Текст книги "Foodchain"

Автор книги: Jeff Jacobson

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

DAY TWO

He hadn’t meant to kill the horse.

No, that wasn’t right, Frank corrected himself as he steered the long, black car along the high desert highway. That’s not exactly being honest. He’d meant to kill the horse, all right, just not then, not that way. He braced his naked knees against the steering wheel and reached over with his cuffed hands to turn on the heat. Soothing, warm air exhaled softly over his white skin.

The grooms called him, “El Caballo Susurrero.” The Horse Whisperer.

After Frank and his mom moved away from East Texas, away from the ghost of his father, they settled in the industrial wasteland of suburban southwest Chicago. Mom told Frank that she was a waitress, but he found out later she was a stripper.

Frank found work at Hawthorne, a nearby horse racetrack. For a long time, Frank worked alongside the little Mexican guys who found their way north riding in the backs of trucks. He cleaned stalls, shaking and sifting the shavings until nothing remained, not horseshit, no soiled hay, nothing except wood shavings. He tacked up the thoroughbreds, preparing the snorting, dancing racehorses for their morning run, and washed them after their workouts.

He may have made a good jockey, but genetics betrayed him. Mom was damn near six feet and his father was at least 6’ 5”. But his father’s height was never impressive; he looked like a scarecrow that had seen too many hard winters.

In the barns, Frank hung back, always helping, always watching. When he spoke, it was quiet, but people started to listen. And listen hard. By the end of that first season, he’d been driven up to Arlington to watch the horses there. His observations about the horses and his race predictions were eerily correct. The big money boys, the guys that watched the races from behind great walls of air-conditioned glass, took notice. It wasn’t hard to pull an eighteen-year old into the fold.

They paid for college. Frank went to school at nights while working at the track during the day. Two years away from a veterinary degree he saw his Mom cough blood. She was washing dishes. He’d come down from his bedroom and saw her back hitch a little as she gripped the side of the sink. Little flecks of crimson suddenly appeared within the bubbles. She whipped at the water in the sink with a wooden spoon, as if stirring in some exotic herb into a frothy soup. Frank put a frozen burrito in the microwave and his mom asked him if he was going out that night and neither one of them mentioned it again.

The next day Frank was bent over, wrapping the front left leg of a five-year old filly nearing the end of her career, trying to focus on the job but thinking of all those flecks of blood in the soap bubbles, when a groom tried to bring a notoriously twitchy colt under the lead line connected to the filly’s halter. Any other day, it probably would have worked, but the colt was spooked by the sound of a pitchfork being tossed into an empty wheelbarrow. It reared and kicked, and the next thing Frank knew, he was vomiting uncontrollably in a hospital bed. The doctors spoke in clipped, officious tones, throwing out terms like “brain damage” and “limited recovery” as if they were simple math equations.

Once the pain went away and the vomiting stopped, Frank didn’t feel much different. Except for two things. He’d been kicked in the left side of the head, and the muscles on that side of his face didn’t work very well. They’d respond halfheartedly, like a tired, petulant ten year old being ordered to wash the dog. Other times, they’d constrict, as if they were trying to climb right off his face. Most of the time, though, they just hung there like heavy, wet curtains. The right side worked just fine.

The second thing was, for some reason he never did understand, he couldn’t get his brain to decipher numeric representations. He could read a traditional watch with an hour and second hand, understood it on a core level, but a digital readout looked like a series of random LED slashes.

The college board wanted to know how he would read textbooks, medicine bottles, syringes. Frank demonstrated that he could count just fine, as long as the numbers were written out as words, and he could mark on the measurements on a bottle or syringe, but they wouldn’t give a definite ruling. His employers told Frank not to worry, that the school had to make sure they couldn’t get sued, either way. Weeks dragged into months. Frank’s mom moved into the hospital and didn’t come out. Yet, there was still hope.

Until the day Frank beat a man to death with a fistful of aluminum horseshoes.

The defense successfully argued that the man had been treating a race horse with exceptional cruelty, and what with Frank’s past as a promising young veterinarian, dedicated to preserving these animals’ health and safety, combined with his recent devastating brain injury, he couldn’t be held responsible for his actions that tragic day. He had to visit a psychiatrist one day a week, and his career as a vet was over, but that was it. No jail. No hospital.

Later, Frank wished he’d been locked away somewhere instead.

The men who’d paid for his aborted education wanted to know how and when he was going to pay them back. The nature of Frank’s work changed. He decided which horses had potential, which horses could stand another round of injections, and which horses would make more money if they died from insurance claims. Once in a while he would hear the grooms whispering about him in halting, flurries of Spanish and English, as if it was safer to talk about a man like that in a deliberate blurring of language. A rumor started that if he visited a horse, held up his finger to his pursed mouth and said, “Shhhh,” that horse ended up dead.

His mom never came out of the hospital. The men paid for her funeral.

And so Frank became the guy you’d go to when you needed a horse dead. At least he killed the horses humanely, with drugs so they’d just slip away, just go to sleep. Not like that sonofabitch who’d slide lubricated wires into the horse’s asshole and then connect the wires to a car battery.

* * * * *

Frank kept the needle around sixty-five and shifted on the gray leather seat, rolling his head, easing the kinks in his neck. Long, black hair hung in his face; the left side of his mouth was pulled down by an unseen fishhook. He had to find some clothes. It didn’t matter what he told the cops, if he got pulled over, that was it. They’d take one look at his nakedness and the handcuffs, and he’d be spending the night in jail. Waiting, no doubt, for more quiet gentlemen to show up. Castellari had connections everywhere. Frank probably wouldn’t last more than a few hours in jail. They’d bail him out and drag him off to a garage in the middle of nowhere and go to work on his flesh.

Clothing was the first priority. Well, that and the goddamn cuffs. He slowed the long black car to twenty miles an hour, scanning the side of the highway. Luckily, he hadn’t seen anyone way out here yet. He found a wide, level spot and pulled the car off the highway and steered it deep into the scrub brush.

Two weeks ago, he’d gotten a call from Mr. Enzo Castellari. Ten minutes before the Breeder’s Cup at the Arlington Racetrack, Frank pretended to pat The Elizabeth Dane’s flank affectionately, but he was actually shooting fifteen ccs of his own special cocktail into her bloodstream. Mom had worked as a magician’s assistant in one of the riverboat casinos for a while, and she taught Frank a few tricks. Mostly sleight of hand. He used a latex bulb syringe, used for cleaning babies’ ears, a curved needle, and a length of surgical tubing that snaked up his sleeve.

As the drugs slipped through the horse’s circulatory system, eventually hitting specific nerve endings in the brain, it was supposed to gradually stimulate her into a frenzy of strength and speed as she went charging out through the race, winning by several lengths. Then, while the insurance was quietly changed, significantly raising the coverage, the horse would slip into a coma and die in three or four days. The insurance companies were in on the scam as well, they had business insurance, and everybody just kept ripping everybody else off up and down the ladder.

But a group of animal rights activists had stormed the racetrack, delaying the race for an hour. Once the race finally got started, Castellari’s horse burst out of the pack early in the race and seemed a sure bet, until blood burst from her nostrils and she collapsed in the soft dirt in tangle of long, impossibly thin legs and leather reins, flicking the tiny rider away. The other horses simply thundered around the body as the jockey, who knew that the horse had been poisoned, got caught on camera stomping at the dead horse.

The Elizabeth Dane was supposed to slip away quietly, out of the spotlight. Instead, she died on national television. Frank knew Mr. Castellari wouldn’t give two shits about his excuses and so he ran, ran out into the parking lot, out of Chicago, out of the Midwest.

* * * * *

There was a pair of wraparound black sunglasses, half a roll of Tums, and a cassette tape of Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass in the glove compartment, but that was it. The car was clean, so clean he couldn’t even find dirt in the plush carpeting.

Frank killed the engine and sat for a moment under an empty sky. Then he got out. He found two crisp black suits, neatly folded and pressed, still snug in their dry cleaning bags, in the back seat. Blinding white shirts too. He figured the suits might have been just in case the two quiet gentlemen got any blood on their clothing while feeding the animals. There were even two pairs of gleaming black shoes.

At first, he didn’t think the trunk key was going to work. He gripped it tight, ready to shove the key through the lock, through the metal, through the goddamn back seat if necessary, but forced himself to calm down. If the key broke, he’d have to walk back to the highway and take his chances.

After a few moments of restrained wriggling, the key clicked over, the trunk popped open. The whole thing was lined with plastic, but under that the carpet was as clean as the rest of the car; the whole thing probably got washed and detailed at least every other day. He yanked at the bottom of the trunk, pulling up the floor, something he’d been unable to do when he’d been locked back here with Red. A black leather bag lay nestled within the spare tire. It held a screwdriver, a jack so tiny it was pretty much useless, and a tire iron, one of those condensed tools, shaped like an L. At the bottom of the L was the shell for the lug bolts; the other end was flattened to a dull blade.

He looked at the screwdriver. It was a Phillips and utterly useless for the cuffs. That left the tire iron. He held the top half of the iron between his wrists, wedging the blade against the plastic strip, while bracing the bottom half of the L against his chest. Then he slowly forced his wrists towards his chest, willing the plastic to snap. It didn’t work. So he settled his hands on the bumper and leaned over, using his weight to increase the pressure on the cuffs. At first, he felt a little awkward with his naked ass sticking out in the chilly night air, but gradually, the pain in his wrists replaced the embarrassment, and nothing mattered but breaking the plastic.

It took a while. In the end, both wrists and the center of Frank’s chest were bleeding, but the plastic finally split, sending the blade into the soft tissue of his left palm. He barely felt it. He threw his head back and hissed in triumph, spreading his arms wide to the glittering stars.

* * * * *

He lived in hotels for six days, never really sleeping. The windows always drew him. It didn’t matter if he could see the flat, alien mountains of the west or a view of I-80 and a couple of neon casinos, he’d turn off the lights and the TV and sit at the little round tables in those stiff, narrow chairs in the faint light from the parking lot and stare, watching the long back car in all that neon, just watch all the lights and finish a bottle of Jamaican Rum.

Until finally, inevitably, he went to answer the door, expecting pizza, and found the two quiet gentlemen instead. They wore expensive suits. Frank was wearing boxers and one sock.

He carried a half-empty bottle of Appleton Estate.

They carried revolvers.

* * * * *

Both suits were roughly six or seven sizes too large. Frank felt like a ten-year-old dressing up in his father’s clothes. Although, he reflected, this wasn’t really at all like his father’s suit. His father had been tall and painfully thin, like Abraham Lincoln, except slouched and without the beard; his father shaved twice a day. He was a preacher and he believed; every moment on this Earth was a test from the Holy Spirit.

His father had handled swamp rattlesnakes in a large shack filled with half-burnt pews stolen from other churches, sliding his hands slowly around, caressing two or three snakes at a time, as more rattlesnakes and cottonmouths slithered around his feet. A bunch of desperate people surrounded Frank’s father and the snakes, all of ’em leaning into it, clapping too quickly, eyes wide and dull, singing kinda’ low, while Grandma slapped her upright piano and moaned a little now and then.

* * * * *

He found a map under the driver’s seat and figured out he was in the high desert mountains of central Nevada. He headed north. The shoes didn’t fit any better than the suit; in fact, they fit worse, so Frank drove barefoot. News of the zoo would have probably reached Castellari by now, so he couldn’t head south, back to Las Vegas. They had his picture, and in Las Vegas you couldn’t stick your hand in your pocket to scratch your balls without two or three surveillance cameras catching you. He couldn’t head west either; California was full of lying fucks who would happily call Castellari for the slightest hint of a reward.

Frank hit I-80 with an empty stomach and an emptier gas tank. He turned west, towards Reno. Nearly four hours had passed since he’d gone for a dip in the alligator tank. He needed cash. Quickly and quietly. Gas stations and convenience stores were out; that was for guys with brain damage, guys with PCP habits bigger than Texas, guys who thought shooting the camera would wreck the videotape.

More than anything, he needed rest, so he took the next off-ramp. It curled down into a low gully filled with tumbleweeds. He followed the narrow road until a sagging pole barn loomed up ahead in the darkness. He found a dark place to park behind the barn and killed the engine. For a while, he just sat still and listened to the dull roar of the freeway, watching the distant headlights scatter shadows across the hills.

* * * * *

Frank had been to Jamaica once, with a filthy rich widow who owned dozens of racehorses. She’d wanted a “friend” to go along. What the hell, she paid a lot. He fell in love with the island, and all he wanted out of life was to simply make enough money to buy himself a little concrete shack, right off of a palm-strewn beach, maybe pick up a sweet and sassy little Jamaican honey. A place where he could lay in the sun, swim in the ocean, and quietly drink himself to death in peace.

He bounced around the radio for a while, but couldn’t concentrate on anything. He closed his eyes, but the surging, boiling water of the alligator tank kept leaking out. Teeth slammed together, tails slapped metal, and segmented white bellies flashed in yellow light as they rolled and rolled and rolled—

Something clamped itself around his right ankle.

Frank screamed and flinched awake in the driver’s seat of the long black car and found his ankle wedged underneath the brake pedal. He jerked his knees angrily up to the steering wheel and sat up. His stomach growled impatiently. But he could handle that. It was the irritating, thirsty itch in the back of his mind that really bothered him.

* * * * *

He headed west again. He needed a place to clean himself up. He pulled into a nearly empty rest stop and parked at the far end. The place smelled of diesel and dog shit. An open area full of maps, brochures, and pay phones split the building in half; the women’s room on one side, men’s on the other. He counted three trucks in the parking lot and no cars.

He waited a while and was just about to meander on over to the building and see if they had any vending machines with food, when a semi hissed itself to a stop in the truck lot. Frank kept still, watching through the rearview mirror. A man jumped out of the cab, stretched, and walked slowly to the men’s room.

Twenty minutes later the guy was still inside.

Frank got tired of waiting. Maybe the guy had stomach flu or something. He slid the tire iron up the inside of the suit’s right sleeve, up along his forearm and curled his fingers around the lower half of the L.

He climbed out of the car, tire iron hot and tight in his fist. He clomped across the parking lot as fast as possible in the loose shoes. It would have been easier barefoot. But he didn’t want any unnecessary attention and since a guy wearing an ill-fitting black suit and oversize shoes didn’t seem as strange as being barefoot, he slogged forward, keeping his toes flexed so the shoes wouldn’t fall off.

Frank stepped into the light in the middle of the building, scanning for food. There was a vending machine for soda, but that was all. No candy bars, no chips. Not even those bags of fake health mixes, with chunks of petrified nuts and dried fruit that tasted like horse shavings. He stopped for a moment, watching the snoring trucks and listening intently. Except for the fast food wrappers dancing in the wind, nothing moved.

Frank stepped inside the men’s restroom.

Searing white fluorescent light stung his eyes. Bleached gray tiles covered the floors. The stalls waited on his left. On his right, the sinks and reflective metal mirrors. Two air hand dryers. The place smelled burnt, not only through the temperature from the desert air and those hand dryers, but chemically as well.

One of the stall doors was shut.

Frank skied across the tiles to the nearest sink. He twisted the handle, and as water hit the porcelain, he bent over to see what waited under the closed door.

A pair of gray snakeskin cowboy boots.

Frank splashed water on his face, then bent and drank deeply. The water tasted foul and smelled of sulfur, but since he hadn’t had any liquid at all in over eight hours, he didn’t mind. He gulped it down, pausing only to suck in a quick breath now and then.

The stall door swung in, slowly. A voice, rough and low, whispered, “Hey man. Hey. Look at me.”

The guy on the toilet was close to Frank’s age, maybe low thirties, sandy beard, wearing a Mack Truck cap, and a plaid western cut long-sleeve shirt. His jeans were bunched around his ankles, and his right hand was stroking his erect dick.

Frank slowly straightened, wiping the water away from his lips with his left hand, keeping his right hand with the tire iron hanging loose at his side. “I’m sorry?”

He stepped out of the black shoes. The tile was cold and clammy beneath his feet.

“Look at this, man.” The breathing and stroking grew faster. “Look at it. Yes…You like it, don’t ya? You like my cock. I can tell.”

“Yeah,” Frank agreed as he took three quick steps towards the stall and brought the tire iron down on the trucker’s head before the man could even let go of his dick. The iron bar hit his skull with an unsatisfying, brittle thud. So Frank hit the guy again, cracking the corner of the L into the trucker’s nose. The guy finally let go of his dick and instead of protecting his head, went for his jeans. Frank cracked him a few more times and the guy twitched and flopped for a second or two like a fish on a flat rock, but eventually he stopped trying to move at all.

Very little blood hit the floor. Most of it was running down the guy’s face, down his neck, soaking into the plaid shirt. The guy’s eyes had rolled up, showing nothing but white slits. His mouth hung open. His hands hung straight down on either side of the toilet, arms more limp than his dick. Frank left the guy’s jeans down around his ankles and snagged the wallet. Eight crisp twenties waited inside.

Frank shook his head. His luck was making him nervous. The trucker had a fistful of pills in a plastic baggie in his shirt pocket. Frank tried the boots. They fit much better than the shoes, a little tight, but not bad. The suit legs were so wide that the cuffs nearly obscured the snazzy snakeskin; Frank felt like he’d just stepped out of some seventies exploitation movie.

Frank slipped the large black shoes on the trucker’s feet, rearranged the limp arms in the man’s lap, and locked the stall door from the inside. Frank slipped under the door and backed away, scrutinizing the closed door. It simply looked as if the trucker, with his jeans down around his ankles, draped over some large black shoes, was simply taking a long, unhurried shit. Maybe he was reading the paper. It would have to do. Frank tucked the money and baggie of pills away in the inside pocket of the suit jacket, flexed his toes in the boots, and left.

* * * * *

He hit Reno an hour later and headed north, rising suddenly into the Sierra Nevada mountain range. He came around a hill and nearly had a heart attack when he saw the border station. With much of the state devoted to agriculture, California had established permanent roadblocks around its borders, stopping every car that crossed over into the state, asking everyone if they were bringing any fruits or vegetables across. But the officer, a young woman with a face as round and smooth as one of the state’s peaches, hadn’t shown the slightest interest in Frank. Even before he shook his head to her question, she was already waving him through.

He bought a bottle of rum and spent and hour in a tiny town called Milford. It wasn’t exactly Appleton Estate, but it would work. He parked near an old cemetery full of genuine gunfighter skeletons, sipped from the bottle for a while, and finally slept.

His dreams were dark, full of slippery shadows and galloping hooves on tight sand.

* * * * *

The midmorning sun hammered through the windshield like the stern gaze of God and left Frank sweating and confused. The bottle, half-empty, sat upright in the passenger seat as if waiting to be seatbelted into place. He screwed on the cap and threw it under the seat. That was fucking smart, leaving an open bottle in plain sight within the vehicle. Sucking at the sweet and sour film on his teeth, he found an empty campground near Honey Lake and took a shower. It felt good to scrape off the slime from the alligator tank, not to mention the piss on his leg.

Frank slid back behind the wheel, feeling clear and level. He decided the bottle could wait. He wasn’t sure what to do. The long, black car had half a tank of gas left. The urge to keep running still seethed through his veins, so he decided that he needed more ground between him and the zoo.

* * * * *

He followed a rough two-lane road northwest, through vast plains of sagebrush and patches of bleached, gray husks of trees, scorched long ago by forest fires, still standing guard like silent ghosts. The pavement curled out through lava-strewn hills, eventually spitting the long, black car into a narrow valley. To the southwest rose the steep, forbidding Sierra Nevada Mountains. To the west and north, more mountains. To the east there was nothing but the high desert wasteland beyond the few low foothills.

He spotted the water tower first, a dying Martian crouching over a cluster of white buildings and a few scattered homes. The green, bullet-specked sign read, “Welcome to Whitewood. Home of the Wildcats.” The population was three figures; he figured that might be a generous estimate.

Frank pulled into the gas station on the right side of the highway at the edge of town. Behind the gas station, there wasn’t much but empty desert and rolling foothills. He stopped next to the pumps, remembering this time that the tank was on the passenger side of the car. The place only had two pumps, no roof, just a tiny store next to the one car garage.

Frank climbed out and nearly went to his knees in the heat. “Good fucking Christ,” he blurted in venomous surprise as two hours of air-conditioning bled out of the car. The air smelled dry and full of lead.

A three-story farmhouse with a wraparound porch sat directly across the street from the gas station. The house looked old, hurt. The wood may have been painted green once, a long time ago. Somebody had started nailing up aluminum siding along the north wall, but gave up after a while. Chunks of shingles were missing. Most of the windows were covered in flattened cardboard boxes, swollen and splotched from rain. The place looked like it was suffering from a serious case of gangrene.

The surrounding yard wasn’t much better. Ten or twelve cars had been eviscerated in the patches of dead weeds and smooth dirt. Amongst the tires, car doors, bumpers, and broken glass, was a rusted horizontal freezer. A pair of lawn chairs flanked a gigantic satellite dish, nearly eight feet across, perched awkwardly at the edge of the yard like some fat vulture, and looked like it was capable of picking up signals from one of the moons of Jupiter. Frank got the feeling it was some kind of shrine.

A leafless oak tree, gnarled and twisted in slow-motion agony, rose from the center of the yard, rising into stumps of limbs nearly forty feet in the air. It took him several seconds to realize the dead tree was full of children.

Frank froze, holding the gas nozzle in midair. The children’s silent stares made him powerfully uneasy. Still keeping his eyes on the tree, he jammed the nozzle into the gas tank and squeezed the handle. The clicking tank behind him made him feel a little better, but not much. He had a little over forty dollars left, more than enough for the gas, but while looking at the deserted streets, he’d been thinking of breaking one of his own rules, seriously considering robbing the gas station. But now that was out of the question.

One of the kids had a slingshot.

The kid, a boy with a flattop that may have been trimmed about three or four months ago, raised the slingshot. It had some kind of brace that came out of the bottom of the handle and wrapped around the kid’s wrist. He was seven or eight, wearing shorts that hung to his calves and a #54 Chicago Bears football jersey. He stretched the elastic surgical tubing back, straightening his left arm, pulling his right hand back to his jaw, and let fly.

Something popped into the rear window, about a foot from Frank.

Frank tried hard not to flinch, but knew he was too late. Then he got pissed. He knew from hearing the deep crunch that it had left a small crater in the window. He left the clicking tank behind and started across the empty street. Weeds grew from cracks that zigzagged across the pavement. He put his hands in his black suit pockets to hide them in case he suddenly had to curl his fingers into fists. He just wanted to talk to the children, not scare them. Not yet, at least.

Frank stopped in the middle of the road feeling like he’d just stepped onto a cast iron skillet that had been left on the campfire for too long and wished he hadn’t left the sunglasses on the dashboard. “Hi there.”

The children didn’t say anything. They stood on limbs, leaning against the trunk or quietly hanging from the branches with both arms. In the vicious afternoon light, the kind of light that carves shapes into greasy slivers of silhouettes, it looked like the burnt husk of a tree full of skeletons. To Frank’s sunblasted eyes, the tree looked like it was still on fire.

He shielded his eyes from the glare and tried again. “Hey there.” He realized he didn’t know what the hell to say.

“Nice boots,” a girl’s voice sniggered, as the kid with the slingshot fired another projectile at him. Frank heard the rock or whatever it was whistle past his head and thwack into the car.

Suddenly, nearly every boy produced their own weapon. Most of them had slingshots, but a couple had BB guns, long narrow pistols and skinny air rifles.

Frank took a step forward, no way in hell that he was letting a tree full of children scare him away, and heard hissing snaps as the kids began pumping the BB guns, priming them to fire.

A low growl prickled the hairs on the back of Frank’s neck. He faltered, stopped as a dog wriggled slowly out from under the porch and padded silently through the junk, stopping just short of the pavement.

At first, he thought it was a pit bull, but the dog was larger than any pit bull he’d ever seen. It had the wide head knotted with clumps of muscles so large around the jaws that it looked like it had the mumps. The short bluish hair was shot through with flecks of gray. The teats hung loose and low. One eye was gone, leaving just jagged folds of scar tissue. She looked like she’d happily chew on the rusted engine blocks all day and fire sharpened nails out of her butt.

Frank found out later the dog’s name was Petunia.

Petunia fixed her good eye on him and growled again.

With a sinking, numbing certainty, Frank realized that his gift with animals, his ability to somehow calm them, even talk with them, wasn’t going to work with this particular dog. He jammed both hands back in his pockets and clenched his fists and weighed his options. He could either keep walking forward to the dead tree, which meant almost certainly facing the dog, not to mention the onslaught of slingshots and BB guns, or he could back away and pretend nothing had happened.

The gas pump stopped clicking.

Frank didn’t like it much, but he backed across the street.

The girl laughed. “You fuckin’ pussy.”

Frank suddenly wished he had one of the quiet gentlemen’s guns, just one, so he could shoot a couple of the boys out of the tree like goddamn pigeons. He just wanted to pay for the gas and get the hell out of here. As soon as he reached the car, they fired. Rocks, marbles, BBs, and grapes struck the car and the pavement in sudden, crackling, popping sounds, like Drano poured into Rice Krispies. Frank didn’t turn around, refused to even look back across the street. He replaced the gas nozzle and went into the small convenience store.