She Rides Shotgun Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of Kenneth Crosswhite

  Epigraph

  The road was so dimly lighted;

  There were no highway signs to guide;

  But they made up their minds

  If all roads were blind

  They wouldn’t give up till they died.

  —Bonnie Parker, written on the run

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  0

  Part I: The Girl from Venus 1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part II: . . . And Cub 16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Interlude: Whale Ship Cannibals

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Part III: Zombie Walking 36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  Part IV: Perdido 46

  47

  48

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jordan Harper

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  0

  CRAZY CRAIG

  PELICAN BAY

  His skin told his history in tattoos and knife scars. He lived in a room with no night. And he was to his own mind a god.

  Crazy Craig Hollington, Pelican Bay lifer, president of the prison gang known as Aryan Steel, which made him the president of all the dirty whiteboys in California, lived his life in a Supermax cell where the lights were on twenty-four hours a day. He couldn’t own anything firmer than a Q-tip. They rolled his shower stall to the door of his cell twice a week to keep him from the other prisoners. But he was a god made of other men.

  He had men for a mouth. That’s how the death warrants left Supermax. A bent guard on Aryan Steel’s payroll brought the warrants from Crazy Craig to the plugged-in whiteboys in gen pop.

  He had men for blood. They moved Crazy Craig’s death warrants around the prison on kites, pieces of paper swung on a string from cell to cell. “To all solid soldiers on the block or on the street,” the warrants began. They were signed with the motto “steel forever, forever steel.” The words in between described a vendetta. The warrants named the three condemned: A man. A woman. A child. The warrants spelled out specific acts of bloodshed. The warrants were Defcon Old Testament.

  He had men for feet. The cons sent the warrants out into the world. They sent them out in pigpen ciphers worked into letters home. As thumbtack braille punched through deposition paperwork. As dried piss painted onto the backs of envelopes, invisible until the paper was held to fire. They sent them out in the visiting room, a featherwood passing her man a balloon of dope in a kiss, him passing her back the death warrants in a whisper. The warrants spread through California wherever peckerwood gangsters and white trash hustlers made camp. They read them in Slabtown and Sun Valley and Fontucky. The warrants went out through Aryan Steel associates and wannabes. They moved through the memberships of shitkicker gangs who paid allegiance to the Steel. Peckerwood Nation. The Nazi Dope Boys. The Blood Skins. Odin’s Bastards.

  He had men for eyes. A couple of skinheads in Huntington Beach—three-day strangers from sleep on a crank binge—put together wanted posters. They put the pictures to the death warrants, made them official. They quoted the death warrants verbatim. They tacked on rumors. They pulled pictures off the Internet. The man’s mug shot. The woman and child, pictured together. The posters got passed around. People memorized the facts, the words, the faces.

  He had men for hands. It only took a few days all told before the posters came to a man with a throat-cut tattoo and fuck-you-money ambitions. Addresses were compiled. Plans made. Weapons secured. Blood pacts sealed.

  His will be done.

  Part I

  The Girl from Venus

  The Inland Empire

  1

  POLLY

  FONTANA

  She wore a loser’s slumped shoulders and hid her face with her hair, but the girl had gunfighter eyes.

  Gunfighter eyes just like her dad, her mom would tell her, usually after a few whiskey pops when Mom could talk about her ex-husband without the anger she carried for him poisoning her. She’d crunch ice and tell Polly about that special type of pale blue eyes. How Wild Bill Hickok and Jesse James and fighter pilots all had them. How sniper schools hunted for recruits with those washed-out blues. Polly didn’t tell her mother what she really thought, but if she had she would have said all that stuff about gunfighter eyes sounded like bullcrap. Polly couldn’t have gunfighter eyes because she wasn’t a gunfighter. Polly did no violence, not to anything but the skin around her fingernails and the flesh of her lips, both of which she chewed raw.

  So Polly didn’t think much about gunfighter eyes. At least she didn’t until the day she walked out the front door of Fontana Middle School and stood there staring into her father’s eyes.

  Gunfighter eyes, no lie. They were faded blue just like her own, but with something under the surface of them that made Polly’s heart beat in her neck. Later on she learned that eyes don’t only reflect what they’re seeing. They also reflect what they’ve already seen.

  Polly had not seen her dad in nearly half her eleven years, but she knew him without doubt. And seeing him standing there she knew something else too. He must have broke out. Her dad was a bad guy and a robber and he was supposed to be in jail. He liked being a bad guy more than he’d liked being a husband or a father, that’s what her mom said. Polly knew sometimes he’d sent letters, but her mom never let her read them, and he’d quit a few years ago anyway. She knew that to have a bad guy for a father was pretty much the same thing as not having one at all. Especially when they’re in jail. She’d heard her mom say that he still had at least four more years left before they’d even think of letting him go, and that was if he had good behavior, a thing her mom doubted very much that Nate McClusky could ever have.

  So if he was standing here and not in Susanville, he must have broke out. Polly wondered if she should run, or maybe if she ought to yell for an adult, one of the other parents or a teacher. But she didn’t do any of those things. She just stood there letting the fear freeze her.

  Maybe she wouldn’t have to scream and yell for help. Any grown-up who looked had to see there was something wrong going on. Her dad didn’t look like he belonged there with the other parents, who all had soft parent bodies and soft parent eyes. He had a face carved out of pebbled rock and tattoos all over, the kind of stuff the boys in her class drew on the backs of their notebooks, dragons and eagles and men with axes. His muscles seemed so big and sharply drawn it was like he was missing his skin, like the tattoos were inked right into the muscle. His hair, which in pictures was the same dirty blond as her own, had been shaved clean away. There was a look on his face, one Polly had never seen on it before in the couple of pictures of him she’d found over the years or her own blurred memories. She couldn’t quite figure out what that look meant, but whatever it was it made her feel even worse.

  It was a hot day with a dirty sky, and the kids moved quickly to their parents’ air-c
onditioned cars. They ignored her the way lions ignore gazelles when they already have blood on their chops. Even in this crazy second, with her escaped convict dad standing over her like something from a hide-your-eyes movie, Polly felt a loser’s blessed relief at being passed by.

  Madison Cartwright, who’d been the first to call her Polly Pudding-Ass back in the fourth grade, bumped into her, too busy on her phone to see where she was going. Madison always had new clothes and she already had boobs and she moved through life easy, as if she was on the moon. Her glare made Polly feel hot, like her eyes shot Superman beams. Madison opened her mouth to say something knifelike. Then she saw Polly’s dad standing there, all muscles and dragons and gunfighter eyes. She turned and walked away fast with her mouth hanging open, so ridiculous that Polly would have laughed if she wasn’t so close to tears.

  So it was just Polly and her dad standing there with nothing but dirty air and silence between them, like a high noon standoff in one of those cowboy movies her stepdad liked.

  “Polly,” her dad said, his voice scratchy as wool. “You know me? Know who I am?”

  Her tongue felt too thick for talking, so she just nodded like yes. Hardly even thinking, she reached behind herself to where the bear’s head poked out of her backpack and gave his ear a squeeze. It helped, like it always did. She held down the urge to take the bear out and press him to her chest.

  “Listen close,” her dad said. “You’re coming with me. Right now, no time for fuss.”

  He turned and walked toward the street. Her brain told her not to follow him. Her brain said run inside and find Mr. Richardson. It told her to scream help help help.

  But she didn’t do any of it. Even though she wanted to run with everything she had, she followed. The urge to run, the urge to scream for help, she shoved them down where she shoved down everything else. What else could she ever do?

  He led her to an old man of a car with its windows all rolled down. She got in, her backpack between her knees so that the bear looked up at her with his single scratched black eye.

  The silver cap where the key should have gone into the neck of the steering wheel was missing. Metal and wires poked out from the hole that sat there in its place. Her dad fished under the seat and brought out a long dull screwdriver. He jammed it into the hole and twisted. The car coughed. It didn’t start.

  Polly put together the missing key and how her dad was a bad guy, and she understood that she was sitting in a stolen car. She looked out the window back at the school like maybe somehow she’d see real-life Polly still standing there under the dirty sky.

  Polly unzipped her backpack enough to pull the bear loose. He stood a foot tall, brown with white on his paws, ears, and snout, although the white parts weren’t really white anymore. They were the color of the manila paper Polly used in art class. One of his black glass eyes was missing, leaving only a dry patch of glue like glaucoma. She moved the bear with practiced hands so he stood on her lap and looked around. She had practiced with him for hours and hours so he moved with a liquid sort of grace, like a true and living thing.

  “Shoot, girl,” her mom had said once, “some days I feel like I know what that stuffed bear is thinking a hell of a lot more than I know what you’re thinking.”

  Hearing Mom in her head made Polly now wonder where she was. Why she would let this happen to Polly.

  “Little old for teddy bears, ain’t you?” her dad asked.

  The bear shook his head like no. Her dad eyed Polly that way people did when she moved the bear like he was alive. The look was a question. The question was are you nutso?

  Polly didn’t think she was nutso. She knew she was too old for teddy bears. She knew the bear wasn’t alive. She knew he was only stuffing and fuzz. She just didn’t care.

  She probably was nutso.

  She watched the bear dance in her hands until she was calm enough, focused enough to ask the question she’d wanted to ask since she first saw her dad.

  “Did you break out?”

  Her dad puffed air out his nose, sort of a second cousin to a laugh.

  “Nope. Got sprung on some lawyer shit.”

  Polly didn’t know what that meant, which made everything worse. A breakout at least was a thing her brain could label and understand. She couldn’t make any sense of lawyer shit.

  He got the engine to come to life. But before he could pull out he caught something in the rearview mirror that made him sit straight and tall in his seat. Polly turned in her seat to see what he was looking at. A police car moved past them school-zone slow. Polly had a feeling she’d never had before, like the whole world and everything in it was nothing but a pane of glass that could shatter at any second.

  The cop car passed out of sight. Her dad said something to himself. It sounded to Polly like he said goddamn zombie walking, but why would anybody ever say that?

  The cop was gone, but that feeling that the whole world that had felt so solid minutes before was only glass, it didn’t leave Polly. Not then, and not ever.

  Her dad pulled into traffic. Polly caught a shimmer of herself in the sideview mirror and knew what the look on her dad’s face that she’d never seen before had been. A look that looked so at home on Polly’s face and so wrong on the face of her father.

  The look on his face was fear.

  2

  POLLY

  FONTANA/RANCHO CUCAMONGA

  Her dad gripped the wheel like it might try to jump out of his hands. He drove slow, used his signal when they moved from one lane to another or made a turn. He didn’t say a word. He parked in the lot for one of those big sports stores where you could buy anything from a baseball to a canoe.

  “Sit tight,” he said. “Anybody messes with you, hold down the horn. I’ll listen for it.”

  She watched him walk into the store. She realized she needed to pee, bad. She guessed she’d needed to for a while but had been too worried to notice. She chewed on her thumb, found a nub of flesh close to the nail, sunk her teeth in, tugged it loose with a red jolt of pain. She kicked her feet against the dashboard, thud thud thud. She dug into her backpack, found her new library books. She found one on UFOs. Polly liked reading about outer space, which made sense, seeing how she was from Venus.

  She had been nine—three years after her dad went away, the year he quit writing to her—when she’d decided she was born on Venus. She didn’t for real think she was from another planet—Polly knew just where she came from, and she didn’t believe in aliens. But she was from Venus all the same.

  She figured it out about the time she quit doing her homework. The first time she didn’t do it, it was just because she forgot. Ms. Phillips, her fifth-grade teacher, had kept her inside during recess as punishment, which of course it wasn’t. Polly, who was mostly just playground prey to the other kids, sat happily at her desk with her books as recess raged outside. She didn’t read her schoolbooks, which were so boring and stupid it made her want to yank out chunks of her own hair. She read what she wanted to read. She learned more during recess than she ever did in class. She swore to herself never to do homework again.

  One day the next week the principal came to Ms. Phillips’s classroom to take Polly away. She remembered their footsteps impossibly loud in the hallway, that forbidden feeling of walking through school when classes were going. He took her to a room where a woman in a white sweater asked her to sit down across the table from her. Polly remembered the way the woman had lipstick on her teeth, how it made her look like a vampire who had just fed.

  The vampire had Polly solve mazes while timing her. She showed Polly lists of words and asked what they had to do with each other. She had Polly fit blocks together.

  “She shows me this chart, right?” Mom had said later in the car. “Like this,” and she traced a hump in the air with a chipped blue nail, “and she said it was a belt curve that shows how smart people are. Most people are in the middle, she said. Seems to me most people are on the dumb side, but whatever. She said that r
etarded people—she didn’t say retarded but she meant retarded—are all the way on the left of the curve. And she said you, you’re all the way on the right.”

  She side-eyed Polly when she said it, like this was a secret Polly had kept from her. Polly felt herself twisting on the inside. She kept her eyes on her book, on a picture of Venus. It was a pale white pearl hanging in space. It looked so calm. Tranquil was the word the book used, and that was a good word, wasn’t it?

  Polly kept reading, and the book said that while Venus looked tranquil, that was just how it looked from the outside. When you got to Venus what you learned was that that calm surface was really clouds of acid, and underneath that tranquil sky was nothing but jagged rock and howling windstorms. Polly read about this pearl planet with a storm inside it and the thought burped full-formed out of Polly’s brain: I’m from Venus. That was the way Polly felt, that outside she was quiet and calm but inside her acid winds roared. She’d never known why she’d been that way, so quiet on the outside but inside so screaming loud, but now she knew.

  I’m from Venus.

  Maybe this was the thing, the reason her brain didn’t seem to work the way other people’s brains worked. Why it never stopped moving. The reason she couldn’t talk to people free and easy the way others did. The reason the other kids pushed her away. They could smell she was from Venus, even though she wasn’t really. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. It only mattered that it was true.

  Now, in the sports store parking lot, Polly’s Venus-child brain kept yelling the same questions over and over.

  Why had her dad come to get her? Why was he driving a stolen car? Why did he look over his shoulder all the time? Where was Mom?

  Even if he hadn’t broken out, even if this car wasn’t stolen, Polly knew Mom’s feeling about her dad well enough to know that she would never send him to pick up Polly. She’d have sent their neighbor Ruth or she would have called the school, or even woken Polly’s night-shift-working stepfather Tom up from his day sleep to come get her.