Take Me There Read Online Free PDF Page A

detonate. Then a door on the clock flies open and a bird bursts through, squawking and screeching. The cackling of the bird mixes with the screams in the room until all I can do is cover my ears and close my eyes while I pray for it to stop.
    I sit up, covered in sweat. Look around. Try to get my bearings.
    I’m in the Mustang. Wade and Baby Face are curled up together in the backseat.
    Look out the front window at a gas pump.
    Remember we pulled into a truck stop outside of Kingman.
    The memories of last night come back to me.
    I think of Jess waiting for me.
    No! Stop! She’s better off without me, and I have to keep my head together so we can get to Texas. I must find my father. That’s all I can think about right now.
    I fill up the car, and then I get back on the highway heading east.
    Craggy mountains ahead as far as the eye can see.
    Before long the highway splits so that the westbound lanes are a good thirty yards away, across a field of juniper and turpentine weed.
    No buildings but an occasional mobile home.
    No cops. Nobody chasing us.
    I let myself breathe and read the signs as I pass.
    SPEED LIMIT 75
    WATCH FOR ROCKS
    NEXT SERVICES 22 MILES
    DEER FARM 43 MILES

    WATCH FOR ELK
    They make me think of my mother’s box room. There is distance between the signs, and I find them easy to read. Thepleasure and pride I feel surprises me. Not like California, where words lurch out at you from billboards, flashing neon signs, and passing commuter buses. Out here there is enough space between the words.
    Words are like people, I think. Put too many of them too close together and they cause trouble.
    “Grand Canyon National Park—a hundred and three miles,” says Wade, waking up and pointing to a sign. “I never seen the Grand Canyon. We gonna go?” he asks, and I realize this is the first time he’s ever been out of Southern California.
    “We’ll see,” I say, not wanting to disappoint him so early in the day.
    All I can think about now is finding my father. I will see him and talk to him and know what kind of man he is. Then I will know if badness is in my blood, or if, by some miracle, it is something I can outrun.

7
    J ESS HAD SAID SHE’D BE BRINGING HER CAR IN EARLY ON Monday, so I got to work by seven. By the time seven forty-five came around I was edgy. At eight o’clock she still hadn’t showed up, and I was a lunatic. By eight fifteen I was wishing I still kept a bottle of Jack Daniels in the trunk of the Mustang.
    “Somebody piss on your parade?” Nathan asked me when I jumped down his throat for asking me to hand him a lug wrench.
    I told him where he could put the lug wrench.
    At nine fifteen Gomez left to go to the salvage yard. He spent every Monday there, looking for cars he could buy cheap, fix up, and turn for a profit. Five minutes after he left, I was surprised to see Baby Face looking out the front of the garage and growling. A hopped-up Prelude Si was parking, and a black van pulled in behind it. My grip around the wrench tightened when I saw who got out of the car.
    Eight Ball.
    Eight Ball got his name and his tattoo—the number eightinked on the back of his shining head—after beating a rival gang member to death with a pool cue. The guy had killed Eight Ball’s older brother, Nine Iron, the former leader of the Baker Street Butchers.
    After he beat the guy’s face to a pulp, Eight Ball put his body on the pool table, tied his arms and legs together behind his back, and shoved an eight ball in his mouth so he’d look like a stuffed pig when his homies found him.
    Eight Ball had been the leader of the BSB ever since.
    His younger brother, Two Tone, got out of the Prelude, and two guys named Ajax and Spider got out of the van. Eight Ball looked around the exterior of the shop, checking things out—he was always checking things out. Then he walked through the front lobby and into the back of the shop.
    “How did they know we were here?” I asked Wade. I didn’t even carry a cell