cruising with the top down was a little slice of heaven. The stretch of highway leading upward from West Texas to Las Cruces runs alongside the Mesilla Valley —a fertile floodplain four miles wide, blanketed with lush green farmland and dotted here and there with fragrant pecan groves. It was a pleasant respite from the hostile no man’s land we’d been driving through, but I was so damn furious at Gio for the attention he’d drawn our way —and so damn worried about getting snagged by the cops before we managed to track down Varela’s soul —I couldn’t properly enjoy it. So instead, I sat there needling him, oblivious to the danger lurking a couple feet behind us.