Read Online The Front of the Freeway by Logan Noblin - Free Book Online

I can show you out, but everything they told you about what’s allowed and what’s right and what’s wrong, forget it. It’s the chain around your neck. We’re not playing by their rules anymore, JT. They’re the only thing holding us back, and if you want out, you’re going to have to break all of them.”
    This isn’t a game anymore. This isn’t just weed and nickels and dimes. Tony’s preaching now, but he’s forgetting something.
    “We didn’t just rob them, Tony. This isn’t about dealing right now. He’s dead. It’s on us.”
    “Look, you want to get to the top of the food chain, you can’t play nice with the other big fish all the time. Here look at this.” He’s drilling the point of his slender, boney finger into a black-and-white portrait of Darwin’s face on the cover. “These are the only rules, JT. This is the only real law. Survival of the fittest. You get it? That’s it. We’re animals, JT, just like everything else. You, me, everyone; we’re not above it. These are the only rules anyone lives by. You pick your place in this world, no one else. You can be king of this fucking jungle, but you’re going to have to stand up and take it.”
    I was right; this isn’t about selling drugs. This isn’t even about money anymore. Tony wants out, and he’s dragging me out with him. But why me? Maybe he knew I’d follow him, because I’m from where he’s from. Or maybe he’s been talking to himself for too long, and he just needed someone to hear him scream. But Tony’s breathing out his revolution again and, somehow, I’m breathing it in just fine.
    “No more bodies, Tony. I’m serious, I’m not going to kill people.” Tony smiles for the first time since Baby Gap and leans over the glass table, pulling Darwin and the Ziploc pouch to him.
    “Alright man,” he grins. “No more bodies.” You can hardly see the old man’s face through the broken green mesh of crumbled leaves Tony’s rolling into a white paper stem on the book cover. And everything’s calmer now, in Tony’s little world, in Tony’s mind, in the middle of all his madness.
    “What are we going to do about the car?” Tony pinches the gnarled white paper to his lips and breaths deep. Squinting as he holds his breath, he leans back into the thick black leather and lets the fog roll out of his mouth, wrapping up around his head in smooth, sinister vines. And then he laughs.
    “Let’s smoke it.”
    “I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.”
    —Robert Frost
    Los Angeles is a desert. Under all the lights and concrete, it’s just five hundred miles of heat and brush cracked by the Los Angeles River, a sliver of water trickling out of the Simi Hills that couldn’t fill a bathtub. And if an Irish engineer hadn’t stolen the water from the Owens Valley and brought it to L.A. in the Aqueduct, it’d still be five hundred miles of sand and sun and lizards. But he did; he sucked the Owens Lake dry and drenched L.A. in it. The Owens farmers were so mad they tried to blow the whole thing up. Fifteen times. But he got the water here, the Irishman, and he made himself a lot of money doing it, too. This is his legacy, this whole empire. This is his city. He just had to rob Owens blind to build it.
    That’s where we took Tony’s red-painted hearse. Well, that’s where he took it, anyway. I followed him up the 5 North for an hour and a half in a sleek grey Mercedes he borrowed from some lawyer that thought he was a valet. Then, we turned off the freeway, through a mile of smooth dirt roads cut into an ocean of dark green tomato vines, and to the edge of the little concrete valley, running from one end of the midnight horizon to the other. That’s where we’re sitting now, on the edge of the gravel canyon, next to an empty box of Sam Adams, staring into the dark filth bubbling up through the black current.
    “Here’s one.”
    I throw back the last sudsy mouthful from a slender