Heat (44 page)

The next thing you realized was that the motherfucker was
huge
, and when the Big Four saw that, they kind of quieted up and considered him again, even as the low dogs nudged each other and made faggot leather-boy jokes and got ready.

The stranger was in no hurry to come to the bar. He walked around the front half of his car and stood before the bank of bikes, the good ones, the ones the brothers rode, all gleaming chrome and glossy black. The man was big, taller than the Cow-Boy, which put him at maybe six-six or six-eight, and the fucker was
broad
. He had his full back turned to the bar and it was a big fucking back.

Fat Joey got up and got a little closer to the window and Ratchet came with him and they had a good look at the guy in silence.

The man’s head turned a little, just enough to show the plane of his cheek, as if he could feel the weight of their stares, or maybe hear the low laughter of the Pack rousing itself for a fight. Fat Joey couldn’t see the man’s face, but the thought struck him that the man smiled and it was a hard thought to shake.

Then the man turned around, facing the bar like a gunslinger, and he just stood for a while with his long coat rippling around his knees in the backwash from the highway. His bare chest gleamed with sweat, hairless (inspiring a new wave of faggot jokes), and the muscles there rippled with every subtle movement, but they still couldn’t see his face. In the shadow of his low hat, he had no eyes at all, and Fat Joey found himself oddly transfixed by the thin slash of the man’s mouth. He couldn’t decide whether it was smiling or not.

The Dark Man turned around again in a billow of leather and moved away to keep looking at the bikes, and Fat Joey’s mind unstuck itself and sagged back into a little cold pool of deep unease. The Dark Man still looked like a faggot, like a weight-lifting faggot maybe, but he didn’t move like one. He moved like the Cow-Boy. He moved like Top Dawg. He moved like a motherfucker that
means
it.

And when he moved, Fat Joey could see a gun tucked down in the side of the Dark Man’s pants like an afterthought, a little black toy the Dark Man wasn’t even trying to hide.

“What do you think?” Ratchet asked, chewing on a toothpick.

“Think he’s gonna come in here with his bad self,” Fat Joey answered. He moved his hand back on his belt and found the smooth grip of his revolver. “Think we’re gonna have to bust a cap in his faggot ass to move him on.”

Ratchet grunted, chewed his pick, and watched the Dark Man walk around the row of gleaming machines belonging to the big four and the highest-ranking brothers. “My daddy used to tell me stories about the man in the long black coat. It’s another name he had for Death.”

Fat Joey took his eyes off the window to look uneasily at Ratchet. “Why’d you tell me that, man?”

“No reason.” Ratchet continued to gaze at the Dark Man, and after a while, Fat Joey did the same.

Outside, the Dark Man turned his head and said something. The driver’s side of the car opened, and the muttering and derisive laughter of the low dogs rose to howls…but there was silence from the brothers and silence from the Big Four.

The driver was a bitch, and the bitch was a freak.

She had dark purple hair, a little longer than her shoulders, with two white stripes at her face, but that didn’t make her a freak. She had no shirt on and her bare tits were hanging out, two good handfuls, firm and perky the way he could vaguely remember Cammy’s being in the beginning. That almost made her a freak, but what pushed her over was the metal.

Her eyebrows were dark lines beneath steel tracings. Her ears were completely rimmed with loops. Her tits were pierced, not just her nipples, but her whole
tits
, sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight. Her waist was belted with chains hanging in web-thin strands from hoops in her skin. There were gems in a half-diamond around her navel and a gold hoop in the bellybutton itself. Seeing all this, Fat Joey was reasonably sure her pussy was pierced, too.

“What the fuck is that?”

That was Top Dawg, come at last to see what the big deal was, and Fat Joey and Ratchet moved aside to let him come between them. The Dawg’s eye went to the bitch first, and Fat Joey could all but see the gears grinding in the Dawg’s head as he thought about putting it to that cyber-snatch, but then he got a good look at the man with her and the Dawg started frowning.

Outside in the baking sunlight, the two strangers were still browsing the bikes. The Dark Man gestured curtly and the freak-girl came over beside him and that was the point at which Fat Joey realized the bike they were looking at so closely was
his
.

“What the fuck?” Top Dawg said again, and the man in the long black coat touched Fat Joey’s bike.

Not a pansy touch, or a timid poke like you sometimes got from fuckers at gas stations, the ones who want to call you brother and trade road stories because they had a Honda in the garage at home under a tarp. Those touches were bad enough, but no, this crazy motherfucker had his whole hands on the bike and the girl was talking and pointing like she was selling him the fucking thing.

Fat Joey glanced at Top Dawg, but the Dawg didn’t move, so Joey didn’t move. He stood, fuming, watching the faggot bad-ass grip his goddamn bike. He still wasn’t quiet in his mind about the way the Dark Man looked or moved, but he felt better being pissed off than uneasy, and he thought that shooting the Dark Man for touching his bike would solve both problems nicely.

“Go,” said the Dawg at last.

Fat Joey went, shoving the door open into the heat of high noon and stepping out onto the sagging porch. “Hey, you candy-ass motherfucker!” he roared.

The girl jumped and the Dark Man gave her one up to the side of her purple head without even turning around to see where the shout came from. He thumped his hand down on the bike’s dash and the girl dazedly answered, her eyes darting from Fat Joey to the Dark Man and back again.

There was something weird about the Dark Man’s hands. He kept them in fists most of the time, in or close to the pockets of his coat, but when he tapped at the dash, Fat Joey could see, just for an instant, something…sharp…

That was the last bit of fuck-upedness Fat Joey could handle. He was ready to skin, and if it hadn’t been for the Dawg watching him through the window, he would have shot the Dark Man right there in the parking lot, right through the middle of his broad, turned back. He thought about doing it anyway—his place in the Big Four was rapidly dimming in importance compared to the urge to blast this bad motherfucker out of existence—but he knew that Top Dawg was getting creeped out, too, and when the Dawg got creeped, the Dawg wanted to be in on the bloodletting. If Fat Joey just plugged this fucker right now, the Dawg might just be pissed enough to open a few holes in Joey.

It took nearly every drop of guts that Fat Joey had left to raise his voice to the Dark Man again.

“Get away from my goddamn bike or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

Now the Dark Man turned, and for a split second, Fat Joey was frozen. His legs shivered once, violently, as if his lower half had made one desperate jump back toward the bar and been outvoted by the rest of him. ‘Fuck it,’ Fat Joey thought suddenly. ‘He can have the fucking thing.’

The Dark Man started walking, not fast or slow, but steady and in a straight line for Fat Joey. He caught his girl by the arm as he passed her and dragged her along at that same even speed until she picked up her feet, and then he let her go and kept on coming. He mounted the wooden steps to Charlie’s, thumped heavily across the creaking boards—

—and went right past Joey and into the bar without glancing at him again.

The girl came after, as Fat Joey was pulling in his first breath after realizing he’d been holding it. Close up, she was nothing but pale, creamy flesh, gleaming metal, and the diamond flash of cut gems. Fat Joey had only a dim impression of purple hair and wide, terrified eyes as she darted past him in the Dark Man’s wake.

And that bothered him even more than the Dark Man’s disinterest, because the girl didn’t looked scared
of
Joey, she looked scared
for
him.

Fat Joey hesitated, his hand on the butt of his revolver, but he hesitated too long, and when he turned, the Dark Man was inside. He was standing before the bar, bold as walking talking God, and frowning at the wall behind the register. He acted like he was alone in the place, acted like the muttering crowd of the Pack was nothing but static on the radio. All his attention was fixed on the worn and faded map of American Route 66, peppered with black and white photos of brothers Charlie had known, back in the day. More creeped out that ever, Fat Joey came in off the deck and closed the door.

The Dark Man stood motionless as his girl huddled at his side, but stirred himself when Charlie approached. He said, “Do you have something like that for this place?”

The man’s voice was deep and gravelly, but utterly uninflected.

Charlie glanced back at the map, then at the Dark Man, and wiped the bar down with a rag. “Got Rand McNally.”

The Dark Man waited, as patiently as if still expecting an answer.

“Hey asshole,” one of the low dogs called, and the Dark Man by-God turned around. It was Hagen, of course. Only Hagen was stupid and ambitious enough to think of impressing Top Dawg by poking sticks at this dangerous stranger. Hagen grinned when he saw the Dark Man’s shadowed face and said, “The word you’re looking for is ‘road map’, ya stupid ass-banging motherfucker.”

The Dark Man continued to stare for a beat or two before he turned back to Charlie. “Do you have a road map?”

“Got Rand McNally, I said.” Charlie left the bar rag where it was on the counter and rested his hand a little lower down, nearer to the shotgun he kept below the bar.

Now there was an expression on the Dark Man’s face—a faint frown, ready to be anger.

“That
is
a road map, leatherqueer,” Hagen supplied, and the other low dogs nearest him ran a course of laughter across the room.

“Give me one,” the Dark Man said.

Charlie reached one out from behind the register and slid it toward him.

The Dark Man took it and turned towards one of the booths, in the back of the room where none of the Pack were gathered. He gave absolutely no sign of intending to pay.

Charlie grunted, eyeing the Dark Man’s back, and then said, “You want to run a tab ‘till the end of the day, fine. But you’ve got to get more than that. This place is for paying folks only.”

The Dark Man looked back, not at Charlie, but at the girl, and he was frowning openly this time.

“He says we need to get something,” the girl said.

“What?”

“He says we have to buy—”

The Dark Man shook his head curtly, cutting her off as effectively as if he’d slapped her. “What am I supposed to get?” He jerked his hand through the air as the girl opened her mouth and turned his back on her. “Just get it,” he ordered, and went to a booth.

“Keep in mind,” Charlie called after him. “You stiff me at the end of the day and I’ll bust lead in your ass, son.” He came up with the shotgun and hefted it casually but deliberately in the Dark Man’s direction.

“Fair enough,” the Dark Man said, and did not look around.

Neither did Charlie, who put his shotgun away and fixed his baleful bartender’s eye on the freak-girl. “You whoring here tonight, honey?” he asked evenly.

The girl shook her head, one arm twitching as though wanting to rise and cover herself.

“Map’s three bucks. Beer’s two bucks. I got bourbon and I got rye and that’s what I got. You wanna smoke, I got some of that, too. I got no food and the phone don’t work. Advice is free and I got some for you, honey-tits: Stay away from my girls and don’t give me shit or I’ll ventilate your purple fucking head. Now. What do you want?”

“T-two beers, please.”

Fat Joey’s unease deepened even more. He’d lived his whole adult life in gangs, from the age of twelve on up until now, and he’d heard the coarse rhythm of their words. Even whackos like Pitbull and book-reading types like the Cow-Boy had the same indefinable sound to their speech.

This girl, tattooed and pierced and bare-titted in a goddamn bar, sounded at least reasonably educated. The Dark Man, Mr. Movie Poster for the Apocalypse, sounded like he’d ought to be reading the damn news at ten o’clock.

Fat Joey looked around the bar again, and this time, he made a real head-count. Eight low dogs, four with knives, two guns, two unarmed. Thirteen brothers, two with knives, one with a gun, four with both. Ratchet had a pistol. The Cow-Boy had two, gunfighter slung over his hips. Top Dawg had a pig-sticker and a .45. Sue-Eye had her knife and Charlie had his shotgun.

And all of a sudden, it didn’t feel like enough. Not enough by half.

Fat Joey watched Charlie pull out two dark bottles from the ice chest and slap them down on the bar. The girl took them with a breathy, “Thank you.”

Polite. Educated. Pretty.

Cammy used to be like that. It got beat out of her in a hell of hurry. Sheb brought her in when Cammy was thirteen and looked eighteen. Now she was eighteen and looked thirty. Pretty soon, Sheb would show up with another bitch under his arm and Cammy would find herself shit out of luck, food for the low dogs or working for Charlie. Cammy was what life looked like when young girls were rode hard.

This girl, for all the metal and purple hair, looked more like a life begun in the safety of a house with four walls, a life that dipped into danger here and there on some nice, well-lit streets. A life that had only recently put her in the back pocket of the Dark Man. She did not belong here.

Fat Joey glanced around at Ratchet and then at the Cow-Boy. Both were silent, troubled, immune to the hooting laughter of the low dogs. He watched the girl nervously square herself to face the room. Her shoulders hunched, her eyes dropped, and she went swiftly toward the booth where the Dark Man waited.

There was a bad moment when Hagen reached out to flip the girl’s skirt up, showing the full curves of her naked ass to the whole room, and Fat Joey looked wildly around in time to see the Dark Man’s eyes, like silver slits in the shadow of his face.