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“What are you waiting for? Drive!” he yelled.
He sounded scared too. The rest of his gang emptied out of the back of the store, all of them scattering in every which direction and I got a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Afraid, I rushed to take the car out of park and peeled out of that back alley like my life had depended on it. Behind me, Tina and Trey were dead quiet. Stacy was just as wide eyed behind me as I felt, and no one said anything even when a Taylor Swift song came on the radio. It was as if everyone was lost in their own heads.
“Did something happen back there?” I finally tried, but no one answered me. I wondered if they’d even heard me, but then Rico cleared his throat. My heart squeezed tight, nervous.
“Get on the highway. We need to get out of here, stat,” he directed, and I silently did what he said.
I hadn’t known he had a gun.
Would he turn it on me? Had he killed someone in there? What the fuck had happened back there to make them all this scared?
I glanced in the mirror again, looking back at Trey’s and Tina’s stark white faces. They weren’t even kissing. Instead, they looked sullen and scared, both sitting on either side of the car as far apart from one another as they could get. There was more distance between them than I’d ever seen before and that unsettled me more than anything else.
I took a right onto University Street, and slowly made my way through downtown. I turned down the radio, listening as I heard the telltale screech of police sirens not far away. My heart hammered in my chest as I stopped at a red light, only to gun it as soon as it turned green. For a few minutes, I just drove, my pulse rapidly spiraling out of control. As soon as I turned onto the onramp, I breathed a sigh of relief and started to pick up speed.
Not long after that, I could see red and blue lights behind us.
“What happened in there, guys?” I tried again.
No one answered.
The red and blue lights behind me started to multiply. One car quickly became two, and then three, and then it suddenly became half a dozen. My panic rose in spades, and I kept pressing harder and harder on the gas pedal.
I was already going eighty, but I kept picking up speed. Soon, I was hitting near close to one hundred miles per hour, well and truly above the speed limit and dangerously close to reckless driving. I don’t know why that detail from driver’s ed decided to pop into my mind at that particular moment, but I tried not to dwell on it.
Rico looked over his shoulder, finally seeing what I saw in the rearview mirror.
“Oh, shit,” he whispered.
Those words petrified me. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road while we drove at such a high speed, but I knew there was no going back now. If we got caught, I had a feeling that my father wouldn’t be able to get me out of trouble, let alone the rest of my friends. The five of us could be looking at very real jail time if this all turned out badly.
One hundred ten.
The speedometer kept creeping up. Soon enough, a dozen police cars were on our tail. I kept trying to push it faster and faster, but when I finally turned my eyes from the rearview mirror to the road in front of me, I shrieked. Above us, a helicopter had us pinned with a spotlight. No matter where we went, it would be able to follow us from above. It rained so much here, but tonight was the clearest night we’d had in a long time.
Rotten fucking luck.
The highway ahead of us had been cleared out, pitch black aside from the line of cop cars cutting us off about a mile out. The red and blue lights were blinding, and I looked for an exit. Panicked, I realized I’d just passed one and there wasn’t another for at least a mile past the barricade. This was quickly turning from bad to the absolute worst. The dashboard lit up without me touching anything at all.
“Fuck. Does this car have one of those emergency-off systems?” Rico asked worriedly.
“I don’t know. Isn’t that something you’re supposed to know?” I asked, my voice trembling with panic.
“This is OnStar. This vehicle has been reported stolen and will thus be shut down in the next thirty seconds.”
Fuck me.
The speedometer started trailing downward no matter how hard I pressed on the gas pedal. The car gradually slowed down to ninety, then sixty, then thirty until it finally came to a complete stop. Then every light in the car went out. It would have been a complete blackout except for all the police lights that were currently focused on us.
I grabbed the keys, turning them in the ignition in a panic. The SUV wouldn’t respond. It was as if the car had gone completely dead. Within seconds, the car was surrounded by police. Every single one of them had a weapon trained on us.
“Exit the vehicle with your hands up!”
The loudspeaker was so loud that I jumped. With a quiet cry, I turned my head and stared at Rico, looking for anything he might offer in terms of solace. His face was hard, like this wasn’t the first time he’d been in a situation as crazy as this. The warmth that had been there when I’d first taken the dare to drive the stolen car had all but disappeared.
“What about the gun?” I tried tentatively.
