The Hell is I Ching?
My hand tightened compulsively. At the same time, I started backing up, so the back seat door opened up. The body came crashing down onto the top of the car, making spider webs on the window, denting the roof, and ruining the advertisement that perched atop the car.
I started freaking. I could grab the case now, shove the money into it, leave it on the pavement, and remove the body before I drove off. But no, I wouldn't have enough time. I'd get shot before I was in the car.
And the major problem was that I could not stop staring at the body. He was dead. I didn't need to check anything; I didn't need to check that the blood that was dripping across my windshield was real. Nobody would play a joke this elaborate on little old me, so this was real. Period.
My knees were shaking. I kept flexing my hands. I felt like my breath was constricted; like someone was squeezing on my lungs. I found myself repeating a single cuss word over and over until I was mumbling, and then I grew silent.
Calm down. Calm down. God, he's dead. Shit. Just calm down. Breath- do something! You've dreamt of things much worse- had nightmares much more gruesome than this. Why are you freaking out now?
Footsteps to my right finally allowed me to turn my eyes away from the body on my cab. My heart may as well have stopped. Instead, it merely skipped a beat. Vincent, making sure he was unruffled and glancing around to make sure that there was no surveillance, no cops, and no nosy neighbors, walked into the back alley.
"You…" I felt like an idiot, saying this. But it was the only thing that my mind seemed to be able to register. "You killed him."
"Good guess. But no. I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him."
"You…" I decided not to repeat the obvious, especially if Vincent was just going to be ironic with me. I took a couple of seconds to try and steady my breathing.
"Why's my door open?" Vincent asked, frowning.
I considered just sitting down. I didn't feel steady at all. But my numb mind found myself answering before I really thought about it.
"Was gonna put the money in the bag. Put the bag on the street for you. Drive off." My voice seemed soft and distant. I found myself taking a couple of steps away from Vincent, backing away from him.
A movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention and I froze, my gaze locking with Vincent's. He had drawn his gun. His eyes were no longer glancing around, but were solidly focused on me. As I had figured, he wasn't going to let me run. Still, at least I tried.
"Red light." he said, and then continued. "You were going to ditch me? After we made a deal?"
"Had a bad feeling." I said, regretting the fact that I hadn't turned him aside when he first came up to the taxi.
I didn't put my hands up. Instead, I let them hang there. With a small start, I realized that I could just barely feel my gun through the coat. What if I drew? Staring at the gun barrel before me, I figured it wasn't such a good idea.
There had to be a decision made here. I knew the man wasn't going to put his gun down until he saw either a choice of submission or rebellion in me. So what was I going to do? Well, I had a gun and two hidden knives. Added to the pile was amnesia. I had no set personality, and no set background yet. So why not create them?
"Ok… Fine." I sighed. I glanced around nervously and immediately lectured myself for doing so. "If I'm going to be stuck with you anyways…"
Ignoring the gun that was trained on me, I turned and walked towards the front of the taxi. I grabbed the back of the dead man's coat and rolled him off the car. Then I looked up at Vincent, whose eyes were narrowed. I could feel that my expression was reluctant.
"So where do you want him?" I asked.
Vincent seemed suspicious, but after a moment of thought he put away his gun and began walking towards me.
"Pop the trunk."
I tried not to say something stupid and quote the movie again. It felt weird to say something that was scripted and get the same exact answer that I thought I was going to get. In fact, it was almost fun to mess with. Of course, it was a little less amusing when you had someone who was likely to kill you less than ten feet away from you.
Still not enjoying the situation, I got to the front seat and eventually found the button that would 'pop the trunk.' Then, at Vincent's beckoning, I walked back over to the body.
"You're kidding me, right?" I asked.
"Grab his wrists."
I did as I was asked but, trying to keep some form of normalcy- whether faked or real- I didn't allow my submission to go quietly.
"Damn it, man. Why do you have to put him in my trunk?"
"Would you rather he sat up front with you?"
"Hardly." We stopped at the back of the car. Vincent lifted up the trunk and then grabbed the man's legs again. "Still, why don't you just leave him in a dumpster or something? In fact, why'd you make him fly out a window in the first place?"
We hauled the body into the trunk. Vincent made sure he fit in the trunk without any limbs extending out of their boundaries. Then he proceeded to the backseat. I followed, deciding for once not to be like Max and try and wiggle my way out of it once more. Vincent wouldn't let me go, that was for sure.
"I didn't let him. He fell out of the window on his own."
"Right. And the bullets that came from your gun had nothing to do with it, I'm sure."
Vincent frowned at me. My sarcasm may save my life someday. Either that, or it'll get me a bullet in my head and somebody will find that the man took my suggestion and stuffed my body in a dumpster. The thought was not a pleasant one and I pushed it aside quickly.
I sat in the driver's seat with the door open. Vincent took a water bottle- I have no clue where he got it from- and used it to wash away the blood on the windshield. He'd glance at me now and then, expecting me to run or at least try something stupid. I just sat facing out of the car until he was done.
Next, Vincent fetched a roll of duct tape, whose origins are also unknown to me. I had to help him put the sign back together. In fact, I wasn't too happy with the idea and argued that a broken sign is still noticeable with duct tape on it.
"Ok, that's good enough." Vincent said finally.
The man tossed the empty water bottle into the trunk, threw his tie in as well, and then shut the trunk. He made his way to the backseat. I made sure to wait until he was in the car before turning in my seat and shutting the door.
I started up the car and drove to the end of the alley, stopping there. Although I was trying to play it cool by saying rude things, my mind's eye was still stuck on the corpse that was now in my trunk. I wanted to state that Vincent killed the guy out loud, but found it pointless, so I resisted the urge.
"Where to now?"
"Just drive."
Throughout the drive, I began to realize just how much adrenaline had helped me. That hand on my lungs, which had temporarily been driven off, returned. I began taking shaky breaths, trying to calm myself again. I was finding it hard to properly focus, my mind stuck on the dead body in my trunk.
"Shit." This wasn't working. I was losing control. I kept thinking about that one dead body, and then I'd remember that he would kill at least four more people tonight- and that was if I was lucky.
The fact that I had not run for my life and was instead sitting here in the driver's seat, practically escorting him willingly to his next victim, made me feel like I was in on it; like I was as responsible for these people's deaths as Vincent. The thought gave me no pleasure and made my hands feel dirty and tainted. The amount that my hands flexed increased.
It wasn't that I had agreed with what Vincent was doing earlier when I was playing it cool. It was just that the adrenaline had helped me function and going along with it had helped me avoid a bullet of my own. But now I was facing a night of something I did not agree with at all.
I didn't want anybody to die. The thought repeated itself in my head over and over once I stumbled upon it, and questions concerning my mother began popping up. What would she say if she knew I had played along in this bad situation? What would she do in this situation? How would she stop the murder- could she stop the murder? And a more pressing question was how was I going to do what I knew was good and right when Vincent may as well be pointing a gun at my temple all night, warning me not to do anything that disrupted his job?
As long as Vincent had a gun near him, I knew he would draw quickly and shoot without thinking twice. It made me wonder. I had a gun. Would I be able to draw and fire quicker than him?
"Calm down." I heard Vincent order from the back. He was shifting his gaze back and forth from me to his work prep. "You can't drive properly when you're not paying attention. You have to focus on the job now."
I heard him tap on the screen rather loudly. It was obvious he was annoyed that things hadn't gone right. Not only was I a liability now, but he had to worry about managing me as well as getting his job done.
"7565 Fountain. You know it?"
"Um…" I tried to conjure up some memory, but lacking any from this world, I instead resorted to my memories of the movie. "S-sort of." Just in case, I began tapping on my own computer to make sure I knew where I was going.
"How long you figure?"
"Er… Seven… Seventeen minutes." I glanced up at his reflection in the rearview mirror. "Look, man. I'm not ok with this. I don't agree with driving you around so that you can kill people."
"I told you we had other stops tonight."
"You also said you had to visit some friends." I said, angry at the bullshit he was feeding me.
"They're somebody's friends. You drive the cab, and I'll make my rounds. You might even come out seven hundred bucks ahead."
I glanced at him via the rearview mirror again. When he wasn't checking on me or looking at his computer, he was glancing outside and making sure we didn't have a tail.
"Look, I don't mean anything by my disagreement. Hell, my amnesia even means I lack the most basic of knowledge except what's been embedded into me. But it is not my job to escort you to your next hit."
"Tonight it is." Vincent stated even before I was finished talking. He pinned me briefly with one of his more serious looks.
"You obviously don't understand what I'm getting at." The picture of the corpse in my head had become horribly vivid, reminding me of my more gruesome nightmares. I found I was trying to breathe differently just so my stomach would settle down. I refused to throw up in this car. "I swear to God I see another body, I may throw up over it."
Now Vincent's attention was on me. I was becoming a hassle to deal with, I knew. I couldn't help it. Still, he had to assist me in regaining control, or things would get even more troublesome for him.
"Hey. You're stressed. I can understand that. But you need to just keep calm and keep breathing."
"What do you think I've been trying to do?" I grumbled a tad defiantly.
"Are you breathing?"
"So far."
The screeching of car tires snapped my attention to a near-miss that was down the street to my left. I was way too jumpy, my senses on hyper drive. The adrenaline may have abandoned me, but the frame of mind I had acquired while pretending I lived in an area that was constantly at war had by no means left me.
"Ok, here's the deal. You were going to drive me around tonight, never be the wiser, but el gordo got in front of a window, did his high dive… We're into plan B." he paused from observing the scenery and looked at me. "You still breathing?"
"Plan B?" I took the opportunity. "Does plan B always involve taking a taxi driver hostage?"
"We gotta make the best of it." he pressed on, giving me a look. "Improvise. Adapt to the environment. Darwin. Shit happens. I Ching. Whatever. We gotta roll with it."
"'The hell is I Ching?"
"What, you've never heard of it?"
I gave the man a look that clearly said 'do I look like I've heard of it?'
"My point is," he plowed on, "That you need to focus on making it out alive. Do the job, and then this night will be over."
I wanted to say 'bullshit.' I was tempted to just flip out. But I caught myself. I reigned in my impulses and decided to bide my time. If I rebel entirely now, I'll likely end up dead. It was best to at least make him believe I was submissive, if not completely unaware of his mind games.
"So, what? You're given a job and you just kill them without any more information than where they live and how to get to them?"
"That's the way it works." The man's attention had returned to the screen.
"So you only met that guy tonight, and you killed him?"
"What, I should only kill people after I get to know them?"
"No, but…" I couldn't think of what I was trying to say.
"Danielle, there are six billion people on the planet and you're getting worked up because of one fat guy."
"Who was he?" I said, feeling like I was slowly submerging myself in the script from the movie.
"What do you care?" Annoyance was the tone in his voice.
"Why don't you?" I said quickly, before he could go into a rant about Rwanda. And also, I was curious. Despite my fascination for sociopaths, I had never fully understood their disconnection from everyone. I supposed since I was empathic, the idea of not being able to sense other people's problems was as foreign to me as knowing what other people were thinking was to him.
"Should I?"
"I just don't see how you're happy going into the job blind. It's one of the things I never liked about the military; you have to do whatever you're told without any questions and are expected to believe you're doing what's right, no matter what. I just don't like the idea that you can kill someone that easily."
"Have you ever heard about Rwanda?"
"Oh boy." I muttered. He was dead set on making a point here, wasn't he?
"Tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye? Did you join Amnesty International or Oxfam? Save the Whale, Greenpeace or something? No. I off one fat Angeleno and you throw a hissy fit."
Was it bad that I just let him ramble on? I glanced at him a couple of times in the mirror. In fact, I almost forgot that I was driving. It wasn't enough of a habit for me to drive without paying any attention to the road.
"I don't know any Rwandans. It's a little hard to take something like that personally when I'm not involved."
The man stuck me with another one of those stares.
"You don't know the guy in that trunk, either."
I sighed and began to focus on driving. There was obviously no point in arguing, so I figured I'd just agree to disagree. I hated being young and inexperienced. The adults could have bouts that had good points and true sentences, but when they threw one good line at me, I came up blank. It was frustrating. At least I had the decency to hold my tongue instead of act like a child and say something completely stupid.
Knowing that I would be of no help while I was constantly disagreeing with Vincent, he drew another card from his hand. If I hadn't seen the movie, it might have actually quelled my arguments for a time. I say maybe because I was a naturally a suspicious person, even when I was 13.
"Ok, if it makes you feel any better, he was a criminal involved in a continuing criminal enterprise."
"Is that what they told you?" I said skeptically. But I was already done fighting, and Vincent could see it. I was resigning myself to my fate for the moment, and his interest was beginning to wander to his preps and the world outside the taxi.
"So… what?" I said, dreading the scene that this line would trigger. I glanced out the window, seeing if I could turn off the street or spot the cop that would come up. But I found nothing, so I continued speaking. "You're just taking out the trash?"
Without waiting for Vincent to say his allotted line, the siren of the car I hadn't spotted went off behind me. The red and blue lights offended my vision, making me flinch. The glare on my mirrors bothered me for some reason.
I pulled to the curb in response to the officer's voice. My hands started to tense a little more, although I had stopped flexing them. This was all I needed. More people adding more stress onto me. I was beginning to suspect I had a health condition or something because I was not feeling too good.
"God, I hate knowing everything." I muttered, earning a look from Vincent.
"Get rid of them." Vincent ordered.
"How?" I asked, hoping he might actually give advice.
"You're a cabby and a woman. Talk your way out of a ticket." The script is strong with this one.
"Fine. I will. Just… don't do anything." I almost added the word 'stupid' at the end, but decided against it.
"Then don't let me get cornered. You don't have the trunk space."
"Jesus, I can't believe you." I said in disgust.
"Believe it."
I stayed silent, my jaw clenched in annoyance. Then, remembering that I was supposed to be acting innocent to cops, I made myself relax. I felt my shoulders lower, and my face became pleasant instead of annoyed and tense. I wasn't going to go for flirtatious. But that was because I had no experience in that area and I wasn't going to make myself look like an idiot.
I heard the car doors behind us slam shut. Then I heard footsteps approaching either side of the car. I kept my hands on the steering wheel.
"He's probably married." Vincent said, looking at the cop to the right. "The other one has kids. Probably his wife's pregnant."
"Quit being an ass." I growled loudly enough for Vincent to hear. At the same time, I heard the left cop's ring clicking on the window. I remembered to relax my features again just before I lowered the window.
"How you doing?" I heard the cop say. Buddy, if only you knew. "My partner's going to help you out on that side."
Wondering why they had to have the other cop tell me I was going to be helped out by his partner, I turned to my right and looked into the blaring light of a flashlight. After showing a flicker of annoyance, I tried to make respectful eye contact with the man. It was a waiting game, I knew that. The longer I extended this, the better. Then they'd get a call, and we'd be off free… Well, actually that didn't seem so exciting since 'off free' for me included being Vincent's hostage.
"License, registration." the man said routinely.
"Sure." I glanced around the car for a moment, wondering where I would put it. Then, copying the movie, I looked where Max had it. They looked right, so I handed them to the cop. He seemed to be fine with it.
"I'm pulling you over because your windshield's smashed." Yes, I know. "Is all this current?"
"Yes sir." Maybe being pleasant wasn't making these guys think of just letting me leave, but I was certain being nervous or disagreeable would make things much worse.
While the right cop examined my papers, the other cop seemed interested in checking for anything unusual about the car. His light fell upon the smashed windshield. I waited for his allotted line.
"Is this blood up here on your windshield?"
I allowed my attention to wander from the cop to my right and instead focused on the windshield, squinting at it while the cop's flashlight was on it.
"I suppose, yeah." I tried to make my voice sound mildly surprised. "I hit a deer earlier."
"You hit a deer?" the cop with my papers said with complete disbelief.
"Yeah, on Slauson." I had an image and a general feeling of where that road was when I said it, making me uncomfortable. How could I know where it was?
"A South Central deer?"
"I know. It doesn't seem possible, but it just jumped out right in front of the car and I couldn't manage to avoid it." Damn, I wish I had better lines than this. I wish I knew what to say other than this.
"So why are you still carrying a passenger?"
"Well, his stop was on the way to the garage. I figured it wouldn't be too much of a problem."
"The problem is that your cab's unsafe to drive and we have to impound it. So we got to do a vehicle inventory. Pop the trunk and step out of the vehicle. Sir," he called Vincent's attention. "I'm sorry, but you're going to have to call another cab."
"Is all of this necessary, officer? I'm just a half a mile from here." Good attempt, Vincent.
"Yes sir, I'm afraid it is. Please step out the vehicle. You too, ma'am."
"If you open that trunk, they go inside." I heard behind me. I turned to the nearest officer.
"You know, it has been a really long night." Goodness, could I think of anything to say that wasn't scripted? "And the barn is right up there. Just… give me a break this once, will ya'?"
"Pop the trunk. Step out of the cab." He opened the door for me, making me frown for the first time since they had arrived at my window.
Suddenly, doubt flickered through me. What if the call never came in and Vincent ended up killing both of the cops? It would be just my luck with the way things were already going.
With a sigh I found that I had no more ideas. Resisting further would cause far too much suspicion, so I got up out of the car. How else could I stall? I just needed a little longer. The cop next to me gave me a look, waiting for me to pop the trunk. I gave a little start, hearing Vincent's door open. The cop must've thought my mind had wandered and I was just remembering to pop the trunk now.
I was just beginning to lean into the car to find the button again when I heard the radio go off. I was so thankful that I actually gave a small sigh of relief before remembering that I wasn't supposed to know about this. I paused where I was, watching the police officers for their reaction.
"Partner, we gotta roll."
I was handed my papers and instructed to head straight to the garage. I watched the cops get in their car, then noticed Vincent was looking at me. He motioned his head towards the car, telling me to get inside.
I got in the car, sighing. The cops drove off, and then Vincent got back in the back seat. He holstered his gun.
"Get going."
Shieb: And there's the next chapter. It's not much, but I had to go through some more slow scenes in order to get the basics taken care of... I mean, it didn't just feel right to jump from her driving to... er... Well, a scene that'll happen in the next chapter.
Anyways, the next chapter is good. It's where I start mixing things up and calling up questions for the main character. Mainly, I confuse her and stress her even more. Mwahaha! I'm so evil to my characters... Please read on. A new chapter will be posted soon.
