by Steph Post
“Let us pray, brothers and sisters. Let us pray for the strength to obey God’s will.”
Only Felton remained with his eyes wide open.
Jack O’ Lantern snapped his lighter shut and shoved it deep down into his pocket. He inhaled deeply and kept the smoke in his lungs as long as he could. When he finally blew the stream of smoke out, it caught in his throat and he bent over double, wheezing and coughing. The group of men standing near the row of bikes glanced his way, but he shot them a dirty look. He needed time to think and they weren’t helping.
The smell of smoke had finally dissipated and the ground was cool to the touch where the fire had burned, but a strange black ring remained around the entire circumference of the clubhouse, smudged in places, but still clearly visible in the hazy morning light. The unnaturalness of the dark mark bothered him, as well as its placement. How had it been done at all? Jack O’ Lantern shook his head and turned his back to the clubhouse.
The woods beyond the fence were already alive with the sounds of cicadas and other summer insects. The increasing heat was bringing them, and their racket, to life. Over the din, Jack could hear traffic in the distance from the highway. Behind him, he could hear gravel being scuffed and kicked around as the Scorpions stood about in the yard, drinking watery gray coffee and inspecting each other’s bikes. Ratface and Toadie began shadow boxing each other and creating a rolling diatribe of insults to each other’s sisters, mothers and girlfriends. They were restless and trying to find a way to shed their nervous energy. Jack tilted his head upward. The morning had started off with a heavy blanket of stifling, dirty clouds, but they were slowly thinning. A faint stain of blue was beginning to bleed across the sky. A buzzard circled lazily on an air current, but otherwise the endless space above him was empty. Only in the sky could one find silence. He watched the buzzard until he heard a single engine plane droning in the distance and then he gave up. He couldn’t get her voice out of his head: If I don’t get my money before the evening service on Wednesday, you will experience baptism by fire. And after that, well, there is always dynamite. Do you understand? Jack O’ Lantern pulled his cigarette from his lips and stomped it into the gravel. He understood all right.
Slim Jim sidled up next to him and clapped him on the shoulder.
“We gotta talk about this, Jack.”
Jack O’ Lantern shrugged Slim Jim’s hand away.
“What do we know about last night?”
Slim Jim scratched the side of his face. The sticky air was already causing both of them to sweat.
“What we know is shit.”
Jack O’ Lantern turned on him.
“What does that mean, Jimmy? Where were the guys on guard? Whose ass do I need to feed to the wood chipper?”
Slim Jim looked over at the men standing around the motorcycles. Everyone was quiet now, standing still, pretending like they didn’t care what Slim Jim and Jack O’ Lantern were talking about.
“Tiny and Ratface were supposed to be on the perimeter. Tiny said he ducked inside to pop some more Percocet and Ratface didn’t know Tiny had left so he went inside to take a leak. I guess the fire started just about as he was shaking his dick off. They couldn’t have been inside for more than five minutes.”
“Are you kidding me? What is this? The damn boy scouts would do a better job watching this place. A guy’s gotta take a piss, he can use the side of the house! Jesus H. Christ!”
Jack’s face was becoming the same shade as his hair. He turned his back on the Scorpions and marched over to the edge of the lot. He stood with his hands in his pockets for a moment, his shoulders hunched up, and then he lashed a kick at the chain link fence. It sprung back and wobbled and Jack kicked at it again. Slim Jim waited patiently for Jack O’ Lantern to come back to him. When he did, his face was still flaming, but Jack seemed to be doing his best to keep his temper under control. He ground his teeth and stared down at his boots.
“All right. I’ll deal with Tiny and Ratface later. What about the security cameras? They had to record something.”
Slim Jim shook his head slowly.
“That’s the thing, Jack. I been over all the tapes. I could even see Ratface walking up the steps into the house. Then, they all go blank.”
“What’d you mean, they all go blank?”
“I mean, on camera two, thirty seconds after you see Ratface go up the steps, the tape goes blank. They all do, at the same time. Nothing but snow. The next thing you can see is us running around like a bunch of retarded ants trying to put the fire out.”
Jack O’ Lantern glared at Slim Jim.
“You have got to be shitting me.”
“I’m serious, man. And that’s all we got. I don’t even know how they got in here. Our padlock was still on the gate and I already checked the whole fence. Nothing’s been cut. It don’t make no sense.”
Jack O’ Lantern looked up at the top of the fence, strung with razor wire.
“Could they have gone over?”
“Maybe. I’m not sure what difference it makes. All that matters is that in less than five minutes some freaks got through the gate, drew a perfect circle around the clubhouse with God knows what, lit a match, and got out without us knowing a thing. Who does that preacher bitch have working for her?”
Jack O’ Lantern looked sharply at Slim Jim.
“You gotta quit saying that. We don’t know who it was.”
Slim Jim shook his head in disgust.
“Come off it, Jack. We gotta stop playing around. These guys got a right to know who they’re dealing with. They’re not dumb enough to think this was just the Cannons. Or, well, not all of them are dumb enough. Either way, they deserve to know what’s going on. You got Toadie over there talking about voodoo and ghosts and God knows what else. Some of the guys are freaked out, man. You gotta deal with that.”
Jack O’ Lantern glanced up at the group of men trying not to look at him.
“Okay.”
“I mean it. You tell them about Tulah, or I will.”
“I said okay!”
Jack O’ Lantern took a deep breath to calm himself and then walked over to the line of motorcycles. Toadie and Legs moved aside and Jack joined the ragged circle. Slim Jim stayed standing slightly behind him. Jack O’ Lantern looked into the faces of his men and realized that Slim Jim was right; they were scared. These were men who were comfortable with slashing tires and banging skulls. They were not men who knew how to handle waking up inside a ring of fire. The prospects looked like they were on the verge of deserting, if only they had the key to the padlock on the fence, and Legs wore an expression somewhere between being pissed off and needing to puke. Tiny was crunching on another pain pill as he wobbled on his crutches and seemed only half aware of what was going on around him. And this was it. This was his crew. Two scared kids, two men questioning his judgment and a guy with a bum leg and a pocket full of dope.
Oren would have walked straight up to Ratface and punched him in the jaw. Then he would have kicked Tiny’s good leg out from underneath him. He would have stood there with his thick arms crossed over his barrel chest and roared, asking if anyone else wanted more of the same. Jack O’ Lantern had seen it happen many times before. Oren would have cowed the Scorpions into doing exactly what he wanted; he would have made them afraid. And most importantly, Oren wouldn’t have let some crackpot woman preacher get the best of him. Jack O’ Lantern was pretty sure if his uncle knew about the fire, he’d be rolling in his grave. Or clawing his way up out of the pine box to strangle Jack for letting it happen.
Jack O’ Lantern spit on the ground at his feet and met the eyes of the club.
“I don’t want to talk about blame right now.”
Legs rolled his eyes and shot Ratface a dirty look. He mumbled something under his breath, but Jack ignored it.
“I don’t want to talk about the fire neither, because that just goes back to blame and we don’t got the time or the man power to start playing that game. We gotta fo
cus on what we’re doing right now. What we’re doing today. You hear me?”
Tiny shifted his weight awkwardly and cleared his throat.
“Are we talking bout the Cannons? You think it was the Cannons?”
Jack O’ Lantern kept his voice steady.
“I think it was the Cannons.”
Jack could hear Slim Jim huffing behind him.
“So we need to deal with them.”
Legs grunted.
“And how we gonna do that, huh? Stay holed up here all day again, shooting pool and taking turns being on the lookout for arsonists? Standing around with our dicks in our hands? That ain’t working, Jack.”
Jack O’ Lantern nodded.
“I know. So we’re not sitting around no more waiting for them to just show themselves or roll up on us.”
“Then what?”
“We’re going old school, boys. It’s time we quit playing around and we got back to basics. Practice is over. It’s time we set the trap.”
JUDAH CLIMBED over to the passenger side of the Bronco and leaned his elbow out the window.
“You want to go over it again?”
Ramey bit her bottom lip and then nodded from the driver’s seat of her car. The two vehicles were parked side by side in the same turnoff where Judah and Levi had hidden their truck in only a few days before. The Bronco and the Cutlass barely fit abreast in the narrow drive, but both were hidden far back enough from the main highway by the low hanging pine boughs and high scrub. Ramey slid her hands up and down the steering wheel a few times before looking over at Judah through her rolled down window and reciting the plan back to him.
“We hear the first set of motorcycles take off and listen for which way they’re gonna go.”
“From the sounds I heard in the woods yesterday, they’re most likely gonna head north again. They probably have a set run, a set route they take for trying to lead someone on.”
Ramey picked at the rubber seal on her window.
“Right. So the bikes take off, we listen, and then I take off after the first group.”
Judah glanced toward the highway.
“Yep. Just tail em. Don’t get too close, but make sure they know you’re back there. Make sure they know you took the bait.”
“Okay.”
“I should be able to hear the next set of bikes not long after you leave. They’ll be following behind the first set, hoping the lure worked and they hooked someone on the line. So again, don’t go too fast. You want the guys behind you to have seen you, so they think they’ve got you sandwiched between them.”
“All eyes on me, huh?”
Judah reached across the space between them and tapped the lip of her window.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be right behind the second set. Far enough back that they’ll think I’m just another car on the highway. They should be so focused on thinking their trap worked, that they snared you, hopefully they won’t be concerned about another car way back behind them.”
“Hopefully.”
“Ramey, I mean it. I won’t let those bikes outta my sight. They’re not gonna get to you.”
She nodded slowly, watching the road through the glare of her windshield.
“And I just keep following the first two guys.”
“Until you get up near Kentsville. When you see the sign for the Wal-Mart right off the highway, you turn sharp. Turn into the parking lot, but stay on the outer edge so your car is still visible. As soon as you see the bikes come up behind you, drive up to the front. The Scorpions won’t want to roll up on you that close to the store. They’ll hang in the back of the lot, trying to figure out what to do and I’ll be right behind them.”
Ramey shook her head and frowned.
“Judah, I don’t know. If there’s two of them and you’re by yourself…”
He cut her off.
“It’ll be fine. It works because I’ll have the element of surprise. The whole time they thought they were trapping you, I’m actually trapping them. And it’s not like we’re going to OK Corral it out among the minivans. They’re gonna want to talk to me, remember? It’s just gonna be on my terms now, not theirs.”
“Is that what they wanted to do with Benji? Just talk?”
Judah sighed.
“Look at me.”
Ramey shifted in her seat so she was facing Judah across their open windows. Her lips were turned down in worry.
“Nothing like that’s gonna happen to me. You gotta trust me, okay? I’ll handle it.”
“And you think you’re gonna get the answers you need from them?”
Judah shrugged his shoulders slightly.
“I hope so. I don’t know what else to do. You just get to that Wal-Mart and stay up by the front. You get scared, you leave your car in the fire lane and get your ass inside the store. Get around people and you should be safe.”
In the distance, they could hear the faint roar of a motorcycle engine. Ramey started to speak, but Judah held up his finger for her to be quiet. Ramey touched her keys hanging from the ignition and listened to the sound grow loud for a moment and then begin to fade again. She looked to Judah and he nodded once.
“The sound is going away from us, so they turned north. All right, you got this?”
Ramey turned the ignition, but didn’t answer him. Judah reached out through the window and grabbed her hand.
“You got this?”
Ramey looked Judah in the eyes and forced a tight smile to her lips. Judah squeezed her hand.
“Ramey?”
She let go of his hand and gripped the steering wheel.
“I got it.”
Ramey put her foot on the gas and swung out onto the highway. When she curved around the bend, she could see the two motorcycles far up ahead on the straightaway. She sped up until she gauged that she was at the right following distance and then held steady. Ramey didn’t look down Lightning Strike Road as she passed it, but she was hoping she’d been seen; she only wanted to go through this once. The bikes ahead of her swung around a lazy curve and when Ramey followed, she could no longer see the stretch of highway behind her.
For five minutes she saw only the bikes in front of her. The road was continually twisting and she lost sight of the motorcycles a few times, but with her windows rolled down she could always hear their engines growling and whenever she came upon a straight track of road she could glimpse them up ahead. Neither Scorpion was wearing a helmet and one had a long ponytail whipping behind him. She kept shifting her eyes back and forth from their dingy red and white Scorpion patches to the empty road behind her reflected in the rearview mirror. A light blue work van passed by too close as they went around a tight curve, but that was the only other vehicle she saw until they came upon a long straightaway with a fallow field stretched along one side. She swerved to avoid yet another deep, pitted pothole and when she glanced back up at the rearview mirror she caught a glimpse of what she’d been looking for: about half a mile back, two more motorcycles were obviously on her tail.
Ramey’s heartbeat sped up but she took a deep breath and forced her eyes back on the road in front of her. It had worked; the Scorpions had taken the bait and now all she had to do was keep it steady until they bumped over the railroad tracks and she could swing off into the store parking lot. She tried not to think about the fact that she was now trapped between four dangerous bikers who most likely thought she was Sherwood Cannon. She knew that what she was doing was risky. A hundred different things could go wrong and it felt like Judah had stayed up half the night with her, listing them and coming up with backup plan after backup plan. Ramey had begun to suspect that he was trying to offer her a way out from going along with him, but she never took it and so he never outright said it.
She came up to another long straightaway and Ramey realized that they were almost there. It had been years since she had been up to Kentsville, and even longer than that since she had come by this route, but she approximated the distance and figured they were o
nly about three miles away now. It was mostly a straight shot, with only a few more curves, and she knew she’d be seeing the bikes behind her again. She checked her speed, trying to decide how close she should let herself get to both sets of Scorpions. They were about a mile down the straightaway when Ramey began to get uneasy. Every time she glanced up into the rearview mirror she saw only the road. Where were the motorcycles behind her? How had she gotten so far ahead?
Ramey slowed down and kept her eyes on the mirror. The uneasy feeling was growing into uncertainty. Judah had told her to just focus on what was ahead of her, to only worry about getting to the parking lot, but she knew that she should have been able to see the bikes behind her now. Just as she was coming up to the curve ahead, she heard the sound of motorcycle engines roaring and realized it was coming from the bikes in front of her. She sped up, but as she went through the lazy S-bend in the highway the uncertainty escalated into stabbing panic. Something was definitely changing. She stomped down on the gas, but when she came out of the last curve the straightaway ahead of her was empty. Ramey’s jaw dropped. They were gone.
Judah had told to her to get the parking lot no matter what, but now Ramey slowed down to a crawl. She had lost the Scorpions she was following and she had no idea what had happened to the ones following her. She knew it was dangerous to wait, but she pulled off parallel to the road in the entrance to a sandy driveway. She craned her neck out the window to look behind her, but the motorcycles were nowhere in sight. She picked up her cellphone from the cup holder between the seats and dialed Judah. The phone rang six times, but there was no answer. Ramey snapped the phone shut. Her heart was racing and she could feel the blood pounding in her temples. She looked straight ahead down the road in front of her and then twisted back around to look behind her again. The road was deserted in both directions. Even if something had happened to the Scorpions tailing her, she should have been able to see Judah by now. Her breath was coming in short gasps and she blinked her eyes rapidly as she tried to decide what to do.
She looked down at the cellphone in her lap. Something had gone wrong with the plan, she knew, but why wasn’t Judah answering his phone? Why hadn’t he called her if there was a change? She picked up the cellphone and stared at it like it was poisonous. She was afraid to call again. Afraid she would hear only the six rings and then silence. Ramey squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again to look down the road. Empty. She hit redial and brought the phone to her ear. No answer. It kept ringing. No answer. No answer.
