Blacktop Wasteland

Ronnie, despite telling Bug he had not, used cocaine both the previous night and that morning. He sees four people inside the store: the heavy-set manager, Jenny, an older white woman, and a young Black man. The robbers order everyone onto the floor. When the manager tries to prevent him from taking Jenny into the backroom where the safe is, Ronnie strikes her with the butt of his gun, opening a cut in her head. Jenny was unable to disarm the alarm. With effort, Ronnie opens the safe and takes out the diamonds as well as some cash. When he and Jenny go back into the showroom, the manager opens fire on them with a large gun. Ronnie shoots her. The young Black man rises and dashes toward the door. Quan shoots him in the back of the head. As Ronnie and Quan exit, the manager continues to shoot at them.

The point of view shifts back to Bug once the robbers leave the store. He opens the door for them, Quan getting in the back seat and Ronnie up front. Hearing sirens, Bug realizes that, because of the alarm and the shooting, the two-minute head start he planned is gone. He races out of town with two patrol cars behind him. Bug knows what kind of vehicles are chasing him and how fast they can go. As they are about to catch him on the interstate, he engages a nitrous oxide booster he has installed and pulls away, running at 135 miles an hour. He comes to a part of the road that is under construction, and he swings the car backward: “Ronnie was screaming in his ear. No words, just one long nonsensical wail. They were doing 60, hurtling toward an unfinished section of the road. Backwards” (119). As Bug intended, the car sails off the elevated pavement and lands on a large mound of dirt. The two police cars collide and careen off the elevated roadway. Bug drives down a country road to a quarry lake, where Boonie’s wrecker is also parked. He runs the Buick into the quarry to dispose of it, and they drive away in the wrecker.

It takes three hours on the back roads for them to get to Reggie’s trailer. While Ronnie is buoyant, Bug knows something went wrong because of the shooting. Realizing Quan is stoned, Bug slaps him and tells him he is persona non grata. Bug says he only wants to see Ronnie one more time—when Ronnie brings him his portion of the money. Bug goes back to his deserted garage. He has mixed emotions: elation at his escape job, yet dread at the police investigation that will happen because people were fatally shot.

The police interview Lou Ellen Lovell, the jewelry store manager, two weeks after the robbery. She is recovering from her gunshot wound to the thigh. The police ask why the robbers went straight for her safe rather than the expensive jewelry in the display cases. Lou Ellen—not wanting to divulge about the illicit, unregistered diamonds—feigns ignorance and asks to end the interview.

After the police leave, she receives a phone call from Lazarus “Lazy” Mothersbaugh, the mobster to whom the diamonds belonged. The call is a pretense; because the diamonds were stolen, Lazy knows Lou Ellen must have told someone about them, and he phones her only to confirm she is at home before he sends hitmen to interrogate her. Two men, Horace and Burning Man, come into her apartment and ask her whom she told about the diamonds. When they torture her by pressing on her wound, she says she told Lisa, one of her two employees. Figuring that Lou Ellen is probably lying, the men assume it is actually Jenny, the other employee (and toward whom Lou Ellen is romantically inclined). They smother her by placing a plastic bag over her head and set her apartment on fire before leaving to find Lisa and Jenny.

Bug waits at the payoff rendezvous site in Carytown, Virginia. Running two hours late, Ronnie shows up in a used Mustang for which he paid $7,000. He hands over Bug’s money in two cereal boxes. Bug drives away immediately.

The point of view shifts to Ronnie, who mentally reviews the setup for fencing the jewels with a Chinese organization in Washington, DC. As Ronnie meets the men to deal the goods, he wonders fleetingly “why such a small store would have that much in diamonds sitting in the safe. The bag of money they handed him forced that idea to flee like a startled rabbit” (137). He already has dreams of living it up with the $750,000 he got for the diamonds. He dials Jenny to tell her he is on his way to her apartment with her share of the money. Their conversation is brief, and Ronnie thinks she sounds odd.

Bug arrives in Red Hill and deposits $8,000 in his bank. He goes to the nursing home and gives the administrator $30,000 in cash, saying he will pay the remaining balance later in the week. He goes to his mother’s room to tell her he’s paying so she doesn’t have to leave the nursing home. She knows immediately he was involved with the robbery, saying, “When they say the robbers got away in a Buick Regal that jumped an overpass under construction, I knew it. I just knew it” (140). Ella warns him people will be looking for him.

After a bittersweet conversation with his mother focused mainly on his father, Bug goes to the ramshackle house where Ariel lives with her other grandmother. He sits on the hood of his Duster as he meets with Ariel and gives her $24,000 for a year’s tuition for Virginia Commonwealth University. Though they clearly love each other, their affection is not verbally expressed.

Bug decides to buy some groceries on the way home to celebrate. Fire engines rush up behind him, and he is stunned to see his competitor’s shop, Precision, going up in flames. Once at home, Kia asks him if he got paid and asks him to reaffirm this will be his last job. When she is putting Darren to bed, Bug overhears a news report about an apartment fire and the death of Eric Gay, whom Quan shot in the jewelry store. He was the husband whom Bug helped when his car broke down while his wife was in labor. The news calls the shooting an “attempted robbery” (147). Bug immediately knows there is more to these events than he realizes.

Ronnie shows up at Jenny’s apartment. She scarcely opens the door, just enough to take in the two boxes of cereal that contain her $80,000 cut of the proceeds. Ronnie is annoyed at her brushing him off but says to himself as he leaves that he’d already been thinking about moving on to another girlfriend and that “[m]aybe the time to upgrade was now. Jenny was beginning to look rode hard and hung up wet anyway” (151).

The point of view shifts to Jenny, who opens the cash-packed boxes. Hurriedly, she packs an overnight bag. Lying dead on her apartment floor is one of Lazy’s mobsters, whom she killed with a butcher knife after he attacked her. His phone has been ringing regularly ever since, almost seven hours after he arrived. She hops in her car. As it begins to rain, she feels it symbolizes cleansing—a new start. She thinks about where she is going to go, eventually to the Bahamas. There are few cars on the road, one being a black Cadillac. Approaching the interstate, she notices that the Cadillac has turned around to trail her. This is the last the reader sees of Jenny.

The point of view reverts to Bug, whose mechanic business has expanded exponentially since the Precision shop burned the previous day. As he and Kelvin work on cars, Precision owners Patrick and Butch Thompson show up at Bug’s garage and accuse him of setting the fire: The police say the fire was arson and that a Black man was seen running from the scene. In the ensuing fight, Bug and Kelvin beat the two men savagely. The Thompsons, in turning up to Bug’s garage, have ignored the police’s orders to let law enforcement handle the crime; Bug therefore knows the Thompsons will not file a complaint about getting beaten up.

Bug drives to a wealthy neighborhood to pick up Javon, who spent the previous night with his white friend, Tre Cook. Cook’s house is quite close to the site of Precision. Bug drives Javon to an isolated place and asks him if he set the fire in Precision. Javon confesses that he did, but he says he was just trying to help: He tells Bug that Kia cries at night when he is gone, that she’s been worrying Precision will drive Bug’s mechanic garage out of business. Bug makes Javon promise he will tell no one. Once Bug’s sons are in bed that night, however, he tells Kia that Javon started the blaze. He says they must protect Javon so he does not end up like Bug in juvie.

The remainder of the chapter is a flashback to 1991 when Bug and his father went to the Tasty Freeze. While they were there, three men surrounded Anthony and told him to get into their car. They accused him of informing the police about someone who was facing 25 years in jail. Anthony pleaded with the men to let him take Bug home. Seeing that one of the men had a gun and suspecting they might kill his father, Bug slid into the driver’s seat of the Duster, which Anthony noted. Anthony threw a milkshake in one of the men’s faces and jumped out of the way as Bug gunned the engine. Bug ran over the three men, at least one of whom died— the man is Red Navely, the father of Melvin Navely, mentioned at the end of Chapter 11. Shortly afterward, Bug was sentenced to five years in juvenile detention, and Anthony disappeared.