by Thom Whalen
* * *
“You Gus?” Randal asked. He didn’t bother buying me a six-pack this time. Which was okay. I still had four bottles left from the last one. Katie was a cheap date, booze wise.
The man behind the counter was about Randal’s age. However old that was. Maybe thirty. When I was eighteen, everyone over the age of majority looked old to me.
“What do you want?”
“You know a guy named Billy Paul?”
The man looked wary. “Yeah. I know Billy. What do you want with him?”
“I heard that you were tight with him.”
“You heard wrong. I barely know him.”
“When you were younger, I mean.”
“Long time ago,” Gus said. “Real long time ago. High school.” He squinted at me. “You’re too young to be a cop.” He peered at Randal. “And you’re too…” He paused to search for an apt word. He knew better than to say crazy.
“Yeah, I am,” Randal said. “We’re not cops. We just want to find someone who was tight with Billy recently. You know who that might be?”
The bell over the door tinkled. A girl who looked like a student – sandals, blue jeans, a tie-died blouse, and her long hair controlled with a thin leather headband – looked at us uncertainly.
Randal stepped back and gestured to the counter. “You got a customer,” he said to Gus.
“Fifth of Old Crow,” she said.
She appeared to be not much older than me but she ordered like it was a daily habit. Gus didn’t hesitate to put the bottle on the counter and ring it up.
As soon as she left the store, Randal said, “So who’s tight with Billy these days?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Billy’s dead. Murdered a couple of weeks ago over in Wemsley. He left some unfinished business. We’re settling it for him.”
“Gosh. Dead?” Gus’s face fell.
“Murdered.”
“Who did it?”
“Nobody knows. You got any idea?”
Gus shook his head. “Just about everybody, I guess. Billy didn’t have many friends left. Not that I knew about. Not for years. But he was sure good at making enemies.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“You didn’t know him?”
“I was just a business associate.”
“What kind of business?”
“Billy kind of business.” Randal’s tone shut down that topic. “When was the last time you saw him?”
Two young men came in the door. Before they had bought their two-four of Bud, another guy arrived. Gus didn’t seem to serve anyone over the age of twenty.
It was a good five minutes before we were alone with him again. The liquor business was good after midnight in Utica. At least, it was this close to the college.
“Summer students,” Gus said when we were alone again. “Most of them flunked classes last term so they’re trying to make them up over the summer. Most of them’ll flunk the same classes again. My best customers are on permanent academic probation.”
Gus didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would know much about college, but I guessed that if you worked around students for long enough, you picked up stuff by osmosis. Or maybe he had tried to get a degree and knew about academic probation from bitter personal experience.
“You were telling me about the last time you saw Billy,” Randal prompted.
“Yeah. Not that long ago. Maybe a month. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years and he breezed in here one evening and said that we should go out for a beer. I didn’t see any problem with talking about old times over a beer or three, so I met him at the Sundown the next afternoon. He wasn’t so keen on talking about old times. He had an agenda. He wanted to crash at my place for a while. Said he didn’t have any place to stay and wanted to sleep on my floor for a few days while he got himself set up here. I wasn’t keen on the idea because I knew that a couple of days would turn into a couple of months and I wouldn’t be the one sleeping in the bed. I had to say no a bunch of times before he accepted that I wasn’t his patsy any more. He left mad.”
“Did he say what he was going to do while he was here?”
“No specifics. Billy had lots of big plans but they were vague. He wasn’t a details kind of guy, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Randal said. “I was in business with him. Just that one deal, but I know how guys like him operate.”
Gus nodded sagely.
“These big plans of his. Did any stick in your mind?”
“Yeah. He was mostly rambling on about the Road Snakes. How they rattle and roll.”
“Road Snakes?”
“I guess it’s a motorcycle club up in the Adirondacks. He talked about them like they were going to be the new Hells Angels but I think they were mostly a bunch of wannabes.”
“In the Adirondacks?”
Gus laughed. “Yeah. I know. Can’t imagine a more unlikely place for an outlaw biker club. He figured that there’d be a member or two in every little village. They’d add up to a force. That’s what he said. That they were going to be a force.”
“And they called themselves the Road Snakes?”
“He showed me a picture of their patch. A rattlesnake coiled around a motorcycle wheel. The rocker underneath said Rattle and Roll.”
“In the Adirondacks?”
“Yeah. Not exactly rattlesnake territory. In Arizona, maybe, but in upstate New York? A blue jay perched on a sugar maple, maybe. But a rattlesnake? Not much credibility there.” Gus raised an eyebrow. “But he did have a bike. I’ll give him that. An honest-to-God chopper. Chrome engine and pipes that rumbled like an earthquake. I sure did like his bike.”
“Yeah. I know the bike. It’s a sweet ride.” Randal grinned. “You know where I can get in touch with anybody who’s in this so-called outlaw biker gang?”
Gus shook his head. “Billy didn’t name any names. Not real names. A few nicknames like Buster and Dude. That kind of thing, but I didn’t pay any attention to that. He was just blowing smoke. Trying to make it sound like this club had hundreds of members. I’d be surprised if it was more than half a dozen guys, each more whacked out than the other.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll go looking for them.”
“Try Oak Falls. It’s a little town up in the eastern Adirondacks. I think he said they had a clubhouse there.”
A couple more college kids came in, looking for beer and giving us the stink eye, so Randal and I split.
Outside, Randal asked, “How much of that do you believe?”
I’d believed it all. But now that Randal raised the question, I got to wondering. “I believe the part about the motorcycle gang. He had no reason to make that part up.”
“We’ll see,” Randal said. “We’ll see.”
My stomach churned. I didn’t want to see any motorcycle outlaws, not even a half dozen, each more whacked out than the other.
Randal drove but the ride back was uneventful, for which I was thankful. It was almost two before I got to bed and we had to work in the morning.
