None of the highway pirates had ever seen such a thing, and when the throttle was turned up to full power, Smoke and his crew gawked at beating blades and landing lights blazing as trees whipped in hurricane-force gusts.
“Shit,” Smoke exclaimed. It was rare he showed emotion other than anger and hate. “Would you fucking look at that!”
Cuda, Possum, and Cat sat in awed silence, the chopping of the blades thudding their eardrums and exciting their blood like lust.
“I wonder how hard it’d be to fly one of those things,” Smoke said. “You imagine what we could do with something like that? Fuck trucks! Shit, no one could ever catch us and we could deliver the goods ourselves in half the time from here to Canada, get the middle man out of the way.”
The helicopter lifted, flooding wildly swirling grass with dazzling light, and through an expansive passenger’s window, Smoke could just make out one of the Crimm daughters ripping open a bag of junk food, maybe chips. Then he noticed someone else. Andy Brazil was trotting back to his unmarked car. It turned Smoke to molten lava to see that son of a bitch again. When Andy had been a city cop, he and Hammer had been responsible for catching Smoke and putting him in prison. Not a day had passed in Smoke’s cell when he hadn’t entertained sadistic fantasies about what was in store for those two cops.
“Well, well, well,” Smoke said, as the helicopter rose above trees and thundered into the sky. “Look who’s here. Maybe I ought to blow his motherfucking brains out right now.”
“Whose brains?” Cat tore his eyes away from the bright light churning up the night. He followed Smoke’s vindictive stare to a blond trooper climbing into an unmarked car.
“Why you want to blow his brains out now, man?” Possum protested as Smoke put the SUV in gear. “Don’t go be doing something like that with all these police around! You crazy or what? You wanna do that, I’m getting outta the car.”
Possum was riding up front, and when he grabbed the door handle, Smoke backhanded him across the face. Cuda and Cat shrank into their seats, getting smaller and falling silent. They despised Smoke but had nowhere else to go, and were in too much trouble by now to do anything but stay in their present employment. Both Cuda and Cat had started out in street gangs, which were a dime a dozen these days. Being a pirate was like being the Mafia, Cat reassured himself as he didn’t move or blink in his seat in the Land Cruiser. Nobody messed with Smoke and his road dogs, and they went after bigger prizes than just ripping off people and ATM machines and doing drive-by shootings for fun. The other day, Smoke had taken his crew to Cloverleaf Mall and bought all of them brand-new Nikes and all the pizza and french fries they could eat in the food court.
So he wasn’t all bad. Possum was trying to make himself feel better, too. But he was tired of being smacked around by Smoke and worrying about him hurting or killing poor little Popeye. When Possum was growing up, his daddy used to smack him around, too, and do awful things at the dinner table, stabbing steak knives into the wood and throwing food across the room. His daddy
liked to shoot rabbits and send the dogs after them so he could have the pleasure of watching the small, shrieking creatures torn to bits. Possum began to stay in the basement, dropping out of school to watch TV in the dark. Over the years, he stopped growing and crept up from the basement only late at night to raid the refrigerator and the liquor bottles after his parents had quit fighting and gone to sleep.
Possum had never caused any kind of trouble until he was able to see in the dark and sunlight hurt his eyes. Then he began to venture out of the basement after midnight and walk around Northside’s Chamberlayne Avenue, looking dreamily at cars gliding past and normal people out–people who could come and go as they pleased and didn’t have to spend their days in the basement listening to their daddy tear up the house and beat on their mama and torture animals.