Race stared down the shimmering road again and when he spoke he didn’t answer the question. “Sixty grand, up in smoke, and you can just shrug it off.”
“I didn’t shrug anything off. That’s what happened. Up in smoke.”
Race and Dean Clarke had met in Fallujah – or maybe it had been Tikrit. Clarke a medic specializing in pain management, his treatment of choice being primo dope accompanied by generous helpings of Wyclef Jean. Race’s specialties had been driving Humvees and not getting shot. The two of them had remained friends back in The World, and Clarke had come to Race half a year ago, with the idea of setting up a meth lab in Smith Lake. He figured sixty grand would get him started, and that he’d be making more than that per month in no time.
“True glass,” that had been Clarke’s pitch. “None of that cheap green shit, just true glass.” Then he’d raised his hand above his head, indicating a monster stack of cash. “Sky’s the limit, yo?”
Yo. Vince thought now he should have pulled out the minute he heard that come out of Clarke’s mouth. The very second.
But he hadn’t. He’d even helped Race out with twenty grand of his own money, in spite of his doubts. Clarke was a slacker-looking guy who bore a passing resemblance to Kurt Cobain: long blond hair and layered shirts. He said yo, he called everyone man, he talked about how drugs broke through the oppressive power of the overmind. Whatever that meant. He surprised and charmed Race with intellectual gifts: plays by Sartre, mix tapes featuring spoken word poetry and reggae dub.
Vince didn’t resent Clarke for being an egghead full of spiritual-revolution talk that came out in some bullshit half-breed language, part Pansy and part Ebonics. What disconcerted Vince was that when they met, Clarke already had a stinking case of meth mouth, his teeth falling out and his gums spotted. Vince didn’t mind making money off the shit, but had a knee-jerk distrust of anyone gamy enough to use it.
And still he put up money, had wanted something to work out for Race, especially after the way he had been run out of the army. And for a while, when Race and Clarke were hammering out the details, Vince had even half-talked himself into believing it might pay off. Race seemed, briefly, to have an air of almost cocky self-assurance, had even bought a car for his girlfriend, a used Mustang, anticipating the big return on his investment.
Only the meth lab caught fire, yo? And the whole thing burned to a shell in the space of ten minutes, the very first day of operation. The wetbacks who worked inside escaped out the windows, and were standing around, burnt and sooty, when the fire trucks arrived. Now most of them were in the county lock-up.
Race had learned about the fire, not from Clarke, but from Bobby Stone, another friend of his from Iraq, who had driven out to Smith Lake to buy ten grand worth of the mythical true glass, but who turned around when he saw the smoke and the flashing lights. Race had tried to raise Clarke on the phone, but couldn’t get him, not that afternoon, not in the evening. By eleven, The Tribe was on the highway, headed east to find him.
They had caught Dean Clarke at his cabin in the hills, packing to go. He told them he had been just about to leave to come see Race, tell him what happened, work out a new plan. He said he was going to pay them all back. He said the money was gone now, but there were possibilities, there were contingency plans. He said he was so goddamn fucking sorry. Some of it was lies, and some of it was true, especially the part about being so goddamn fucking sorry, but none of it surprised Vince, not even when Clarke began to cry.
What surprised him – what surprised all of them – was Clarke’s girlfriend hiding in the bathroom, dressed in daisy print panties and a sweatshirt that said CORMAN HIGH VARSITY. All of seventeen and soaring on meth and clutching a little .22 in one hand. She was listening in when Roy Klowes asked Clarke if she was around, said that if Clarke’s bitch blew all of them, they could cross two hundred bucks off the debt right there. Roy Klowes had walked in the bathroom, taking his cock out of his pants to have a leak, but the girl had thought he was unzipping for other reasons and opened fire. Her first shot went wide and her second shot went into the ceiling, because by then Roy was whacking her with his machete, and it was all sliding down the red hole, away from reality and into the territory of bad dream.
“I’m sure he lost some of the money,” Race said. “Could be he lost as much as half what we set him up. But if you think Dean Clarke put the entire sixty grand into that one trailer, I can’t help you.”
“Maybe he did have some of it tucked away. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But I don’t see why it would wind up with the sister. Could just as easily be in a Mason jar, buried somewhere in his backyard. I’m not going to pick on some pathetic hooker for fun. If we find out she’s suddenly come into money, that’s a different story.”
“I was six months setting this deal up. And I’m not the only one with a lot riding on it.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about how to make it right in Vegas.”
“Talk isn’t going to make anything right. Riding is. His sister is in Show Low today, but when she finds out her brother and his little honey got painted all over their ranch—”
“You want to keep your voice down,” Vince said.
Lemmy watched them with his arms folded across his chest, a few feet to Vince’s left, but ready to move if he had to get between them. The others stood in groups of two and three, bristly and road dirty, wearing leather jackets or denim vests with the gang’s patch on them: a skull in an Indian head-dress, above the legend THE TRIBE • LIVE ON THE ROAD, DIE ON THE ROAD. They had always been The Tribe, although none of them was Indian, except for Peaches, who claimed to be half-Cherokee, except when he felt like saying he was half-Spaniard or half-Inca. Doc said he could be half-Eskimo and half-Viking if he wanted, it still added up to all retard.
“The money is gone,” Vince said to his son. “The six months too. See it.”
His son stood there, the muscles bunched in his jaw, not speaking. His knuckles white on the flask in his right hand. Looking at him now, Vince was struck with a sudden image of Race at the age of six, face just as dusty as it was now, tooling around the gravel driveway on his green Big Wheels, making revving noises down in his throat. Vince and Mary had laughed and laughed, mostly at the screwed-up look of intensity on their son’s face, the Kindergarten road warrior. He couldn’t find the humour in it now, not two hours after Race had split a man’s head open with a shovel. Race had always been fast, and had been the first to catch up to Clarke when he tried to run, in the confusion after the girl started shooting. Maybe he had not meant to kill him. Race had only hit him the once.
Vince opened his mouth to say something more, but there was nothing more. He turned away, started towards the diner. He had not gone three steps, though, when he heard a bottle explode behind him. He turned and saw Race had thrown the flask into the side of the oil rig, had thrown it exactly in the place Vince had been standing only five seconds before. Throwing it at Vince’s shadow maybe.
Whisky and chunks of glass dribbled down the battered oil tank. Vince glanced up at the side of the tanker and twitched involuntarily at what he saw there. There was a word stencilled on the side and for an instant Vince thought it said SLAUGHTERIN. But no. It was LAUGHLIN. What Vince knew about Freud could be summed up in less than twenty words – dainty little white beard, cigar, thought kids wanted to fuck their parents – but you didn’t need to know much psychology to recognize a guilty subconscious at work. Vince would’ve laughed if not for what he saw next.
The trucker was sitting in the cab. His hand hung out the driver’s-side window, a cigarette smouldering between two fingers. Midway up his forearm was a faded tattoo, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR, which made him a vet, something Vince noted, in a distracted sort of way, and immediately filed away, perhaps for later consideration, perhaps not. He tried to think what the guy might’ve heard, measure the danger, figure out if there was a pressing need to haul Laughlin out of his truck and straighten him out about a thing or two.
&n
bsp; Vince was still considering it when the semi rumbled to noisy, stinking life. Laughlin pitched his ciggie into the parking lot and released his air brakes. The stacks belched black diesel smoke and the truck began to roll, tyres crushing gravel. As the tanker moved away, Vince let out a slow breath, and felt the tension begin to drain away. He doubted if the guy had heard anything, and what did it matter if he had? No one with any sense would want to get involved in their shitpull. Laughlin must’ve realized he had been caught listening in and decided to get while the getting was good.
By the time the eighteen-wheeler eased out on to the two-lane highway, Vince had already turned away, brushing through his crew and making for the diner. It was almost an hour before he saw the truck again.
Vince went to piss – his bladder had been killing him for going on thirty miles – and on his return he passed by the others, sitting in two booths. They were quiet, almost no sound from them at all, aside from the scrape of forks on plates, and the clink of glasses being set down. Only Peaches was talking, and that was to himself. Peaches spoke in a whisper, and occasionally seemed to flinch, as if surrounded by a cloud of imaginary midges . . . a dismal, unsettling habit of his. The rest of them occupied their own interior spaces, not seeing each other, staring inwardly at who-knew-what instead. Some of them were probably seeing the bathroom after Roy Klowes finished chopping up the girl. Others might be remembering Clarke face down in the dirt beyond the back door, his ass in the air and his pants full of shit and the steel-bladed shovel planted in his skull, the handle sticking in the air. And then there were probably a few wondering if they would be home in time for American Gladiators, and whether the lottery tickets they had bought yesterday were winners.
It had been different on the way down to see Clarke. Better. The Tribe had stopped just after sunup at a diner much like this, and while the mood had not been festive, there had been plenty of bullshit, and a certain amount of predictable yuks to go with the coffee and the donuts. Doc had sat in one booth doing the crossword puzzle, others seated around him, looking over his shoulder, and ribbing each other about what an honour it was to sit with a man of such education. Doc had done time, like most of the rest of them, and had a gold tooth in his mouth in place of one that had been whacked out by a cop’s nightstick a few years before. But he wore bifocals, and had lean, almost patrician features, and read the paper, and knew things, like the capital of Kenya and the players in the Wars of the Roses. Roy Klowes took a sidelong look at Doc’s puzzle and said, “What I need is a crossword with questions about fixing bikes or cruising pussy. Like what’s a four-letter word for what I do to your momma, Doc? I could answer that one.”
Doc frowned. “I’d say ‘repulse’, but that’s seven letters. So I guess my answer would have to be ‘gall’.”
“Gall?” Roy asked, scratching his head.
“That’s right. You gall her. Means you show up and she wants to spit.”
“Yeah and that’s what pisses me off about her. ’Cause I been trying to train her to swaller while I gall her.”
And the men just about fell off their stools laughing. They had been laughing just as hard the next booth over, where Peaches was trying to tell them about why he got his nuts clipped: “What sold me on it was when I saw that I’d only ever have to pay for one vasectomy . . . which is not something you can say about abortion. There’s theoretically no limit there. None. Every jizzwad is a potential budget buster. You don’t recognize that until you’ve had to pay for a couple of scrapes and begin to think there might be a better use for your money. Also, relationships aren’t ever the same after you’ve had to flush Junior down the toilet. They just aren’t. Voice of experience right here.” Peaches didn’t need jokes, he was funny enough just saying what was on his mind.
Now Vince moved past the cored out, red-eyed bunch, and took a stool at the counter beside Lemmy.
“What do you think we ought to do about this shit when we get to Vegas?” Vince asked.
“Run away,” Lemmy said. “Tell no one we’re going. Never look back.”
Vince laughed. Lemmy didn’t. He lifted his coffee halfway to his lips but didn’t drink, only looked at it for a few seconds and then put it down.
“Somethin’ wrong with that?” Vince asked.
“It ain’t the coffee that’s wrong.”
“You aren’t going to tell me you’re serious about taking off, are you?”
“We wouldn’t be the only ones, buddy,” Lemmy said. “What Roy did to that girl in the bathroom?”
“She almost shot him,” Vince said, voice low so no one else could hear.
“She wasn’t but seventeen.”
Vince did not reply and anyway no reply was expected.
“Most of these guys have never seen anything that heavy and I think a bunch – the smart ones – are going to scatter to the four corners of the earth, as soon as they can. Find a new purpose for being.” Vince laughed again, but Lemmy only glanced at him sidelong. “Listen now, Cap. I killed my brother driving blind drunk when I was eighteen. And when I woke up I could smell his blood all over me. I tried to kill myself in the Corps to make up for it, but the boys in the black pyjamas wouldn’t help me. And what I remember mostly about the war is the way my own feet smelled when they got jungle rot. Like carrying a toilet around in my boots. I been in jail, like you, and what was worst wasn’t the things I did or saw done. What was worst was the smell on everyone. Armpits and assholes. And that was all bad. But none of it has anything on the Charlie Manson shit we’re driving away from. Thing I can’t get away from is how it stank in the place. After it was over. Like being stuck in a closet where someone took a shit. Not enough air, and what there was wasn’t any good.” He paused, turned on his stool to look sidelong at Vince. “You know what I been thinking about ever since we drove away? Lon Refus moved out to Denver and opened a garage. He sent me a postcard of the Flatirons. I been wondering if he could use an old guy to twist a wrench for him. I been thinking I could get used to the smell of pines.”
He was quiet again, then shifted his gaze to look at the other men in their booths. “The half that doesn’t take a walk will be looking to get back what they lost, one way or another, and you don’t want any part of how they’re going to do it. ’Cause there’s going to be more of this crazy meth shit. This is just beginning; the tollbooth where you get on the turnpike. There’s too much money in it to quit, and everyone who sells it does it too, and the ones who do it make big fucking messes. The girl who tried to shoot Roy was on it, which is why she tried to kill him, and Roy is on it himself, which is why he had to whack her forty fucking times with his asshole machete. Who the fuck besides a meth-head carries a machete, anyhow?”
“Don’t get me started on Roy. I’d like to stick Little Boy up his ass and watch the light shoot out his eyes,” Vince told him, and it was Lemmy’s turn to laugh then. Coming up with deranged uses for Little Boy was one of the running jokes between them. Vince said, “Go on. Say your say. You been thinkin’ about it the last hour.”
“How would you know that?”
“You think I don’t know what it means when I see you sittin’ straight up on your sled?”
Lemmy grunted and said, “Sooner or later the cops are going to land on Roy or one of these other crankies and they’ll take everyone around them down with them. Because Roy and the guys like him aren’t smart enough to get rid of the shit they stole from crime scenes. None of them is smart enough not to brag to their girlfriends about what they been up to. Hell. Half of them are carrying rock right now. All I’m saying.”
Vince scrubbed a hand along the side of his beard. “You keep talking about the two halves, the half that’s going to take off and the half that isn’t. You want to tell me which half Race is in?”
Lemmy turned his head and grinned unhappily, showing the chip in his tooth again. “You need to ask?”
The truck with LAUGHLIN on the side was labouring uphill when they caught up to it around three in the
afternoon.
The highway wound its lazy way up a long grade, through a series of switchbacks. With all the curves there was no obvious place to pass. Race was out front again. After they departed from the diner, he had sped off, increasing his lead on the rest of The Tribe by so much that sometimes Vince lost sight of him altogether. But when they reached the truck, his son was riding the guy’s bumper.
The ten of them rode up the hill in the rig’s boiling wake. Vince’s eyes began to tear and run.
“Fucking truck,” Vince screamed, and Lemmy nodded. Vince’s lungs were tight and his chest hurt from breathing its exhaust and it was hard to see. “Get your miserable fat ass truck out of the way!” Vince hollered.
It was a surprise, catching up to the truck here. They weren’t that far from the diner . . . twenty miles, no more. LAUGHLIN must’ve pulled over somewhere else for a while – but there was nowhere else. Possibly he had parked his rig in the shade of a billboard for a siesta. Or threw a tyre and needed to stop and put on a new one. Did it matter? It didn’t. Vince wasn’t even sure why it was on his mind, but it nagged.
Just past the next bend in the road, Race leaned his Softail Deuce into the lane for oncoming traffic, lowered his head, and accelerated from thirty to seventy. The bike squatted, then leaped. He cut in front of the truck as soon as he was ahead of it – slipping back into the right-hand lane just as a pale yellow Lexus blew past, going the other way. The driver of the Lexus pounded her horn, but the meep-meep sound of it was almost immediately lost in the overpowering wail of the truck’s air horn.
Vince had spotted the Lexus coming and for a moment had been sure he was about to see his son go head on into it, Race one second, roadmeat the next. It took a few moments for his heart to come back down out of his throat.
“Fucking psycho,” Vince yelled at Lemmy.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 14
