I opened my mouth to talk, but all that came out was a gravelly, drowning gurgle. I coughed, and a bit of the blood I had swallowed shot from my mouth and stained the white shirt I wore under my jacket. I took the jacket off, because I did like it and wanted to keep it at least marginally clean.
"Where shou-" I started, sputtered for a moment, and continued. "-Should I be going?" I wasn't sure if he could hear me over the wind, so I listened carefully for any type of reply from him. I was about to ask again, when he flopped back into the car and shook the hair from his face, which was substantially lighter now that it wasn't as thickly adhered together with the blood and sweat of many a day's killing.
"I said, let's grab a bite." he said, sounding a bit annoyed. Then, leaning into the front seat from the back, grabbed the steering wheel from me and pulled us over into the oncoming lane. He cackled as a the car in front of us charged forward, blaring its horn, and only veering into the next lane at the last possible moment. I closed my eyes and took my foot off the gas, and his terrifying cackle didn't die until the car came to a stop.
I opened my eyes and saw we had parked, quite impeccably I might add. I turned around and saw my captor was gone; I tried opening the door, but the handle didn't catch. I tried again after unlocking it, and found a reassuring resistance this time as the door opened.
I stood up and looked around, trying to spot my captor. He wasn't close; I considered running away right there and then, but something told me to at least make sure I didn't run right into him. He was nowhere in sight, it seemed.
A ways down the block, on the edge of the park we had parked against, a man with long, dirty hair was standing in front of a hot dog stand, where a shirtless man with a crumb-filled moustache was shifting his eyes between the homeless man who stood silently in front of him and a small oil fryer on top of a stool next to him, from which emanated the sound and smell of bubbling grease.
I was stricken at the quality of the homeless man's jacket; it looked a lot like mine. It was the same kind, from the same store. I took a closer look and saw that it really was mine. My mind jumped around; It told me to grab my jacket from the car, even though I knew it wasn't there, then run away, while at the same time it kept me firmly planted to the spot as I watched the mustached hotdog vendor bicker at my knife-wielding abductor, who didn't reply, but slowly inched forward, his face obscured by his knotty, natty hair.
The vendor, at the end of his short-fuse, began to walk out from behind the hotdog cart to convince the loiterer to loiter someone else, but he was too deliberate at this; and he quickly got a face full of boiling grease, and fell to the ground screaming and clutching his now bright-red skin.
Now would be my last chance to run; but I already knew that I wouldn't make it very far without a knife in my back, and that the hotdog vendor, now shouting angrily and flailing his hands about the air, temporarily blinded, had suffered a fate far more generous than I mine. With a dejected sigh I resigned myself to being the psychopath's chauffer for a night. It was a far more sufferable option than being his next victim.
He got into the passenger seat this time, breaking the window and pulling himself through rather than waiting for me to unlock the door.
"This jacket is nice." He said, flicking a few small droplets of grease off the sleeve and onto the windshield, where they trailed down the glass and fell into the air-conditioner, filling the car with the smell of burnt potatoes. "What can I call you?" he asked me, sounding the most genuine I had heard from him all night.
"Whatever you like." I replied, keeping my gaze fixed firmly on the bumper of the SUV parked a few spaces ahead. I could see him smile from the corner of my eye as he wiped my blood from his knife and onto my jacket, wetting it in the remnants of the grease.
"How about…" he started, and went into what appeared to be deep thought. He must have remembered a particularly hilarious act of unspeakable violence, because he started laughing, and something in the back of my head started laughing with him.
"What about you?" I asked, trying to quiet the laughter in the back of my thoughts. He didn't respond audibly, but, as if out of nowhere, a card seemed to float down from the ceiling of the car. I grabbed it and flipped it, and the amnesia that had been muddling my thoughts since I had fallen into this nightmare allowed me a momentary reprieve.
Printed in small, black vertical letters on the left and right-hand sides of the card was a word that suddenly took a turn towards the ironic under the current circumstances.
JOKER.
