Dark Dragons (5 page)

He looked out the window.  No cops yet.  Just
behind a large building, he spotted a small parking lot with some tree
cover.  Darren turned hard right toward his target, but saw that he would
have to ram another fence.  This was thinner than the last one, though,
and he knifed through it easily.

He stood on the brakes, let the chunk of fence slide off the
hood, and found a place to hide the beat up car in the parking lot. 
No
one around.
  Darren shut the car off and used his shirt tail to wipe
his prints off the wheel, keys and shifter.  He got out and did the same
to both door handles.  Warm Santa Anna winds brought in the wail of
far-off sirens.

A silver Ford pick-up was backing out of its parking space,
and Darren went for it, summoning the last of his energy into his legs.  The
driver put the truck in Drive, only twenty feet away.  He pumped faster,
lungs hot, and caught the right wall of the truck bed and heaved himself up and
over as slowly and as quietly as he could, careful not to knock his shoes
against the truck.  Incredibly, the driver didn’t hear the disturbance,
and Darren flattened his profile to avoid the rearview mirror.  He quickly
looked over his shoulder.  A single cop car had stopped behind the wrecked
Sunbird, now steaming from a broken radiator.

A half hour later, he called a cab from a gas station. 
Just another day in SoCal paradise.

Friday, May 14

“Seymour, you’re turning out to be a juvenile delinquent,”
Tony said.

“Juvenile?  He’s eighteen, man,” Nate said.  “If
they catch him, he’ll go to county with the big boys.”

“I wiped my prints off,” Darren said with a whisper, looking
to see if his mom was near.  “They won’t find me.”

Jorge shook his head.  “Not if Marcus tells that woman
whose car you stole.”

Darren shrugged.  “He’s too stupid to think of that.”

Tony Simmons, Nate Douglas and Jorge Lopez were watching
Darren doing work on the bad guys.  He was playing
War Rabbit III
on his Xbox.  His character, General Bunny, had a variety of weapons to
choose from in which to trade shots with hunters and psycho weasels who threw
their turds at the hero.

“Grand theft auto,” Tony said, shaking his head.  “Just
when you thought you knew a guy.”

“I had to do something to get out of there,” Darren
replied.  “They would’ve caught me and decided to ass-rape me first before
smashing every bone I have.”

“Marcus Lutze is someone you don’t wanna antagonize,” Nate
said.  “Just let him get in the occasional face punch and let him
be.  The guy is psychotic.”

“Yeah, don’t give him any puppies,” Tony said.

“No shit.”

“Why?” Darren asked.

“In fourth grade, he put one in the microwave in the
teacher’s break room.”  Tony said it so nonchalantly, it almost sounded
fake.

Darren nearly choked on his gum and hit the
PAUSE
button.  “What?”

Tony nodded.  “You were never told that one? 
Yeah, me and Nate where there in school when they led him out with the cops,
remember Nate?”

“How can I forget that?  We didn’t see him for two
years until he came back in the sixth grade.  Spent a little time at St.
Michael’s with the Jesus shrinks.  That obviously didn’t work.”

For the longest time, Darren thought he was dealing with
just a token school bully.  Now the slow feeling of dread began to coil
into his gut.

“Did his mom drop him on his head when he was a baby?” Jorge
asked.

“I think the guy’s a psychopath,” Tony said. “You know . . .
someone with the inability to feel guilt or empathy.  Disregard for
morality, prone to violent tendencies, and all that shit.  Two years ago,
he was ragging the hell out of Stewart Smalls who was some goth emo kid who
picked the wrong time to announce on his blog he was coming out of the
closet.  Stewart wound up eating his dad’s .38 Snub-nose, and I heard
Marcus’s name got mentioned a few times in the suicide note they found.”

“Jesus,” Darren said, handing the video game controller over
to Tony.

“This Rated-T for Teen game is turning me into a psycho
killer!” Tony shouted.  “Video games are evil,
yeah!
”  He
promptly began killing bad guys.

“Don’t forget the carrot!” Nate cried.  “Get the
carrot!  It’ll give you——”

“I got it, I got!”  But General Bunny got squashed by
an 18-wheeler before the carrot could give him an M61 Vulcan Gatling cannon.

Tony Simmons was the rebellious, reckless type but one of
the smartest kids in school, which invoked a little envy in Darren.  Yet
Tony never wanted to admit he was intelligent.  He chose to hang with the
burnouts and smoke reefer in the school parking lot during lunch hour.  He
had spiked hair which he dyed yellow, five hoop earrings in each ear, pierced
nose and naval, pierced tongue and eyebrows, and wore t-shirts that said things
like “I’m the teenage girl you masturbated with over the Internet” or “I only
support gay marriage if both chicks are hot.”  Tony, like Darren, was relegated
to a lower social status at school, just another loser lost in the fog that was
Verdugo Valley High.

Tony lived with his dad and older brother Curtis.  Mom
wasn’t around.  She had gone out for cigarettes one night when Tony was
only ten, and as the usual story went, never came back.  His dad, a fat
slob partial to the drink, got his kicks beating the shit out of Tony only when
he couldn’t catch Curtis.  Tony would show up at Darren’s house on more
than one occasion sporting a cut lip or a black-and-blue shiner on his
cheek.  “Oh this?  I fell off my bike,” he would say.

Darren figured this probably explained the reason why Tony
smoked pot and pulled fire alarms instead of thinking about SAT’s and wondering
about his life’s possibilities.  Tony didn’t care if he graduated——he only
had ten credits——but Darren knew he had brains.  One time, Darren went
over to Tony’s place and found him on his bed reading Virgil’s
The Aeneid
.
. . whatever the hell that was . . . and scribbling notes in the margins. 
As soon as he noticed Darren, Tony shut it quickly and said, “Just a book I
found in a trash bin.”  He had a burnout image to protect.

*

Allison Babineaux sat on her bed, painting her fingernails
and listening to her son Darren and his friends playing a hotly contested video
game downstairs in the den.  She tried not to think of what the room
looked like but couldn’t escape from the image in her head.  Soda bottles
and potato chip bags probably littered the floor, half-eaten candy bars melting
on her expensive carpet, or better yet, everything she cherished was either
broken or damaged beyond repair.  She tried to forget the night when
Darren had one of his get-together’s and someone had knocked over her favorite
Chinese figurine.  Nobody had claimed responsibility of course.

After drying her nails, she faced the mirror to count how
many wrinkles and crow’s feet had appeared on her face since the last time she
looked.  No additional, face-disfiguring features had materialized that
she could see.

The ruckus downstairs grew louder.  Someone
cursed.  Great, she thought.  What teenage atrocity would overtake
the house this time?  An argument?  A wrestling match?  Loud
music?  At times, Darren and his friends jumped on Allison’s nerves like a
herd of peevish elves.

She almost hit the roof when someone cranked up the TV
surround sound, and the window-rattling base of hip-hop pulsated through the
house.  Elvis, Allison’s four-year old black lab, groaned in protest.

“Darren!” she shrieked.  She flew down the stairs, and
burst into the den.  To her surprise, the room wasn’t as bad as she had
imagined.

*

Darren felt a headache coming on when he saw his mom and let
out a slow, placating breath.  It wasn’t the overbearing motherly presence
he detested but the manner in which that presence arrived hell-bent.  Or
rather the way it was dressed——as usual.

Darren’s mom was only eighteen years older than him. 
Allison had gotten her teenage self in trouble at summer collegiate camp after
high school graduation, endured several parental lectures on abortion and
adoption, and nine months later rejoiced she had carried Darren to term and
decided to keep him.  Darren was told all of this, of course, whenever he
pissed her off.

Thirty-six years old, and she dresses like a college girl
out Saturday night bar hopping.
 Tonight, it was a tight pair of
embarrassingly short, Daisy Duke cut-offs and a dress shirt tied at the bottom
over her navel which practically pushed her boobs up and out of the damn
thing.  Darren noticed at a very early age that his mom didn’t look like
most moms.

The first time Tony met her, he had said to Darren
unbeknownst with a wink-and-smile, “You gotta hook me up with sis.”  And
that’s what sucked even more——Allison looked much younger than
thirty-six.  She
could
pass for Darren’s older sister, and Tony
hadn’t been the only one fooled in the past.

“Did I not say in the past when you guys got together, ‘No
loud music’?” Allison said.

“Nate accidently hit the wrong button,” Tony said, his smile
lopsided.  “Sorry, Misses B.  It won’t happen again.”

Nate and Tony both nodded in agreement with dreamy
faces.  It wasn’t hard to tell Darren’s friends really didn’t give a crap
about playing video games at his place.  There was sightseeing to be
had.  At least Jorge, a devout Catholic with an amicable nature, was
always sensible enough to sense Darren’s discomfort and not leer.

“Going out to the bar again, mom?” Darren murmured, his eyes
on the TV.

Pause.  “Yes.”

“Which boyfriend is it this time?”

The air in the room became suddenly charged with the threat
of a brewing storm.  The other guys sensed it.  The dog sensed
it.  Hell, even the fish in the tank stopped swimming.

“Excuse me?” Allison said, teeth slightly clenched.

Darren fell silent.  Not in fear from his mother, but
in dread that if he said anything more, it would come out in a scream of
absolute poison.  His face felt hot, his stomach turned, and——
if Tony
and Nate don’t stop leering at my mom’s
——
!

“Sam,” she said.  “You like Sam, remember?  He took
you to the Lakers game?”  She looked at the clock.  “Seeing that it’s
almost eleven, I assume you guys will be staying over.  I wish you would
tell me these things, Darren,” she said, sweeping The Mother Stare over them.

“Must have forgot,” he replied.

She waved her hands toward the back door.  “Come on,
party’s over.  Get your tent, hon.  You’re all sleeping
outside.  I don’t want you guys breaking something in here.  Tony, I
told you not to smoke in my house.  Another reason everyone’s staying
outside.”

Tony stomped the butt out in a Coke can.  “Sorry,
Allison.”

“And Darren . . . go to school on Monday.  Please?”

“I’ll just be in detention for a week.”

“Don’t worry,” Tony said.  “I’ll make sure he’s
there.  Remember, I’ll be there, too.”

“Imagine that,” Allison replied.

“Hey, I thought there was a fire.  Somebody had to pull
that alarm.”

Allison pointed her finger at Darren.  “Go to school.”

*

Darren’s friends went to the garage to get his tent while he
stood in front of her, no doubt waiting impatiently for more motherly counsel.

Allison studied her son’s face, trying to peek through his
eyes that had lately become stone walls.  Despite having decent grades, he
was having so much trouble at school with arguments, fights and back
talk.  She would love to get her hands on this Marcus Lutze.  Maybe
the move out here had been a mistake.  It had only been a year since his
father’s death, ten months since she had divorced Zach after ten years of
marriage——which gave Darren no heart loss since they never really got
along——but a job with a starting pay of $88,000 at an upstart computer firm in
Simi Valley was worth the move.  She merely snatched the offer and ran
without thinking of Darren and his adjustment to a new school.  Go figure.

She looked at Darren longer and was again amazed at how much
he looked more and more like his father the older he grew.  Same dark blue
eyes, wavy brown hair . . . which needed to be cut . . . and a lithe
build.  His father’s death had affected Darren more than it had her. 
She hardly knew the man who had been Darren’s father . . . other than a few
nights of teenage bliss at summer camp and, later, nods of greetings when he
picked up Darren every other weekend.  She was just now beginning to
accept his death and get on with life, but Darren truly missed his dad and
their pilgrimages to NHRA car races, the Detroit Auto Show at Cobo Center, and
all the dirty jokes he used to tell which Darren would relay to Allison that
made her groan.  The image of that mutilated classic 1970 Mustang Boss 429
would be etched in their minds forever.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“For what?” he said.

“I’m sorry if I embarrass you.”

Darren shifted his weight from one side to the other, looked
at the clock, to the floor.  “You wouldn’t embarrass me if you would just
stop . . . dressing like that . . . when my friends are over.”

Allison nodded.  “You’re right, and I’m sorry.”

Darren turned for the door, his face still dark.  “Why
can’t you just dress normal?”

“Normal?”  Allison truly felt sorry she had embarrassed
her son in front of his friends but wasn’t about to be lectured.  “How
about June Cleaver.  Or Carol Brady.  I’ll wear pearls and a gingham
dress from now . . .”  Nope, she thought.  She closed her eyes and
put her hand up to her temple.  “Darren I said I was sorry.  I will
remember to go
normal
whenever your friends are over, but when I’m going
to social functions not attended by horny teenage boys, I intend to dress to
kill with high heels.”