The Adventures of Cadillac Girl! Part 2.5

Speeding through the neighborhood, barely stopping for anything--stop signs, speed humps, kids on bikes--my mind also ran way too fast.

What the fuck do I do? Call the cops? Ha! I imagined how that conversation would go: "Yes, 911? Yeah, I've just gotten in a gunfight with some yakuza thugs in the middle of the fucking street, can you help?" Call Mr. Arigaki? This would be the obvious choice, but perhaps I ought to get his daughters well removed from danger first. How far is "well removed"? My place? If the gang found out the girls' AirBnb, how likely was it that they knew my address? But where else was I to go? Not like I've got an underworld connection or anything.

I looked into the rearview mirror, which swung wildly back and forth on the wire connecting it to my backup camera. I set my gun atop the sea of glass in the passenger seat, then steadied the mirror, seeing through what was left of the glass that no one was following us, then turned it down to face my passengers.

"Are you guys okay?" My voice was uncharacteristically loud and harsh. "Are you hit, are you cut?"

They frantically shook their heads no, although the tears on their faces catching the light, the hyperventilating, and the full-body shaking made it hard to tell which question they were responding to. "Hey, I'm getting us out of here," I said, trying hard to soften my tone, "I'm getting us out of here, it's gonna be okay."

We turned right onto La Cienega. I decided the best course would be to hit the eastbound 10 freeway, where the chance of other motorists and cops noticing us was slightly lower than on the surface streets. The 10 also would take us toward my place--which I guess I would find out when I got there whether or not it was compromised--and the makerspace where my other Cadillac--the 1981 Fleetwood Brougham V6 I picked up a couple weeks ago--was kept. So the plan was (1) "drive casual", (2) swap vehicles, (3) take the girls back to my place, and (4) call Mr. Arigaki.

Right, "drive casual". Yeah, super easy when you're driving a Cadillac with a windshield that now better served as a colander and an interior full of shattered glass, shell casings, and passengers in absolute hysterics. I turned up the radio a little bit--80s on 8 was playing "Heaven is a Place on Earth" by Belinda Carlisle--took a peek at the gauges--oil pressure was fine, volts were fine, temp was okay for now but the radiator probably had a couple holes in it--took the rearview in hand to take another peek, seeing no one threatening behind us, I yanked it out of the ceiling and threw it into the passenger-side floorboard so its swinging wouldn't attract any more attention than we already were. The myriad of bullet holes in the windshield caught the light and scattered it into a galaxy of chaos as we drove casually.

It wasn't until we reached the red light at Pico that the realization dawned on me that I was in the worst shape of anyone in this car. The first thing I noticed is that my hands shook uncontrollably any time they weren't attached to the steering wheel. All I could smell and taste was gunpowder. Somehow my mocha Frappucino hadn't been knocked over or sprinkled with glass or brass, so I took a hungry sip through the straw. It tasted like gunpowder too. Each heartbeat echoed through my skull, building into the harbinger of a debilitating migraine.

Fucking A, Britt, why did you shoot the fucking gun inside the car?

Each heartbeat also echoed through the sizzling pain in my arm--oh fuck, I got shot! In the semi-darkness--not wanting to attract too much attention by turning on the dome light--I couldn't tell much under my black sweatshirt (my favorite fucking Future Fantasy Delight sweatshirt, mind you) apart from the surprisingly neat slit just below the shoulder, the fact that most of my sleeve between my shoulder and elbow was soaked, and my upper arm was sensitive to the touch all over. But it still worked, and I had a first-aid kit in the trunk, so I guessed I could figure that out once I got to the makerspace too. In this situation I was extremely thankful for the general obliviousness of the typical late-night Los Angeles driver as they passed us in their shiny LED-lighted crossovers with shiny legible dmvdotcadotgov plates with a first digit of 8, not noticing anything wrong with the giant, slow, brown land yacht.

Just another night in L.A.

The Adventures of Cadillac Girl! Part 2 (WIP)

In my headlights the four gangsters all looked like caricatures of bad greaser cosplayers, their noses pointed skyward like an MD-88 mid-takeoff while their eyes fixated upon me and my passengers. Only one was visibly strapped, holding a shorty AR-15 with a drum magazine horizontally across his waist, but I knew the rest of them were packing as well. The second one from the left stepped forward. He was the only one not dressed in black, with an abstract shirt under a blue-and-white jersey jacket that glittered in the light, and a pompadour so over the top I wasn’t sure if it was meant to conceal a weapon or be used as a weapon. Just like his style, every step was dramatic, thrusting his hips and making sure his boots clacked loudly against the pavement.

I invisibly took a deep breath, licking the roof of my mouth and my lips. My left hand stayed resting on the sill of my open window as it had been, while my right slowly moved, first into the back seat to make the universal “stay calm” gesture to my passengers, then to my hip to slowly work my Glock out of its holster. The unicorn--I’m just going to refer to him by that--came to a stop near the front of my car, clacking his boots like a Russian honor guard, sweeping the tails of his jacket to reveal a rose-gold 1911 on each hip, and sweeping his head around to point the tip of his hairdo at me.

A tense silence, then he spoke, in a Nicolas Cage-grade Elvis impersonation: “You--” dramatic double finger guns at me “--got something I--” some exaggerated hand gesture to lead into double thumbs pointed back at himself “--want.”

I shrugged, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, bud. Now why don’t y’all move it along, I got places to be.” My Glock was out of its holster and in my lap.

He snorted, then laughed toothily. “Tell ya what. I’ll make this real simple. You--” finger guns “--give us the girls, and you walk--” waving-off gesture “--or we--” waving toward himself and his fellow thugs “--take the girls. Over your--” finger guns again “--dead body.”

My grip tightened on my gun. “That’s not going to happen.”

He laughed again. “So be it.” He turned around with a full 360 spin bookended by a clack of his boots as the rest of his gang who hadn’t already done so produced their weapons, forming a firing squad in the middle of the street

I took a deep breath. “Get down,” I said to my passengers, looking at them in the rearview.

The clack of his boots was a countdown. Clack, clack, clack, clack…I took another deep breath. My left hand moved to my Glock, my Glock moved toward the window.

And with the same dramatic spin move, the unicorn produced his 1911s and then shit hit the fan.

I don’t know who on the gang shot first, but I know who on the gang I shot first. The unicorn went down with three shots, his legs kicking out parallel to the ground with a drama that I wasn’t sure was due to the 180-grain 10mm Auto bullets or him being just as dramatic in death as in life. Bullets slammed into my Cadillac’s hood and through the windshield. My passengers screamed hysterically, fighting each other for the slightest extra millimeter of cover. I took down the next thug with another three shots, then thrust the shifter into reverse and put my right Chuck Taylor through the firewall, the giant land barge lurching backward with a chirp from the rear tires.

I couldn’t hit the other two without half leaning out of the car, so I half-winced, half-cringed at the ugly necessity of what I was about to do as I took aim and drained the rest of the magazine through the windshield at the remaining two thugs getting smaller--and less well-lit too, as one of their rounds took out my right headlight--as we accelerated away from the scene, each report going off like a grenade inside the car.

The slide locked over an empty chamber, so I threw myself over the front seat to drop the empty magazine and reach for a new one. As soon as I got my hand over the fresh magazine, a round burst through the windshield and sliced across my left-shoulder with a searing white-hot pain. My passengers screamed even louder, I made some very un-lady-like noises, but my arm still worked, slamming the magazine home and yanking the slide.

With a bit of distance between us and the remaining gangsters, I stood on the brakes and wrenched the wheel to the right. Tires squealed in agony, the car listed heavily to the right then the left like an ocean liner in heavy seas, then the car simply stopped broadside across the street with an abruptness that nearly threw us all out onto the pavement if only the doors weren’t in the way. Shit. My J-turn attempt failed and now we were in an even worse position as the thugs continued to fire at us. Rounds thudded into the doors and blew out both right-side windows, showering us with glass. I took aim again, seeing only one gangster left, the one with the AR-15, approaching us almost casually from a few car lengths away, sending us a burst here and there. The distance was stretching the limits of what my subcompact could hit, but I did what I could to steady myself before I rapidly squeezed off five or six rounds, each muzzle blast rattling my brain inside my skull. I wasn’t sure if I hit him, but he fell or stumbled to cover between two SUVs, and that was all the time I needed. I mercilessly neutral-dropped the Cadillac and we sped off, tires and passengers screaming into the night.