Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber Read Free Book Online Page B

had started their sound check at Monty's. I hit the horn again. I imagined my dad wandering through the house with a scotch and soda in his hand, wondering how on earth a foreign exchange student had found out about his ongoing affair with his assistant. I blasted the horn again. Back in Boy Scouts we'd learned Morse code, and I tried to remember how to do SOS, but settled for a series of irregular, spastic-sounding honks, hoping it sounded desperate and not just like a malfunctioning car alarm or the drum part from "My Sharona," a song that Inchworm sometimes played at our live shows, but only ironically.
    At the far end of the alley, a pair of headlights appeared.
    "Thank you, God." I hit the horn in shorter, sharper blasts and started shouting out the open window. "Help! Help me! Up here!"
    The headlights turned in and started toward me. Red and blue swirled from the roof as the cruiser pulled up directly behind me, doors opening.
     
    The female officer who approached the car didn't look as if she were in a hurry.
    "Is there a problem, sir?"
    I jerked my head down at the plastic wrist restraints. "I'm tied to the wheel here."
    "Yes, sir. I can see that."
    "The woman who did it is up in that office building. She has a gun. She went up there to kill somebody. She's an assassin. Also, she's Lithuanian." Why this last part was important, I didn't know; maybe it added what the SAT might call verisimilitude.
    "An assassin?" Now I had the cop's attention, but she seemed just as interested that I was seventeen years old, wearing a rented tuxedo, and driving a Jaguar that clearly didn't belong to me. Her flashlight went to the stamp on my right hand: UNDERAGE . She drew in a deep breath. "Is this some kind of joke?"
    "There's blood on the windshield," I said. "Does that look like I'm joking?"
    She raised her flashlight to the windshield and played it across the blood. That was when a bullet hole appeared in the glass. It was a brand new bullet hole, I realized; it had just happened.
    The pop sound arrived afterward, like an afterthought. The cop went into a duck-and-cover position next to the Jaguar, grabbing her radio from her belt and saying cop things into it, shouting codes and signals. I heard the next bullet go whining off the cement next to her and she sprang back up, bounding off in the direction of her cruiser. Shots were spanging and spackling off the ground now like hail, and a second later Gobi came running back up to the car and jumped into the passenger seat with the gun in her hand. Blood flecked one side of her face and she was breathing hard, looking over her shoulder at the police car.
    "You did it again, didn't you?" I asked. "You shot somebody else!"
    "What were you doing?" she said, turning the ignition key. "Drive."
    I hit the gas and sent us roaring blindly back down the alley, scraping past a dumpster and stacks of boxes, my hands still tied to the wheel. Before I could say anything, Gobi raised the butt of the pistol and whacked me across the back of the head.
    "Ow! Shit! Crap!"
    "All I ask you to do is wait! One simple thing! Only wait!"
    "I didn't—"
    She raised the gun again. I shut up, cringing back. She lowered the gun. "You put innocent lives in danger when you take stupid risks! What were you thinking?"
    "Were you really going to shoot that cop?"
    She looked back. The police lights were flashing up the alleyway after us, playing off puddles and brick walls. "I might still have to." She shook her head, gazing at me with a mixture of exasperation and annoyance. "I understand now why you never have a girlfriend, Perry."
    "What? I've had a girlfriend! What's that got to do with anything?"
    "You do not know how to listen to a woman." She pointed. "Out this way, take a right."
    Tires screeching, I took the corner too fast, the back of the Jaguar fishtailing and caroming off the back of a newspaper stand. I hoped that she didn't lean out the window and start shooting back at the cop, but the very act of