Mad Dogs (18 page)

“So everything's locked up tight inside there.”

“There you go.” I shrugged my shoulders and grinned. Prayed.

Her black mirror eyes held my reflection as she said: “What
are
we going to do?”

Blue-orange flame arced down behind her idling cruiser—
glass shattered
.

The cop turned so she could keep me in her vision as she glanced left and right, saw nothing that looked like shattered glass. Her sunglasses swung back to target me in the same instant that over her shoulder I saw a wisp of black smoke spiral up the far side of her cruiser's hood, smelled rubber and roses
burning
.

Flames from the made-off-drugstore-shelves Molotov cocktail caught the far front tire of her cruiser on fire.

The cruiser's tire exploded with a
whap
! The cop whirled, drew her gun. Black smoke swooped up from her cruiser. The exploding tire propelled the ignited Molotov brew up into the engine compartment. Flames hit a fuel-injecting gas line.

Wham!
A burp of flame blew open the cruiser hood.

The cop staggered backwards towards me in the canyon between the parked cars.

KA-BOOM!
Her cruiser's gas tank erupted in a ball of flame.

Heat blast knocked the cop off her feet.

Me too, a wall of angry heat flashing my face.

Flat on my back on the pavement between two cars, I saw a roaring pillar of orange flame and black smoke rocket straight up into the evening sky. The explosion triggered dozens of honking car alarms.

So much for covert operations. How much of our cadre got filmed?

Get up!
Fire roared outside my canyon between two SUVs. The dazed cop lay at my feet, her face and hands redder than mine felt. From everywhere came the stench of melting rubber, burning gas, hot metal, and… burnt hair. The gun had been blown from her hand. I saw her groping for her lost weapon.

She's trying to fight the good fight
.

So I dragged her back from the fireball. She was dazed, struggling to her knees as I ripped the mike out of the radio on her belt, tossed it away, yelled: “I'll get help!”

And ran toward the mall drug store.

Soon as I charged out of the black swirling smoke, Zane—who'd concocted and thrown the Molotov cocktail—slammed a BMW sedan's driver's window with a back kick. The window crackled into a safety-glass spider web. His second kick pushed out the cobwebbed pane. Russell clicked the BMW's locks, hammered the ignition cap off the steering column and used a screwdriver as a car key. The engine roared to life. Russell and Zane raced the stolen BMW through the parking lot where a crowd stared transfixed by the burning cop car. Hailey and Eric ran to meet my feet-pounding escape. The broken windowed BMW stopped just long enough for us to jump in with our gear, then in a cloud of black smoke and the honking of car alarms and wailing-nearer fire truck sirens, we roared away from the mall's pillar of fire.

32

“Look at me!” I yelled at Zane from the back seat of our stolen BMW as Russell drove through first dark of the New Jersey suburbs.

Beside me, Hailey said: “You've got 'bout half of each eyebrow left.”

“Plus a healthy pink glow,” said Russell.

Zane said nothing from the front passenger's seat.

Wind rushed in from the kicked-out driver's window.

“I was doing swell!” I yelled.

“No you weren't,” said Russell as he made a random left turn. “You always think you're doing swell when you're talking to a woman, but you aren't.”

“Wasn't a woman!” I yelled.

“See?” said Russell. “You were that confused.”

“It was a cop!”

“'Xactly,” said Zane. “And she was on her way to locking you up.”

Zane shook his head. “Good thing we had Hailey and Eric shadowing you. If Officer Mirror Eyes had put you in her car, we were all gone. Or you'd have had to lunch her when she did her frisk.”

“You almost burned me up!”

“Yeah, I kind of misjudged my toss. I meant to hit it in front of the cruiser where a ball of fire would be a zero-damage diversion you could use.”

“But blast was classic,” said Eric.

“Wild,” said Russell.

“Now the law knows—”

“Not as much as if they'd have nabbed you,” said Zane. “What they've got is a dazed street cop's description of a citizen who saved her life when hell broke loose.”

“And the coming alert on this stolen car.”

Lights snapped on in New Jersey. Rush hour was steady, but we kept moving.

“Wish we'd scored a local map,” said Russell, peering out at neighborhoods scattered along the maze of city, county, state and federal roads we drove.

“Keep the ocean on your left,” said Zane, pointing to an arrow that claimed BEACHES were one mile thataway.

Evening became night blowing its chill through the kicked-out window of the stolen BMW. Road construction sent our route this way and that. We kept a gut reckoning on the ocean. Sometimes we were certain that its blackness loomed between light-dotted buildings flowing past Russell's broken window, sure that the night sky held the scent of sea air. Sometimes we drove past mini-malls and fast food factories that could have been in Kansas, through neighborhoods that could have been Ohio.

We were 45 minutes on the road, rolling
sort of
south on a one way road past high rise condo buildings and ramshackle houses. Maybe it was the night blowing through the window while Russell drove, maybe it was my better self realizing that
what the hell
, they were only eyebrows, but I'd cooled down, was about to say something funny
and
nice to Zane when Russell glanced across a vacant lot towards the ocean.

“Holy shit!” yelled our driver Russell.

Look left: no red light spinning police cars.

Behind us: nothing but empty night road.

Same through the windshield.

“Right's clear!” yelled Hailey from that side of the back seat.

Russell surged the BMW forward only to hit the brakes and skid through a left hand turn at the first corner. We raced along a deserted park, took another tires-crying hard left, shot down an empty one-way street going back the way we'd come—

Russell hit the brakes so hard we all flew forward, snapped back.

We were at a dead stop in the middle of a one-way street going the opposite direction of our plan. The empty park lay off to our left. To our right, a stone walled building rose up to the stars and ran for a full block past three lonely streetlights. Straight through its mountain should have been the sea.

Russell slammed the BMW into PARK, threw open the driver's door and pulled himself half out of the car to gawk at the building's roof.

Seconds later, he dropped back behind the steering wheel, said: “Oh… my… God!”

Then punched the gas. The Jeep shot forward. Russell steered the BMW into the horseshoe driveway of a WW-II Navy hospital converted to a grand dame haunted hotel.

“Wait here!” he yelled and dashed into the lobby.

“Oh,” I deadpanned as Russell disappeared into the hotel. “OK.”

I got out of our ride. Rolling blackness a block away had to be the Atlantic. To the left of the ocean stretched a wall of crumbling boardwalk pit stops. To the right loomed that huge abandoned Arabesque castle. I glanced up toward what Russell might have spotted that flipped him out, saw a huge unlit sign of bulb lights that read:

WELCOME TO—

“Get in!” yelled Russell, running to the BMW.

Not wasting a blink to finish reading, I did: he was the driver.

“Only five blocks away!”

Russell rocketed us out of the driveway and back the direction we'd been going before he'd seen
whatever
. We roared through that night with our driver. With faith.

Our stolen BMW cornered a left, shot down a wide street with cars angled-parked at a median strip. A car pulled out: Russell whipped into that space. He climbed out of the BMW and groaned in seemingly sexual awe. Staggered across the street to a long one-story building with walls of gray pancake-like bricks and a white awning. I was behind him when he dropped to his knees and spread his arms wide in hallelujah to the promised land.

Black letters on the building's white awning: THE STONE PONY.

Glowing white letters on black background sign read: CAFÉ AND BAR.

Wailing rock guitars, throbbing drums and a husky-voiced woman singer echoed out to us as Russell knelt in the street.

“No,” I said.

“What the hell,” said Zane. “We need to eat.”

“OK,” I sighed. Knew then that the unlit electric lights on the Arabesque building read WELCOME TO ASBURY PARK, N.J. “We need to eat. We'll be fine.”

Eric sealed the BMW's kicked-out driver's window with the wheel cover for the BMW's spare tire. We paid a cover charge at the bar's door and stepped into a black walled dream factory filled with beer fumes, cigarette smoke, and colored lights. A huge white pony adorned the black carpeted wall behind the band grinding it out on the stage for a crowd of two hundred college boys and hair-flipping co-eds, for 20-somethings from lawyer shops and cement plants, for faces who looked as set in their 30s as Russell, Eric and me. A Black man older than Zane limped past with a cane. We edged our way to a back bar. The sand-haired woman bartender with a tan, a halter top, and a navel ring held up a finger:
Wait.

Guitars chorded with a drum flourish to end the song blaring from the stage.

“Thanks a lot!” said the woman bandleader with a slung guitar. A waterfall of black curls tumbled down her ivory face to her black blouse cut low and straining. She wore black jeans and strap-on shoes with thick black heels. “We appreciate you coming out to hear us tonight, hope you like that last one I wrote, it's called
Sex In A Stolen Car
.”

A few people clapped.

“We're gonna take a break now, but we'll be back with covers of your fav's and a few of ours we know you'll love. You better, or you'll break our hearts.” Waterfall woman's crimson lips grinned to show she was joking, but the truth slipped out that she was serious. “Remember, like it says on the marquee, we're Terri and the Runawayz.”

Our bartender leaned over and said: “What can I get you guys?”

My hand warded off her smile: “No booze!”

Zane told her: “I'll have a beer.”

“Me, too!” said Russell.

“Make it four,” said Hailey. She nodded to pudgy Eric. “Ours are light.”

“OK,” I conceded, “but only one round!”

Zane asked: “Can we get food?”

“Whatever's fast and filling,” I said. “Emphasis on fast.”

“Hunger, man,” said the bartender. “It's a bitch. The cook's got pasta. Tomato, sausage and peppers sauce. It's fast, but if you slop it on you, it'll look like blood.”

She relayed our food order into her microphone headset as she walked towards empty glasses stacked in front of the back wall's American flag.

I whispered to Zane: “What if someone goes into the BMW? Takes it?”

“Steals our stolen car?” He nodded toward singer-songwriter Terri as she walked across the room to collect hugs from three of her day-job girlfriends. “For sex?”

“We're not a joke! Or a song!”

“Sure we are,” he said, handing me a beer. “Relax.”

Russell wedged between us: “Do you know where we are?”

“Lots of signs,” I told him.

“No, man: do you know where we
are?

“There are places,” he said, “where magic percolates. Where art meets audience and both transcend. Like the Newport festival stage or Harlem's Cotton Club or the Cavern Club in Hamburg where the Beatles fused or the Texas honky tonks that spun out Hank Williams and Buddy Holly—or Hell, the Globe Theater way back in way back.”

“Don't stretch a beautiful theory,” I argued. “Rips apart when you compare a beer soaked bar, some colored lights, drunk college kids, bluesy factory hands and a hot rocker like what's-her-name up there to Shakespeare.”

“Hey: America's poets put down their pens and picked up guitars.”

“What if they can't sing?”

“Like Bob Dylan?”

“William Carlos Williams wrote real poems after the A-bomb, TV—”

“Jersey dude, right?” said Russell. “Loved Sinatra? Rocked out around here?”

“Here, guys!” Steaming plates of red sauce spaghetti plunked on the bar.

“And this place,” whispered Russell, “this place… The blue collar sound rebelling against the suits back when I was a baby in the '70's… That stage… Springsteen.”

Russell shook his head. “Maybe if I hadn't cared about the world blowing up. Maybe if I'd believed my words and music would do it instead of figuring I had to put my ass on Uncle Sam's line. I mean, I was a good rocker—
am good
, and that worked out swell for Uncle, my
what-I-can-do
covering his
higher purpose
in dark alleys and…

“But maybe,” he said, his eyes full of the stage where instruments waited in front of a huge white pony. “Maybe. If.”

Zane coaxed him back from the badlands of
what might have been
. “Eat.”

As Russell obeyed, Zane whispered to me: “How much money we got left?”

“Not a lot,” I said. “The bus, motel, whatever you guys used at the mall…”

“Oh well. Give me a hundred dollars.”

His eyes told me
just do it
. He held the bills I slipped him, beckoned the bartender to us, asked: “Where's the manager?”

The bartender pointed to a trim woman with brass hair.

Zane elbowed his way through the crowd until he reached the manager. She let him do the talking, then turned her no-bullshit eyes our way. Told him something.

Hailey whispered to me: “What's he doing?”

Zane worked his way through the crowd, spoke to the singer Terri as she sat with her friends and band. She said something. He said more. She shrugged
yes
.

Zane gave her the $100 of our operational/survival money.

Walked back to us, told Russell: “OK, it's paid for. Pick an axe. Take your shot.”

“What?” said Russell.

Zane said: “The stage at the Stone Pony is now yours.”

Russell stared at him. At me.

Words came out of my heart. I had to say: “Go for it. Time's a wasting.”

For a frozen moment of eternity, Russell only stared at us, his eyes wet.

Then he turned and shouldered his way through the crowd toward the stage.

Off to my left, I saw the brass haired manager speak to the technician who ran the sound booth against the wall opposite the stage. Break over, he strode back to work.

Russell stood below the stage. Hesitated. Took the long high step and was up there with the guitars and drums, the keyboard and the back wall white pony.

Across the room, Terri and her band watched their costly instruments.

Russell let his fingers glide over one of the sleek, fully electric guitars. A classic wooden box guitar fitted with a mike caught his eye. He picked it up.

“What if he's no good?” I said to Hailey.

“Then he goes down rocking. Better than not trying. Everybody goes down.”

But we each drained our beers.

The sound tech turned the white spot on Russell. Set the mike
live
.