The Front of the Freeway by Logan Noblin Page A

the curb, and something in me wishes he would just keep on driving forever.
    The black-and-white pulls tightly in behind us and immediately begins barking orders in a muffled, mechanical monotone.
    “Put your hands…wheel…don’t move.” Tony cocks his head and squints at the steering wheel, and to my surprise, turns down the radio. He turns to look at the officer, shouting over two humming motors,
    “What?”
    “Put your hands on the steering wheel and don’t move.” In the rear-view mirror young Officer Mumbles steps out of the car, flashlight raised, creeping slowly towards the driver’s side door. Tony slides his hands casually over the wheel and waits.
    “Don’t move, keep your hands on the wheel.” The officer edges towards Tony, flashlight at the ready, forgetting academy protocol with every step. Hands shaking, check. Palm on the driver’s door, check. “Get out of the fucking car,” check. Tony tosses me a bored look and turns to the trembling blue jacket at his window.
    “Officer, you and I both know that I can’t open this door with my hands on the wheel.”
    God damn it, Tony.
    Tony looks unimpressed with the blinding white eye staring back at him through the driver window, quivering in the officer’s young hand. He tears the door open with his free arm and yells through two sweat-beaded lips. “Out of the fucking car!” Tony raises his hands to his cheeks, and takes one last, soft, verbal jab.
    “Should I get my own seatbelt then? I only have two hands, officer.” The furious uniform stretches across Tony’s lap, knocking Tony’s chin with the base of the light as the other hand grabs for the seatbelt. Tony spits blood against the back seat, but in an instant I realize that, with the grace and ease of a ballroom dancer, Tony’s maneuvered his body perfectly with his partner’s, together, in time. In the brief, hanging moment that the officer’s eyes fix to the buckle, his long, blue torso stretched across Tony’s, Tony draws the gun from beneath his leg, presses its nose into the soft exposed underbelly before him, and squeezes the trigger.
    A hot, wet blister bursts red on the officer’s back, and blood coats the ceiling like a canvas. The heavy blue mass slouches to Tony’s lap, screaming and gasping, a red eye dilating across his back, both hands clutching a bubbling, dark sore on his stomach. Drenched in thick, painted blood, Tony rolls the shaking body from his lap to the street and slams the door shut. With a sudden lurch, we’re hurling through side streets in a painted red taxi, scampering around concrete and back onto King. Tony pinballs through traffic, bouncing between lanes in a scared metal rabbit. Up Jefferson, down Central—I fix my eyes to the street, bracing for a siren as my body runs numb.
    The growling motor fills the red cabin like a fog, smearing the passing streets and Tony and the blood into a single passing nightmare. It’s just a dream. I look around at the blood-freckled window and the painted ceiling, and then at Tony, his dark brow flexed to a knot above his eyes, glaring through the window without a shadow of his typical warmth. It’s all too real. I can feel everything—the sweat on my shirt, my obnoxiously heavy breath—all under the steady roar of Tony’s engine. I sink into the heavy, tense silence, and watch every mundane, tangible thing pass by the window. I’m not going to wake up. Another right, another left. Another stucco neighborhood another mile from home and Tony stops again, a quick turn into a steep driveway. We roll into a cluttered one-car garage, a squat wood frame with the legroom of a coffin, and Tony kills the engine and hurries to shut the garage door. In the rear-view I watch him grab at the ceiling and draw a metal curtain closed, and with the clatter of steel against concrete, we’re alone again, tucked away in the quiet dark of Tony’s garage.
    “I merely suggested that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right…that