‘Step away from the truck, sir,’ George said in his flat and colorless Trooper voice. You’d never believe, hearing him talk to some John Q. at the side of the road, that he could scream himself hoarse on the Little League field, yelling at kids to bunt the damn ball and to keep their heads down while they were running the bases. Or kidding with them on the bench before their games to loosen them up.
Lippy had never torn the Fruit Loops off any of George’s shirts in study hall period four, and maybe that’s why he stepped away from the truck when George told him to. Looking down at his boots as he did it, losing the grin. When guys like Brian Lippy lose the grin, what comes in to take its place is this kind of dopey sullenness.
‘Are you going to be trouble, sir?’ George asked. He hadn’t drawn his gun, but his hand was on the butt of it. ‘If you are, tell me now. Save us both some grief Lippy didn’t say anything. Just looked down at his boots.
‘His name is Brian?’ George asked me.
‘Brian Lippy.’ I was looking at the truck. Through the back window I could see the passenger, still sitting in the middle, not looking at us. Head dropped. I thought maybe he’d beaten her unconscious. Then one hand went up to her mouth and out of the mouth came a
plume of cigarette smoke.
‘Brian, I want to know if we’re going to have trouble. Answer up so I can hear you, now, just like a big boy.’
‘Depends,’ Brian said, lifting his upper lip to get a good sneer on the word. I started toward the truck to do my share of the job. When my shadow passed over the toes of his boots, Brian kind of recoiled and took a step backward, as if it had been a snake instead of a shadow. He was high, all right, and to me it was seeming more like PCP or angel dust all the time.
‘Let me have your driver’s license and registration,’ George said.
Brian paid no immediate attention. He was looking at me again. ‘ED-die JACK-you-BOYS,’ he said, chanting it the way he and his friends always had back in high school, making a joke out of it. He hadn’t worn any head-down Christs or Nazi swastikas back at Statler High, though; they would have sent him home if he’d tried that shit. Anyway, him saying my name like that got to me. It was like he’d found an old electrical switch, dusty and forgotten behind a door but still wired up. Still hot.
He knew it, too. Saw it and started grinning. ‘Fat Eddie JACK-you-BOYS. How many boys did you jack, Eddie? How many boys did you jack in the shower room? Or did you just get right down on your knees and suck em off? Straight to the main event. Mister Takin Care of Business.’
‘Want to close your mouth, Brian?’ George asked. ‘You’ll catch a fly.’ He took his handcuffs off his belt.
Brian Lippy saw them and started to lose the grin again. ‘What you think you gonna do with those?’
‘If you don’t hand me your operating papers right now, I’m going to put them on you, Brian. And if you resist, I can guarantee you two things: a broken nose and eighteen months in Castlemora for resisting arrest. Could be more, depending on which judge you draw. Now what do you think?’
Brian took his wallet out of his back pocket. It was a greasy old thing with the logo of some rock group — Judas Priest, I think — inexpertly burned into it. Probably with the tip of a soldering iron. He started thumbing through the various compartments.
‘Brian,’ I said.
He looked up.
‘The name is Jacubois, Brian. Nice French name. And I haven’t been fat for quite awhile now.’
‘You’ll gain it back,’ he said, ‘fat boys always do.’
I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. He sounded like some halfbaked guest on a talkshow. He glowered at me, but there was something uncertain in it. He’d lost the advantage and he knew it.
‘Little secret,’ I said. ‘High school’s over, my friend. This is your actual, real life. I know
that’s hard for you to believe, but you better get used to it. It’s not just detention anymore.
This actually counts.’
What I got was a kind of stupid gape. He wasn’t getting it. They so rarely do.
‘Brian, I want to see your paperwork with no more delay,’ George said. ‘You put it right in my hand.’ And he held his hand out, palm up. Not very wise, you might say, but George Morgan had been a State Trooper for a long time, and in his judgment, this situation was now going in the right direction. Right enough, anyway, for him to decide he didn’t need to put the cuffs on my old friend Brian just to show him who was in charge.
I went over to the truck, glancing at my watch as I did. It was just about one-thirty in the afternoon. Hot. Crickets singing dry songs in the roadside grass. The occasional car passing by, the drivers slowing down for a good look. It’s always nice when the cops have someone pulled over and it’s not you. That’s a real daymaker.
The woman in the truck was sitting with her left knee pressed against the chrome post of Brian’s Hurst shifter. Guys like Brian put them in just so they can stick a Hurst decal in the window, that’s what I think. Next to the ones saying Fram and Pennzoil. She looked about twenty years old with long ironed brownette hair, not particularly clean, hanging to her shoulders. Jeans and a white tank top. No bra. Fat red pimples on her shoulders. A tat on one arm that said AC/DC and one on the other saying BRIAN MY LUV. Nails painted candycane pink but all bitten down and ragged. And yes, there was blood. Blood and snot hanging out of her nose. More blood spattered up her cheeks like little birthmarks. Still more on her split lips and chin and tank top. Head down so the wings of her hair hid some of her face. Cigarette going up and down, tick-tock, either a Marlboro or a Winston, in those days before the prices went up and all the fringe people went to the cheap brands, you could count on it. And if it’s Marlboro, it’s always the hard pack. I have seen so many of them. Sometimes there’s a baby and it straightens the guy up but usually it’s just bad luck for the baby.
‘Here,’ she said, and lifted her right thigh a little. Under it was a slip of paper, canary yellow. ‘The registration. I tell him to keep his ticket in his wallet or the glove compartment, but it’s always floppin around in here someplace with the Mickey Dee wrappers and the rest of the trash.’
She didn’t sound stoned and there were no beer cans or liquor bottles floating around in the cab of the truck. That didn’t make her sober, of course, but it was a step in the right direction.
She also didn’t seem like she was going to turn abusive, but of course that can change. In a hurry.
‘What’s your name, ma’am?’
‘Sandra?’
‘Sandra what?’
‘McCracken?’
‘Do you have any ID, Ms McCracken?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Show me, please.’
There was a little leatherette clutch purse on the seat beside her. She opened it and started pawing through it. She worked slowly, and with her head bent over her purse, her face disappeared completely. You could still see the blood on her tank top but not on her face; you couldn’t see the swollen lips that turned her mouth into a cut plum, or the old mouse fading around one eye.
And from behind me: ‘Fuck no, I ain’t getting in there. What makes you think you got a right to put me in there?’
I looked around. George was holding the back door of the cruiser open. A limo driver couldn’t have done it more courteously. Except the back seat of a limo doesn’t have doors you can’t open and windows you can’t unroll from the inside, or mesh between the front and the back. Plus, of course, that faint smell of puke. I’ve never driven a cruiser — well, except for a
‘week or so after we got the new Caprices — that didn’t have that smell.
‘What makes me think I have the right is you’re busted, Brian. Did you just hear me read you your rights?’
‘The fuck for, man? I wasn’t speedin!’
‘That’s true, you were too busy tuning up on your girlfriend to really get the pedal to the metal, but you were driving recklessly, driving to endanger. Plus assault. Let’s not forget that.