Pain Killers (45 page)

Tina gasped and put her hand on her chest. “You’d do that?”

Before I could answer, the beefy guard put down one phone and picked up another one. Then he ran out of the booth, waving his arm like a third base coach telling a runner to slide.
“Go go go!”
I shouted.

“What?”

“Just do it!” I yelled, jamming my foot down over Tina’s on the gas. We plowed past the man so fast he had to jump out of the way. “Hit the siren.”

Seconds later, we both remembered to breathe.

“Jesus Christ!” Tina cried. “Jesus fucking junkie Christ!”

She started laughing. Then I did. Nothing was funny. It was primal relief. Tina took the small-town curves at sixty, shouting, “I can’t believe this!”

“Me neither!” I shouted back. “I feel like the hangman had his noose around my neck, then crapped his pants and fell off the scaffold.”

“That’s so poetic.”

Without slowing down, she lurched across the seat to grab my hand. The ambulance bounced over a curb and clipped a mailbox, nearly pancaking a schnauzer and its blue-haired owner, who’d bent to scoop its droppings in a plastic bag. She saw us howling and dropped the leash.

Tina shrieked, “What just happened?”

“I think we got a message from the warden,” I said, “and you almost killed a senior citizen’s reason for living.”

I stuck my head out the window, craning backward, to make sure puppy and Grandma were okay. Tina snaked her hand between my legs.

“‘The loins,’” she sighed breathily, “‘the place of the Last Judgment.’”

“Nick Cave?”

“William Blake.”

“Either way.”

A garbage truck pulled out of nowhere. Tina swerved, going full stunt driver. We squealed into a cul de sac of clapboard houses and scared a posse of skater kids, barely missing the nose of a speedboat poking out of a driveway. The tires screamed like they’d just seen their parents die. The ambulance spun a full 180, burning tread until the asphalt smoked. We ended up facing the wrong way down the one-way street we’d just careened off of.

The siren was still blaring. Families poured out of their houses to see who had the emergency. One workadaddy, waxing his pickup in a garage opposite, threw down the rag and ran over, Glock in hand.

“Gun!” I shouted.

Tina slammed back into drive and floored it. A woman in curlers flew out her front door with a shotgun. As she peeled out Tina pounded the wheel and shouted. “Shooting at an ambulance? What’s wrong with these people?”

“Paranoid,” I shouted back. “It’s that ‘San Quentin’ on the side in big letters,” I said. “They think we escaped. Neighborhood Watch probably has Stinger missiles.”

She cut left through a church parking lot. “I don’t want to find out. Is the old freak all right?”

I pulled back the sheet. Mengele eyed me wildly, nostrils flared over mustache and gaffer’s tape.

“He’s fine,” I said. “Right, Herr Doktor?”

I gave his mustache a tweak. He flinched. But seeing him so helpless, I was beginning to understand. You really
could
do anything to a man if he wasn’t human. I pulled the sheet back up over his head, checked on his straps, and fought back the desire to hit him with a tire iron before I clambered back up front.

“You know where you’re going?”

Tina chewed her thumb. “I need cigarettes.”

“Now?” I glanced back at Mengele.

“Yes. Now. There’s a Seven-Eleven two blocks up. Is there a problem?”

I threw up my hands. “Problem? God no! Just because we’re driving a hot ambulance with the Butcher of Auschwitz in it, that doesn’t mean there’s a fucking
problem.
”

Tina glared and plowed through traffic.

Amazing the respect you get in an ambulance. The way cars skittered to the side, like they were afraid we were going to hit them, made me want to. “Adrenaline
is
a great drug,” I shouted in Mengele’s direction.

We spotted the 7-Eleven and Tina swung the ambulance past a gaggle of teens cadging beer money in the parking lot.

“Wait here,” I said, scattering the boys as I jumped out and ran inside. The turbaned manager backed away from the counter when he saw me. “You call 911?” I barked at him.

“No, sir! I never—”

“Goddamn it! You think we don’t have real emergencies? That’s a hundred-dollar fine!”

“But, sir, I—”

“Never mind. Give me a pack of Newports. No, make it a carton.”

I still had the paramedic’s tinted shades on but made sure to keep my hat low and my face angled away from the surveillance camera.

I saw that the 7-Eleven gang had gathered round the ambulance. One of them, a tall boy in a sideways Raiders cap, was leaning in Tina’s window.
Perfect.

The turbaned clerk rushed back with the carton and asked if I wanted a bag.

“Just matches.”

He placed the cigarettes on the counter and hesitated. “Sir, that fine…If you could—”

“If I could what? Take a carton of cigarettes so you won’t have to pay the money?
Baksheesh?
Is that what we’re talking about here?

“No! Sir, I was only asking if—”

I cut him off. “That’s not how we do things in America, sahib. But just this once.”

The manager looked horrified. I might as well have spit in his face and accused his mother of killing cows and fucking Gunga Din. I felt horrible. “Hey, just messin’ with you,” I said lamely, peeling a pair of C-notes from the wad I’d taken off Zell. Most I’d slipped to the paramedics, but a man has needs. I slapped the bills on the counter and grabbed a Slim Jim and a pack of Dentyne. “These too. Keep the change. Use it to buy a handgun and get rid of those hoodlums out front. Look at them! It’s not fair to respectable people.”

He took a second, but the manager smiled cautiously and I smiled back. Then we both laughed, shook hands. That was a good moment.

“Sorry for being an asshole,” I said.

“Is America,” he said. I knew what he meant.

“What was that about?” I asked, back in the ambulance.

“What was what about?”

“Your little confab with the local ne’er-do-wells.”

“We were just chatting. Driving an ambulance looks like a pretty cool gig to a sixteen-year-old. They wanted to know how you get to be a paramedic.”

“Really? So what’d you tell them?”

“Study hard and stay in school.”

“Are you serious?”

Roaring through traffic had started to feel normal. Traffic parted like the proverbial Red Sea. Tina kept turning to scream at me and I kept yelling at her to keep her eyes on the wheel. She was the only woman I knew who liked car fights.

“Get off my back, Manny. You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

“What
you’ve
been through? I’m lucky I’m not gelded and missing my kidneys. And you still won’t tell me what’s in my scrotum.”

“It’s smaller than a bread box.”

“Great. Thanks. Wait till you wake up with a joke ovary.”

“Fuck you! Do you think I
liked
being there, playing nurse to that bastard? He didn’t exactly have a steady hand when he was holding the scalpel. If I hadn’t taken over you’d be worrying about a lot more than your left ball.”

“Wait! You took over the scalpel?”

“You can thank me later,” said Tina.

The ambulance swerved and a man in a wife beater dove for the curb. Tina cheered up. “The thing about you, Manny, all you ever think about is yourself.”

“Not true. Since I saw your naked ass frolicking outside with your Aryan love buddy, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about you. More time than I want, to tell you the truth. I mean, Bernstein, for Christ’s sake!”

“You’re not going to let that go, are you?”

“Oh, fuck it.”

I wanted to roll down the window, let the breeze slap me across the face. But I was so pissed I grabbed the handle and ripped the window panel out of the door. Tina burst out laughing again.

“It was loose already,” I said.

By now she was smacking her leg and pleading. “Stop…. Oh, God! I’m going to pee myself!”

I was furious. Mostly because
she
wasn’t furious. But the sight of Tina laughing so hard made me start to laugh. At least it sounded like laughing.

Minutes later, siren killed, we bumped the wrong way over a speed bump marked NO ENTRY into the gravel off-street parking lot behind the Homeaway Motel. Tina nosed the ambulance into a spot in the corner under a balcony.

“I’m in two ten.”

“Where’s your car?”

“Right beside us.”

Sure enough, there it was.

“I forgot you drive that fucking Prius! My plan was to stick Beppo in the trunk till we figured out what to do with him.”

“Don’t worry, it’s bigger than it looks.”

“Fine.”

She killed the engine and I scoped out the motel. It was Motel 6 without the elegance. An Escalade took up two spots in the corner. The rest of the cars looked like their owners might have lived in them.

“Even if we can squeeze him in,” I said, “I’m worried about somebody seeing an ambulance in a motel parking lot and calling the cops.”

Tina grabbed her Newports. “Trust me, baby. Nobody here calls the cops.”

I checked the place out again. Amazing what they can do with cinder block and rust. “Well,” I said, “they’re not leaving the curtains open, that’s for sure. What is it, a shooting gallery?”

“Among other things. Though the fiends I’ve seen look pretty cranked out. Mostly, the clientele’s all baby mamas and families visiting the prison, or illegals staying twenty to a room, working the pickup landscaping crews. The last thing any of ’em’s gonna do is call the
policía.
”

I eyed the corners. “No surveillance camera?”

“Funnily enough, when I checked in, the lady in the office told me some tweaker stole it the night before. Wonder how much crystal that buys you?”

“Maybe they just wanted the video. I’d sure want the tape of
us.
Kidnapping, driving a stolen ambulance, impersonating a paramedic…How many felonies can you commit in a parking lot without actually killing somebody?”

“Impersonating a paramedic’s a felony?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that one gets you community service. Give me a hand.”

I pulled the sheet off and met Mengele’s eyes, pink rimmed and hateful. Sometimes he looked old, sometimes he looked like he’d had his skin pressed. “Help me put him in the front seat.”

“Why?”

“So he can get out the passenger door. Just in case. If anybody’s watching, it looks a little less weird than taking his body off the gurney and throwing it in the trunk. Anything in your room have sentimental value?”

“Not really. And I registered with a fake name.”

“So you won’t mind if we just split?”

“Well, I would have liked the little soaps and shampoos.”

Tina looked so beautiful I wanted to take a picture of her face and candy it. She raised her eyes from me to the balcony, letting one long finger slide across her parted lips. “We could hang out for a couple minutes…. There’s something so nasty about cheap motels.”

“Yeah, there is….”

I let my mind drift for a second, then shook my head like a man trying to get bees out of his ears. “
No!
Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Come on, Tina. I know how you’re wired. If it’s dangerous, irrational and potentially life threatening, it turns you on.”

“You make me sound like Evel Knievel.”

“Really? Did he enjoy pretend anonymous sex with his ex in hot-sheet motels?”

“‘Evil,’” she intoned, “‘is screwing strangers after cocktail parties.’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti.”

“I never get invited to cocktail parties. Why do you like to pretend I’m a stranger? You did that last time we were in a motel.”

“Don’t ask. It’ll ruin the mystery. Details, details. Let’s go.”

Once Mengele was in the front seat, Tina opened the passenger door. I eased him out gently, carrying him the way you would a fragile relative. Tina snapped the filter off a Newport, started to toss it, then put it in her pocket. The cop in me appreciated a perp who knew how to hide her tracks.

“What happens,” she asked, “when they find the ambulance?”

“It doesn’t matter. I guarantee the warden’s got friends in local law enforcement. If he wanted to get us, we’d be got. We’re more dangerous caught and talking than we are on the lam.”

Curtains parted in the room across from us. A blinking ghost appeared and quickly closed them again.

“On second thought,” I said, “even people who don’t call the police might call the police if they see us stuffing a body in a trunk. Give ’em something to bargain with next time they get popped.”

I tapped Mengele on his head, because I could. “For all we know the fucking Mossad was closing in. Or the Nakam. We’re probably doing the old bastard a favor.”

“What’s the Nakam?”

“It means ‘revenge’ in Hebrew. They were vengeance squads. After the war, a bunch of death camp survivors got together to avenge the six million. They caught up with a couple thousand unpunished Nazi bigwigs. Killed them straight out. They even planned to put arsenic in the Munich water supply.”

Tina stopped the flame halfway to her cigarette. “Did they do it?”

“The arsenic? No. But they did other stuff. There was an internment camp outside Nuremberg, full of SS men, and the Nakam managed to sneak in and poison the bread. A thousand Nazi POWs died.”

Tina was impressed. “I had no idea Jews did that.”

“Neither did the POWs. We’re full of surprises,” I said. The curtain parted again, then closed just as fast. “Now come on, we gotta move. The tweaker probably thinks we’re coming for them next. Grab the blanket so I can wrap him up.”

My ex-wife’s eyes glazed over, the way they did when lust hit. She leaned over and bit my neck. “Nothing hotter than a take-charge guy.”

“Just grab the fucking blanket.”

“Wait—does the Nakam still exist?”

“Nobody knows.”

“Wow!” Tina stood there holding the ambulance blanket. “That is
unbelievable.
…”

“Seems pretty believable to me.”

I grabbed the blanket out of her hands and threw it over Mengele’s shoulders, wrapping it high enough to hide the tape on his mouth.