“Don’t Jesus me.”
“All right.”
“Don’t Jesus me!”
“I get it. I got it.”
“Ram the bitch!”
“Doin’ it,” Kuba says as he accelerates.
“Stop her now.”
Even if a dude is your homey and your ace kool, he needs to be afraid of you deep down, needs to know that your fuse is always lit and short. Sometimes, you have to get your Joe Pesci on, be like that hothead he played in Goodfellas. Otherwise, even your main man can wonder if the crown will fit him better than it fits you. Like everyone, Aleem needs friends, but he never forgets that a best friend is potentially his worst enemy. It is a display of weakness, not a full moon, that can cause your homey to go werewolf on you.
Kuba is standing on it, and the Aviator is surging forward. All the leaves and fruit and bark that the orchard has shed in its long dying—a rotting sludge and the fungus that feeds on it—sloshes against the undercarriage and spews out from beneath the tires. The bow of the vehicle falls and rises, and the chassis shudders, and the back end tries to fishtail, but sweating Kuba holds tight to the twisting wheel. They are coming up fast on the vintage Explorer, which has a smaller engine and can’t outrun the Lincoln, coming up fast and faster. Aleem feels his face flush with excitement, as he imagines the Explorer brought to a halt and jammed against a tree, imagines yanking open the driver’s door and dragging Nina out from behind the wheel and throwing her down in the muck. When the boy sees that, he’ll know who owns this family, who has the power and always will.
They’re seconds short of ramming the Ford when the Aviator’s engine fails. The Lincoln doesn’t sputter or cough, just cuts out. The Ford pulls away. The Lincoln loses momentum in the swampish mud and forest mast, quickly coming to a halt.
“What’s this shit?” Aleem demands.
Pushing the starter, Kuba says, “Wasn’t me.”
“Get it going.”
“It’s dead.”
“Like shit. Try again.”
“Dead. It’s dead. Put that away.”
“Put what?”
“That cannon in your hand. I didn’t do nothin’。”
“We got lights, wipers.”
“Battery’s not dead.”
“No shit.”
“Just the engine. I didn’t do it.”
The taillights of the Explorer are dwindling into the storm.
Aleem turns to peer through the passenger window. In parallel alleys, three sets of headlights are screened by dead trees and driving rain, but all remain visible enough for Aleem to discern that they’re stationary. Only the Explorer is still on the move.
Kuba sees the situation, too. “How they do this?”
“Who?”
“Gotta be cops.”
“What cops? You see cops?”
“We’re screwed if it’s cops.”
“There’s no cops.”
“There’s somethin’ for damn sure.”
Aleem looks out the windshield just as the Explorer goes dark. The beams don’t fade into the night; they suddenly blink out. The Explorer is near the limit of visibility in the storm, a small gray mass barely recognizable as an SUV, no longer receding. “She been stopped, too.”
Kuba says, “She don’t even have lights.”
Aleem holsters his pistol. “Let’s go.”
“It’s dead.”
“We ain’t.” Aleem puts up the hood of his jacket and opens his door.
The Aviator that’s gaining on Nina suddenly falls behind, as do the SUVs flanking her in other north-south alleys. They seem to have come to a sudden stop.
“Michael,” she says, and a small laugh of relief escapes John.
The respite from terror is brief. Something happens related to the impact with the tree, which had seemed of little importance. The rattle becomes a louder knocking. The knocking erupts into a three-note tolling like an iron bell. The Explorer shudders violently. The instrument panel brightens with an array of warning lights, some of which Nina has never seen before, and the fuel gauge falls to zero. The Explorer rolls to a stop, the engine dead.
She switches off the headlights. She hopes they are far enough from Aleem and the others so that it might appear as if they have driven out of sight. She can’t rely on that. “We’re on foot from here,” she says, taking the phone from John. “Bring the duffel.”
“What about our suitcases, the stuff in back?”
“Leave it all. Just bring the Tac Light in the glove box, but don’t switch it on.”
As she opens the door and rain shatters over her, Michael’s voice comes from the phone. “Why have you stopped moving?”
“Breakdown,” she says. “Hit a tree, ruptured the gas tank. I don’t know what else. We gotta run for it.”
“Turn your phone off and get somewhere safe. Save the battery. I’ll track you by it. Be there maybe in as little as two hours.”
She turns off the phone and pulls up her hood and gets out into the howling night and closes the door and looks toward the distant Aviator. It’s only an SUV, a fancy kind of truck mostly obscured by its headlights and the storm, but it looks mysterious, as though it was made on a far world by unknowable creatures and has come from beyond the moon and down through the night to this orchard for a purpose too strange to be fathomed by human reason.
At the front of the Ford, she meets John—“Stay close”—and leads him out of the southbound alley and west through darkness, splashing across saturated ground that sucks at their inadequate shoes. She isn’t blind, but the colorless landscape is black and grainy shades of gray, like a CT scan, and her sense of vision is reduced to something like computed tomography that requires the training of a radiologist to accurately and easily read the way ahead. The trees are shapes without form, but they are a shade darker than the sky and thus define the harvesting alley, although the treacherous footing prevents her from hurrying as fast as she would like. She doesn’t dare use the Tac Light and reveal their location. She doesn’t want to move among the trees until her eyes become somewhat dark-adapted, when she will be better able to discern and avoid low-hanging limbs and the snares of fallen apple wood that could trip them or gouge them with the ragged spears of broken branches.
They have gone fifty or sixty yards when her fear suddenly ripens into dread, which she takes to mean that intuition is warning her of an imminent, lethal encounter. She stops and halts John and looks north, surveying the cloistered night from west to east. The lights of four vehicles were previously visible, filtered through the trees, but now all is darkness. The headlamps have been doused. Aleem and his seven homeys haven’t gone away. They’re coming for her and John, and though they’re as hampered by the darkness as she is, they have eight times more guns than she has and God knows how many knives. More important than weapons, they have an unshakable confidence born of the overweening self-esteem that sociopathic gangbangers all seem to share, and they will never stop any more than wolves, electrified by the scent of prey, will relent in the hunt.
Since John issued from her and she first saw his sweet face, Nina has wanted nothing more than the freedom to make something of herself and support her child, the freedom to raise him to be wiser than she had sometimes been and to be a blessing to others. But in this world where the powerful too often fail to see the humanity in those weaker than themselves and seek to rule by fear, freedom is fragile, sustained only by sacrifice and fierce determination.