Jeff Strand - A Bad Day for Voodoo

One block ahead, the just-stolen car came around the corner. We all stood there and stared as the carjacker drove up right next to us and stopped.

“Your mom called,” said the guy, holding up my phone. “She sounded worried. I told her you were dead.” He laughed and tossed the phone into the backseat. “Seeya!”

He sped off again.

I couldn’t believe this. “He just—t can’t—what the—how could—did you see—he just—”

Neither Kelley nor Adam had a response to this.

“I’m chasing him,” I said, and I took off running again. Somebody who would cheerfully tell a teenager’s mother that her child was dead would certainly poke a voodoo doll.

Much like your average dog, I still hadn’t completely worked out what I was going to do if I succeeded in catching the car. But my adrenaline was pumping and my mind was racing and I felt like I could just yank his carjacking butt out of the vehicle, and toss him into a crosswalk signal. I knew that was unlikely to be the way this situation played itself out, but I simply wasn’t willing to allow myself to become a pile of body parts.

Kelley shouted at me, but I kept going.

Nothing in the world was going to stop me from catching up with that car. Nothing .

Well, except for the microscopic patch of dirt that I tripped on, causing me to tumble forward and smash onto the ground. Though I was able to break my fall with my hands, saving myself from pulping my face against the cement, it still hurt.

Kelley and Adam ran up behind me and helped me to my feet. My palms were all scraped up, and my left knee stung.

“Please don’t run anymore,” Kelley requested.

She was right. Or maybe she wasn’t right. One of those. Either way, it was clear that I was not going to suddenly become a superhuman crime fighter, which was very disappointing.

“It’ll all be okay,” said Kelley, giving me a hug. “I promise.”

This weirded me out, because Kelley was not one to offer “things are gonna be just fine” sentiment in situations where things could be significantly less than fine. She pretty much called them as she saw them. I don’t mean in a cruel “yes, the cancer is going to kill your grandmother” way, but if you said that you thought you weren’t going to win at a swim meet, and she sized up the competition and agreed that you probably weren’t going to win at the swim meet, she’d say that you probably weren’t going to win at the swim meet, even though most other people would tell you that they thought you were going to win at the swim meet even if they didn’t believe it.

For her to resort to “It’ll all be okay, I promise,” she had to be seriously stressed out.

Why did my elbow suddenly itch?

It was nothing. Phantom itch.

Another car turned onto the street, which was nice because it proved that we weren’t in some sort of postapocalyptic wasteland.

A cab!

“Hey!” I shouted, waving my hands over my head. “Hey!”

As the cab approached us, Kelley and Adam joined in on the hand waving and hey shouting. The cab didn’t seem to be slowing down, so I stepped out into the street in front of it. (It was half a block away, not inches. I wasn’t going to go through all of this only to be hit by a taxi.)

The cab stopped, and the three of us rushed to the passenger- side door. I threw it open and leaned inside. The driver was a really muscular dude who looked about thirty, with long black hair that flowed over his shoulders. He could have passed for a romance novel cover model except that he was wearing a shirt.

“I’m not in service,” he said.

“We really need your help,” I insisted.

He shook his head. “I’m off duty! I’m gonna party!”

“Please! I’ll double your fare!”

He looked at me suspiciously. “Where’re you going?”

“We need you to try to follow a car.”

“Car chase? Hell yeah! Get in!”

I hurriedly got in the front seat while Kelley and Adam got in the back. The cab shot forward before we’d even closed the doors.

“Which way did it go?”

I pointed ahead. “He turned right one block ahead.”

The driver floored the gas pedal. I noticed a large number of aluminum cans on the floor.

“Fan of Red Bull?”

“Man, I chug that stuff like cold water in the desert! Woo! Woo!”

He spun around the corner so quickly that I was thrown against the door and Kelley was thrown against Adam, which I’m sure she didn’t appreciate.

“What color car are we following? Blue? Red? Green? White? Taupe?”

“Silver.”

“Silver! I love silver cars! Two door? Four door?”

“Four door.”

“Hell yeah, four door! Oh, we’ll find that silver four-door! We’ll find it! Woo! Woo!”

I wished this cab came with a second seat belt. Or a shoulder bar like you’d get on a roller coaster.

“You look that way,” said the driver, pointing out my window. “Girl in back, you look to the left. Guy in back, you look behind us. I’ll just spin my head three-sixty and watch everywhere.” He laughed way too loudly for the quality of the joke.

“Do you have a phone I could borrow?” I asked.

“Why?”

“I want to call the police.”

“You wanna call the cops on me? Bite me.”

“No, the guy who stole my car.”

“You gonna let the cops ruin our fun? There’s no party when the cops are around! Party! Woo! Woo! Woo!”

Getting in the cab, never the wisest course of action, was seeming like an even worse idea.

“It’s really important that I get the car back,” I said. “I just want a backup plan in case this car chase doesn’t work.”

“Oh, this is gonna work,” said the driver. “When I’ve had this many Red Bulls, I get all extrasensory and stuff.”

He sped through a red light. The camera flash went off.

“My bad,” he said with a chuckle.

A couple of people were standing on the corner, looking like they might—I swear—be conducting some sort of illegal transaction involving ferrets. Maybe they were fake ferrets. I don’t know. But a couple of ferrets were exchanged for an envelope. Then they watched us race by, looking at me as if there was something wrong with being in a speeding cab with a caffeine- overdosed driver.

“We’re all going to die!” Adam predicted.

The cab ran over something small, but I am 97 percent sure it was not alive.

“Is that your car?” the cabbie asked, taking both hands off the wheel to point.

It was! My mom’s car was about six blocks ahead, stopped at a red light.

“Yes! That’s it! You’re a genius!”

“Then hold on,” he said. “I’m gonna run that thieving bastard right off the road!”

CHAPTER

9

There was a great deal of screaming after he said that.

Our driver clutched the steering wheel as if it were a struggling tiger, and though I can’t prove it, I think he actually growled. I know for a fact that his eyes didn’t really glow red, but if there were ever a time at which somebody’s eyes would glow red, this was it.

Time once again seemed to move in slow motion. “IIIIIIII doooooonnnnnn’t thiiiiiinnnnnk yooooooouuuuuu shouuuuuuuuld doooooooo thiiiiiissssss!” I said.

The distance between the cab and my mom’s car closed from six blocks to three blocks in about, oh, a quarter of a second.

“Nonononononononononono!” shouted Kelley and Adam at the same time, as if they’d rehearsed it.

Two blocks.

“Bad!” I screamed. “Badness!”

One block.

Then the cabbie slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched, and the cab spun into the opposite lane at a forty-five degree angle, and we all screamed some more.

“I decided I probably shouldn’t do that,” the driver explained.