We Got the Beat

For Holly West’s anthology Murder-a-Go-Gos

Photo from Encounter Bow

We Got the Beat

by Thomas Pluck

She was taking an Uber home from the party she wasn’t supposed to be at when it happened. My girl Allegra lived in a subdivision that was a maze. Google would send you into the lake, and people would drive into it, if the gates weren’t locked with a passcode for residents to walk their dogs.

Go left, she told the driver, but he pulled up to the lake gates and killed the lights and told her this fare is fucked up and she could get her ass out and walk. It was cold as balls, she was drunk, and had twisted her ankle and left her coat at the party, so no way was she stumbling home like a baby giraffe through streets with no sidewalks, where someone saw a bear last winter.

You could die.

Come on, you don’t have to walk unless you really want to.

Creeps know when to get you.

When they think you’re scared and weak and guilty and are more afraid of your parents yelling at you than giving some guy’s dirty D a handy.

Allegra had chugged off a handle of vodka with the Varsity boys and they had ideas in their hungry eyes, so she locked the bathroom door, called the Uber and shimmied out the window. She lost a heel on the trellis and  landed on her buzzed ass in the garden. 

She texted the Beat Girls with quick little thumbs and started stalling, talking to him in that baby voice asshole guys like.

I’ve never done that before.

That’s probably a lie, because she always got mad when we made fun of her for kissing Kenny Orevole in sixth grade because he was such a dorkus, but do it to some creepy old dude with a mustache in a black Acura plate XTL-5309?

No way!

How am I supposed to get up front when you have the doors locked?

He sees something in her little doe eyes, knows if he pops the locks she’ll run. So he says he’ll get in the back. Isn’t that where it happens? In the back of a black Acura that smells like a wet dog when you’re holding back drunk-burps? Who says romance is dead? YOLO!

He kills the engine and gets out and he can’t open the back door. Dumbass horndog can’t figure out the child locks. The lights bleep on as he hits the buttons and Allegra’s out the other side, hopping barefoot on her twisted ankle.

Hey!

See the Beat Girls walking down the street: 

Senga

Rox

Zorra

and me.

We got the beat!

We got the beat down.

I smash the back window of his car with my shorty Louisville slugger. It explodes into a million shards. Little Rox twirls her majorette baton and clubs horny boy behind the knee. He goes down and drops his keys. Zorra works him over with her drumsticks like Phil Collins on chronic, shouting and swinging.