Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [132]
We smiled at each other. He had automatically locked the door.
“I hope he brought a tape recorder because I’m only going to say it once.” Andrew put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m glad it’s me, not you. Going to prison.”
“I’ll stand by you,” I promised. And then I felt a great liberation, as if an old, worrisome question had been resolved.
“Andrew, let’s get married. I love you.”
He kissed me, hard.
He would not surrender in his father’s house. He would not surrender to his buddies, knowing it would be something they could not live with afterward. Out of deference, because he was a cop’s cop, they gave him a break and took his weapons, and we all followed in a caravan—my car, him in his car with Lieutenant Barry Loomis, and two vans of Santa Monica officers, over to the closest strip mall we could think of that would be in Los Angeles County, out of the jurisdiction of the Santa Monica police.
It was one of those neighborhoods where the haze is always hanging low, scouring the eyes and the hoods of dented cars with patched-up ten-year-old paint jobs, where wide commercial avenues, built for a dense mix of fast food and retail, instead are empty and scrawny as cheap Christmas trees. Everything seems to be on a slant. Signs are broken or defaced. Figures do not walk upright, unless they are mothers dragging double loads of grocery bags; buses don’t stop very long and drivers keep their eyes straight.
There was a Laundromat and a Lucky supermarket, a used record store, a bright blue Caribbean restaurant with beaded curtains and exuberantly painted suns and moons and fiery cockatoos.
Andrew’s car pulled into the center of the lot. It was mostly empty, the middle of the afternoon, except for indigents who were lounging at the outdoor tables at McDonald’s. Too early for the hookers. Barry got out quickly, turning his anguish into clipped, efficient movements, getting on the radio and telling everybody where to go.
The vans had rolled in and the guys were keeping their distance, waiting for the LAPD captain to arrive.
“Ana!” Barry snapped his fingers. “Andrew wants to say good-bye.”
Why don’t you go back to the seventies? I wanted to say to him and his ridiculous mustache. I don’t need orders from you about when and where I should talk to Andrew Berringer, sashaying past the uniforms, who were still trying to make sense of what was going on.
Andrew was sitting alone in the car, fingers drumming the steering wheel.
“How’re you doing, babe?”
“I’ve had better days,” he said.
“I am serious. I want to marry you.”
He snorted. “Is that your ambition now? To be a prison wife?”
“I don’t care. I love you.”
“I love you, too.” He gave me an unreadable look. “Do I have safe passage?”
“Always,” I assured him, and waited for the question.
It was not an answer that he wanted but a promise.
“One last time?”
“Don’t say that.”
We kissed through the open window, then he turned the ignition.
“You better not do that.”
He had me by the neck—
“Andrew!”
—and pulled me halfway inside the car and with the other hand, he steered.
“Andrew! Please! Stop!”
It was a muscle car, in seconds we were going in treacherous, widening circles.
“Stop the car!”
My feet were lifted off the ground, yet I was pinned through the window by his desperate strength.
“Kill me,” he said.
We were going faster, wider, a death spiral.
“No, I won’t, I love you—”
But it didn’t stop anything or change anything. Figures were scattering and weapons were drawn and there were shouts, “Get down, get down! Police action, get down!” Andrew’s teeth were clenched, but with effort, not rage. Our foreheads banged, I bit my tongue.
“Kill me. Please, just do it.”
There was shouting. Gunfire. They blew out a tire and the car veered crazily.
He pulled tighter so I could not breathe. My body flew like a rag doll as he relentlessly and with purpose kept doughnuting the car in wilder circles. The glass façade of the supermarket came rushing at us, gleaming shopping carts and spinning women grabbing babies. “It’s all