rewrite:blood-ch4

Chapter 4

I could see a cut on my arm, long, deep. The windshield was almost broken, so I kicked it out. I got out of the car, and helped Carletta get out herself. She was less hurt than me, but less strong all the same. I had hit the gym quite a bit in the last month. We were on our way to get to Cheddar’s scratch kitchen, closer to the west-side. I was driving, and the freeway was mostly empty. We were riding around 85 miles per hour. A drunk driver skidded onto the road from the merging lane, and hit me from behind. We swerved and span out. What a way to get to know somebody.

“Are you okay?” I asked her, scared the cut only looked minor.

“I’m fine, just a little hurt.”

“Okay. Well, i’m gonna call the cops.”

“Alright, go for it.” she was shaken up. So was I. we could have died. We weren’t exactly going slowly. I took a look at the car. It was definitely totaled. The other car wasn’t. I ran over to the man in his car. The operator answered, and I said “hello, I was just in a car accident on I-40, and I don’t think the other guy is gonna be okay.”

“Okay sir, i’ll put you through to the police, do you know the nearest mile marker.

“Yes, it would be 49.”

“There should be some police there in a moment.”

“Thank you.”

I hung up, and looked at the man in his car. He had his head on the dashboard, and I could see blood seeping out of the sides.

Carletta ran up next to me to look at him. “Jeez, he really got fucked up.”

“That could have been us.”

She didn’t want to think about that. I was confused. Why is it that this guy could be dead, but our car took more damage, and flipped over, and we survived. I even passed out. Why would he die?

Carletta ran up to the window, and knocked on the glass. “Hello, are you okay.”

There was no response to her question. He was most definitely dead. A few minutes, a squad car and an ambulance pulled up next to the wreck. They set up cones, and pried the man’s car door open, to reveal that the man was more hurt than me and Carletta had thought. They pulled him off the dashboard and he woke up. I could see four deep cuts, and a broken nose that were obvious. When he woke up, he let out a painful scream, and yelled “fuck” nice and loud so everyone could hear it.

When he got up and started trying to walk. He fell right over. He was a mixture of drunk, and injured. The paramedics helped him up, and then to the ambulance. He had a compound fracture in his right leg, and a broken bone that was split cleanly, so skin and muscle dangled the rest of his forearm. He mumbled something mean and painful. Once they got him in the ambulance, they shoved some morphine in his arm. When he started screaming, they restrained him, to make sure they would be able to give him proper medical treatment. I could see him scream after every single bump in the road. The expression on his face told me he was in pain, even before the accident.

One of the paramedics saw the cut on my arm and sat me down to check it out. He dabbed on rubbing alcohol and it burned my skin. When he was done, he put on a cloth bandage, and let me go on my merry fucking way.

I called a cab for Carletta, and another for me. They both came around the same time. I got in mine, and Carletta got in her’s, because we weren’t romantic. We just left. That was the end. The taxi driver took me to my apartment, and I could see James and the white kid sitting inside. When I walked in, they were both tied into wooden chairs, and somebody hit me in the back of the head with a frying pan. In my mind’s eye, I could see the words “wake up.”

Then I woke up.

James had a few of his ribs broken from the fall. After I called 911, a paramedic and a police car pulled up. James was still breathing, beside the fact that he had fallen off the second story, after breaking glass. Some shards were sticking out of his legs, so he couldn’t walk.

James had always thought that it was my fault that he had gotten into a gang, and essentially that I was the reason that the three of us were in so much trouble all the time. Every time something bad would happen to me, he would tell em about it. He would always say something like, “why did you do this to us?” or “what were you thinking?” For some reason, in his mind, I was always the bad guy.

This wasn’t the first time he had tried to kill the white kid either. One time he pointed a gun and stuck it right into his face, and started screaming demands at him. The white kid met the demands, which were step the fuck off, and in return, James agreed not to blow his head off, and leave me with the gun.

I knew that James was the type of person that would do anything and everything that he was told. One time, I asked him to kill some random person, just because he was behind on coke money, and James slit his throat right there. James didn’t care about his actions. If there was nobody to hold him back, James would kill, slaughter and otherwise rape anybody he wanted to. If he wanted to do it, we would, no questions asked.

The police questioned me. I told them all about James. Well, not really. I didn’t tell him he had a history of violence, that we were both in a gang, or that I had come from Tallahassee. So basically, I was lying through my teeth to this police officer. Once I told him the entire story, I knew what I needed to do. It was time to run away. Just one more time.

The hotel that we stayed at was high end, and right near the airport. I took about 15 minutes and walked over there. The ticket to salt lake city was about $400. Which was not too much for me, because from the time I started selling coke in albuquerque, I had already made about $20,000. I walked a few blocks over and got a soda from some restaurant I forget the name of. The flight was set to leave in about five hours. I had all the tie in the world to do basically whatever I wanted. But I still needed to protect myself.

I had a gun, a knife, and a corkscrew on me. I dumped them all in a nearby trash can so that security wouldn’t give me too much trouble. I was on my way back to the airport, when something had struck me in the back. It was sharp, and a loud bang followed. I fell onto my stomach. As I heard people screaming and could feel the presence of somebody coming closer and closer to me. He flipped me onto my back, and I could see his colombian smile under his bushy mustache before he said “wake up.”

Then I woke up.

The room was musky and dirty. There was nobody near me. I sat in a twelve inch chair that only held half of my body. I was leaning to my left with a door sitting in front of me. There was a wall directly on either side. It was dark, and all that was lighting the room was a small 50 watt light bulb above me. I could barely stand up, because the door was so close to my face. The knob twisted before I touched it, and James was on the other side.

He pulled me out, and I fell over. He helped me up to my feet and said “dude, are you alright.”

“Yeah, just haven’t really moved for a few hours.”

The room outside was the living room of Carletta’s house. She let us stay there for a few nights while we had our apartment bug-bombed. We had just moved in, and there was already so many cockroaches inside, we couldn’t sleep.

I stepped up, and we walked into the next room over, where Carletta had let out some cereal for us all to eat, and the white kid had already poured himself some fruity pebbles.

We both sat down and Carletta said “Hi. How much are you guys gonna eat.”

“We haven’t eaten in three days.”

“Answer the question.” she said, in a joking manner.

James thought she was serious, and said “ I’m fucking hungry.”

She looked at him kind of confused as her smile changed. She walked away, just to get away from him.

“Good job man.” the white kid told me, and I was just as confused as Carletta was.

When we were done, we all left the house as fast as we could. We didn’t want the same thing that happens every time we are somebody’s guest. Which was that our host dies. We decided to head  over to the Felony to get some coffee. Carletta didn’t like the smell so she wouldn’t let us drink any in her house or when we stayed in the motel.

The Felony seemed more claustrophobic than ever before, and we sat down. Coffee smelled strong and we all paid a bit for our coffee, and booked it. We didn’t want anybody to find out where we were. Especially any police. We wanted to avoid anybody in our gang, so we wouldn’t have any more jobs to do. We didn’t want any police to know where we were because we have killed plenty of people in Albuquerque, and we didn’t want to got to jail very much.

Once we were a few blocks away, we decided to stop and look at the construction happening on central. They were just starting to dig up the road. The days were about 80 degrees, and I was very sure that the workers for the city were hot as shit out there. They were getting ready to put in some trolley system or some shit that everybody was bitching about. I didn’t understand it, but it did make it harder to get around. You mostly had to walk, and there was a much higher charge for taxis.

We all walked around, and didn’t do much the rest of the day but wait for the bug bomb to clear out of our house. When it was done, the exterminators called me and told us about it. We walked about ten blocks back and made it back to our house. It stank, but none of us were sick.

I slept on a bed that folded out from our couch, James and the white kid took a lumpy, stained and disgusting piece of shit in the only other room. I stayed up late listening to music. It was almost like we were back in Tallahassee again.

That was, until somebody decided to try and break in.

Behind the couch, was a window. Somehow, despite the lock and the fact that we were living on the third floor, somebody opened it up and jumped over me to try and steal our shit. He didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know who he was. Maybe he was on of our clients. He saw our shitty tv, and moved into the room that James and the white kid were in. I stood up, and pulled out my gun. He could hear me and turned the light on in the room I was in. I was already pointing the gun at him, and he was scared as shit.

I got a good look at him. He was maybe 20. Scrawny as shit, and unarmed. His hair was dirty, and so was his clothes. He stood there silent, as he could hear James and the white kid waking up and getting out of bed in the room behind him. He looked like he was in so much fear, that he was going to piss himself. I told him “You picked the wrong house, motherfucker.” and cocked my gun.

James got the shotgun in the next room and pressed it against the back of this kid’s head. He started crying. He begged “Please don’t kill me. Please.”

I whispered, “you’re gonna jump out the window then.”

James poked him with the shotgun, directing him back the way he came. His hands were up, as he walked slowly toward the couch, and stepped up onto it. He put both his hands on the windowsill, and jumped onto the pavement. I heard a crack, and a scream. I knew he broke a lot of bones. I didn’t call a paramedic. He knew what he as doing could get him hurt, and it did.

I went to bed. I was tired as shit, so it didn’t take too long. I had a dream where I was in a closet, and somebody busted open the door and hit both my knees with a hammer before screaming at me to wake up.

Then I woke up.

Carletta was sitting across from me. So was the white kid and James. Block wooden chairs held them still, as they looked at me. They weren’t even tied up. No duct tape. Just sitting in a room. The room was an interrogation. As I looked to the side, I could see a baby blue room, and one way glass. We were all there in the investigation of the kid who leaped from our window. He was trying to press charges. We knew he wouldn’t win. He broke into our house. We all knew what happened. I mean, I knew everything. But I told them what happened. They believed me, because it seemed to all line up. Also, I didn’t lie to James and the white kid that often.

A police officer walked in, and sat down at the end of the table to my right. “Good afternoon.”

“You too.” I said, trying to seem polite.

There is something that I have learned about police officers. I mean, you have to have learned something if you have to evade getting in trouble as many times as I have. You just act polite, and be extremely nice to them. Pretend you haven’t been in trouble. Have them explain all the charges, rather than acting like you know them. Try and joke around.

Most of all, act like the good guy. Make the other person look as bad as you can. It will make them look worse as a person. Even though you do this, don’t put yourself on a pedestal. Gloating makes you seem like a worse person.

“What happened here.” said carletta. She was genuinely concerned.

We didn’t have a lawyer present. That makes it look like you don’t need somebody telling you whether what the next thing you say will be incriminating. Besides, I was right. The kid came into our house, and we pointed guns we bought. Illegally. Shit. maybe we did need a lawyer.

“Well, the boy is saying that you invited him in and threatened to kill him if he didn’t jump out of the window. He is saying that you lured him into your house with the promise of an illegal job, selling drugs. All we need is your statements.” The cop said all this with a small smile. I think he knew that the kid came in through the window. He was already on our side. I don’t totally know why.

“I wasn’t there,” said Carletta. And it’s true. She wasn’t.

“Yes, well, you did use to lease the apartment, didn’t you? Because if you did, you could be liable to it again.”

“Well I did. I moved out years ago. Why would it possibly matter.”

“There’s just a possibility that you could have been involved.”

I could feel a thumping in my head. From the back of it. It was almost like somebody was hitting me repeatedly. I could hear this strange gunshot kind of sound too.

“Well, see what happened was that Me and the white kid were both sleeping, right. And all of a sudden we wake up because our door was wide open and the light was on in the other room. I sat up far and I could hear Gerry yelling at this kid in the other room. He had his gun out, so I reached behind the nightstand, and grabbed the shotgun. I walked up behind the kid and pressed the gun behind his head. He let out a whimper and begged not to die. So we said ‘okay’ and made him jump out the window. We thought that would be a good punishment for him. We didn’t call any cops.” James seemed smart. Smarter than usual.

Sometimes I forget that James is black.

The cop looked at the rest of us and we all nodded our heads.

“Well, his statement…” he was cut off by Carletta.

“Look, we told you the whole thing, can we just go to a holding cell or something.” she was breaking all my rules when dealing with police. She cut him off, talked in a smart ass voice, and she was demanding action be taken in her favor. I had to do something. But I didn’t.

“Okay.” said the policeman, seeming more satisfied with the situation than they usually are.

When he left the room to get paperwork, we all leaned over to James. This was the first time he had spoken up to someone that was superior to him, without killing them with a knife of course. The cop walked back in and let us go. They questioned the kid again and he came clean after hearing our statement. We were free to go, after we signed a couple papers. When we left, we all went to our respective homes and went to bed.

Then I woke up.