Midnight Rider

by D V Wolfe

  “Bane,” Noah whispered beside me. “Is it safe to walk between the wires?”

  “Look for his shoe prints. It’s the only way to be sure,” I said. I led the way to his door, careful to step in the indentations in the dirt and gravel that were visible. Several times, I assumed I’d misjudged an indent for a footprint and closed my eyes, hoping the end would be quick.

  “Huh,” I said when we reached the door. “Stacks must be losing his touch.”

  From inside the trailer, I heard the pump of a shotgun.

  “Noah hit the dirt!” I shouted, rolling to one side of the door. Behind me, Noah went down face first. The shot blew the door off its hinges and I watched it sail off to the right and land in the middle of the labyrinth of wires in the front yard. There was an explosion that rocked the trailer and sprayed the dirt and garbage from Stacks’ yard like shrapnel ten feet into the air. I stumbled forward and almost fell, catching myself on the broken flamingos which promptly snapped off under my weight. I felt the metal legs dig into my side and I jerked away. I stumbled and then collapsed, my back against the trailer. My ears were ringing and the air was full of dirt and smoke. I heard some muffled yelling near me and looked up to see Noah roll onto his back, holding his stomach.

  I closed my eyes, trying to suck back in the air that had been knocked out of me. I saw movement through the haze around us. Neighbors, checking to see what the commotion could have been. I’m sure most of them were probably used to Stacks and his noise by now. But he had been gone a while.

  “Accident,” I choked, getting to my feet and holding the sawed-off behind me. “We’re fine.”

  I picked my way around the side of the yard as I stumbled over to Noah and looked down at him. I didn’t see any blood. His eyes were closed.

  “Noah!” I knew I was shouting, but with the ringing in my ears, it sounded muffled and distorted.

  He opened an eye and looked at me. “What!” He shouted.

  “Are you ok?” I shouted back. He assessed himself and moved his arms and legs around before nodding. I stood up and pulled him to his feet.

  “Stacks! You scrawny pain in the ass, come out here!”

  There wasn’t any movement from the trailer. I stomped up the one step leading into the trailer and stuck my head through the hole that used to be the doorway.

  The trailer didn’t actually look much different than it always had. Floor to ceiling pizza boxes in one corner. Computer towers, monitors, receivers, and god-knows-what-all wired together, flashing and beeping, lining the walls from one side of the trailer to the other. The police scanner and old Philco portable radio that he’d rewired and replaced the guts of more times than I could count, sat on the kitchen counter. Sleeping bag on the couch. I couldn’t see the other two rooms. When the trailer had rocked, it looked like it had dislodged towers of newspaper clippings, classified files that “just fell out of the sky” and electronics that had been organized at one point. I climbed in through the door hole and looked around.

  “Stacks!” I shouted. Something under the pile of clippings at my feet moved and I pointed my barrel at it. If his pet snake, Yolanda was loose in here, I was going to shoot first and apologize after. A foot appeared under the clippings. Well, not really a foot. A ratty blown-out Chuck Taylor that I could see a brown sock that used to be white through, appeared.

  I reached down and grabbed the foot. There was a squeak and the other foot appeared starting to kick at me, trying to free the captive foot. I set the shotgun down on the nearby table and grabbed the other foot. Holding both his feet, I shook him like someone shaking sand from a beach blanket, and the rest of him appeared.

  “Hi Stacks,” I barked. “Hell of a welcoming party.”

  Stacks looked up at me. “Well, you should have gotten the point! You’re not welcome!”

  “I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Dammit, Bane,” Stacks said, scrambling backward and using the couch to pull himself to his feet. “They were going to send me to the Pen! I’m sorry I turned you in, but you had a clean record, at least in this body, and it was going to be three federal strikes for me!”

  I glared at him. “It was you! Nya was right!”

  “Shit, I thought you knew already! I thought that’s why you were here!”

  I was starting to become aware of the volume of our shouts and I took that as a good sign that at least some semblance of hearing was returning.

  “No Stacks, though you owe me a lifetime of favors for that mess you got me into, that’s not why I’m here. Now sit down. I need to check on the kid.”

  I pushed him back onto the couch and turned to look out the door hole. Noah had slumped down to his knees but he was upright and staring at me. He looked downright cranky.

  “How ya doing?” I called out to him.

  “Just mother-fuckin’ peachy,” He shouted.

  “Good,” I said and turned back to look at Stacks. He looked tiny, surrounded on all sides by the towers of pizza boxes and the mountains of electronics. His Scooby-Doo shirt was once black but gray now from repeated washes with hard water and detergent. But, it looked like it hadn’t seen the inside of the washing machine since he moved out of his parents’ house, because it was now decorated with oil stains and pizza sauce.

  I moved a stack of books from one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. I turned them to look at the spines. Books on paranormal phenomenon and hacking into computer firewalls.

  “Nice bedtime reading,” I said. Stacks was motionless, just watching me. “Sorry for the impromptu visit. I would have called, but I know how you are about cell phones especially when the person calling you is the one you ratted out to the Feds two years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Stacks began. I held up a hand.

  “I should flay you alive and turn your sorry hide into a steering wheel cover for Lucy, but instead, I thought I’d give you a chance to get square with me.”

  Stacks leaned towards me with his elbows on his knees. “How much am I going to hate this?”

  “You know how much that one-armed surfer girl hates that shark?” He nodded. “They braid each other’s hair and make friendship bracelets compared to how much you’re going to hate this.”

  “Fuck,” Stacks said, leaning back and closing his eyes.

  There was a commotion next to me and I looked up to see Noah leaning on the splintered door frame.

  “What kind,” he panted, “of a fucking moron, plants explosives in his own fucking yard and blows a shotgun through his own fucking front door?!” Noah barked.

  “Noah, meet Stacks,” I said with a grin.

  Noah was holding something in his hand and he tossed it into Stacks’ lap. It was the gnome’s head. “Aw Gumpy,” Stacks said, looking down at the little guy. The top of his hat was now broken but it looked like his head had made a fairly clean break from the rest of his body.

  Noah limped by and slumped into the kitchen chair next to me, still glaring at Stacks.

  “What?” Stacks said, looking from the gnome head in his lap to the pair of us. “Is this the gnome head in the bed thing? Are you going to whack me?”

  “Not in the traditional ‘leave the gun, take the cannoli sense’,” I said. “But I’m going to ask you a question and I want you to think really hard about it before you answer. I want you to be as clear, concise, and well-thought-out in your response as possible. Got it?” Stacks nodded. “Are you ready?” I asked. Stacks nodded again. “What kind of fucking moron plants explosives in his own fucking yard and then welcomes guests by blowing off his own fucking front door with a shotgun?”

  Stacks shrugged. “I thought you were here to kill me.”

  “Day isn’t over yet,” I muttered.

  11

  “So I’m paranoid,” Stacks said. “It’s not like you didn’t know this about me beforehand.”

  “Paranoid is throwing salt over your shoulder and double-checking the locks on the door. Maybe watching the neighbors out the win
dow when they get close to your yard. There is no word for what you are. I can’t decide if you’re more homicidal or suicidal,” I said, setting the sawed-off down on the table. “But putting aside your mental hang-ups, I need some help.”

  “Should I just say ‘no’ now and get it over with?” Stacks asked.

  “Depends if you care about making it to tomorrow or not.”

  “Alright, what do you need, Bane?”

  “I need to know how to kill a demon.”

  Stacks shrugged. “You’ve got that exorcism rite from Gabe. Just send the bastard back downstairs.”

  “No,” I said. “I need to kill him.”

  Stacks just stared at me. “Bane, it can’t be done. Demons aren’t something you can just take some electric-shock therapy to. Yeah, I heard about your Rawhead microwave. Randy from Sand City built it for you, didn’t he?”

  “Randy’s got a big mouth,” I said. “Anyways, I know it can be done. I heard something about grinding their pelvis.” I was bluffing on the “knowing” part but I was desperate and hoping that my confidence in stating that it could be done, might shake something loose in the forest of useless information that lived inside Stacks’ head.

  “Slosh Figgins, right?” Stacks said with a grin. “Yeah, I was the one that told him about the pelvises once when he was drunk as a skunk and somehow that managed to stick in that cobweb he calls a brain. He forgot his wife’s birthday, but remembered the crap I fed him about demon pelvic bones.”

  I slumped back in my chair. “Figures. I’m running outta time, Stacks. I need to take down some big-ticket items and I mean fast.”

  “Demons, huh? How big a ticket are they?” Stacks asked.

  “My accountant won’t tell me,” I said. “But it’s got to be pretty big considering the amount of hell they raise. And this one, in particular, is apparently gunning just for me.”

  Stacks’ eyes grew wide. “Really? What makes you think that?”

  “Nya told me that some Verit snitches of hers gave it up.”

  Stacks ran a hand through his black hair, making it stand up at the back. “Well if it came from Verits, you can pretty much set your doomsday clock by it. That is if she was able to translate their babbling correctly.” Stacks cracked a grin and raised an eyebrow. “How is Nya by the way?”

  I rolled my eyes. “She’s fine and definitely still not interested in you.”

  Stacks picked at something stuck to the front of his shirt. “How do you know?”

  “Because she’s Nya and she doesn’t take too kindly to guys who screw their supposed friends over to weasel out of something they did,” I said.

  Stacks sighed. “Fair enough. But, if I help you with this, will you put in a good word for me?”

  What the hell? I loved seeing Nya get annoyed at Stacks. “Sure.”

  Stacks leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands. “There was something I heard once about a monk in the 1500s marching into Hell and killing demons with the branch of an elm tree or something, but you know how those legends are. Usually penned by some guy living in a cave eating rats, drinking his own urine, and talking to his shadow for company.”

  “Right,” I said. “Do you know anything about Soulman Spice?”

  Stacks’ gaze flicked up to meet my eyes. “You mean Soulman's Spice?”

  “I guess. Is there a difference?”

  He sat up straight. “Soulman's Spice is a piece of lore I’ve run across a few times. Supposed to be some kind of demon repellent.”

  “Like salt and holy water?”

  “Salt and holy water are a sneeze. Soulman's Spice is supposed to be like a full-on allergic reaction for demons. Maybe it could be turned into something deadly.”

  “Is it hard to come by?” I asked.

  “Might be. No one’s exactly sure what it is. The last person who mentioned it in writing died in 1515.”

  “Shit.”

  “Where’d you hear about it?” Stacks asked.

  I sighed. “This shifty bastard I know.” I straightened up. “So where would we start to look for this legend of the monk that killed demons?”

  Stacks put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. “It’s in a first edition reprinting of Latinate letters from these cloistered monks in the Cyclades.”

  I stood and started going through the piles of books nearest to me.

  “It’s not here,” Stacks said, “It’s a first edition. You think I’d let that in the same room as pizza boxes and electronics grease?”

  “Stacks, for all I know, the Queen of England, the Declaration of Independence, and the entire Terracotta Army could be hidden in all this crap,” I said.

  “I’ve been busy,” Stacks said. “Anyway, the book is in the Indianapolis library.”

  “Road trip?” Noah asked from his seat. I turned to look at him.

  “You up for it?” I asked.

  He nodded and stood. “But I’m not sitting in the middle.”

  We did our best to fit Stacks’ door back into the door frame.

  “I’m surprised the explosion didn’t bring out the boys in blue,” I said while Stacks pointlessly locked the deadbolt we were able to align, despite the fact the hinges were gone along with the middle section of the door.

  “They stopped coming out here after a while,” Stacks said. “They’d take me in but I’ve worked out a reasonable explanation for everything at my house.”

  “Explosives?” I asked.

  “Totally legal method of rodent destruction in this county.”

  “The shotgun blast?”

  “Accidental discharge while cleaning. Fairly common in this trailer park.”

  “The hacking gear?”

  “I repair computers. That’s how I make my living.”

  “The tinfoil on the windows.”

  Stacks was quiet for a second and then he said, “Cheap way to cool off the homestead in this summer heat.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. Noah opened Lucy’s door and motioned Stacks to get in first. I set the sawed-off behind the seat and put the wooden box back in the rack to give him some room.

  We all climbed in and Lucy’s size, while seemingly comfortable when I’m by myself and companionable with Noah, now seemed cramped as hell with all three of us shoulder-to-shoulder.

  “No farting, sneezing, or giggling,” I said. “We’re in so tight, that if one of us does it, they’ll be doing it for all three of us.”

  We motored through town and stopped at a four-way just in time to see the sheriff’s car rolling by in front of us. He’d already seen us so there was no use trying to hide. Stacks and I gave him a little wave. I saw the word, “fuck” form on his lips when he saw us and we were just past the intersection when we heard his siren go off and the lights on the top of his car start to dance in the rearview mirror.

  “Good ole Smoky,” I muttered. “Someone needs to teach that man how to forgive and forget.”

  “He always knows where to find me,” Stacks said. “It has to be your additional presence that has his tighty-whities in a knot.” I turned down an alley that went behind the bakery and raced up a side street.

  “There,” Stacks said, pointing to the corner house. “The Fergusons are gone this week.”