Dark Rain: 15 Short Tales (14 page)

here were about twenty of them. And only one of me.

I liked my odds.

Actually, I didn’t. But I also liked to maintain a sense of positive expectation, even while a half-dozen faces turned simultaneously toward me, squinting through the smoke.

One of them rose straight up from a log. I briefly wondered where they had gotten a log in the desert while I stiff-armed the guy, sending him spinning and stumbling back over the same log that may or may not have been indigenous to the region.

Although most eyes were on me, I still hadn’t attracted the attention of the man I wanted most, a man lounging in a wicker chair near the big fire and chatting up a young female, herself sitting on a flat piece of driftwood. Misplaced logs and driftwood? Someone in this group had to be a closet beachcomber.

She spotted me first, eyes widening. I didn’t fault her. My eyes would widen too if I saw me coming.

Now I heard the whispery sound of heat being withdrawn, hammers snapped back, and shotguns pumped. I also heard the snap of switchblades.

I stepped around the fire. Someone stood quickly from a plastic chair. That someone got kicked back into said plastic chair, to tumble ass backwards into the sand. People moved toward me, but I had a bead on the man in the wicker chair.

A man who finally looked at me.

I could have been wrong—and the evening light was murky at best—but I was fairly certain his left eye was washed out, like a broken egg yolk in a sunny side up that got away from the chef. According to Camry, he was blind in the washed-out eye. I might have felt sad for him, except that I caught sight of the girl next to him, a girl sporting fresh bruises along her arms and upper thighs.

Steel Eye was faster than I expected. He was up and moving, reaching behind his back, and withdrawing a pearl-handled revolver.

Or rather, trying to.

Turns out I’m pretty fast too, especially now that my leg had been healed by God. Funny story.

I took two long strides and just as Steel Eye was bringing his weapon up, I drove my fist straight into his mouth and heard a sound that I knew to be teeth breaking.

The punch was delivered with a lot of momentum, too. Not to mention I had put all of my weight in it. The result was pure mayhem. If Steel Eye wasn’t such a big son of a bitch himself, I might have broken his neck. As it was, his head snapped back, and he staggered backwards. He would have fallen if I had hadn’t grabbed his collar and spun him around. I brought up my own gun and pressed it against his temple, then faced the others. A half-dozen guns of varying shapes and sizes were pointed at us.

“What?” I grinned, perhaps a little too big. “Do I have something in my teeth?”

y punch had been a little harder than I had intended. Blame it on adrenalin. And having all those weapons pointed at my back.

The result was that Steel Eye was mostly limp in my hands and I was doing all the work of keeping the son-of-a-bitch on his feet. He stood maybe an inch or two shorter than me and had shoulders nearly as wide. Both of which made keeping him up on his feet while I held a gun to his head all the more difficult. Luckily, I thrive in difficult situations. Or so I tell myself.

“Who the fuck are you?” asked the girl who was standing now. She had a tasteful skull tattooed on her stomach, the teeth of which were biting down on her bellybutton.

“I might have made a wrong turn somewhere.” I shrugged, holding Steel Eye mostly up on his feet. “Does anyone know where the IHOP is?”

A handful of bikers took a step forward. That handful had enough facial hair to carpet a small dining room. Shag, of course.

“What the fuck?” one said. Hard to tell who said what, since there were a lot of them and the firelight only reached so far.

“That’s what I said,” I agreed. Steel Eye was coming back to the land of the living, grunting and shaking his head. I held him even tighter, digging the Walther into his temple. He was in for a rude awakening, literally. “Here I am looking for an IHOP. The guy at the gas station said to make a right at the dirt road to nowhere.” I nodded. “Come to think of it, I made a left at the dirt road to nowhere.”

“Let him go,” said a big black guy who was, yes, even bigger than me.

“No can do,” I said. “Steel Pecker and I are going down in a blaze of glory. Okay, that might have been more suggestive than I intended.”

“Get him,” said the big black guy.

“Take another step toward me, and I blow your intrepid leader’s brains out.”

The intrepid leader was putting two-and-two together. He was also now fully awake. He struggled in my arms, but I was stronger. I knew this because I was stronger than most people. He fought me briefly, then gave up, especially when I dug my gun harder into his temple. Steel Eye might have grunted. Then again, that might have been me.

The two guys on either side of me stopped inching toward me. They looked uncertain. Steel Eye waved them away. Then he tried to speak, but gave that up quickly enough. My forearm, I was certain, was crushing his larynx.

“You shoot him,” said the black guy. “And we shoot you.”

Steel Eye didn’t like this logic. He gestured toward his men to back the fuck off; that is, if I correctly interpreted his frantic waving. The two guys to my right and left did just that, backing into the shadows. Meanwhile, Steel Eye and I backed up against the boulder behind us, removing the possibility of someone getting a potshot behind me. I suppose someone could always drop from above. But that was a big boulder, and these guys were drunk.

“You’re a dead man,” said the black guy who, come to think of it, might have been the official spokesperson for the Devil’s Triangle.

“There’s a very good chance that a lot of us might die tonight,” I said. “Steel Eye would be the first.” I gave the black guy the hard stare. “And you would be the second. What happens after that, I leave to the fates. Or to divine providence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means God will decide who lives and dies. But not you, my friend. I kill you next.”

The black guy blinked. I don’t think he liked me. “Well, fuck you, asshole.”

Yup, definitely didn’t like me. “That’s the spirit.”

“He can’t breathe,” said another guy.

“He’s not supposed to breathe,” I said. “He’s supposed to listen.”

Still, I loosened my grip a little. Truth was, he
was
fighting for breath.

“Fine, motherfucker.” A young guy held his gun out toward me. “The fuck do you want?”

“What I want,” I said, and then tightened my grip on their esteemed leader, “is for all of you to throw your weapons aside.”

“Fuck that and fuck you.” He held the gun out, pointed at my face. A clean shot would get me. He was too drunk for a clean shot.

Steel Eye motioned frantically, and slowly, one by one, they all tossed aside their weapons. Most landed in some nearby bushes that, I suspected, doubled as urinals.

“The knives, too,” I said. “Anyone knows that any biker worth his salt has a knife or two. Go on.”

They did so. A half-dozen blades flashed through the night air, to disappear out of the firelight and in the surrounding shrubs.

“Now,” I said. “Let’s talk.”