A Date With Fate (30 page)

I skimmed over the Luke part of her question by telling her she’d meet him at dinner the next night and could decide herself if he was Superman or Jimmy. I pointed at the duffle and indignantly told her what Candy had done.

“That shit’s so weak! She’s out of control. You never mess with someone’s gun.” Mac shook her head in disbelief.

“I know, right.” I agreed, smiling tightly.

From the doorway, Jazy spoke. “Candy needs her ass kicked up between her shoulder blades. Margaritas are served, my sisters. Now, Bel can start talking.”

I moaned while following them into the kitchen. “Ah man, can’t we do a mind meld instead? I just want to eat, drink, and be happy. Then go dance and not say a word for hours.”

Jazy patted my shoulder. “Embrace the suck, Anabel. Embrace the suck.”

Mac and Jazy laughed merrily at my expression.

Kenna wasn’t joining us and I was relieved. I like my second oldest sister, but there was a constraint between us due to old history and bad blood that prevented me from fully relaxing when she was around. It may have something to do with the fact she was pals with Candy. It may have something to do with the fact that she’s changeable and unreliable. She and Mac get along like oil and water, so there’s tension there. Mac’s pretty straight and Kenna carries around her own pharmacy. You could take your pick of reasons; I was simply glad she wasn’t around tonight.

The six of us were a lively group sitting around Mac’s kitchen island on bar stools eating Nachos and drinking Margaritas. Stella and Anna took turns filling the others in on the blow-by-blow recounting of the day, so I didn’t have to talk much. I was able to kick back and mostly listen while my five favorite females excitedly dissected the mystery of the missing Cheryl Crookston and the horror story of Larissa’s ex.

I smiled in the right places, and occasionally commented, but I found myself still feeling like I was outside my own skin looking in. I wanted to relax, but I pushed away my drink. The tequila wasn’t calling my name after all. My right foot was jiggling my leg up and down like it was motorized.

I took a deep breath and tried to center in on what was causing my unrest. It was hard to determine if I was still experiencing an aftermath from today, or if I was anxious over something else. I concentrated on breathing slowly in and out, the girl’s conversation a pleasant buzzing in the background. I emptied my mind of any conscious thoughts of Luke, or any of the other people bugging me from today.

I didn’t come up with any answers, but I was ready to go when the dishes were stacked neatly in the dishwasher and Mac announced we should hit the road. I felt like a live-wire strumming with energy.

Our group walked Stella out to her studio door and said our goodnights. She was having a friend over to watch a movie. We had to tease her when she confessed it was a male friend, who was not really just a friend, yet nothing more than a friend, at this moment in time. After that clear answer, the most she would say was his name was Eric George Jasnik and he was totally cute.

Everyone climbed into the van, leaving me the front seat. I guess it was my special night.

Before I opened my door, I hurriedly whispered to the waiting Stella, “Hey, is this the dude I’ve glimpsed you waiting on so much lately in the Sci-fi section?”

She grinned, putting her hand up above her head. “He’s about so tall with blondish-brownish hair and a butt courtesy of Lacrosse?”

I grinned back. “Ah, male sports are a wonderful thing. Don’t do anything I would do, you hear?”

“When am I going to be old enough to do what you would do?” Stella laughingly demanded.

Squeezing her shoulders, I gave her a smacking kiss on the cheek. I opened the van door. “Silly girl, when you’re my age, of course.”

Stella sputtered. “You have been saying that for years, Auntie Bel, you damn brat!”

I laughingly waved and Tre J honked lightly as we left. Stella waved back before climbing the stairs to her studio. By habit, like a well rehearsed dance move, all five of us craned our heads to watch until we saw her door close and Stella was safely in her apartment.

Chapter XII

“Smackwater Jack” by Carole King

Saturday 11/17/12

8:40 PM

We were on our way to the Castle Rock N’ Roll Bar and Grill, or The Rock as it’s called by us locals. It’s about ten minutes north of Northfield and sits at the lonely junction of two county roads miles from nowhere. It’s a hot spot well known for hiring local bands great to dance to on the weekends. The Rock packed the house nuts to butts, but not until closer to ten o’clock most Friday or Saturday nights.

With all the pent-up energy I was feeling, I didn’t care if we were unfashionably early. We’d get a table and I could lose myself in dancing for a couple of hours on a less crowded dance floor.

A Colbie Caillat song came on and Anna started us off “I do, I do, I doing” from the back. Soon the van was swaying on its axles as Tre J whizzed us out of town and up Highway 3 towards Castle Rock.

It was fun to cut loose and act wild, singing to the loud music and dancing in our seats from the waist up. It didn’t take long for Mac and Jazy to start changing the words of the song to something nasty. Anna was screaming with laughter from the very back seat while Tre J pounded the steering wheel. Tre’s belly laugh is so contagious; soon we were all screaming our laughter as hard as Anna.

I don’t think any of us knew what was happening when our van was first rammed abruptly off the road, tilting us dangerously and changing our laughter into real screams of confused terror.

It was the front and back wheels on my passenger side that hit the sloping, asphalt shoulder at sixty miles per hour, causing the van to violently rock and sway at the difference in the surfaces and angle of the tires.

“Hold on!” Tre J bellowed. She did not use the brakes, but took her foot off the gas to slow us down to a safe speed to cross back up. At the same time, she fought the steering to keep the van steady and not roll or flip us as we sailed half on and half off the road. The shoulder was paved here, and not the deeper gravel that would have almost guaranteed the van rolling at this sloping grade.

Glancing in her side view mirror she shouted in enraged disbelief, “That van rammed us!”

At the word “van”, I whipped my head around. It was dark. I couldn’t see past everyone’s heads in the back, or through the tinted van windows. I could only see headlights racing up behind us again.

“He’s coming after us! Hold tight everyone!” I shouted. Tre J was scowling with concentration. “Can you get us back up on the road and go faster?”

“Oh, yeah!” She shouted back, instantly wrenching the wheel to the left.

The passenger side of the Chrysler followed and shot up over the ledge of the blacktop shoulder.

We were level on all four wheels again, but we were soon shrieking and yelling in terror because the van barreled across the middle line and into the headlights of oncoming traffic. Tre J immediately compensated by punching it while sharply yanking the steering wheel back to the right. Fishtailing wildly at first, the van straightened out. We’d made it back into our own lane right before a semi truck bearing down on us sailed past in a whoosh of blasting air with its loud horn sounding off angrily. It narrowly missed creaming us by a split second.

Swiveling to look behind, I snapped off my seatbelt while cheering on a white-faced but determined Tre J. “Go, you wild woman! He’s right on our tail—GO!”

Jazy screamed a rebel yell while Mac shouted over her, “What’s going on, why is this guy after us?”

Anna screamed frantically from the back, “It’s the man in the van from today! He’s trying to kill us!”

I had the duffle bag in my lap, but had to fall on it to keep it from flying when another smack hit us from behind as the killer van crashed into us again. The hit was on the back left bumper and caused us to swerve sharply, but not go off the road this time. Thankfully, Tre J has experience driving big rigs because now that she knew what was happening there wasn’t a better person to have behind the wheel. She didn’t panic. She held the van steady and we were pulling ahead while flying at over ninety.

Jazy yelled in warning, “Curve coming up soon!”

Tre J nodded grimly. She reluctantly eased her foot off the gas pedal and hollered, “Damn! He’s catching up again!”

There were no headlights in sight coming towards us, so Tre J kept to the middle of the road.

The three girls in back cried, “Hold on!”

The van was rocked violently from the left side, rear bumper once more. The back end tires were hopping and stuttering as they slid out to the right. Tre didn’t hit the brakes, but again took her foot off the gas and went with the slide, only lightly steering. I thought we were going off the road and would flip this time for sure, but then the tires gripped and shot us out forward in the right direction.

We all cheered in noisy relief while screaming encouragement to Tre. She kept ahead of the van behind us, swerving back and forth in a random pattern to not be such an easy target. There were no oncoming headlights, but the curve was fast approaching and we couldn’t take it going this speed.

Tre was chanting furiously, “Shit, Shit, Shit!”

I had the duffle opened, and my Glock out. I slapped in the full magazine, racked the slide to chamber a bullet, and flipped off the safety. I hit the button to lower my window.

At the sudden blast of cold wind, Tre J dared a quick glance over at me. A beaming grin the size of the Mississippi broke across her tense face at the sight of the gun in my left hand.

Jazy saw it and pounded her seat. “Yes! Shoot the crazy fucker, Bel!”

Mac sat forward to see around my chair. “Get him, Sister!”

Yelling to be heard over the sound of the air screaming in through my open window and the even louder screaming coming from behind me, I instructed Tre. “Go ahead and slow down. Keep to our right to lure him. Let him almost catch up, and then I’m going to hang out the window and shoot back at him. When he gets close you have to swerve to the middle of the road so I have a better shot at him. Got it?”

Eyes on the road, Tre J let loose a war cry and shouted, “Got it!”

Jazy unbuckled in a flash and knelt between the seats and faced back. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when to shoot!”

Anna and Mac yelled they’d tell me, too. I turned to the open window and sat on my right knee, angling myself to face backwards. I put my left leg straight out and down, tucking it into the space between the seat and the door, planting myself. I held the gun tightly in my left hand, resting the barrel on the window ledge. I held onto the top of my seat with my right, hugging the head rest.

Tre slowed down abruptly. The wind had whipped stray strands of my long hair into my face. It was a good thing it was up in a pony tail tonight or I’d be blinded.

Anna was shouting prayers and giving play action from her lookout seat in the back. “Let her get him, let us be okay, here he comes, let her get him…here he comes! Oh man alive, Junior, HERE HE COMES!”

Pulse racing, I was excited but amazingly not scared or nervous. I visualized how I was going to shoot back at the van and where I was aiming. Then I was AWOL’ing, wondering whether it was possible a person could use up all the adrenaline in their adrenal glands before the body could produce more. I focused abruptly when I felt the van veer over to the left. Bracing myself, and holding tight onto the head rest to prevent falling over between the front seats, I heard three yells of, “NOW!”

I leaned out with the gun. Aiming behind us and to the left, I started pulling the trigger with no hesitation. When shooting, my gun makes the expected booming sound. Having no ear protectors the noise was deafening. That was the last thing I heard for awhile.

The gun jerked in my left hand with the small recoil from each shot, but I knew what to expect. I religiously practiced shooting my weapon on the range at the Dakota County Rifle Club for months. I held on steady as possible with just one hand and fired behind us until the ten shooter clip was empty. I saw tracers from bullets meeting metal, but couldn’t tell where they were hitting in the blinding mix of glaring headlights and black darkness of the night.

I leaned back in and ejected the empty clip. I snatched the half empty second magazine off the seat under my knee, and prepared to keep shooting.

That’s when I realized our van had slowed to a stop on the side of the road under one of the infrequent light poles along this lonely stretch of highway, about twenty yards past the curve.

When first starting to shoot, I’d felt a hand slip down the back of my low riding slacks and firmly clutch a bunch of fabric to hold me steady. I don’t believe I was in danger of falling out of the window, but I now had one hell of a wedgie.

Feeling a tap on my right arm as I squirmed on the seat, I looked over to see Mac’s relieved and smiling face. She was pointing behind us.

I read her exaggeratedly enunciating lips. “He’s gone! He turned and left!”

I nodded, grinning. I thumbed on the safety of my gun, but still kept in it my clenched grip. I wasn’t ready to trust he wouldn’t come back.

After a few moments, my hearing was returning a little. All of us were exclaiming over what had happened and talking at once.

I raised my voice. “Did I hit him?”

Anna replied excitedly, “I saw sparks bouncing off the van, so you hit that. I don’t know if he got hit, but the maniac slammed on the brakes and turned around. He drove off like a bat out of hell right as we came out of the curve.”

I grinned over at Tre. “Guess who now has to be sober cabbie all the time? You were unbelievable, girl!”

Tre J blushed while we all extravagantly complimented her driving skills.

Jazy smacked my right shoulder, laughing. “Speaking of sober; good thing you didn’t drink your tequila tonight or this could have ended much differently.” She shook her head in wonder. “To think we have Candy to thank for stealing your gun in the first place!”