The Highway Kind(5)

“Steve?” I said. “Steve.”

He turned off the car. Carefully, ridiculously, he depressed the rectangular button to turn on the hazards. We were perpendicular to the roadway, lengthwise to two lanes of traffic. The front end of the Odyssey was pushed up against the gates of whatever studio executive’s palazzo this was, and the butt end poked very slightly out over the edge of the steep face of the hill. If someone came flying around from the north, they’d smash directly into us. If, on the other hand, someone came up from the south, they’d send us spinning around and off the hill. In the one second it took me to process these particulars, to realize how much peril we were in here, Steve had pulled a small silver gun out of the pocket of his cheap-ass windbreaker. The gun was pointed directly at my face. His expression had not changed.

“Steve...” I said. “Come on. I don’t know Vance. I didn’t kill your family. I live in California, Steve.”

“But you do steal cars.”

“I do not!”

He thumbed back the hammer on the gun and said, “You organize the stealing of cars.”

“Yes,” I said, pulling my body backward, away from the gun. Squirming inside my seat belt.

“Okay. Yes.”

“Tell me how it works, Mr. Roegenberger.”

I hesitated; gulped for air.

“Talk.”

“We—we—get lists from the DMV. On Hope Street. I have a—there’s a guy there. I pay him. For existing VINs. Unclaimed VINs. Vehicle numbers.”

“I know what VINs are.” Steve had undone his seat belt, inched his gun hand closer to me.

“We clone the lists, and then we retag them onto different cars.”

“Different cars? Different cars? Stolen cars. Stolen from where?”

“From Oregon, Steve. From—I don’t know. Idaho. Washington State. Far, far, far from Indiana.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Steve. “That’s not the point.”

I lunged for the door and Steve shot me in the hand. I screamed. I writhed in pain while the tip of my finger spouted blood, but all my writhing and screaming made the car rock a little beneath me, so I stopped, afraid of sending us over the edge. I whimpered. I clutched my hand.

Steve spoke. With agonizing slowness, he spoke. “It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t you, because there was someone like you in Indiana too. Someone that Vance and Vance’s friend were working with. I couldn’t figure out who that was. But you, you and your friends, you’re less careful, I guess.”

Graham, I thought while my finger pulsed blood. Fucking Graham!

“But it doesn’t matter. It’s not you, but it’s you. The world is full of you. My state, your state. Everywhere. The world is full of you. Scheming and taking. Grasping. Cheating. Pulling strings, taking shortcuts. And what is at the end of it? Far off at the other end, where you can never see? My family. My boy. My girls. My beautiful girls. Dead in the road.”

I didn’t want to die. I thought I could hear an engine starting, close by, maybe at the top of the road. Any second a car would come tearing up or come roaring down.

“What do you want, Steve? What do you want?”

“I want my family back.”

“I can’t do that.”

“I know.”

He pushed the barrel of the gun into my temple. I gazed out into vast smoggy sprawling twilight Los Angeles and knew it would be the last thing I’d ever see. There was definitely a vehicle coming down the hill; I could hear it clearly now. A gardener, I bet. Done for the day. Gardening truck, flatbed. I could picture it. In another ten seconds it would be on top of us. It would cut the Odyssey in two or send it spiraling over the side of the hill, and it wouldn’t matter, not to me, because Steve was going to shoot me first.

But I had to try. I had to keep trying—right? That’s what you do?

“Listen, Steve, I’m sorry. I admit it. I’m bad. I see that now. I admit it. Is that what you want? For me to admit it?”

“Admit it? Why would I care if you admitted it?” He gave his head a little shake while he dug the gun tighter into my sweaty forehead. “No, no. I want you to die for it.”

I closed my eyes and the city disappeared and I waited. But nothing happened. I tasted the cigarettes and Starlight mints on my breath. I heard the engine of the truck coming down the hill. I felt its rumble in my butt cheeks.

I heard Steve crying. I cracked my eyes open, one at a time, and the gun was still pressed against my skull but Steve’s head was lowered and his cheeks were red and wet with tears. His shoulders shook. The gun slowly came down, dragging along my forehead, my cheek, my chin. He was no killer after all. He was just a man, a poor sad man—lawn-mower dad, widowed husband, middle-aged and alone and out of his mind with grief.

And then I heard them and I turned and I saw Sean in the middle row in jersey and cleats, earbuds in, gazing out the window. Angie with her nose in a children’s novel, one lock of dirty-blond hair wound around her index finger. The twins in the back, mewling and yelping, the happy little shouts of infancy. The floor of the car was littered with snack crackers and granola crumbs, splattered with spilled juice, the discarded cellophane wrappers of cheese sticks like shed skins beneath the seats.

Angie looked up and gave the small shy smile of a curious kid, and in the center of her forehead was a bullet hole. Sean had two through his chest, and the babies a half a dozen each, a spray of holes in their tiny bodies.