Free Fall in Crimson (10 page)

"Watch what?"

"He's into body art, and this one is kinda pukey, but it's what she wants, I guess. Go on through to the second room there."

When I opened the door and went in and shut it behind me, Ted looked up from his work and said our traditional greeting. "Hi, sarge."

"How you, lieutenant?"

"Come see what you think of this."

He had his wheelchair rolled up close to a cot which was elevated on four concrete blocks. A doughy broad-faced young girl lay on the cot. Her denim shorts were on a nearby chair. She wore a yellow T-shirt, and she was naked from the waist down. Ted had his tray of needles and dyes close at hand. There was a broad strip of masking tape placed to keep her big dark bush of pubic hair pulled down out of the way so that he could start his design right at the hair roots. It was almost done. It was a pattern of three mushrooms, growing up that white-as-lard lower belly, chubby romanticized mushrooms, the kind under which would squat a Disney elf. There was a book open nearby with a color drawing of three mushrooms growing in a cluster. Ted had simplified the drawing somewhat.

He went to work. The girl compressed her lips and closed her eyes. The needle machine buzzed.

The window air conditioner rattled and thumped. She snorted and her belly muscles quivered.

"It's wearing off again," she said. "Jesus!"

"Almost through. Hang on."

It took about five minutes more. The buzzing stopped. He caught a corner of the tape and ripped it free.

"Ouch! Goddamn it, that hurt!"

"Stop being such a baby, Lissa. Go look at yourself."

She swung her legs off the couch and slipped down to the floor and walked over to a narrow wall mirror. She had a white hippo rump, a bushel of meat jiggling and flexing as she walked.

She stared at herself and giggled and said, "Wow. This's gonna blast ol' Ray right out of his skull."

"I can believe it," Ted said.

She came walking back and picked up her shorts. Before she put them on she gave me a speculative look and said, "Whaddaya think?"

"Well, I'd say it's unusual."

"You bet your ass it's unusual. And I got your word of sacred honor, right, Ted? Nobody else gets the same thing?"

"Not from me, they don't. Even if they get down on their knees and beg."

She put her shorts on and fastened the snaps. He said, "Here, I forgot. Rub this into the design now and when you go to bed and in the morning. It's an antiseptic cream. For three or four days. Don't forget. No, go in the can and do it, hon. I'm a little tired of looking at you."

She shrugged and left, slinging her big plastic purse over her plump shoulder.

When the door shut, Ted said, "Play your cards right, Trav, and you could cut a piece of that."

He rolled himself over to the sink with his tray of equipment.

"'Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who's the fairest one of all?' I think I'd be overcome by all that gentle beauty. You know, you're pretty good at that, Blaylock."

"Necessity is the mother of income. Tattooing is very very big lately. You should see my dragons and snakes. The mushrooms took a little over an hour. For eighty bucks. I've got one crazy broad for a customer, I've put over a thousand dollars' worth of dye under her hide. Very
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strange stuff. No anesthetic cream for her. The thing for her is that the pain of the needle is a turn-on. It's all a marine motif. Dolphins and pirates and old ships; mermaids, things like that. I wish you could see her. Unlike dumpy little Lissa, she's got a hell of a nice bod. Too nice for what she's having done to it."

I sat down beside his desk, and when he came rolling over I got a better look at him. He was even thinner than before. His color was bad and his thinning hair looked dead.

"You feeling all right?" I asked.

"Not too damn wonderful. Like they told me in the beginning, I'm severed so high up, I got what they called a limited life expectancy."

"Where's Big Bess?"

"Well, there was a very very flashy Colombiano pistolero came in, and he really took to her, she being about twice his height and weight, and she was tired of waiting on a paraplegic crip, so now he has her stashed down in the Hotel Mutiny there, eating chocolates and watching the soaps, while he is out around town gunning down the competition. But I've got Mits, my little Indian, and she is a wonder. She's quicker and better and a lot cleaner than Bess. And my God, that little bod is strong. She can pick me right up and walk with me. Loyal as hell. I wonder why I put up with Bess for so long. Or she with me."

"Business going okay?"

"Real well. I really like this body-art work."

"You draw pretty pictures."

"That was what I was going to be, several thousand years ago. I had two years at Parsons." I knew we were both thinking of what had come after that. Basic training, OCS, battlefield promotion, and finally a morning of hard cold rain and incoming mortar fire when I had helped carry the litter down the hill and prop it in the weapons carrier.

"In the VA hospital," he said, "I did a lot of sketches of the guys. I wanted to try to be a commercial artist-not enough mobility to make it. Then this came along. I studied up, mail-ordered the gear, started practicing on my friends. It's a gas. Want one on the arm? Eagle?

Anchor? Hi, Mom? Semper Fidelis? F.T.W.?"

"No, thanks a lot. I always figure a tattooed man either got so sloppy drunk he didn't know what was happening, or he needed to have a tattoo to look at to reassure himself he was manly. That F.T.W. is what's on the T-shirt out there, on Mits. What is it?"

"It's been around awhile, Trav. It's the outlaw biker's creed. It stands for Fuck the World."

"Oh.

"Something special on your mind?"

"I shouldn't come out here and ask for favors."

"This is the second time in ... what is it? ... Anyway, lots of years. I just hope to hell there's something I can do."

I leaned back and rested the heel of one boat shoe on the corner of his desk. "What I need to know is how much the bike clubs are into the drug traffic."

He closed his eyes for a moment. It accentuated the death look of the long bones of his skull.

"So far, the question is too loose. The answer is too complicated."

"Ramble a little."

"Well, take the Fantasies. The insignia is the black fist and the yellow lightning, with a red circle around it. With the local affiliated clubs they could maybe put five to six hundred machines on the road, as against the two thousand the Bandidos could mount out west. Now most of these guys are factory workers and warehousemen and mechanics and such. They have meets and shows, smoke pot, wear the sincere raggedy garments and heavy boots, get tattooed, sport a lot of chains and medals, grow big bushy beards, zoom around on weekends with their so-called foxy ladies hanging on behind, drink a lot of beer, smoke a lot of pot, blow coke. What they have, Tray, is a kind of brotherhood hang-up. Anybody is in trouble, they all help. They look a hell of a lot nastier than they are. It's a charade. You get hard with them, they'll stomp you flat
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into the ground. But if there's no provocation, they have nothing to prove.

"Now as to trafficking in drugs, the story is a little different. There are the club officers, with what the law calls no visible means of support. The officers are the link between the troops and the drug importers and distributors, the money washers, the mafia accountants. Now say we take some group leader captain, call him Mother Machree, and he gets hold of one of the troops, Tom Baloney, and he tells Tom that when he gets off work at the body shop he is to go to the corner of First and Main and sit idling his engine and somebody will hand him a package, and he's to run it up to such and such a corner in Hialeah, weaving around through the back streets, shaking any tail, and get there at seven on the nose and hand it to the woman in the red dress who asks him how many miles he gets to the gallon in that thing he's riding."

"What's the payoff to Baloney?"

"That's one of the points I want to make. He gets the knowledge that he has been full of brotherhood and loyalty, and he knows that Mother Machree will toss five hundred bucks into the pot for the next beer bust. But the troops are getting restless. They know that maybe Mother got six thou for setting up that foolproof run, and there's the feeling around that maybe the officers are getting too far into the business. Some of them have taken to wearing the corporation garments, blow-dry hairstyles, limos with Cuban drivers. Too much separation between the officers and the troops. That is the kind of bitching I hear. They are being used, and they know it."

"Do any of the troops do any retailing on their own?

"It could happen, but I don't think it would be a big thing. It really wouldn't go with the image they try to project. It would have to be a situation where there was a heavy cash-flow problem; a man out of work. Or maybe a favor for a friend."

"Suppose a man in Lauderdale got a call that somebody would meet him at such and such a time way up the line, over a hundred miles away. And when he went up there to buy, the man who called him wasted him, and though there were no witnesses, maybe the machine the biker was using was identified as to make."

"Recently or way back?"

"Two years in July."

"That's very heavy action, Sergeant McGee. What kind of machine?"

I dug the piece of paper out of my shirt pocket. "The man who saw the track says it was the rear K-One-twelve of a set of ContiTwins, deep enough to indicate a quarter-ton machine, so he guessed a BMW Nine-seventy-two."

"Pretty reasonable guess. But it could have been an HD, or a Gold Wing Honda, or a Kawasaki KZ series, or a big Laverda or Moto Guzzi, or a GS series Suzuki, or an XS series Yamaha. All burly machines. Big fast bastards. But sweet and smooth. You almost can't stress them. And they could all wear ContiTwins. Where did it happen?"

"Up near Citrus City, on the turnpike: A man named Esterland who was dying of cancer."

"I think I remember news an the tube about that. Sure. But there wasn't any mention of drugs or bikes."

"Not enough to go on, so it didn't get in."

"Where do you come in, Trav?"

"A little favor for the guy's son. Ron Esterland. By the way, he's an artist too. Had a big sellout show in London."

"Hey I know the name. Didn't make the connection. Saw some color plates of his work in Art International. Pretty much okay"

"So what should I do next?"

"I don't understand why the buy should have been set up so far out in the boonies. But I can tell you that any one of those kinds of horses I named would be owned by somebody known to the brotherhood. Up by Citrus City and from there on up, it's a different turf. Up there you've got the Corsairs. But there's a lot of interclub contact, when bikers from both clubs go to
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out-of-state rallies and rendezvous. I think that maybe, if it was nearly two years ago, it's become part of the legend."

"How so?"

"Trav, these people go back to a kind of tribal society. Myths and legends. Whoever was involved would keep his mouth shut and make his woman keep her mouth shut. But after a long time there's not much heat involved. Maybe his woman has switched riders. With lots of beer and grass and encampments in the night, the word gets out. A little here and a little there, and it gets built up into something a lot wilder and more romantic than it was. Do you understand?"

"Sure. I think so."

"If you can find a legend that seems to fit and then unravel it all the way back to the way things really were, you can maybe-just maybe-come up with a name. And even that won't mean much.

It'll be a biker name: Skootch or Grunge or BugBoy. And there's turnover among the troops.

Some get into heavy action and get put away. Some of them, when the fox gets pregnant, decide to pack up and get out."

"Can you find out if there's a legend about Esterland?"

"I can listen. I can poke around a little but not much, because it makes these people nervous. I get along fine because I carry good merchandise, and my people do good work, and the prices are right, and the law has never learned a thing out here. And if you learn anything from me about that little party . . ."

"You don't need to say it. Now, something else. A couple of biker movies a few years ago.

Chopper Heaven. Bike Park Ramble."

"Saw them when they came on the cable. What do you want? Some kind of critique?"

"Whatever."

"The outlaw bikers came off meaner and nastier than they are as far as tearing up civilians is concerned. And they came off a little more clean and pure than they are the way they act within the group. Enough stimulation, and they get into gangbang situations. And if anybody finks to the law, man or woman, they can be a long slow time dying in the piney woods. Technically there were very few mistakes. A lot less than usual. I understand they used outlaw bikers as technical advisers. The sound track was too loud. And those pack leaders were just a little bit too evil to be real. They came out close together, those two movies, at least five years ago. Probably seven years ago. The straight clubs are still bitching about those movies because they think the civilians can't tell the difference between outlaw and straight. I see they still run them on syndication, late at night. Why do you ask?"

"Ted, I'm just rummaging around in this thing, kicking stones, shaking the bushes. The fellow who wrote and produced and directed those two movies stood to maybe get hold of a lot of money due to the killing of Esterland."

"How could that be, for God's sake?"

"Esterland's daughter was dying, in a coma. No chance of recovery. If Esterland survived her, most of the money would go to a foundation. If he died first, the daughter would get it; and then it went to the mother, who was still legally married to Esterland, on the death of her daughter a couple of weeks later. And that movie person, Peter Kesner, is or was close to Mrs. Esterland."

"Way way out there on the end of a long stick, pal."

"For two and a half mil, net, you can think up some very strange things. People will take a lot of pains over that kind of money."