Main Bad Guy: Chapter 1

The third book in the ‘Love & Bullets’ trilogy begins with a peculiar flashback…

Fiona had been an honor student throughout school, a pigtailed brown-noser who aced every test and kept her hand raised in class until it went numb. “I want to win everything,” she always told her classmates, an attitude that would serve her well in adulthood — especially when she had to walk into rooms full of men with guns.

Under different circumstances, she might have become a neurosurgeon or a business executive. Instead, she met August Leadbetter, the self-styled Che Guevara of her eighth-grade class, and the best kisser in her life until she met Bill. (Every school has a few of those revolutionaries, to balance out the brown-nosers.)

August liked to leap on his desk and yell punk lyrics in class.

August stood on the roof of his mother’s house on humid summer afternoons and tossed water balloons at the open sunroofs of passing cars, hoping to send a soaked and panicked driver off the road.

August also pushed little red pills. And Fiona was the experimental type, if you pressured her hard enough.

“Oh, come on,” August said one afternoon, unzipping his pin-studded backpack to reveal his stash, most of it stolen from his mom’s medicine cabinet. “It’ll be fun. The world goes into slow motion. It’s the only way to survive math class.”

They stood behind the equipment shed at the far end of the football field, safe from prying eyes. Fiona extended a hand, fear prickling her belly — or maybe it was excitement. The pill in her palm seemed very large. She asked: “What if I overdose?”

“You only overdose if you mix drugs,” August shot back. “Come on, it’ll relax you. Exams are making you all stressed out.”

Figuring you only live once (carpe diem, as her Latin teacher always said), Fiona popped that little bundle of chemicals in her mouth and swallowed, her throat clicking.

And felt rain on her face.

The smell of the ocean filled her skull.

Opened her eyes — had she closed them?

She saw gray sky, black pines. She lay on something rough and cold. A dim roar filled her ears: the blood in her veins, amplified to superhuman decibels by whatever the fuck August had given her. No, wrong: the sound came from outside of her. Holy crap, she thought. Where am I?

She turned her head and saw a maroon station wagon barreling toward her.

Her confused brain burned two precious seconds wondering if the car was an illusion (the “drug talking,” as the characters in novels always put it) and she was “tripping out” or whatever. Her hammering heart said no, she was a real person on a real road with a real mom-mobile about to squish her flat.

She thrashed, and her body flopped across the yellow line as the honking station wagon screeched to a stop three feet away. The driver’s door opened, and a middle-aged lady with a pinched face burst out. Through the windshield Fiona saw a young kid staring at her slack-jawed, shocked. You and me both, she wanted to tell him. You and me both.

When she got back, she planned on murdering August in as painful a way as possible. Dunking him in a piranha tank seemed like just the thing. Or skewering him with a red-hot poker.

The lady yelled: “Are you okay?”

Fiona opened her mouth to speak and emitted only the softest of gurgles.

“Oh my God,” the lady continued. “Are you on drugs?”

Fiona grunted like a bullfrog. Her legs and arms refused to peel from the pavement, no matter how hard she tensed her muscles. The lady hovered over her, and Fiona’s roving eyes settled on something that sent a shivery bolt of fear through her gut: the station wagon’s license plate.

It read: Delaware.

And Fiona had popped that pill in the great state of New Jersey.

Fear dumped enough adrenaline into her bloodstream to reactivate her knees. She stood on quaking legs, brushing away the lady’s hand. Another car hummed to a stop behind the station wagon. Fiona could see something bulky on its roof, like a ski rack.

No, those were bubble lights, because it was a friggin’ police car.

Well, today was going nowhere but up.

“This girl’s on drugs,” the lady yelled at the bored cop with a porn-star moustache who climbed out of the cruiser, his hand on his service pistol. As he hip-strutted toward them, Fiona pictured her parents’ faces hard with disappointment, the school principal wagging a finger in her face, her science-club friends whispering behind her back. No top school would accept a girl with an arrest record. And getting a good job? Forget about it.

August had set her whole life on fire.

“What’s your name, girl?” the cop asked, halting five feet away.

Keep up the zombie act, Fiona told herself. Make them think you’re not a threat. Letting her chin droop to her collar, she shuffled a few steps to the left, trying to clear a little space between her and the adults.

“Kids these days,” the lady continued. “I mean, it’s not like we didn’t have controlled substances in our day, officer, but from what I hear they’re getting into now…”

The cop swiveled toward Mom of the Year, to better absorb her nuanced assessment of the nation’s drug problem, and Fiona saw her chance. She sprinted for the cruiser, the cop shouting at her to stop, reaching for her — too late. She slammed the door and locked it before he could grab the handle. The keys were in the ignition, thank God.

As the cop pulled his baton from his belt, readying to smash the window, Fiona keyed the engine to life and pushed the column-shift and hit the gas, barreling down the road in reverse. The cop’s baton smacked the hood as she passed. She giggled. It was like something out of a movie.

Now to deal with the problem at hand: escaping. She was tall for her age and had no problem seeing through the windshield. Her lifetime experience behind the wheel amounted to driving a pickup on the backroads of her cousin’s farm, but she had watched enough action movies over the years to absorb how stuntmen executed a turnaround at speed, and it seemed simple enough. A hundred yards down the road, she stood on the brakes and spun the wheel, the view out the windows blurring, the cruiser tilting hard as it skidded onto the shoulder. Her heart froze. You’ve lost it, you idiot. You’re going to crash.

But the cruiser bounced back to pavement, facing in the right direction. In the rearview mirror, the shrinking cop yelled into the radio on his shoulder, no doubt calling backup. Beside him, Mother of the Year clutched her jaw, swaying from foot to foot.

At least he didn’t shoot at me, Fiona thought. The only thing worse than getting kicked out of school for drugs is a bullet to the head.

She accelerated to ninety, trying to put as much distance as possible between her and… what? They would scramble a fleet of cop cars to hunt her down, from all directions. Helicopters overhead, armed with snipers and spotlights, as the radio waves crackled with her name and description. So long as she stayed in this vehicle, nowhere was safe. You need a big parking lot. Like a mall or something. Dump the vehicle, call your father, and hide. At least you feel fine. Imagine if that pill had messed up your ability to walk.

Even as her brain puzzled over logistics, she found herself laughing uncontrollably. This was fun.

Three miles later, the road widened into four lanes, and the forest on either side of the road gave way to endless concrete: a sea of parking lots around the glittering island of a mega-mall. Some Dark God was protecting her. She steered the cruiser into the first open space she saw, locked it, and ran toward the mall, avoiding the front doors in favor of the loading docks in the rear.

Her joy at finding an ancient payphone on the mall’s third floor curdled when she tapped her hip and realized, for the first time since waking up on the road, that her cute Paul Frank monkey wallet was missing. Had that little shit August taken it?

Across from the payphone was an Irish pub, packed with hungry shoppers. Through the windows, she saw a family stand to leave, the father dropping a few bills and quarters in tip money on the table. Guilt squeezed her throat as she entered the pub and scooped up the change, ducking out the door before a waiter noticed. How long until the cops swept through the mall, on the hunt for a teenage carjacker?

“Get in the ladies’ room,” her father told her over the phone, once she explained everything that had happened. “In a stall. Wait. Don’t leave for anybody or anything. I’ll get there in exactly three hours from this moment, after it’s dark. What’s the back of the mall like?”

She wiped a tear from her cheek. “Typical. There’s like the place where trucks come in, some dumpsters, stuff like that.”

“I’ll be by the dumpsters. You know the car.”

“Okay, Daddy. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just get through it.”

Her father was waiting where he promised. He still had his work beard, which made him look a bit like a young Fidel Castro. I guess it helps him blend in, Fiona thought. Wherever he’s been going lately, it gives him a serious suntan. His sleeves had slid away from his wrists, revealing small cuts and a few nasty bruises.

When she slid into the front seat, he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. She opened the rear door, and he said: “No. The trunk.”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened, but that’s a pretty messed-up punishment.”

“How else am I getting you past any cops?” he said.

But there were no checkpoints. Cocooned in the warm darkness of the trunk, Fiona contemplated her wild day. Sure, it was a rush to score a hundred-ten on a test (she always went for the extra credit) or show off her math skills in front of the class, but that was nothing compared to the high-octane thrill of ripping off a police cruiser and taking it on a high-speed chase. The fear just added to the excitement. For the first time in her life, She wondered: who am I really?

Once they crossed into New Jersey, her father pulled the car onto the side of the road and let her out so she could ride in front. They sat in silence for the next fifty miles, Fiona chewing her nails and doing her best not stare at her father too closely.

After what seemed like an eternity, he asked: “So what happened?”

“A boy at school gave me a pill. I’m sorry I took it. I was stupid.”

“You were curious.” He smiled. “It’s one of the best things about you. But you can’t take a teenage boy at his word.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And I’m sure you’ll never do it again. Did the cops identify you?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t tell them my name. Didn’t tell them anything.”

“Good. And I bet they’ll want to cover all this up. It doesn’t reflect well on a department when a kid steals an officer’s car. I’ll make some calls, see if anyone’s making an issue of it. If they are, well, someone down the line probably owes me a favor.”

“Thank you.” Relief swept through her like a warm wave. She added the mileage from the highway signs and figured her body had traveled some hundred-fifty miles south while her mind orbited Mars. At least she had done it (somehow) in a single afternoon; she could plead illness at school tomorrow. Her mother, working yet another epic shift at the hospital, would have no idea what happened, provided her father kept his mouth shut.

Fiona suspected he would. Her father never liked starting drama, and things had been powder-keg tense for a long time between her parents.

Her father’s next question snapped her back to reality: “What was the boy’s name?”

“August.”

“What are you going to do to August?”

She lashed out a foot. “Hit him in the balls.”

Her father shook his head. “No, sweetie, that’s not good enough. You need to punch him in the face, not just once but repeatedly. You need to break his nose. Understand?”

“I don’t want to hurt him for life. Or disfigure him.”

“You’re such a kind soul, hon.” He squeezed her shoulder. “But if you break his nose, you’re doing him a favor. For the rest of his life, every time he looks in the mirror, he’ll remember what happened. The consequences of doing bad. So maybe the next time he wants to push drugs on someone, he’ll think better of it.”

It made sense. August might have killed her with that pill. If he did the same thing to someone else, and they died, how could she live with herself?

“In fact, when we get home, I have a gift for you.” Her father smiled. “Something that might help you out with your friend.”

The gift was a pair of brass knuckles. Her father taught her how to hit with the added weight on her hand, using one of his worn-out punching bags in the garage. He demonstrated proper technique with his own steel knuckle-dusters, which had a little spike on the pinkie edge (“It’s for opening beer bottles,” he joked). They had a weekend of real father-daughter bonding before he had to leave again.

The next time August saw her behind the shed, between fourth period and lunch, his eyes sparkled with relief. “Thank God,” he cried, arms spreading wide for the hug. “I don’t know why the hell you wandered off like that…”

She hit him hard in the face, twisting her hips like her father taught her. The brass knuckles crunched the delicate bones around his nose, and blood flew. She let him fall to his knees without punching him again; her father might have advocated crippling someone who crossed you, but Fiona figured she would show August a little mercy. After all, he had given her the most exciting afternoon of her teenage life.

“Why did you do that?” August blubbered through his bloody hands. “You’re nice.”

“You have no idea who I am,” Fiona said, wiping the brass knuckles on her jeans. She didn’t know who she was, either; not really. But she intended to find out.

Excerpted from the novel “Main Bad Guy” by Nick Kolakowski, published Feb. 8 by Shotgun Honey (an imprint of Down & Out Books). Available via Barnes & Noble, Amazon (including Kindle), and a bunch of other fine venues. The first two books in the “Love & Bullets” trilogy, “A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps” and “Slaughterhouse Blues,” have some nifty redesigned covers, too.