AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He was smiling. “You asked what kind of music I like. I love show tunes.”
I don’t know why, but I laughed out loud.
“I am particularly fond of Lerner and Loewe. Camelot. Have you heard of it?” He sang softly. “ ‘In short there’s simply not/A more congenial spot/For happy-ever-aftering than here in/Camelot!’ Predictable, I know.”
I cracked up. It helped. “We gotta get a ride somehow, Bennacio,” I said after I caught my breath. “We can’t walk the whole way to Halifax.”
Bennacio stood up. “No, we cannot. Get up, Kropp, and stand with your hands by your sides.”
He was staring down the road, and I stood up and looked with him. I heard the siren before I saw the car and the flashing lights.
“Great,” I said. “Cops.”
The patrol car pulled into the emergency lane, cut the siren, but left the blue-and-reds spinning. The patrolman stepped out of the car, his hand on the butt of his pistol.
“Get on your knees with your hands behind your head!” he shouted at us. “Now!”
“Do as he says,” Bennacio said quietly, and we kneeled on the pavement and I laced my fingers behind my head. The patrolman’s shoes went scrape-scrape against the concrete as he came toward us.
“You fellows know anything about what happened back there?” he asked.
“We ran out of gas,” Bennacio said.
“Looks like you did more than that,” the cop said. He stopped a couple of feet from Bennacio, his gun drawn now and aimed at Bennacio’s high forehead.
“I have a gun,” Bennacio said calmly, as if he were remarking on the weather. “Behind my back.”
“Don’t move!” the cop said, and he wet his lips. He wasn’t much older than me, maybe nineteen or twenty, looking kind of silly in his tall brown hat, like a kid playing dress-up. He crouched down, the gun’s muzzle about four inches from Bennacio’s nose, and reached around his back to find the weapon that wasn’t there.
Bennacio’s right hand shot straight up, his index and middle finger extended from his fist, into the kid’s neck. He fell straight down and lay still.
“You killed him,” I said. “Jeez, Bennacio!”
“He is not dead,” Bennacio said. “Come, Alfred.”
He was already on his feet and walking rapidly toward the patrol car.
“We’re taking his car?”
“Yes.”
“Because we’ve got no choice.”
“Yes.”
“I want to go home, Bennacio.”
He turned at the door. “What home, Alfred?”
He wasn’t trying to be mean. He just didn’t know what I meant by “home.” What did I mean by “home”? The Tuttles’? Knoxville? He didn’t know and I sure didn’t know. I had no real home anymore.
I got in the car.
24
He cut the spi
nning red and blue lights, hit the gas pedal, and the Crown Victoria was soon up to 105. Cars pulled out of our way as we approached because we were obviously on some pretty important police business. I rode shotgun, next to the cop’s actual shotgun, and thought if we were attacked again it was all up to me because we were out of arrows and something like a shotgun wasn’t elegant enough for Bennacio.
