Biker (6 page)

She paused, as if gathering herself. “When Moon was seven years old he went to the county fair with his father. Moon wandered off by himself. While he was walking, another boy snuck up behind him and jabbed a pin in his ass. Moon turned around. The boy was with two friends, sauntering with exaggerated innocence, fully cognizant of what he'd done. Moon followed him for the rest of the day. Found out where he lived. And then he waited. He waited for eight years, when they both were in high school. He waited for that boy after school. Every day that boy took the same shortcut home through the woods. Moon waited with a baseball bat and when the boy came, Moon sprang from hiding and broke the boy's knees. He placed the bat on the boy's throat and told him who he was. Then he stood on the bat until the boy was dead. Moon told me this and I believe him. That was his first murder.

“He said if I ever told anyone he'd kill me.”

Cass returned with the checkbook and a glass, handed the checkbook to Ginger, walked to the far end of the patio to smoke a cigarette. Cass pulled the black valise onto her lap and used it as a desk.

“I'm writing you a check for ten thousand dollars. Let me know when you need more.”

“Ginger, that's not necessary.”

“I think it is. Cass speaks very highly of you, and I trust her instincts.” She tore the check out and handed it over. “Find my little boy.”

CHAPTER 9

Cass and Pratt returned to Cass' farm with Ginger's file. Once inside they fell onto the old sofa in the living room and tore each other's clothes off. This is the life, Pratt thought, fucking her doggie style on the sofa. Cass was by far the best-looking woman he'd ever scored and he had no intention of letting her get away. Until she grew tired of him, as she inevitably would.

“Son, don't expect it to work out 'cause either she's gonna dump you or you're gonna dump her. That's just the way it is.”

But life had proved Duane wrong on a number of points so there was hope.

Pratt swallowed three ibuprofen, bungeed the file to the back of his bike and promised to call. Cass ran down the steps for a final embrace that stitched pain like a machine gun up his side and roused his dick.

“What's so funny?” Cass said, smiling.

“You are.”

“Can you ride, baby?” Cass said, hanging on to him.

“I can always ride. A cement mixer could run over me and I'd still ride. I'll call you.”

“You'd better.”

He got on his bike and cranked.

Pratt needed his computer. The computer had revolutionized investigations. Everyone and everything was up on the Internet somewhere. Half the prison population was on Facebook. Thank God Chaplain Frank Dorgan had convinced Pratt to take a computer class in prison. He had even learned how to type.

Pratt rode the back roads. He saw several deer, one of which watched him curiously as he motored by.

Dear Lord
,he prayed,
please help me find that good woman's son and grant her some peace
.

It was seven by the time Pratt pulled into his driveway and used the remote in his tank bag to open the garage door. One half the double-car garage housed his stealth Honda, a gray four door. The other half was devoted to bikes, including the basket-case chopper whose engine rested on the living room table. Old tin Harley and Indian signs hung on the wall. There was a workbench laden with tools, a motorcycle lift, an air compressor and a ten-speed Trek.

He got off the bike and collected his mail from the roadside box. Bills,
The Horse
, various come-ons. He sat at his computer in the spare bedroom he used as an office. He Googled War Bonnets. The Wikipedia entry said:

The War Bonnets Motorcycle Club is an outlaw motorcycle gang and organized crime syndicate. The club is headquartered in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and was originally formed in 1969 by Native American Vietnam veterans who were refused entry to the Hells Angels because of their race. Law enforcement officials estimate there are approximately 100 to 200 full patched (official) members
.

It has its main presence in the Upper Midwest
.

Several reports in the
Des Moines Register
about War Bonnet meth activity. Pratt Googled Eugene Moon. Nothing. He conducted a LexisN search with the same result. He Googled the Shaolin Temple and found their web page. They were indeed accepting Western students.

Last time Pratt went to Sturgis the Hells Angels had the nitrous concession. The Sons of Baal had the marijuana concession. And the War Bonnets had the meth concession. Bike Week began on Monday. Pratt had mixed feelings about Sturgis. There were good memories and bad. Over time, the good had become tainted with the bad. He hadn't been to Sturgis since before he went to prison.

Pratt was stuck. So he did something he never would have done in his previous life. He called a cop. He called MPD Detective Heinz Calloway. Calloway was on the Gang Task Force. His specialty was outlaw motorcycle gangs. Go figure.

“Calloway,” the detective answered on the second ring.

“Heinz, it's your favorite biker. I'll buy you lunch if I can pick your brain.”

“What about?”

“A missing person case involving the War Bonnets.”

Beat.

“The War Bonnets. Ain't heard that name in years. Well it just so happens lunch is open tomorrow. You can meet me on the Union Terrace at one.”

Pratt worked on the basket case engine in his living room, fitting the new S&S pistons by hand while
American Idol
played in the background. He turned the television off at ten, washed his hands and face and knelt by his bed as he had every night since his release.

Except last night.

“My Lord, I want so many things I'm ashamed. This is just a general all-purpose prayer to let you know you are in my thoughts, I'm trying like hell to love my neighbor, and please have mercy on that good woman Ginger Munz. Amen.”

He waited a minute.

“And please let Cass and me turn out well.”

CHAPTER 10

In the morning Pratt flexed his ribs. Not bad. He had to run. He'd been putting it off and putting it off. After a breakfast of cold fruit and a banana, he put on his sweats, running shoes and Brewers tank top and clipped his iPod to his belt. He went out to his driveway to stretch. George and Gracie yapped savagely at him from the top of Lowry's drive.

“Yap, you thankless bastiches,” Pratt said, feeling the pain in his ribs crackle throughout his body like static discharge. He took off down the road in long, easy strides listening to The Shazam at top volume. Every step brought a jolt flashing strobe-like through his body. The pain lessened as he ran. Or maybe he became used to it. It wasn't severe enough to keep him from running. He was used to pain.

Run it off
.

He passed a mini-mansion rising a quarter mile down the road. A mile further on, ground was broken for a strip mall. Civilization on the march. It wouldn't be long before it was solid megalopolis from Chicago to Milwaukee to Madison.

He gave it two miles before turning around, the pain a familiar throbbing presence. An old friend. The trip back was slower. He stripped the duct tape off in the shower, put on fresh jeans and a Badger T-shirt that covered the dragon. A few crude jailhouse tats peeked out from under the sleeves. He'd been meaning to have them lasered but never seemed to find the time. They might prove useful.

He spent an hour cruising the web, stopping at his favorite sites, chatting with friends he'd never met.

At twelve-thirty Pratt saddled up, locked the joint and headed into town. He found a motorcycle parking place directly across from the Student Union and backed in between two plastic-sheathed crotch rockets. Frat boys loved to cruise in shorts and flip-flops. First responders scraped them up off the pavement with spatulas. The Union was chock-a-block with students, faculty and downtown workers looking for shade on the broad terrace overlooking Lake Mendota.

Pratt went up the broad steps past the Socialist Workers Party, Vegan Sisterhood, Committee to Eradicate Capitalism and the Freedom From Religion Society. In the crowded lobby students and businessmen lined up for a scoop of Babcock Hall ice cream. He walked through the Stithskeller and the Rathskeller, studious moles with their noses in laptops, Germanic heraldry on the wall, out the double doors to the patio where a hundred people lounged at round green tables beneath the shade of a towering oak. Two toddlers played precariously on Paul Bunyan's chair while their mothers laughed and talked.

Calloway raised a hand from a table beneath the oak. Pratt put the valise on the table and sat. “How'd you get this table, Heinz?”

“Got lucky. Now you want to feed me before you ask what you're gonna ask? My stomach thinks my mouth has died and gone to hell.”

“What are you having?”

“I'll take a cheeseburger with a side of kraut and a Capitol lager.”

Pratt went down the steps to the outside grill where four students did a steady business in charcoal-grilled meats and drinks. He stood in line. A girl with a diamond nose stud took his order. He returned to the table with a platter containing their food.

Calloway waited while Pratt sat and folded his hands. “Thank you Jesus for this food we are about to eat.”

“Amen.”

Calloway grabbed the burger in both hands. “Give a man a minute.” He wore a white short-sleeved dress shirt, a red tie with a gold pig tack and pants so sharp you could cut cheese in the crease. He chowed down with gusto. No drop of ketchup landed on his shirt.

Heinz Calloway was a six foot five black man with a drifting eye. It wasn't lazy. Nothing about Calloway was lazy. The eye looked disconcertingly to the sky while the other eye pinned you. Calloway used the eye to masterly effect during interrogations. As a youth he'd briefly joined the Jitterbugs, an all-black Milwaukee based MC. The initiation involved smoking a bowl of crack at one hundred miles per hour. Calloway got out before he committed a felony and enlisted in the Army, where he'd trained as a military policeman.

He had a PhD in criminology and rode a Victory.

Pratt dug into his cheeseburger. He finished half before coming up for air. While Calloway ate Pratt filled him in on the job. “I figure my best bet is to find Moon.”

Calloway pushed the tray away and took out a spiral pad. “Eugene Moon,” he said while he wrote. “The War Bonnets are so fucking crazy even the Hells Angels give them a wide berth. Keyser Söze crazy. They had a feud going with the Sons of Baal in Pueblo. Sons of Baal vowed to kill the local War Bonnet prez' family. Wife and two kids. So he killed them himself before the SOB could find them. Strangled the wife and drowned the kids in the bathtub. Then he went to war on the SOB and killed three of them before he was gunned down in a House of Pancakes parking lot. I'll try to dig that up and send it to you.”

“Eugene Moon?”

Calloway shrugged, eye on the sky. “That was a long time ago. Rotsa ruck, as they say. I'll run it through the NCIC. Gimme a call tomorrow.”

“Sturgis starts on Monday. The War Bonnets have the meth franchise at the Buffalo Chip.”

“I would rather crawl a mile through broken glass than spend a night at the Buffalo Chip,” Calloway said. “You might check with the hospital where the boy was born. Some of them take fingerprints of newborns.”

“Is that legal?”

Calloway shrugged. “Who knows? Sixteen years is a long time. Good luck with that. You going to church?”

“Yeah.”

“What church?”

“Resurrection Life. It's out near New Glarus.”

Calloway held his hand out. They did the soul clasp. “Stay strong with Christ, brother.”

Calloway heaved himself to his feet. Putting the spiral pad in a hip pocket, he headed toward the visitor's parking lot along the lakefront.

Pratt found a pay phone in the Union, which he preferred to his cell phone for sound quality. Included in the papers Ginger had given him was Eric's birth certificate at Our Lady of the Redeemer Hospital in Beloit. He bounced from administrator to administrator before landing with a woman in Records.

“Excuse me, what is your interest?” the woman said.

Pratt explained.

“Well there's a problem. The hospital moved in 1998 and the old building was demolished. A lot of records were lost.”

“Didn't you put the records on a computer?”

“They should have, but I'm not finding anything. They could be in there but who knows under what program or heading? I'm sorry Mr. Pratt. We don't have the time to conduct an exhaustive search. We have our hands full just keeping up with the flow of patients.”

Pratt thanked the woman and hung up. He stopped at the bank on the way home, deposited his two checks and took out two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. When he got home he phoned Ginger. She sounded weak.

“Hello?”

“Ginger, Josh Pratt. Sorry to bother you.”

“No bother. What can I do for you?”

“You said Moon was an Indian.”

“He claimed to be part Lakota, and he did have an Indian cast to his features. The dark hair and complexion. He used to scare the bejeezus out of grown men with his crazy Sioux witch doctor act.”

“Did he mention what tribe? Any relatives?”

“No. He never said. All I know it was in South Dakota somewhere.”

“Thank you.”

Pratt was feverish with excitement. It was almost as if Jesus had given him this assignment to pull him out of his funk and point him in the right direction. To find a little boy stolen sixteen years ago. It was a hell of a lot more satisfying than finding a couple of schnauzers or even the Ducatis. Pratt's own father had abandoned him at a Bosselman's truck stop one frigid December evening in Nebraska when he was sixteen, the year Eric was born.

It was one-thirty in the evening and they were on the move, running from angry women, bill collectors and the police. Omaha. Duane had been running his roofing scam, duping little old ladies out of their life's savings in exchange for little to no work on their roofs. They lived out of Duane's old F-150. Duane got drunk, got in a fight with a bouncer at the Dew Drop Inn, got his face smashed in and his ass thrown out the door. Pratt watched it all from a booth in the deepest part of the bar, trying to withdraw in upon himself, trying to be invisible.