We woke up to a cop rapping on our window.
In that moment you take stock of everything you’ve done with your life.
He told us to move on.
I turned on the car and my head felt heavy and we drove.
He found us at a Love’s not fifty miles from the rave. Had to have clocked us instantly: two fuck-ups hunched over taquitos at a Formica booth. He loomed. I recognized him. I grew up with him. Shane must have known. He picked up his phone and hit a button.
“This is all being recorded.”
Danny Ames borrowed a chair from a neighboring table and sat down. “My throat hurts. I’m gonna sound bad.”
I said, “It goes to a cloud.”
“Yeah,” Shane still had a taquito in his other hand. “Saved to a cloud.”
Men in sandals bought bags of chips and soda. Women browsed dreamcatchers. Kids pointed up at the animal heads mounted over bottles of motor oil.
Ames laughed. “He said ‘a cloud.’”
We looked at each other.
“No, but seriously. That’s cool.” Ames cleared his throat. “Am I sounding hoarse?”
Shane said, “You sound good.”
“Oh, okay. I hate to tell y’all this, but you’re gonna have to give me all that shit in your trunk.”
For a moment, we just looked at him. At each other. Ames saw it all click and his muscles relaxed.
Shane said, “They’re gonna kill us.”
Ames shrugged. “Yeah.”
We loaded the canisters into the Impala. Ames slammed the trunk and put his keys in his pocket. Anubis on the keychain. He copied our names and addresses from our driver’s licenses onto his smartphone.
Shane toed rocks in the asphalt. “So what happens now?”
“I’ve seen it go both ways.”
“Which ways?”
Ames peeked in the bag at the cash. “Imagine the two ways it could go. I’ve seen both. I won’t see it either way.”
The Ozarks hid behind a fog. Shane said, “At least beat our asses or some shit.”
Danny Ames took a vape pen from his pocket, pressed the button. Cinammon. “We’re in the parking lot of a Love’s. Beat your own asses.”
He got into his car. Shane said, “They’re gonna kill us,” again.
“Don’t care. Make sure you tell Eloise that Danny Ames took her shit. Make sure you’re clear about that.”
I pointed at his teeth. “Do those come out?”
“What?”
“Your grill. Are the teeth permanent, or can you take them out?”
Danny Ames opened his mouth and pulled out his platinum dentures. Grinned bare gums. “I can take them out whenever,” he said.
THE NEAR-MISS
“It’s slippery out,” Shane said on the drive home. “We could flip the car. We could say that we flipped the car and when the cops showed up they confiscated the money.”
I shook my head.
“We could do what we said. We could hit each other.”
“I’m not going to hit you. Or get hit.”
Shane turned in his seat. Prairie rolling by out the window. “Do you understand how fucked we are?”
I nodded.
“There was a lot of money. That was a lot of money.”
“I know that.”
“We should flip the car. The cops come.”
“We’re both still a little high. I’m not flipping the car.”
“I should have brought a gun.”
“You don’t have a gun.”
“I should have bought a gun.”
“You wouldn’t have used it.”
“I would have shot him.”
“You were just as scared as I was.”
Shane chewed his thumbnail. “Your aura is different.”
I took a deep breath. “Oh yeah?”
“It’s yellow but I don’t know which yellow. You’re either afraid or you’ve come to some new point in your life.”
“I don’t know if I came to a new point in my life. I think I remembered a point from before all this. You know the feeling you get when you almost get in an accident? You just barely miss the car coming at you. You know that adrenaline? That’s what I’ve got right now. I feel like I forgot. I feel like I forgot that I’m the guy who gets pulled over for running a red light. I forgot that the universe has this conception of me as someone who does the right thing. Good things. I don’t know how I forgot that.”
Shane was quiet for a bit. “We’re just different.”
“I think so.”
“I’m the guy who can’t ever see his mother. You know she has a restraining order on me?”
“I know.”
“We owe a ton of money to people who have made other people disappear for far less.”
“We’ll figure it out. I’ll get a job. We’ll pay them back.”
“You’ve still got that adrenaline going?”
“Definitely.”
“I wish I could say I understood it. You’re the near miss, but I’m the oncoming car.”
He reached for the wheel and turned it. I stomped on the brakes and the car spun. It stopped on the side of the road and the engine died.
When I started hitting Shane, I’d only meant to knock some sense into him. Eventually he was yelling stop, and after a few more I put him out.
I fired up the ignition and drove us home.
NEW BOSS
A week later we were sitting in the living room. Charlie cut out lines on the coffee table. None of us spoke. We hadn’t said more than a couple words to each other since we got back from Rockville.
Two large men came through the door carrying guns.
Charlie hopped up and said, “I know you’re not coming in here on some bullshit.”
They pointed the guns at Charlie.
He said, “At least knock.”
The big man on the left said, “I’m Turtle, and this is Little John.”
Charlie said, “Turtle. John.”
Turtle noticed Shane sitting on the recliner. “Shane! Why don’t you answer your texts, fool?”
Shane looked at his hands.
“The rave was several days ago, homie. Where’s the spoils?”
“Danny Ames took it.”
The color went out of Turtle’s face. “Come again?”
“Danny Ames took it.”
Turtle rubbed his face. He said, “Do you know how to use your phone? Phones are pretty amazing. You could have texted that to me and we wouldn’t have bust in this motherfucker and been all rude to our host.” He pointed at the coffee table. “May I?”
Charlie extended his hand.
Turtle did a line.
Little John did a line and yelled, “Holy cows!”
Turtle said, “Don’t pay attention to him. Pay attention to me. He’s a waterhead.”
Little John said, “Better bring my floaties.”
“So Danny Ames took the money.”
Shane nodded.
“It was what…”
“I don’t know. I didn’t count it.”
“We priced it out at about fifteen k. Would you say that sounds right?”
Shane thought about it. “Sounds right.”
“Okay. So, do any of you have fifteen thousand dollars?”
Turtle looked at me. I shook my head. He looked at Charlie, who said, “This isn’t my fuck-up. I didn’t have shit to do with any of this.”
Turtle nodded. “All right. Now, a part of me is wondering if there’s not some subterfuge going on here.”
Shane’s eyes went wide.
“Hold on. I’m not done. You coming back here, just sitting there waiting to get fucked, that’s not what guilty people do. So I believe you.”
We all deflated a bit.
“But you still owe us.” He turned to me. “How much do you have on you?”
I went into the guest bedroom and opened up the drawer. Brought them back around five hundred bucks.