“Shouldn’t he be angrier, surly, setting shit on fire?” I said.
She loaded the plate into the dishwasher. “I wasn’t lying when I said I was lucky. Especially with losing his father, all that change and shifting when he was younger, all could have been a whole other story. I’m not sure what happened that he’s how he is, but I will not stare that gift horse in the mouth too much.”
As I was wont to do because I am a selfish bastard, I thought about my own childhood, and about my mother and my father. How she had left the house for a flower club meeting and never came home. I didn’t have a memory of watching her pull out of the driveway, or a final wave, none of that sepia-toned bullshit you’re supposed to get. What I had was me playing in my bedroom as the front door closed and a car drove away from the house for the last time.
The police found her body a few days later, somewhere in the hills. She had been sexually assaulted, then stabbed to death, though that wasn’t anything I knew until years later, once I was a state trooper and looked up the files on the investigation. That wasn’t the shit you told a three-year-old. No, what I got was a blank-faced Billy Malone, twisting a baseball cap in both hands, struggling to hold back the tears he wasn’t supposed to let his son see, and trying his goddamn best to explain to me how my mother was never coming home.
I hadn’t been like Jonah. I didn’t turn out to be a well-adjusted kid. I was angry, angsty before it was popular, sullen and combative as a hobby. Billy was a father ill-equipped to handle a teenager by himself in the best of circumstances, and I made sure those circumstances sucked left hind tit. He and I spent my formative years in that dance fathers and sons do, measuring each other out, looking for signs of weakness, trying to determine who would be alpha dog, counting the days until Billy could unleash me onto the world and let it take over kicking my ass for a while.
I sipped my coffee. “Be grateful.”
“I am almost every day,” Sheila said. She threw in there a small, quick smile, and there was a twinkle in her eyes that was unexpected. “Almost.”
Woody patted the table like a judge banging a gavel, calling us all to order. “I believe our plan for the day is to go talk to the fine, upstanding citizens at the Highway Saints,” he said.
“It is?” The news came as a surprise to me, and we all know how much I love surprises.
“It is.”
“Goody.”
15
Heavenly Towing was a tow truck and impound lot on the edge of Raineyville city limits. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire enclosed the lot. Inside the lot were heaps of rusted-out cars that hadn’t moved in years, Detroit dinosaurs of oxidized steel, from a time where you measured the gallons per mile and not the other way around. An ancient tow truck was parked next to a line of Harleys.
As promised by Big Country, Graham & Oates Guns and Pawn was across the street from the Saints’ garage. Through the glass you could see TVs, laptops, counters with jewelry, whatever people had worked for and then pawned out for a quarter its value in an effort to keep the lights. At least, that was how I liked to imagine it was since I figured if Oates Sr. was anything like his son, the joint was an asshole operation, scamming hardworking people out of their money. The whole joint could have been filled with rings stolen from grandmothers so someone could buy meth.
Early in the day and I was already in a shitty mood. This particular parlay was going to go well.
We parked down the street, in front of a building full of pain doctors and lawyers, and walked to the tow lot. Motley Crue screamed from a stereo as we let ourselves in.
The area inside the garage was open and without dividing walls, with more motorcycles parked inside and others disassembled and stripped down to parts and scattered across the oil-stained cement floor. Two guys in work coveralls worked on a bike. Three other guys huddled around a table toward the back playing cards, laughing and drinking beer at ten in the morning. The stereo continued to blast “Kickstart My Heart.”
Woody and I stood there longer than I thought we would, hands on hips, looking like badasses, because obviously we were. No one looked at us or cared that we were there. Woody and I looked at one another and shrugged. These guys were the worst bikers ever.
Woody brought his gun out and shot the stereo, which exploded in a fury of sparks and feedback, and Vince Neil stopped having anything to say, though if we’re honest here, he hadn’t brought much to the conversation anyway.
This got everyone’s attention, as gunfire and exploding electronics do. The guys working on the motorcycle grabbed wrenches and hopped to their feet and moved toward us. I pulled my gun and swung my aim toward them.
The ones playing poker threw their cards down and whipped out guns of their own and leveled them at us.
“Drop the guns, boys,” Woody said.
“Fuck you!” one of them said. The one with the lightning bolts tattooed across his head, Mickey Nevada. He squinted at us. “You’re the assholes from the other night at the Dew Drop. With that faggot Dave Miller.”
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you that if you can’t ever say something nice, don’t say nothing at all,” I said.
A guy in coveralls—a kid with stringy hair tied up in a knot on the top of his head—squinted and said, “Bambi’s mom said that.”
The other one, a beefy guy with Buddy Holly glasses and ten pounds of beard, said, “I thought it was Dumbo’s mom.”
Mickey Nevada said, “Donny, Eddie, the both of you shut the fuck up.” He twisted his neck around a few times. “And it was Thumper’s mom who said that. Bambi’s mom died at the start of the movie.”
“Thumper’s father,” Woody said. “Thumper’s mother was just reminding him.”
“Jesus Christ on a pogo stick,” I said. “We’re all pointing goddamn guns at one another, and you want to talk Disney minutiae.”
“Yeah, about those guns,” Mickey Nevada said. “Drop yours.”
Woody smiled. “You first.”
“Do the math, asshole. Three guns pointed at you. There’s only two of you.”
“Right,” Woody said. “Except I can guarantee my friend and I are better shots than you dipshits are, so we’ll shoot most of you all before you ever hit us.”
Here’s a good time to own up to something: Woody was half right. He was a fucking good shot. If bullets started flying, he would most likely, in the chaos, confusion, and gun smoke, plug all three of them. I was ten feet from the two I had a draw on, and even at that distance, it wasn’t a guarantee I’d hit either of them. The times I pulled a trigger and somehow hit what I aimed for felt more like luck than providence or practice. But I had to hope Woody’s casual give-not-a-fuck played things enough to carry me along with it.
Woody threw a casual nod. “What you guys got there? Forty-fives? And you’re, what, forty feet from us? I’ll give you a heads-up that those are shitty South Korea-made guns. The accuracy’s not for shit, and unless you know what the fuck you’re doing, which I can almost guarantee you do not, then you will not hit shit. You might get lucky, but luck in a gunfight is not what you want to rely on. I can promise you I’ll hit all three of you before you maybe—and this a big fucking maybe—nick me with a shot.” He jerked his head toward me and the guys in the coveralls. “And both of them will be dead.”
The tone he had, there was nothing in Woody’s voice but cold, hard confidence. He didn’t care he had guns aimed at him. You could see that freaked out the bikers. Woody had told me once, most guys with guns count on the threat of the gun itself being enough. Bring out a weapon, point it in close enough proximity of the other person, and it’s enough to bring the other person down.
But then you have someone like Woody, who wasn’t unaccustomed to guns pointed at him. It was his norm more than not, which was why he stood there as calm as a preacher on Sunday morning, and I had a queasiness crawling through my stomach that felt like an eventual expulsion of breakfast. Nervousness of too many pancakes—who was I to say?
/> Mickey Nevada bunched up his forehead, and it threatened to pull together the rest of the skin on his skull until the tips of the lightning bolts may touch, which sounded weird when you compounded it with a name like Mickey Nevada.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Here to talk about Jimmy Omaha,” Woody said.
“Your buddy Dave did it. They even got it on video. There. We’re done talking.”
Woody shook his head. “Not that simple. All that video shows is Dave’s van and someone’s arm reaching out the window. Might be anyone’s arm.”
Mickey Nevada glanced over at the other two bikers. “Set ’em down, boys.”
A blond guy, with a nose ring through his septum, he said, “Fuck that. They—”
“Put your goddamn gun down, Teddy,” Mickey said.
This must have been the much-lauded Teddy Oklahoma; Jesus, but the names on these assholes. He snorted air through his nose, and I pondered if it hurt with the piercing. He set the pistol on the tabletop, and the other biker followed suit.
Mickey smiled real big and let his pistol drop to the table top. “Your turn now.”
Woody gave me a nod, and we re-holstered our guns. The two I had drawn on, they tensed up, looking as if they were ready for a fight. I couldn’t blame them since they’d had a gun aimed at them, and that will put people in foul humors.
Mickey said, “Why don’t you guys get out of here, get some sunshine?”
Teddy gave him a look as if he’d asked him to sodomize a farm animal. “You letting these assholes come in here—”
“We’re gonna talk,” Mickey said. “That’s all.”
Teddy seemed to consider the instructions for a few before he said, “Come on, guys,” and the rest of the bikers filed up behind him and followed him outside.
The one with the Buddy Holly glasses walked past me, knocking me in the shoulder and growling as he went by.
Once the garage was empty and it was just Woody and me and Mickey Nevada, Mickey said, “Okay, you wanted to talk, motherfuckers. Talk.”
16
We gathered at the card table. Closer up, Mickey looked older than I expected—later forties with fine lines cutting into his face, his skin tan and leathery from time in the sun spent on the road.
“You were ready to fight Saturday night,” Woody said. “All of a sudden you’re the peacemaker?”
“I had an itch for trouble. That’s what Saturday nights are about,” Mickey said, shaking his head and rubbing his face with his tattooed hand. “Someone should have shot my ass with a tranquilizer gun. I was on day four of a five-day drunk.”
“I’ll call ‘bullshit’ on that,” I said. “No way in fuck all that was in your system was booze.”
Mickey clinched his fist, and the tendons up and down his arm pulsed, tightening and relaxing. “No drugs,” he said. “Jimmy would kick our asses on that.”
“Jimmy ain’t here now.”
“On account of Dave.”
“Dave didn’t do it,” Woody said.
“You keep saying that, but word I’m hearing is things aren’t looking good for Dave. Video like that is some damning shit. They send ’em away on Law and Order for less.”
“Who you getting all this information from?” I said.
Mickey shrugged. “I know people.”
“You mean like Holland Oates?”
“What gives you the idea I’ve got anything to do with the local law enforcement?”
“First, you refer to it as ‘the local law enforcement,’ which implies you don’t take them serious. Second, your arm’s so far up Holland Oates’s ass, every time you burp, people think he’s farting.”
Mickey smiled. It was like watching a hyena smile: you didn’t trust it, but there was a weird curiosity around it. “You make it sound like we’re criminals.”
Woody rested his forearms on the table. “Who’s in charge of your shitheels now?”
Mickey tapped a patch on his cut that read, “V.P.” “I’m next man on the line. I’ll go to the head of the table.”
“Jimmy dying works out well for you then,” I said.
“Jimmy was my brother,” Mickey said. “He saved my life. Him and this club. I got out of the army, I didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. I found the Saints and they helped me get my head clear. You coming in here saying I had anything to do with Jimmy dying, that’s bullshit.”
“Then tell us about the extortion racket you guys are running then,” I said.
He shook his head. “You keep on running your mouth, but there’s nothing coming out.”
“Mickey, I get how the line between you acting stupid and you being stupid is thinner than rest stop toilet paper, but let’s act like we’ve got sense enough to unzip before we take a piss. Everyone knows about the Saints’ shakedown here in town, which is the shittiest criminal work ever. This is a nothing town, and running the places around here for money, that’s just beating up the weakest kid you can find for their lunch money.”
“Dave didn’t want to pay it, and Jimmy was pushing on him,” Woody said. “Was it because Dave used to ride with you assholes?”
Mickey snarled. Yes, snarled. Full on. It was excellent. It had a real Billy Idol/“White Wedding” quality about it.
“Dave never rode with us,” he said. “That drip of dick snot couldn’t cut it. He got himself a piece of pussy that wasn’t his, and they skipped the light fantastic or whatever, became a civilian.”
“You mean Sheila?” I said.
“The fuck else you think I mean? Dave’s lucky he’s still among the living, fucking around with her after Jimmy called her.”
“Called her?”
“Yeah. After her old man died, Little Miss Priss got a wild streak, played ‘hide the hog’ with Jimmy. That brat kid of hers, he used to hang here all the time. He was little, so I bet he doesn’t remember shit about it.” Mickey laughed. “Fuck, we used to play with him while Jimmy would take her in back and bone her like she was a goddamn chicken. You’ll never get how good I got at folding up Transformers, making them back into cars and planes and whatever—”
“Bullshit,” Woody said. He whispered it, with a sharpened edge of anger.
The smile showed back up on Mickey’s face. It was worse this time. It was nothing but a thin line cut across the bottom of his face, and his eyes barely visible through slits.
“You think she’s an innocent little something? Let me end that fantasy for you right now. That first hubby of hers died, and Miss Thing woke up and realized she was missing the good times, so she starting coming around the club and we passed her around. Everyone got a turn on her, like the swing set in the schoolyard. Enough was enough, though, Jimmy got her, and they did their thing, and it all seemed good. Somewhere in it, though, Miss Thing and Dave connected, which Dave knew was a no-no. Jimmy found out, he wasn’t real happy about it, and he stewed on what to do about it. Me, I wanted to put Dave in a hole; it was disrespectful, fucking another man’s property.”
“She wasn’t anyone’s property,” I said. “Wasn’t like she’s a goddamn car.”
Mickey tapped his finger against the tabletop. “Here, in the club, the bitch was Jimmy’s property, and Dave got lucky he didn’t wake up dead. Jimmy, though, he let Dave and her go, because it didn’t make good sense to stir up a shit-storm. Live and let live and all that other bullshit.”
Woody pulled both of his hands into fists, and his body drew tight and ready to pounce. The tension coming off him was palpable, an aura of anger at the ready and set to explode.
“What about the protection money?” Woody said. He pushed the words through his mouth.
“What you’re talking about, that’s illegal,” Mickey said. “What we do is collect money for charity. Civic causes, we do our part, and businesses here in Raineyville, they’re real generous.”
“So when you came to collect a few days ago, and Dave didn’t feel like donating to your cause anymore—” I said.
&
nbsp; “No idea what you’re talking about. Dave and us, we get along. Dave wants to give to the community.”
“I’m sure he was at the Dew Drop to drop off an extra check,” I said.
Mickey shook his head. “The little weasel’s pissed off because his old lady came creeping back around.”
“What?” Woody’s voice was almost a hiss.
Mickey set his boot against the edge of the table and pushed his chair onto its back legs. Casual as fuck, he wanted to be. “Dave’s bitch, Sheila, she swung by here a few weeks back, wanting to get back into a groove with Jimmy.”
All that tension in Woody ratcheted up higher. The tendons in his neck stretched tighter. His knuckles were white and bloodless. His face was as plain and unreadable as a fresh sheet of paper.
“Bullshit,” Woody said.
Mickey leaned back in his chair, balancing on the back legs. “I walked in on ’em over in Jimmy’s office, him with his hands shoved down her pants, her wearing a big O face. Two more minutes and he’d have been giving her a ride for the world. I’d bet you money Dave found out, and that’s why he popped Jimmy. She’s been missing out on good dick all these years, and Dave’s man enough to think he can’t let that shit stand. Can’t blame him; any man with a sack would have done the same.” Mickey winked. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll make sure she don’t go without now while her man’s catching it in the ass.”
Woody grabbed the rim of the table and threw it across the room. Mickey tumbled backward, the last view of his face a look of surprise as his arms flailed to keep a balance he didn’t have. He hit the floor and his head pounded against the concrete. Woody climbed on top of him and punched him. The blows came fast, sloppy, hard, alternating lefts and rights that snapped Mickey’s head back and forth like he was watching a ping-pong tournament. Blood spurted from his nose and his mouth.
I took Woody by the collar of his shirt and pulled him off Mickey. He kept swinging widowmakers that did nothing more than create a breeze. He yanked himself loose and stepped away.
Friend of the Devil Page 8
