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.
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