The Front of the Freeway by Logan Noblin Page B

Tony, what are we doing ?” he mocks, tracing slow, bloody figure-eights across my chest with the point of his pistol from across the room. “Just tying up some loose ends, JT. You know how it is.” I move to sit up but my hand slips in a patch of loose powder and my arm collapses to the cement. On every side, a stack of soft white bricks lines a wall of straight wooden boxes, row after row of brown and white towers falling into the dark, all dusted with a thin film of chalk. Tony didn’t move seventy pounds of cocaine in a night by himself. He had help. He planned for this.
    “You set me up.”
    “You made it too easy, man. I’m sorry it had to happen like this. I didn’t plan it this way, not from the beginning. But I couldn’t pass this up.” He’s right, I made this all very easy. I told him all about Cesar’s and the basement, about the waiting shipment and the thin security. It wouldn’t take much for Tony to put a bullet in Omar’s massive sneering head and empty the shipment into the back of a truck. If Cesar’s still alive, he won’t rest until Tony pays for this. But when they find my body, he’ll think that Tony already has.
    “So now what? You’re going to leave another body in your house and wait for the cops to find me? You’ll be running for the rest of your life.”
    “My house?” Tony edges towards me across the light streaked floor, moving in and out of bars of light and shadow. “No, the paintings and the books, those are mine, but the house? An old woman lives here alone. Well, she did, anyway. But by the time they find she’s not here anymore, they’ll find you, too, dead in the garage with a couple grams of blow and the gun that killed that cop. And me? Well, I was never even here. I’m a ghost.” A cashier, a friend; a guide. And now a phantom. With my body, Tony vanishes, too. His ties to Cesar, a witness to murder, they’re all wrapped and buried in a tidy wood box, and Tony, he’ll disappear as quietly as he arrived, without even a whisper.
    “You can’t do this forever,” I splutter, embarrassed at the desperation in my voice even as it echoes around the concrete coffin. “You know that, don’t you? You can’t rob the whole fucking world!”
    “The hell I can’t!” he explodes, a sudden, vicious reflex shattering the still and heavy quiet. “I take whatever I want, whenever the fuck I want it! And why not? That’s the difference between you and me, Julian. You could never let go. There’s something there, weighing you down, holding you back, always. Your rules, your conscience, your God—whatever it is, I don’t have it. I’m free.” Tony’s no savior. He’s not even a smoking gun pointed in the right direction. He’s a businessman, before all else, and if what he touches doesn’t turn to gold, then it’s blood. Of course this is where it was all going to end, it had to, and I’m here, staring right back into the black and hollow eye of everything he taught me. “What happened to us, JT?”
    “I don’t know, Tony, why don’t you put the gun down, and we’ll talk about it.”
    “No, I mean to us, our species. We used to be animals—what happened to us? Corporations, government, mechanized living. We’re not animals, anymore, we’re hardly even human. We’re robots, we’re slaves—maybe we’re something worse.” Tony’s last sermon. We’ll end like we started, my spectral guide preaching into the dark. But there’s something missing this time, some gaping hollowness at the heart of his nihilism, and for the first time his whole lurid orchestra sounds out of tune.
    “You’re right, Tony, we’re not animals anymore. But we’re supposed to be better than animals. I don’t need God or a judge to be human, but I need to be better than you. Better than all this. You belong in a fucking cage.”
    I had to thank Tony. If not for him, I would have stayed in Romeo’s kitchen, washing and drying Romeo’s shit, dying like my father,