“I’ll sit out there all night,” Real Deal says. “I need something to do besides drive myself crazy.”
“It’s best we stick to the plan,” Antonia says. She steps out of her and Elijah’s cabin, where she’s been eavesdropping. “Stay inside, keep it dark, keep the bikes hidden. Anybody snooping around will have to come right to our doors.”
“That’s all hunky-dory,” Bob says. “But if any shit goes down, I’ll be doing my own thing. Don’t get in my way.”
“We’ll all be doing our own thing at that point,” Antonia says, “but until then, shut your cabin light off.”
Bob hits his cigarette, waiting for her to go back inside before he says, “I’ve about had my fill of that bitch.”
Real Deal doesn’t have time for Bob’s bullshit. He makes sure the .22’s magazine is full.
“That blood’s gonna start to stink if you don’t clean up,” Bob says.
“It’s my war paint,” Real Deal replies.
Bob goes into his cabin and switches off the lamp next to his bed. He opens the front door and whistles. Elijah whistles back, the all clear, and Bob jogs across the parking lot to the clump of tamarisk where Elijah’s hunkered down with a chair, a jug of water, and the shotgun Bull brought back from town earlier today.
“Did you eat something?” Bob says.
“I’m not hungry,” Elijah says.
“I’m starving.”
There’s still some pink in the sky, but it’ll soon be full dark. A nightbird chirps, another answers. A vehicle approaches from the west, and Bob ducks beside Elijah.
“Don’t stare at the lights,” he says.
A Dodge rattles past, whipping up dust. The men swivel to watch until it disappears in the distance. Elijah slaps his forearm and squints at his palm.
“Are there mosquitoes out here?” he says.
“Probably an ant,” Bob says. “There’s plenty of those. The biting kind.”
Elijah lifts his boot in search of an anthill. Bob walks over and knocks on the door of Bull’s cabin. Bull, shirtless, opens up and asks what he wants.
“You have anything to eat?” Bob says.
“First you make me run all over town getting you guns, and now you want to raid my refrigerator?” Bull says.
“I’ll pay.”
“There’s leftover fried rice and a couple hot dogs.”
“Boil the franks and throw them on the rice. I’ll give you two bucks.”
“The stove’ll make a light.”
“I’ll handle Antonia.”
“Yes, sir. Right away, sir. Kiss my ass, sir,” Bull grumbles on his way to his fridge.
Bob steps into the cabin. It’s a pigsty, trash everywhere. Stacks of porno magazines, rusty tools, old glass telephone insulators. Smells like a pigsty too. Bull dumps the rice in a skillet and drops the dogs into a pot of water.
“Put a shirt on,” Bob says. “I don’t want hair in my food.”
“I’m tired of you fuckers telling me what to do,” Bull says. “And now this Fort Apache bullshit.”
“Take off till it’s over. Nobody’s stopping you.”
“This is my fucking place.” Bull turns and waves a spatula. “You take off. Settle your beef elsewhere.”
“Stir some ketchup in there if you got it,” Bob says and goes outside to sit on the old couch on the porch.
Antonia’s at the table in her cabin, trying to read by the glow of the neon arrow. It’s more effort than it’s worth, and she’s too tense to concentrate anyway, keeps looking out the window to where Elijah’s hiding, keeps jumping at noises that make her think someone’s creeping up on them.
She hopes to hell this thing gets resolved tonight. She hates these ratty shacks and Bull and the idea that Bob and Real Deal’s thirst for revenge has put her and Elijah in danger. On top of that, twinges of bloodlust are rippling through her like someone’s strumming her veins and arteries. She’s still a couple weeks out from having to feed, but the stress of the past few days has screwed up her clock. She checks the magazine of her pistol for the tenth time and gives the book another chance, hoping the story will take hold.
Elijah, standing guard, knows everything she’s feeling. He heard it in her voice this evening and saw it in the set of her jaw. Nothing he can say will calm her, though, and he doesn’t want her calm anyway. He wants her on edge, he wants her ready to fight. He looks toward the cabins. The only movement is at Bull’s place. Bob’s out front. Bull hands him a plate of food. The two men talk quietly.
Elijah turns back to the road. From where he’s hidden he can see all the way up and down the strip of asphalt to where it disappears in both directions. Across the road buzzing power lines are strung between steel towers. These, too, extend as far as he can see. He aims the shotgun as if preparing to fire. “Boom,” he whispers. He lowers the gun and brings it up again.
“Boom.”
Because Antonia made them turn off their noisy swamp coolers, Real Deal’s cabin is sweltering even with all the windows open. There’s a .22 cartridge on the table. He flicks it to set it spinning, but the sound is too loud in the enforced silence. He feels he’s close to snapping, and God help the world if he does, now that Yuma’s not here to rein him in.
Bob finishes his grub and walks out to the lookout post. “Private Pyle reporting for duty,” he says to Elijah.
“Come back in twenty minutes,” Elijah says.
“Go on. Throw Antonia a bone. Seems like she needs it.”
Elijah hands Bob the shotgun and goes back to his cabin. Bob settles into the chair. Not five minutes later headlights rise like twin moons in the west. Bob sinks to one knee. As the vehicle draws near, he lifts the shotgun, ready to send a load of buckshot through the windshield. An old pickup—Ford, with an over-the-cab camper—drives past and off into the night. Bob sits again. These false alarms are gonna kill him.
Bull sprawls on his bed, a plastic bag filled with ice pressed to his forehead. Fuck the fucking rovers for dragging him into their shit. The fight they’re waiting for could wreck this joint, and the few bucks he’s made off them won’t be compensation for that. He’s been thinking about moving to the Keys, and tonight’s convinced him he should. He’s got enough money stashed to buy property there, another motel, a legit one this time. Of course in Florida there’s always the danger of running into someone holding a grudge, but plastic surgeons can work miracles, and if he lost some weight, his own mother wouldn’t recognize him.
Outside, Bob stands and stretches. He’s never been able to sit for long, couldn’t even make it through a movie when he was a kid without getting up two or three times. He leaves the cover of the tamarisk carrying only his pistol and walks out to the road. There’s not a car in sight.
He thinks about what he’ll do if Jesse doesn’t show up tonight. If the Fiends couldn’t find the guy in Phoenix, they won’t find him here. It might be time for him to go out on his own. He won’t have anyone watching his back, but he also won’t have to follow Antonia’s orders or worry about anybody but himself. He’ll be able to put all his time and energy into tracking down and dusting Jesse before Jesse finds and dusts him.
He stands on the dotted line in the center of the road and lights a cigarette, takes in the glow of Vegas on the horizon. Gravel crunching in the parking lot snaps his head around. It’s Jesse, toting a shotgun, creeping up on the cabins.
“He’s here!” Bob shouts and fires his pistol. Jesse turns the shotgun on him. He drops to the ground, but enough pellets get him that his knees won’t work. He drags himself out of the road using only his arms.
Real Deal, Antonia, and Elijah fling open their doors. They spot Jesse and cut loose with their guns. Jesse sends a blast Antonia and Elijah’s way then charges Real Deal, firing at him on the run.
Bull, cowering on the floor of his cabin, decides Fuck this and flees out the back door. Someone shooting from the old trailer hits him in the leg. He howls in pain and falls hard. He’s still howling when anot
her bullet destroys his heart.
Real Deal dives sideways in time to avoid too much damage from Jesse’s hail of buckshot. With a joyous roar, he leaps on him when he barrels into the cabin, and they go down in a snarl of arms and legs, falling into the narrow space between the bed and the wall, Jesse’s shotgun sandwiched between them.
Real Deal wrenches one hand free and throttles Jesse. “Yuma,” he shouts. “You watching this, baby?” Jesse comes up with a pistol from somewhere. Real Deal grabs for it, and the round ends up in the ceiling. He forces Jesse’s arm down, Jesse fighting the whole way. His other hand is still on Jesse’s throat, but he’s having trouble choking him and controlling the gun at the same time.
Jesse pulls the pistol’s trigger again. This time the bullet burrows into Real Deal’s leg until it hits bone. He gulps the scream that wells up but can’t stop his hand from going to the wound. Jesse pushes him aside and scrabbles to his feet, headed for the back door. Real Deal grabs the shotgun he left behind and uses it as a crutch to lift himself. The pain in his leg is intense, but he manages to raise the shotgun. Jesse turns in the doorway before he can pull the trigger and fires the pistol at him. One of the rounds nicks his collarbone, and the arm holding the barrel of the shotgun goes numb, fouling his aim.
Jesse’s out back by then, and out of bullets. Real Deal reaches the doorway and sees him toss the pistol and pull a knife. Real Deal roars again and brings the shotgun up one-handed, propping it on his hip. Before he can shoot, a bullet fired from the trailer gets him in the chest. As his mouth fills with blood, he recalls a cloud shaped like a duck that he saw when he was a kid. He drops the shotgun and falls to his knees.
Antonia and Elijah open up through their back door on whoever’s shooting from inside the trailer, then turn their guns on Jesse when he takes hold of Real Deal and drags him into the walkway between two of the cabins.
“Cover me,” Elijah says to Antonia.
“Stay here.”
“I’m going after him.”
No gunfire comes from the trailer as he runs to the walkway, but he’s too late. Real Deal’s been dusted, and there’s no sign of Jesse. Elijah moves up the walkway, keeping his shoulder against the cabin to his right and his pistol up. Where the hell’s Bob? he wonders.
“Are you okay?” Antonia shouts.
He’s about to respond when something tears into his right leg above his boot. Looking down, he sees a knife buried in his calf. In the same instant Jesse reaches out from the crawlspace under the cabin, takes hold of the ankle of his other leg, and pulls hard, toppling him. Elijah rolls onto his back and points his pistol, but Jesse wrenches it out of his hand and turns it on him.
One round hits him in the stomach, two others miss. He cringes, anticipating another shot, but Jesse has a new target. It’s Bob, shotgun in one hand, pistol in the other, who’s appeared at the front end of the walkway. Bob cuts loose with the pistol, and Jesse returns fire with Elijah’s gun, then turns and flees to the back of the cabins.
He runs smack into Antonia, who’s come looking for Elijah. They fire at the same time. Antonia’s shot misses, but Jesse’s gets her in the face, the bullet entering under her right cheekbone, exiting over her left ear, and knocking her off her feet. Elijah screams her name as she hits the ground.
Jesse snatches up the shotgun Real Deal dropped and makes for the ruined trailer at the back of the property. Bob dashes out of the walkway, chasing him and already in his mind catching him and twisting off his head with his bare hands. Jesse whips around and fires the shotgun. The blast tears away Bob’s shirt and most of the skin from his chest to his thigh on his left side, exposing red muscle, yellow fat, and white bone. Tough as he is, he almost faints. A man’s not meant to see that much of his insides. He falls behind Real Deal’s Harley as Jesse disappears into the trailer.
Elijah staggers from between the cabins, grabs Antonia, and pulls her back into the walkway. He wipes some of the blood off her face. Her bulging right eye settles into its socket, and the hole in her cheek is closing, but she’s still unconscious.
The sound of the shots fades and the smoke drifts away. A fraught calm falls over the battlefield. Bob’s wound is healing but still hurts like a motherfucker. He reloads his pistol to take his mind off the pain and retrieves the shotgun he dropped when he was hit. When he’s back behind the bike, he hisses loudly, a signal. Elijah pokes his head around the cabin.
“Real Deal?” Bob mouths.
Elijah picks up a fistful of sand and lets it sift through his fingers.
“Antonia?”
Elijah wobbles the same hand. So-so.
Shotgun and pistol fire pour from the trailer, lighting up the night. Bullets and buckshot ping off Real Deal’s Harley and chew up the cabin behind it. Bob curls into a ball. When the salvo dies down, he realizes he’s been hit in the foot. Blood pours out of a rip in his boot. The guns roar again, the target this time Elijah’s ride. Sparks fly, bullets ricochet, and the bike topples over.
Bob sits up when the shooting stops. He’ll be damned if he’s going to cower like a frightened rabbit until he’s picked off. Hissing again to get Elijah’s attention, he throws him the pistol and aims the shotgun over the seat of Real Deal’s Harley.
“Hit ’em!” he shouts, and he and Elijah blast the trailer until their guns are empty.
A moan from the trailer breaks the silence that follows. Bob drops behind the bike, pulls some shells from his pocket, and reloads. It’s time to end this bullshit standoff, and he’s the one who’ll have to do it. He calls out to Jesse.
“I hear you,” Jesse replies.
“Do you surrender?”
“That’s not how this is going to go.”
“You’re outnumbered, and we’ve got better position. We’ll either make you use up all your ammo and rush you or keep you pinned until morning and let the sun take care of you.”
“Or you might talk me to death,” Jesse says.
“What if I give you a chance to better your odds?”
“Why would you do that?”
“This is really just between you and me. You dusted my partner, and I killed your girl.”
“Go on.”
Bob checks the shotgun wound. It’s almost healed. “Give my people time to ride out of here, and I’ll let whoever you’ve got with you leave too,” he says. “Then you and me’ll go toe to toe with knives, finish what we started on the mountain. You’ll have a fifty-fifty shot.”
In the walkway between the cabins, Antonia has healed enough that she can sit. She and Elijah listen to the negotiation and wonder what Bob’s up to. It seems like a needless gamble.
“He take a bullet to the head too?” Antonia says.
“Hurry and make up your mind,” Bob shouts at Jesse. “This is a limited-time offer.”
“Your people go first,” Jesse says.
“Fine,” Bob says. “I’m gonna get up and go talk to them.”
“Talk to them from where you are.”
Bob rolls over so he’s facing the cabins. “You hear all that?” he says.
“That’s not how I’d play it,” Antonia says.
“Well, that’s how I’m playing it.”
“You expect us to just ride off and leave you?” Elijah says.
“Go on and don’t look back,” Bob says. “The Fiends are through. It’s every man for himself now.”
Elijah looks at Antonia, eyes asking if he should try harder.
“Sounds like he’s got his mind made up,” she says. She’s seen the end coming for a long time but hadn’t pictured this. Elijah helps her stand.
“We need to get our things,” she calls out.
“Leave it,” Jesse says. “And your guns too.”
“We’re supposed to trust you?”
“If you’re going, go now.”
Elijah tosses the pistol, and he and Antonia step out into the open, hands in the air. They walk past Bob crouched behind Real Deal’s ruined bike.
“Good lu
ck to you,” Elijah says.
“See you down the road,” Bob replies.
They sit on Antonia’s Harley. She starts it, and they ride slowly around to the front of the motel. Bob hears the engine clatter as they set off and thinks, Good riddance.
“Your turn,” he shouts to Jesse.
The black man from Beaumont’s limps out of the trailer with a blood-soaked rag tied around one of his legs. He walks between two cabins toward the road. When he’s gone, Bob says, “I’m getting up now.”
The shotgun wound hardly hurts at all when he stands, and his foot’s okay too. He keeps his gun pointed at the ground.
Jesse appears in the doorway of the trailer, carrying a pistol and a knife. “Drop the iron,” he says to Bob.
“You too.”
Jesse flings his pistol into the scrub. Bob does the same with the shotgun. As the men advance toward each other, Bob frees his knife from its sheath on his belt. They stop ten paces apart.
“One,” Bob says, going into a crouch. He’s grinning, can’t wait to cut this motherfucker to pieces.
“Two.”
Jesse twists his feet to plant them in the dirt.
“Three!”
Bob rushes Jesse, going hard, but Jesse sidesteps and jabs with his knife. He misses and has to spin around. Facing each other, the men shuffle sideways, circling. Bob waves his empty hand, and when Jesse glances at it, lunges, slashes him across the chest, and skips out of reach. This is his plan: Get in, strike, get out. If he keeps it up, Jesse’ll soon be so weak, he won’t be able to dodge.
They go back to circling. Bob feints a few times, but Jesse doesn’t take the bait again. Instead he speeds up, shuffling faster and faster, forcing Bob to speed up too. “Haw!” Jesse shouts, like he’s steering a mule. “Haw!” When he stops suddenly and reverses direction, Bob trips trying to mirror him. Jesse’s on him in an instant, stabbing and pulling away before he can strike back. The pain’s not bad enough to bring him down, but he tastes blood, and every breath is a struggle. He’s got to keep circling, though, keep his eyes on Jesse. The fucker knows he’s hurt and isn’t going to give him time to heal.
Rovers Page 22
