I agreed to go with Matt to look at a used car. We’d just finished a ridiculously long drive out to a place even coyotes wouldn’t bother with and stopped in front of a building that looked suspiciously like a wrecking yard. I looked around, mouth slightly unhinged. 

Matt reached beneath the seat of his rented SUV, swung his arm like a crane in one of those claw games, and dropped the prize in my lap with a thud.

“You know how to use one of those the right way?”

The revolver was buttoned in its sheath the way my old Jansport backpack did. It didn’t weigh much but my hands suddenly did; sometimes instinct just tells you stay perfectly still, because there’s no way you’re gonna leave your fingerprints behind. 

“The hell?” 

I pushed at the bridge of my glasses. They hadn’t slipped down, it’s just a habit, and I needed something to touch besides the gun.

Bring a hoodie he’d texted. It’d been hot as hell last week and, despite every AC unit in the city cranked up to eleven, my core temperature was still hovering around max. I’d reached in the back of my closet, grabbed the gray hoodie I kept for walks home from Taco Bell on chilly nights. Now it was bundled in my lap, a .38 plopped in its folds.

“I said I’d come with you to look at a car. I didn’t say I’d be Bonnie to your Clyde.” 

“You don’t know who’s going to come out of there.”

He had a point. The building wasn’t some used car lot on a well-lit boulevard. You know, the safe kind where the salesmen will be there next week if your radiator cracks or the electric window motor starts smoking when you’re stopped at a red light, trying to impress the cute person stopped next to you.

Matt had insisted on wanting a car with a manual transmission. No one drives a stick in L.A. traffic. He drives mostly at night though, when the roads are open and he can indulge his love for speedy manuals. He also says it’s a built-in theft device. 

Months of fruitless searches brought us here, fifteen miles into a remote land where bodies likely get dumped and high tension power lines stretch from huge, ambitious solar farms back to L.A. Long, brown grassy canyons had curved and flowed outside our windows like a woman’s long hips, reaching further than the eye could see, hovering over us as we’d driven along. The roads belonged to double-trailer gravel trucks, their undercarriages stained with the dust and silt of three local quarries. 

Then we rounded a corner, and up popped this place. I looked around. All I had seen up until this point was, in a canyon a few miles back, a towering piece of concrete that looked strikingly like a set of stairs. Only the stairs didn’t go anywhere, and the land all around it was barren and wide open for almost a full mile in every direction.

Nothing out here made any sense to me. 

Starlight Motors has a genuinely modern, four hundred square foot cinderblock office. There’s wifi, a satellite dish on the roof, glossy black walls and freshly tinted windows. From the lot, it looks OK.

But the building is just the head of a bloated tick leaching off the automotive industry. Behind the modern-ish office is a hundred acres of cars, fenced by chain link and topped with razor wire that stretches into the horizon. What they sell is stored with all the love and care of a sun-baked junkyard on the edge of California’s low desert, where land is cheap and history doesn’t seem to exist to the untrained eye.

I started dreaming of the safe, cool drive-thru I usually would’ve been working in. 

“We can go back to Oak Tree for an hour,” Matt said. “You know the place?”

I nodded. I’d been to the gun range with my cousin. “I don’t need practice.”

“Right on, gangsta. Need a minute?”

I looked back at the bloated tick-head office. “What am I doing here? I work a drive-thru. Chalupas and extra sauce packets are my thing.”

“Not today. Today, you’re the Chalupa Gangsta. Just keep that hoodie up, keep your head down, and look badass.” 

I gripped the gun and its sheath. “I am badass.”

Matt reached under the seat again. My heart leapt, wondering what else might come out. Bazooka? Flame thrower? IUD? He set a manila envelope on the rented SUV’s dash. 

“There’s a cashier’s check for forty-six hundred dollars, should I buy the car. I’m going in there,” he pointed. “Keep your head down like you’re napping. Just don’t nap.”

“Don’t nap,” I nodded along.

“Keep your eyes peeled. Engine’s running. AC’s on. Don’t unlock those doors for anyone except me. Any sign of trouble you got that,” he pointed, “to bail you out.”

I sighed. “Can I go home now?”

“No.” He opened his door. “Everything works out we’ll be gone in half an hour. You’ll be driving this lovely SUV back to town and I’ll be in my brand-new-to-me Mazda3.”

“Or?”

He shrugged and smiled. “Or we shoot a few bad guys.”

I shuddered.

“And you go back to the night shift at the Bell.”

Like nothing happened I mumbled. 

He reopened the door. “What?”

“I said go get em tiger!” and threw in an ‘aw-shucks’ fist swing. 

He tapped a knuckle on a glass pane of the office door. It opened. A hand stuck out. He shook it and disappeared inside. 

I lowered my head, eyes fixed on the bloated tick door. If I had laser eyes I could cut the place in half. Like those memes. Yeah, if I had laser eyes I could zap bad guys, cut open the fence like—

Someone tapped the glass beside me. I bounced.

The gun, still in its sheath, weighed down the front pocket of the hoodie. I lowered the window a crack, didn’t tilt my eyes at the guy.

“Hey little lady, you looking for someone?”

“I’m good.”

I rolled the window back up, bowed my head monk-style. Damn you, non-laser eyes.

He tapped again. I shouted at the sealed glass. “WHAT?!”

He held up his hands and stepped away. Where’d that come from? Natural badassery, that’s where. Chalupa Gangsta, bitch.

The guy typed in a code and went in the office. A few minutes later Matt returned and tapped his knuckle on my window. I lowered it a few more inches than with the other guy.

“They’re bringing the car out so I can test drive it. How you doing?”

“Chalupa thug life, yo!”

Matt nodded. “Glad you’re enjoying your day out. Look. I‘m gonna take the car down Sand Canyon, put it through the paces. While I’m gone, same rules. Unlock for no one. Don’t make friends.”

“No problem there.”

He looked off toward where the road curved around a sloping, grassy hillside. “Did you happen to notice that big concrete and steel structure out in the middle of nowhere?”

“The stair-looking thing? Yeah.”

“Well, it wasn’t stairs,” he said.

I scrunched up my nose. “What was it?”

“Well, while you’re sittin,” he pointed toward my cell, “Google up ‘Fillmore Dam Break.’ Read up on a little history.” 

Gravel crunched under his lugged Columbia shoes as he stepped away. I rolled up the window. A gate soon slid open, its silver castors clattering on along metal tracks like a levy. Matt stood aside while a gray Mazda sedan rolled out.

The thing needed a paint job. Bad. I guess stick buyers can’t be choosers. The guy who’d knocked on my window stepped out of the car, held the door for Matt and watched him drive away. Matt shifted and steered away like a pro. The guy watched him go, then slid back behind the gate. It closed soon after that.

I pulled out my cell. I jumped on the dealer’s wifi, went to YouTube and watched that scene from Pulp Fiction where John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson ditch their Nova in a junkyard run by whatshername, the cute one from SNL. I read the comments. Julia Sweeney, right! They end up in a diner that gets robbed. 

I looked down the empty road where Matt had gone, into the endless, rolling brown hills. What had he said? I Googled Fillmore Dam Break.

Amazing what you can live right on top of and never know about. All around us in LA is what we call the LA River, a series of concrete-walled floodways. The guy responsible for it all, William Mulholland, also built a thing called the St. Francis Dam. On a typical night in 1928, just two years after it opened, the dam broke in the middle of the night, just a few miles from the junkyard. According to Wikipedia, huge chunks of it are still lying around. 

I looked around. Nothing I could see. I scrolled for more pictures. There was the staircase, still reaching toward heaven, stranded almost two full miles from where the dam had been. The force of the rushing water had moved it all the way down the canyon.

I turned my head just in time to see Matt and the Mazda come around the corner like an F1 outta hell. I imagined it moving through the canyon like a ten-story wall of water once had, or that blood from the elevator in The Shining. 

I was about to step out to meet him, the way Bogie or Bacall might’ve once done at a train depot. But just as I reached for the door handle, the guy who’d delivered the car slid back through the rolling fence. Behind his back, in his right hand, I could see the small Glock.

Oh, sweet mother of cinnamon twists. 

I knew what he was up to. Matt had backed the Mazda in and the guy approached from a blind spot. I leapt from the SUV, ducked behind its bumper with the gun pointed like that lady on SVU.

“DROP IT ASSMUNCH!”

I don’t know if that’s what Mariska Hargitay would’ve said but the guy stopped and turned. Matt looked at me, too.

“I thought I told you—”

Then he saw it. I saw it too. 

I ripped away the sheath and threw it aside. I waved the gun like I was serious now. Seeing the guy I was covering, Matt pulled a .22 from his waistband.

“Do what the nice lady says,” he said, “and she won’t need to send you to the big drive-thru in the sky.”

“CHALUPA STYLE, BITCH!!”

Pretty sure Mariska Hargitay wouldn’t’ve said that. The guy set the gun on the Mazda’s trunk, lifted his hands and stepped back. Matt retrieved the gun, checked the safety and put it in his own waistband. 

“Well,” he nodded, “I’d say we’ve earned ourselves a nice little discount, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely!”

Matt looked at me. He’d actually been talking to the guy. I lowered the gun and got back in the truck. I set the gun in my lap and lowered my head.

I missed my drive-thru.

*      *      *

I was driving the SUV, following the faded Mazda. Matt called and I put him on speakerphone.

“Nice work back there, Chalupa Style.”

“Let’s not make that my new nickname. I gotta admit, I’ve never had to do that at the Bell. Ever. Mostly all I get is just the smell of beans and hot sauce up my nose. Doesn’t leave until like two hours after work’s over, and even then I—”

“Anyway,” he interrupted, “we’ll go straight to the DMV and register the car. Then we’ll go eat.”

I squirmed. My work is right next to the DMV.

“Ummm,” I said.

“Don’t worry. We’re not going all cheesy roll-ups tonight. I’d say we earned P&L Burger.”

“French toast!” I raised both fists off the wheel. And wouldn’t you know, that was the same moment I had to slam on the brakes. Traffic had stopped. I missed the Mazda’s faded bumper by inches.

“Sorry,” I shouted at the phone. It had bounced onto the floor somewhere.

“I’ve had that rental eight weeks at fifty bucks a day,” he said.

“Fifty bucks! A day?” I picked the cell up off the floor. 

“And I just got this. Try not to wreck it before it’s registered, gangsta.”

“I was just excited about breakfast.”

Traffic moved again. Matt and his new Mazda rolled away. “You always get this excited about food?” 

He had no idea. The day that Mexican Pizzas came back I clocked in four hours early just to be part of the scene. And it had been a scene. We’d had a banner and everything.

*      *      *

We returned the rental. The newly registered, heavily faded and stick-equipped Mazda stood outside P&L Burger. The French toast was soft and gooey like it always is. Deliciousness in your face. With syrup. 

“Did you see how I drew on that guy!”

“Once you got the cover off the gun yeah, you did good. We’re just lucky he didn’t have a friend come around and flank you.”

I crunched my brow. “Is that, like, how you cook a steak?”

“No,” he wove his hand around his drink, “it’s when someone sneaks up on you.”

I waved a dismissive hand. “No one’s gonna flank me. I’m the chalupa queen!”

“Yes, I saw.”

A moment passed. He sipped his drink.

“I read about the dam,” I said. “Pretty scary how you can be wiped off the face of the Earth in the middle of the night without any say.”

“Do we ever have a say?”

I looked side to side. “I hope so. I’d like to think I won’t get washed away in the middle of the night, that my life is going to end up meaning something to someone.”

“I’m sure it will. But then again, maybe it won’t,” he waved a piece of toast. “Maybe we should just get our kicks in now before the whole thing goes up in flames.”

“I’m—”

Suddenly the guy in the next booth jumped up on the bench seat. He waved a gun around the room. 

“EVERYBODY BE COOL THIS IS A ROBBERY!”

I turned to Matt. He kept eating his pancakes. 

“Oh my God, it’s just like the movie.”

He kept his voice down. “Which movie.”  

“Pulp Fiction!”

Matt shook his head. “He doesn’t have Tim Roth’s accent.”

The guy swung the gun at Matt. “You have something to say?”

Matt waved his fork around. “I hate to burst your bubble but this ain’t the first time today I’ve had a gun in my face.”

“Just like the movie,” I mumbled, “and I’m Julia Sweeney.”

The gun swung my way. “You say something, pretty lady?”

“I’m not that pretty.”

“Not the first gun she’s seen today, either,” Matt interjected. “She’s the Chalupa Gangsta.”

The robber looked confused. He stepped away. 

He took everyone’s wallets, emptied the register and sprinted across the lot, past the faded Mazda, around the side of the Taco Bell where I’d usually be handing bags out the window.

Matt leapt up, yanked the yard guy’s .22 out of his waistband and sprinted at NFL speed after the guy. I jumped up and followed. 

Gotta earn that nickname.

Two hundred feet later I slumped sideways, huffing and puffing beside Taco Bell’s dumpster corral. I don’t know why they call them corrals. It never smells like horses and hay, just rotting sauce and Baja Blast cooking in the sun. I put the gun away so no one inside would see. 

I’m not made for gangsta stuff. I looked up at the doors of the Bell, the purple booths inside, the A/C that would feel so, so good.

Maybe they’d let me come in early.

Matt McGee writes in the Los Angeles area. In 2022 his work has appeared in Gypsum Tales, Sweetycat Press and Red Penguin. When not typing he drives around in rented cars and plays goalie in local hockey leagues.