A Bad Day for Voodoo

CHAPTER

9

There was a great deal of screaming after he said that.

Our driver clutched the steering wheel as if it were a struggling tiger, and though I can’t prove it, I think he actually growled. I know for a fact that his eyes didn’t really glow red, but if there were ever a time at which somebody’s eyes would glow red, this was it.

Time once again seemed to move in slow motion. “IIIIIIII doooooonnnnnn’t thiiiiiinnnnnk yooooooouuuuuu shouuuuuuuuld doooooooo thiiiiiissssss!” I said.

The distance between the cab and my mom’s car closed from six blocks to three blocks in about, oh, a quarter of a second.

“Nonononononononononono!” shouted Kelley and Adam at the same time, as if they’d rehearsed it.

Two blocks.

“Bad!” I screamed. “Badness!”

One block.

Then the cabbie slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched, and the cab spun into the opposite lane at a forty-five degree angle, and we all screamed some more.

“I decided I probably shouldn’t do that,” the driver explained.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’ll just follow him at a reasonable pace.”

He got back into the correct lane and proceeded to follow the car, which was going fast but not recklessly disregarding the law.

“Can I please borrow your phone?” I asked again. “I promise I won’t call the police. My mom thinks I’m dead, and I need to tell her that I’m not.”

“You’re the third person today to say that.”

“Seriously?”

“No. Gullible!” He punched me on the shoulder, then handed me his phone. “Here. Make it quick.”

I stared at the phone for a moment.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m used to only picking her name from my contacts list. I’m trying to remember her actual number.”

“Well, just scroll through recent calls. I’ve probably got your mom on there.” He punched me in the arm again. “Kidding! Kidding! Gullible!”

My mom’s car turned to the right and he followed, staying about a block behind.

The ten digits flashed into my mind. (I’m not going to share them here, because, no offense, you might be into prank calls.) I quickly dialed.

“Hello?” Mom answered, sounding frantic.

“Mom, it’s me!”

“Tyler!”

“I’ve got to go, but everything’s okay. I promise you I’m not dead.” I hung up.

“Were you disappointed that I didn’t ram him?” asked the driver.

“Not at all,” I assured him.

“I can still make it happen.”

“No, no. Just keep following him.”

“He won’t get away,” said the driver. “Do you know what my vision is? Guess what my vision is.”

“Twenty-twenty?”

“Not that good. I mean, I’m not a robot. But I can read pretty much any street sign. Go on, point to a street sign and see if I can read it.”

“That’s not necessary,” I assured him. “Just follow the car.”

“Are you being condescending?”

“No.”

“Didn’t think so. Just checking.”

I didn’t bother to look back at Kelley and Adam to gauge their expressions. I knew they were not smiling.

We continued the relatively low-speed chase for another couple of blocks, and then the carjacker stopped. A large metal sliding door opened to his right, he pulled into the garage, and the door closed behind him.

The cabbie drove up next to the door and stopped. I was surprised that he didn’t ask if he should ram it.

I stared at the garage door, trying to figure out exactly what I should do.

“Did I ever tell you why I became a cabdriver?” asked the cabbie. “It’s a long story but a fascinating one.”

“I don’t think we have time,” I said.

“I’ll tell you the short version. When I was three, my dad bought me a Matchbox car—”

“We really are kind of distracted right now.”

“Doing what?”

“Figuring out how to get my car back.”

“Oh, that car’s not coming back. I’ll tell you that right now. Anyway, it was a green Matchbox car, a Trans-Am, a kind of vehicle that you kids today don’t really appreciate but that in my time was quite the—”

I tuned him out, which was not easy. What should I do? They were probably chop-shopping the car right now. At any moment the sadistic carjacker could find the box, and he would open it, and, okay, maybe he wouldn’t start unraveling the doll right away. (I could imagine my skin unraveling, a long thin strip of flesh winding off of my arm until it was just veins and muscles.) But what if he tossed it in a garbage can? What if eighty tons of other garbage got poured on top of the doll at the dump?

I had to get the doll back. Now.

Or maybe I could send Adam to get it. Bribe him with a Snickers.

No, I had to do it.

I opened the door.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Kelley asked.

“Saving my life.” I got out of the cab.

“No!” Kelley opened the back door and got out as well. “He’ll shoot you!”

“No, he won’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Knock.”

“Knock?”

I nodded. “Knock.”

“Uh, guys, don’t leave me here,” said Adam from the backseat. “I don’t have any money for the fare.”

I gave Kelley a quick kiss on the lips. “I’ll be fine,” I assured her. “He has nothing to gain by shooting me. I can talk him out of it. Stay in the car. I’m going by myself.”

“Don’t do this. You don’t have to.”

I gave her another kiss. “Yes,” I said, “I do.” I have to admit that I said it in kind of a corny, melodramatic way, as if I were making some sort of noble sacrifice. Of course, I wasn’t being a hero or anything—I was only trying not to have my fingers burned off one by one. Still, for that one moment, I felt as if Daniel-Day Lewis could play me in an Academy Award-winning motion picture.

“Get back in the cab,” I told Kelley. “Nobody is going to shoot anybody, but if you do hear bullets, I won’t be offended if you drive away.”

Kelley let out an exasperated and heartsick sigh and then got back into the cab. She slammed the door shut. I suddenly decided that I could really use a hug before I went over to the garage door, but no.. .I’d wasted enough time already.

Then Adam got out of the car. “I’m coming with you,” he said, his voice filled with bravery.

“No.”

“I won’t let you do this alone. Part of this is sort of my fault, and I’m going to stand by your side.”

“Adam, my strategy involves talking. You’re not good at it.”

He looked hurt. “I can talk.”

“Seriously, stay in the cab. I need you to protect Kelley.”

Of course, Adam knew that I wouldn’t put him in charge of protecting a bag of stale Cheetos, much less my girlfriend. He looked at the ground and shrugged. “All right. Shriek if you need me.”

“I will. Get back in the car.”

I walked over to the metal garage door. I was sick to my stomach, my head was pounding, at least eight different body parts were trembling, and I very much doubted that my bladder was going to operate at maximum efficiency. But what choice did I have?

I stood there for a few seconds, gathering my courage, and then I knocked.

This information comes from several different sources, mostly Wikipedia, which I know isn’t completely reliable, but it’s sure convenient.

Throughout his childhood, Gary Sheck’s parents had said that one day he should open his own Italian restaurant. Nobody in the Sheck family was Italian, and in fact, the family had a long history of making fun of people with Italian accents, but nevertheless, that was the career path they encouraged. When he was sixteen, Gary took a job washing dishes at a local Italian restaurant, and that’s when he discovered that being a professional dishwasher absolutely sucked.

Here’s how it works: A customer complains to the server that the chicken on his fettuccine Alfredo is overcooked. The server says, “Oh goodness, I’m so sorry. I’ll fix that right up, and it’ll be no problem at all.” The server goes back into the kitchen and informs the chef that the customer sent the chicken back because it was overcooked. Despite the server’s assurance to the customer that it’s no problem at all, it really is a problem, and the chef throws a minor temper tantrum. Of course, the chef can’t come out into the dining area and punch the customer in the face or dump a bowl of spaghetti sauce on his head, so he yells at the server. The server can’t yell at the chef or the customer, so to vent his or her frustration, the server yells at the dishwasher, who is entirely powerless and who had nothing to do with the overcooked chicken on the fettuccine Alfredo.

Gary quickly decided that he didn’t like getting yelled at all day. He wanted to be the one yelling at people who weren’t responsible for what they were getting yelled at for.

He vowed that he would work hard and rise through the ranks until he acquired the power he so desperately sought.

On his second day, when a server named Tom yelled at him because the customer complained about the insufficient intensity of tomato flavor in the lasagna, Gary hit Tom in the face with a large metal spoon and stormed out of the building, never to return to the restaurant business again.

Gary went to his parents and proposed the idea that instead of following the original plan of getting a job, he would pursue an alternate course of action where he did not get a job. Their counterproposal was a simple and straightforward scenario in which he did get a job immediately, perhaps something in retail.

Gary Sheck did not enjoy working retail.

On his second day, after an elderly woman waited until he’d completely rung up and bagged her purchases to reveal that she had a twenty-five-cents-off coupon, Gary raised his fist and was immediately fired. He walked home, unsure of whether he would have punched the old lady in the face or not.

The unanswered question really bothered him, so he walked around until he found another old lady, and then he punched her in the face.

That was infinitely more satisfying than owning an Italian restaurant.

After a few days of soul searching, Gary realized that his opportunities for hurting more people would be greatly increased if he focused on doing jobs that were illegal. He started with petty crimes—a mugging here, a grand theft auto there—and then, on his eighteenth birthday, as a present to himself, he shot a man.

It wasn’t as much fun as he had thought it was going to be. The man died too quickly.

The next one took a lot longer. Gary was in a cheery mood for nearly three hours after that.

He joined a gang called Autopsy Report. By age twenty-five, he was their leader. He decided that Autopsy Report sounded more like the name of a band than a gang and changed it to the Maulers. He got reports that people were confusing it with “the Mallers” and assuming that their turf of terror was limited to shopping malls, so he changed it to the Red Shredders.

Gary knew that to instill fear in his enemies, he needed a trademark. So he became known for bashing his enemies to death with a brick. He was good at it.

By the time Gary was thirty, the Red Shredders had disbanded, but Gary and his five most loyal members stuck together and continued to commit crimes. Gary preferred crimes that were violent or at least destructive, but sometimes he settled for profitable, as with his lucrative auto-theft operation.

Gary was furious at the moment, because he’d told Scorp (the nickname for Scorpion, whose real name was Fred) not to bring in any more of these annoying, sensible, fuel-efficient cars. Scorp had apologized but didn’t seem to really mean it, and he giggled when he told Gary how he’d stolen it from a teenage kid, and the kid’s mom had called, and Scorp had told her the kid was dead.

Gary had to admit that that was pretty funny. Still, Scorp had disobeyed an order, so Gary threw him to the ground and kicked him in the side a few times.

Then they went to work dismantling the car.

“Hold up, hold up,” said Gary, waving for everybody to be quiet. “Did you hear that?”

Shark (real name: Trevor), Blood Clot (Charles), Ribeye (also Charles) and Scorp all went silent.

“Somebody’s knocking!”

Shark hurried over to the garage door and looked through the peephole. “Are you kidding me?”

“Is it the cops?” asked Blood Clot, who had never murdered a police officer but hoped to someday.

“Naw,” said Shark. “It’s a teenage kid.”

“For real?” asked Scorp. “Blond hair?”

“Yeah.”

Scorp let out a high-pitched laugh. “That’s the kid I stole it from! Can you believe that?”

“You think that’s funny?” asked Gary. “You lead him right back here to us, and you think it’s something to laugh about? You gonna laugh in jail? Huh? You gonna have a nice big chuckle in jail?”

Scorp had received three separate black eyes (not that he had three eyes; his right eye had been blackened once and his left twice) and a cracked rib from answering Gary’s rhetorical questions, so he said nothing.

Gary took out his gun. Ribeye and Blood Clot did the same. “All right,” said Gary. “Let him in.”

I didn’t know any of that when the garage door slid open. All I knew was that a big, frightening man grabbed me by the arm and pulled me inside, and then the garage door slammed shut, and then I had five guns pointed at me.