In the rear-view mirror, I catch Schaffer squinting toward the green digital clock on the dashboard. I check my watch against the glowing digital readout behind the dashboard crystal.

“Fifteen minutes.”

His shoulders slump and I hear him go back to rooting around, triple- and quadruple-checking our supplies. My eyes drift closed again and stay that way for I don’t know how long, until a short burst of sirens drags me kicking and screaming back to full consciousness. My eyes spring open and blur from the white-and-red light, but after a few moments, I recognize the familiar shape of another ambulance, parked nose-to-nose with us. I squint to see through the tinted windshield of the other bus and can just make out a shock of bright red hair behind the driver’s wheel.

Price.

“Let go of the fucking gurney.”

My nervous system having had just locked up when the LAPD13 with the red hair stuck the nine in my face, it took me a minute to understand what he was saying. But by the time I caught up to the conversation, it had moved on without me.

“Mallory, get your rook here to take his hand off the gurney.”

The redhead, a lanky piece of psycho with gawky teeth and his hair pulled back into a puffy ponytail, had taken his cold eyes off of me and locked them onto the old man who was previously helping me wheel the gurney back to the ambulance. I chanced a glance sideways to see Mallory being held at knife-point by an overweight Asian guy with a unibrow and a comb-over. He looked scary, but for all the wrong reasons, and it didn’t look like Mallory was buying it either. The only genuinely scary thing about him was the hunting knife he was holding to Mallory’s throat, an elaborate horn-handled job with a bright, silver blade glinting in the thick neon of the Los Angeles sunset. After a few more long moments, Mallory’s voice came rumbling out of his chest, deep and craggy.

“Price, there’s no reason—It’s his first day—”

“I don’t care if he’s retiring tomorrow, Mal. You knew the deal when you put rubber to asphalt. Now just because you’re at a disadvantage, don’t go bitching to me about no reason. Make it easy on yourself and walk away. You too, Thingly,” he sneered at me.

Through the horror, some part of me managed to register the sports star, still on the gurney, start to shudder and hack before going still and silent again. Even without any medical training, I would’ve been able to figure out that wasn’t a good sign. The bigger problem was that nobody but me seemed to notice, or if they did notice, they didn’t seem to care.

“Price, for god’s sake, the cops are on their way. We gotta wrap this up, like, sharpish. Okay?”

So the partner did have a voice, strained and cracking as it was. Price cranked back the hammer of the gun he had to my head and shot a steely glare at the lump of flesh holding the knife on Mallory.

“I don’t give a shit, Connor. Fair’s fair, and I’m gonna bask in my victory for a fucking second. That okay with you?” Price said, turning his gaze back on me, pushing the gun harder against my head. Off to the side, the partner, Connor, deflated, keeping his knife against Mallory’s throat. Beside me, Price leaned in close to hiss in my ear.

“Feel that? That’s a Beretta Model 93. Raffica. Which is Italian for ‘I will turn your head into a fucking salad bowl if you don’t take your hands off the juice-head right now.’”

Still frozen to the spot, it was all I could do to not shit my pants, so I felt like it was pretty unlikely that I was going to be able to take my hand off of anyone or anything in time to avoid getting killed on my first day of work. But that didn’t stop Price from doing his best to prove how bad he was.

“Listen to me, asshole. Clearly Mallory didn’t give you the rundown on how this all works, so let me do you the favor: when somebody’s got a gun to your head and says ‘gimme the fucking gurney,’ you give them the fucking gurney, or you get shot. High bid on this human train wreck is twelve points of his total, and I’m not gonna let some new fish jam that up for me. So I’m gonna give you to the count of three. One.”

Connor interjected then, his voice somehow even more strained than before.

“Listen, kid. I can fucking assure you that nobody’s playing good-cop-bad-cop here. He will shoot you, and I don’t want to have to clean up with mess. He’ll shoot you, then he’ll stick that gun in the juice head’s hand and then he’ll tell the cops that you got topped by the fucking junkie. Just do yourself a favor here.”

“Two.”

“For fuck’s sake, kid! Just let it go! Please!”

From behind us suddenly came the familiar yowl of police sirens, the alarms to all nearby paramedics to finish up any clandestine bullshit immediately. Later, Mallory told me that the LA cops always take their time because they don’t work on commission. I used to think that was a joke.

The sirens yowled again, closer this time, and my vision jumped from Mallory to Price to Connor to Price to Price’s gun, boring into the side of my head. Everything went silent for a second as I stared at Price out of the corners of my eyes, Price stared at me, half-smiling, and Mallory and Connor looked everywhere, probably expecting the cops to roll up any second and arrest the lot of us.

“Thr–”

“Oh, fuck this!”

Moving faster than I’d credit a man of his size to be able to, Connor darted away from Mallory, swung his knife in a wide overhead arc, and smashed the butt of the handle directly into the top of my head. Fade to black.

As Price and Connor pulled away with the sports star safely stowed in the back of their bus, leaving Mallory and I on the side of the road to tend to the new gash split down my scalp, Price leaned out of the driver’s window, leveled his Beretta Model 93 Raffica at my chest and pulled the trigger.

The only thing that came out of the gun was a hollow click as they drove by. As they pulled out onto the street, I heard Price call out to me, his lumpy partner cackling in the background.

“Welcome to Hollywood, kid!”

Ever since that first encounter with Price, he’s been aching me like a blown knee in a rainstorm. It’s Christmas Day? See you in hell. Girlfriend dumped you? Who cares. It’s your day off? Guess who’s got two thumbs and doesn’t give a fuck. And it’s always worse on Oscar Night. Every year, he goes out of his way more than usual to make my life hard and make sure he comes out on top. Spiking an eighty-year old with a hot shot last year was just his latest Oscar Night trick.

I’ve got my hand up, snapping my fingers over my shoulder at Schaffer for what feels like way too long before he takes notice of it.

“We got company. With red hair.”

In less than five seconds, Schaffer, a behemoth of a man, slides seemingly effortlessly into the front section of the bus, dropping himself into the passenger seat. In his lap is the small silver attaché from the back of the bus. He dials in the combination and pops the clasps, cracking the case open and passing me one of two heavy lumps wrapped up in matching oilcloths. Keeping my eyes on Price, I pull the .357 Magnum from the cloth and set it on the dashboard, making sure that Price gets a good look at it.

Pushing my sunglasses back into place, I catch Schaffer pulling the oilcloth from his own gun, a .45 automatic that he’s had ever since I’ve known him. Behind my glasses, I glance to Price’s right and see a lumpy shape—no doubt the irascible Connor Chen, doing his best junkyard dog impression in our direction.

And while I’d love to keep this dick-measuring contest between Price and me going, the radio suddenly crackles to life, jarring me out of making my scary face any more.

“Bus four?”

I swipe the receiver off the hook and hold it to my mouth, pushing the talk button.

“This is bus four, go ahead.”

Crackle, hiss, crackle, hiss. “We’ve just gotten a call about two men involved in an altercation at a house on Mulholland Drive. Be aware, this is a multi-division call. Can you respond?”

The first multi-division call of the night. First one to get there and collect the victim, by any means necessary, gets paid.

“Yeah, we’ve got that. On our way.”

And as I’m about to turn the key and inch the ambulance away from the curb, I see movement in the other bus that looks a lot like Price’s hand jumping to his radio, still staring at me as he speaks. Beside him, Connor shifts his sizable bulk back and forth, finally standing up and heading to the back of the bus, no doubt to make sure they have everything in order before they try and beat us to Mulholland. Slowly, I drop my hand to the ignition and turn the bus on, lightly revving the engine.

“Schaffer, everything in the back’s secured, right?”

He nods at me, head cocked, unsure as to what I’m going to do next, but tucking his .45 in his belt anyway.

That’s when I crash our bus into Price’s.

Not that it’s a crash deserving of the name—it’s pretty hard to actually “crash” into someone else’s car from six or seven inches—you get no speed and no room to build up any usable velocity. But to say that I fender-bended our bus into Price’s isn’t nearly as impressive.

So that’s when I crash our bus into Price’s.

I hear metal squealing against metal and the hissing of rubber on hot asphalt as I sink the gas pedal as far as it’ll go, both of the buses twisting against their own force. Across from us, I see Price and Connor soundlessly screaming though their windshield at us, Price no doubt putting all of his less-than-notable weight on the brake pedal. I’ve got one hand on the wheel, the other on the dash, holding my revolver in place as I scream back and laugh and scream.

It takes about five seconds, a lot less time than I thought it would, for our bus to force Price’s around in place, twisting him so he sits parallel to us. We juke forward as we give him that last push and I have to stomp the brakes as hard as I can to keep from careening out of control. We stop so our cabin windows are perfectly aligned – Price stares over at us, still screaming behind glass, struggling to roll down the passenger side without much success. I curl my fingers around the revolver’s handle. Beside me, Schaffer pulls two small orange plugs out of the glove box, inserting them in his ears.

After two or three more seconds of struggling, Price manages to get his window open a crack, and I pick up on what he’s saying mid-sentence.

“—dogfucking, cocksucking piece of shit Drake prick the fuck do you think you’re doing—”

His eyes flash with the rage of all hell’s engines as he starts trying to force three or four fingers through the crack in the window, like he’s trying to will his hands around my throat, or at least the window to open wider so he can leap through at me. Schaffer smiles as I decide to help Price out with that. I match his expression as I raise the revolver off the dashboard and steady it at Price’s window.

Price gets the memo at the last possible second, taking his eyes off the crack in the window, turning them on me and my nickel-plated friend. He ducks, forcing Connor down with him onto the floor, just as I squeeze the trigger.

I don’t even hear the report—just a faint, sucking buzzing in my ears that tells me I might have punctured something. I see the flash, though. It burns backwards into my retinas and in the blaze, I see the windows of Price’s bus exploding away from me, shattered into swarms of glassy pebbles.

For a second, the flash is everything I see. I close my eyes, trying to ignore the sucking in my ears, and I see the muzzle flare dancing off into the blackness, smudged and getting smaller by degrees until it disappears, a blurry white blob at the vanishing point of some imaginary horizon. When I open my eyes again, Schaffer is laughing like some lunatic off his meds, earplugs still securely in place, clenched eyes streaming tears of hysteria down his cheeks. Price, in the other bus, has poked his head up from the floor and is staring at me, wide-eyed and trembling.


Behind him, Connor’s slumped down, hands cupped over his ears, screaming something that sounds a lot like “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!”

The revolver, still hot in my hand, sizzles against the humid evening air.

I nearly jump off the brake pedal, pivoting my weight and stomping the accelerator through the floorboard, sending Schaffer and me and my latest felony rocketing off to Mulholland and some gleaming fresh hell.