Page 41 of Furious

Not so much Riley.

With reflexes slower than Jo’s—fuck yes, Jo!!!—he’s still hanging out on the line a second after she’s taken off. I can imagine the sweet, sweet shock on his face behind that tinted face shield. He never expected her to launch like that.

JoJo and the AMC Hornet SC/360: underestimated, but amazing.

I know exactly what happens next, and why Riley overcompensates, throwing the throttle totally open in his panic to catch up. He should’ve held a little back. Instead of streaking after Jo, his rear tire spins on the blacktop, pinning him in place for another valuable second before he’s off the line and trying to catch her.

But he can’t.

To a chorus of groaning and heckling from his friends and the gathered crowd, Riley crosses the finish line just after my Car Girl™. And now I’m absolutely screaming, sprinting down the runway toward Jo as she turns the Hornet around to cruise back toward me, this dude and his 600 once again in her dust. We meet in the middle where she pulls to a stop. I throw myself on her before she’s even got two feet out of the car and on the pavement, flinging both of us awkwardly across the seats.

“You did it!” I shriek into her ear. “You’re incredible, Jo!”

She hugs me back, and I feel her arms shaking around my waist, just barely. But she sounds extremely cool and collected when she says, “I’ve been told.”

By the time we work our way back out of the Hornet, Riley’s pulled up to idle the bike beside us, the sourest of frowns above his jagged, scraggly beard. Two of his bros are jogging up from the sidelines behind him. I tense where I stand beside Jo, realizing the potential stupidity of our plan. I mean, beyond winning the race, we didn’t have much of a plan. What if Max’s supposed friends don’t want to give us what we’ve fairly won? Or what if …

What if Riley was lying? He’s got my sister’s jacket, sure, but he never gave us proof of her location, and we never asked. What if all of this was for nothing?

But the glassy-eyed Gixxer boy with the muttonchops practically brays in Riley’s face as he arrives. “Nice burnout.” He barely looks at us as he dumps Max’s jacket into my arms.

I hug the familiar amber-brown leather to my chest, burying my nose in the thick fabric hood. It smells like whatever’s been simmering in the hot bed of Riley’s truck, probably, or beneath his bed. But under the perfume of old-burgers-and-skunk, I still detect a whiff of Max. Like her attic bedroom, it’s held on to traces of her all these months later.

“And the address?” Jo demands while I’m busy sniffing and swallowing hard.

Riley pulls a folded piece of paper from his shorts pocket.

Jo takes it, frowning as she smooths it out and scans the handwritten address. “Clark’s Gold Star Pawnshop in Richmond? What the hell?”

“That’s where she works,” Riley says, begrudgingly.

“No,” I protest. “She’s in Boston.”

“She was in Boston,” Riley says. “But she texted me about a mint-condition Time Walk MTG card from the pawnshop a few weeks ago—”

“MTG?”

“Um, Magic: The Gathering?” Riley sneers at us. “It’s only one of the most powerful and rarest cards. Max said her Boston roommate’s cousin hooked her up with a job after she moved, and she’d send me the card if I’d Venmo her for it. Probably asked twice what it was priced at, and I doubt she even paid for it, but she knew I’d been looking. Anyway, that’s the address it shipped from. You can find her there.”

“But …” I’m flailing upward through this information, like a swimmer swept off their feet by the breakers. “But I got a postcard from her, just a couple weeks ago. She sent it from Boston.”

“Maybe it got lost in the mail, or she had her roommate send it after she left?” Muttonchops guesses.

I can’t think of a reason she’d do that.

“We’ll call the shop tomorrow,” Jo leans in close to tell me. “We’ll ask if Max is working, and they’ll tell us if she’s there at all. This is good, El. This is a clue,” she insists.

“Yes. This is good.” It is. This is a win. I cradle the jacket in my arms, repeating, “This is a good thing.”

And that’s when the blip of a police siren cuts through the sounds of idling bikes and revving engines, as two City of Benton Creek cop cars jam through the gap in the chain-link fence, flashing their warning lights. They park to either side of the gap, and we watch as the pair from one car pulls a plastic road barricade out of their trunk. They set up across the only way out, while the pair from the second car climb out into the overgrown grass, bullhorns in hand.

“Y’all know you’re trespassing,” a cop with a mustache like a Picture Day comb drawls into his bullhorn. “We have to chase you out of here again, it’s gonna be a real problem. Now line up, you know what to do.”

“Shit, shit, shit …” Riley mutters as the small crowd around us shifts nervously.

A guy standing beside his murdered-out Fiesta spits onto the runway, then slumps into his driver’s seat and cruises slowly toward them across the grass. Stopping at the barrier, he speaks to the mustache cop, passing what must be his license and registration through the rolled-down window while the other three check his trunk and back seat.

“El …” Jo whispers while the crowd around us starts to move.