The Black Van

My name is Cody Etu. I am 17.

I’ve got to tell somebody this story, because no one wanted to believe it at first, and that made me doubt it myself.

Telling it to you will help me sort it all out.

I can tell you, I was scared. Scared on a scale of plus ten. Scared to the point that my skin tingled like a million tiny darts were bombarding it. Scared to the point that my Adam’s apple catapulted north till I was choking. In fact, when one of the bad guys grabbed my arm, fear went to another level and I blacked out.

I woke up in a bed in a white room with a bunch of electronics and a needle in my left arm.

It all started when I was lazying around on a summer day. No school. No chores (not that there weren’t any to do, but Mom and Dad were at work). I texted my buddies. No one was available. I was tired of laying on the couch watching tv. Even surfing on my computer was getting old.

So I decided to take a "Sunday" drive by myself. It wasn’t Sunday, but I knew from riding with Mom and Dad and Grandpa and Grandma what a "Sunday" drive was all about.

I packed myself a lunch in a sack, peanut butter and raspberry jam, you know the jam with the little seeds in it, threw in a couple cans of pop, and jumped in my car.

Maybe I should say jalopy. It was 21 years old. My Dad made me take it when my Grandpa finally decided to buy something newer. My Grandpa had pretty much worn it out. The fenders were banged up, there was rust under the rocker panel, and one tail light lens was broken out. The light still worked, so I felt there was no hurry to fix it.

Oh, I forgot to tell you, the muffler was hanging loose, and there was a puffy growl coming out of a broken seam in the tailpipe. The only good thing about the car was that it had a powerful V8 engine. When I put my foot to the floor, the left from fender rose up like it was being hoisted by a crane.

I started out from the suburbs and drove through the country, taking it easy, drinking a can of pop, arm out the window, and looking at the fields of crops, the red barns, and the farm tractors. After an hour or so, I headed into the city because too much scenery gets boring.

I got into the outskirts of the city about one o’clock in the afternoon. Traffic was starting to back up going into the center of the city and I started getting vehicles all around me.
I was listening to my iPod, and wasn’t paying much attention when I felt a bump from the rear of my car.

Looking in the rear view mirror I was confronted by a massive looking black van. The windshield, for God’s sake, was screwed on, and looked like thick plastic. The driver and his passenger were waving for me to move over, like they wanted to get my insurance information or something. So I did. I pulled to the curb, cutting off the guy next to me, but noticed that the van did not follow.

Now I could see it in profile. It was big, not a mini van hauling kids to a sports contest, but a big old thing, all black, with huge tires. The van was so high off the ground I could almost have walked under it. Everything about it looked like it was an aborted Batmobile. The mirrors were bolted on. The side windows were screwed on like the windshield. There were antennae on the roof. The wheel wells were half covered with caps, so only a small portion of the tire showed. The van was a dull, flat black, and looked like somebody had painted it with the business end of a straw broom. But I could make out three faint letters – PUR.

I got to thinking, as I watched the van inch away from me in heavy traffic, that it once was an armored vehicle, maybe used by the military or the police. Later, after the whole incident was over, I found out it had been used to courier money to the bank for private businesses.

Anyhow, I still thought I had been involved in an accident, so I took a ballpoint pen out of the glove box and wrote down the license plate number. Later, the police were astonished that someone had actually had the foresight to write down a license plate number.

I pulled back into traffic, and still thought it was best that I follow the van, in case there was an insurance issue or they went to the police.

I was now almost downtown, with tall buildings standing like redwoods, shoulder to shoulder. The black van was about ten car lengths ahead of me when I noticed it run a red light, go into a complete three hundred and sixty degree spin, and then accelerate into the side of another courier truck, ramming it hard.

Wham! There was a loud pop of exploding metal and the second van tipped onto two tires and then fell onto its side. The rear door popped open and a man in uniform crawled out holding a gun but pointing it to the sky. Too bad. He was shot, immediately, by a big man running from the black van. This guy jumped into the rear of the turned over van, came out quickly with an armload of money bags, threw them into the black van, looked around at all of us like we were a threat. That is when my Adam’s apple started to move north and I could not breathe.

No police anywhere. This guy knew it. So he went back into the overturned van, pulled out another armload of money bags, threw them into the black van, just as I heard a faint siren starting to come our way.

That guy heard it too, because he jumped in the passenger side of the black van, and the driver again made a huge turn around and roared down the street right in front of me. I mean, I was the only car sitting in the location to go after those guys. I threw my sack lunch onto the floor, and pulled out my iPod earplugs. The big V8 in my old beater seemed to want to chase that black van.

So…hey! Why not?

And I was off. Man, that car seemed fast going through the city streets. I could see my car’s reflection in the mirrored glass of the tall buildings, and the sound of my exhaust made it seem like I was taking off in the space shuttle inside a canyon.

The black van had to be going 70 miles per hour because I was now going 85 miles per hour and was barely catching it. The black van braked hard, and went left, and I followed.

I gotta give my Dad some credit. He always told me, keep the gas tank at least half full. You’ll never know when you will be in an emergency. Guess what? I listened, for once, and I noticed the gas gauge was three quarters full. I was good to go.

We were traveling about 65 miles an hour now, going away from the center of the city, and I was now close enough to notice the window in the rear door slide open.
For God’s sake! A gun barrel poked out, and the passenger was behind it, looking dead at me and ready to pull the trigger.

I hit the brakes, spun around with the tires screeching and smoking, and drove into a side street. Something kept me going because I would not think that facing death at 17 is something I wanted to repeat, but I made a left turn, and another left, and presto! There was the black van ahead of me. This time the gun barrel went off, and I saw a puff of smoke and the windshield to my right blew apart. He was trying to kill me!

I hit the brakes again and went left this time into an alley. My face was red. I could feel the heat. I thought I was going to explode into a quadzillion body parts. Still, I kept at it, the old V8 coming back to life when my foot pushed the accelerator to the floor.

Again, I got myself behind the black van, except this time I was so close to the left rear the passenger could not get a bead on me. I’ve seen it done on cop shows, so I thought I would try it. I turned my big old car into the right rear of the van, and there was a big thud, and the van swerved back and forth.

That driver must have been shocked. No cops. Just a young punk trying to knock him off his pedestal.

I could see in his outside rear view mirror that the passenger was trying to get in position to get a shot at me. So I turned my car into the black van again, and again, the driver had to swerve back and forth to keep his balance.

We were on the outskirts of town now. I could hear sirens getting closer, coming from all directions.

But this guy wouldn’t stop. So I hit the gas hard, drove right up along side him till my rear bumper was even with his front bumper. Then I hit the brakes and turned right real hard. The black van collided and spun my car around, and we both ended up running into a concrete bridge abutment.

One thing about concrete, it doesn’t flex. My car was so old it didn’t have an airbag, but my seatbelt held me firm, and I jumped out and started to run, when the driver – a smaller man with a mean expression on his face – grabbed my arm, just like I told you in the beginning, and I was so scared that I blacked out.

That is the last thing I remember until I woke up in a hospital bed with my Mom and Dad standing there with a couple of police officers.

From the police I learned that the black van was busted up real bad by hitting the concrete. Those two guys had no where to run, and the one grabbed me because he wanted to kill me for ruining their robbery. On the bridge above was a police sniper. When the bad guy grabbed me the sniper fired one shot. The bad guy fell to the ground. But I was unconscious. I didn’t know how I was saved.

The passenger was quickly surrounded by police and thrown to the ground and handcuffed.

The stolen money was recovered.

Laying there in the hospital bed, with my parents and the police standing there, I felt kind of proud.

Maybe I had done something good, catching a couple of robbers.

But the police had some questions. How did I get involved? When did I first encounter the black van? Could I produce any witnesses?

About the only thing I could produce was the license plate number, I told them.

I had my Dad give me my jeans, and I took a folded piece of paper out, and explained that the black van had bumped into the rear of my car, and so I wrote down the license plate number thinking I had been in an accident.

That seemed to add credence to my story, and the two police officers were shocked when I handed them the license plate number.

They left, and then it was me and Mom and Dad.

I wrecked my car, Grandpa’s car, I said.

"When Grandpa hears your story, I'm sure he will understand," my Dad said.

"But, Cody, the next time you are bored, go out and mow the lawn or something."