American Outlaw - Jesse James [2]
Sunny kind of looks at me askew.
“Just walk real fast, Bub.”
We speed walk down the short patch of pavement that connects the parking lot to the kindergarten building. She takes small, bouncy steps, and I lumber after her, my coat stretched wide, trying to create a sort of no-camera zone around my small, towheaded daughter. We make it to the front doors in record time.
“Nice work,” I say, dropping to her level for a good-bye kiss on Sunny’s forehead. “Go on, get inside. I love you.”
“I love you, Dad,” Sunny says, as she glances over her shoulder and slips inside, giving me a quick wave.
I walk back to my car, furiously angry, my jaw clenching. My kids have become part of the hunt, and there’s no one to blame but myself. This realization fills me with an intense rage that I need to vent. Clearly, the best target for my fury, at this moment, are the pale, flimsy cuttlefish with cameras fluttering before me.
I nod to them, hatefully.
Now it’s on, motherfuckers.
Hopping into the cab of my truck, I take a moment to focus myself and crack my knuckles before driving in a slow and controlled way out of the elementary school parking lot. I lure them away from the school zone, across the winding, flat, black pavement of the industrial wasteland that is Long Beach, the proud biker armpit of Southern California. I have lived in Long Beach my whole life. It is my home, my haven. My den of pride. And they have followed me here, dead set on staking me out. They must pay somehow . . .
But no matter how much I’d like to, I can’t just drag one of the sleazebags from his car, clutching his oily neck with my bare hands, shaking him until his consciousness dims. No, that would look pretty terrible.
“Okay then,” I mutter, “let’s go for a ride.”
I know this city like the back of my hand. I know its ins and outs, its secret crannies—the pockets where the paved roads end and lead to stretches of dirty gravel and dust.
I drive just fast enough for them to think I’m trying to outrun them, but I’m not. I want them close. I dive under an overpass, finding an open spot where the pavement dips and then dies. I check the rearview: the shoal is going to follow.
We are off the map now, on the hardpack California dirt. I breathe in, relishing the small but undeniable freedom that washes over me. The large, thick wheels of my truck ramble over gravel and dry, broken road, onto the hard flatness of the Long Beach dust bowl. The flotilla of Kias, Sentras, and Subaru wagons gives chase.
Slowly, I begin to increase my speed. I watch as the speedometer climbs from forty to fifty. With barely a tremble, my heavy vehicle cruises to sixty, then seventy, then eighty miles per hour . . .
Behind me, the dust is rising in a plume of massive gray clouds. I know that visibility is gradually becoming more and more obscured for the photographers. A whiteout, a driver’s ultimate nightmare, will be their reality in less than a minute. And what will they do then? Will they change course, or attempt to follow still?
A jagged rock flies up from underneath my back wheel. Spinning, it flies directly into the front windshield of the paparazzo following closest behind me. The windshield of his car shatters. I watch as he brakes hard, pitching jaggedly.
Satisfaction washes over me, intense and immediate. One gone, I think, smiling, twenty-nine to go.
I begin to drive more and more dangerously, careening from side to side without reason or warning, and more and more dust flies up in the air behind me, churned up by my massive wheels. A chorus of tinny horns heralds general panic and mayhem among the paparazzi. Their plaintive war cry doesn’t inspire any fear in me, though: I increase my speed to ninety, then a hundred miles an hour.
Behind me, I hear the dull smash of metal on metal, followed by a furious volley of frightened horn blasts. Some men have damaged their flimsy cars beyond repair. Perhaps they will leave them to bake in the pitiless desert. Or maybe the collision is only incidental, a mere fender bender that won’t