Redemption Song (18 page)

“Charley swore this was 24-karat,” he muttered. “He might know meth purity, but he doesn’t know shit about gold.”

“Bad time?” I asked. He looked up and waved me over.

“Oh, hey, Faust. No, c’mon in. Jenny with you?”

“Just me,” I said. Jennifer had introduced us a few months back when he needed my kind of help. They had business together, but I wasn’t sure if Winslow was one of her distributors or just an enthusiastic customer. Probably the former. There wasn’t much you couldn’t buy at the Sunset Garage, once the right people vouched for you. “Getting into making jewelry?”

He laughed and showed me the pewter pendant around his neck, a coiled and rearing cobra. “Son, I been into it longer than I been into anything else. Good hobby for a mechanic. Keeps your fingers limber. I ain’t winnin’ no contests, but then, I ain’t enterin’ any either. What brings you by?”

“Business, with a twist.”

“Yeah?” he said. “What kind of business?”

“I need wheels and a gun.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought you weren’t keen on guns?”

“I’m not, but I’ve got troubles with some folks who are keen on guns, and I don’t think I can fight back with strongly worded arguments.”

“Reckon not. All right, what’s the twist?”

“I’m a little short on cash. As in, I don’t have any.”

Winslow pointed toward the bay doors.

“There’s the exit,” he said. “Directions are free.”

“C’mon, Winslow. You know I’m good for it. I’ve got a line on a big score.”

That wasn’t entirely a lie. Given my cash situation, I would need to find a big score pretty damn quick once the current crisis was over and done with. Saying I’d already found one was technically just confidence talking.

“I don’t do credit, kid. Bad business. You start making handouts in my line of work, people think you’re soft. Then they start taking instead of asking.”

“And I can keep my mouth shut. Besides, I was hoping, given what I did for your sister…”

I let that hang in the air. He sighed. Then he narrowed his eyes. I could see his brain working, sniffing for an advantage.

“Jenny says you might be going inside for a little while.”

“Maybe. Soft time. Cops got me on a bullshit beef for threatening somebody in traffic. I’m out on bail, don’t even have a trial date yet. What about it?”

“I got a buddy inside right now. Friend of the MC. Needs a little help. Your kind of help.”

I had a sinking feeling. Outlaw biker gangs are a little outside my usual crowd, and I wasn’t sure what kind of occult “help” Winslow’s pal could possibly need behind bars.

“
Maybe
I’m going inside,” I said. “I might walk on the whole thing. Remains to be seen.”

“Well, here’s my proposition. I’ll bend the rules and get you what you need today, just this once. But you owe me double what I’d normally charge, and I damn well better get paid by month’s end, or you and me are gonna have harsh words. That’s if you don’t go inside. If you do, and if you can help my buddy? Then we’re square.”

I winced at “double.” Winslow’s services already weren’t cheap, and he wasn’t kidding about the implied threat. Not even being a friend of Jennifer’s was going to save my kneecaps if I didn’t pay him back to the last penny. Then again, I didn’t have a whole lot of choices right now.

I offered him my hand. He took it in a hard grip and shook it in a way that left no doubt the deal was sealed.

“First things first,” he said, sliding back a tarp on the floor and pulling on a knotted rope attached to a trap door. I followed him down into the cellar. Wire mesh lined the cinder-block walls, adorned with enough firepower to outfit an army platoon and then some. Under the light of a dangling bulb, I took in the sights. Winslow stocked pistols, shotguns, and rifles, and propped up in the corner of the cellar was, I was pretty sure, a vintage World War II flamethrower.

“What size bear are you hunting?” he asked.

“I need something with serious stopping power. If I have to pull this thing, it’ll mostly be for the intimidation factor, to buy me some time. Anyone who’s still dumb enough to run up on me needs to go down hard as a lesson to his friends. On the other hand, it’s got to be small enough to fit in a duffel bag or a briefcase. I can’t be toting an assault rifle around town.”

Winslow rubbed his chin. Then he nodded.

“I’ve got just the thing. You’re gonna like this.”

He searched the wire rack and took down a fat monster of a revolver, matte black with a scarlet backstrap along the grip.

“Here comes the Judge,” he said with a grin. “Taurus Judge Magnum. Six-and-a-half-inch barrel, six-round cylinder, chambered to fire .454 Casull cartridges and, here’s the fun part, .410 bore shotshells.”

I took it from him, feeling the weight, the coldness of the grip.

“Shotshells,” I said. “As in shot
gun
shells?”

“That’s right. You don’t want to get in any long-range shenanigans with this baby, but if someone gets up in your face? One pull and you’ll take
their
face
off
. Plus it’s one ugly, mean-lookin’ mama.”

One thing for certain, the gun had the intimidation part down pat. It still wouldn’t stop Sullivan, but if I shot him right between the eyes, the sting might slow him down long enough for me to do something useful.

“I’ll take it. Got something I can toss this into?”

He gave me a black Nike gym bag and stocked it with ammo, padding it with crumpled newspaper so it didn’t sound like an arsenal rattling around in there. Then we went upstairs to do the paperwork. Once he finished, I found myself the proud owner of a clean, legal firearm, courtesy of a nonexistent (but very friendly) South Texas gun-shop owner. I even had a cash receipt.

“This here’s your blue card,” Winslow told me. “Says your gun’s registered in Clark County. Of course it ain’t, so don’t let any legal beagle dig too deep into it. Anywhere else in the state, you’re golden as long as you’re carrying open. You should have your boy Paolo do you up a bogus concealed-carry permit if you wanna cover all your bases.”

“You’re the man, Winslow.”

“Just don’t blow your damn foot off. I’d feel bad. C’mon, let’s see what we’ve got out back. I’m assuming you’re gonna want a cage?”

“A…like a roll cage?”

He rolled his eyes. “Like a safe little four-wheeled box you sit in, instead of feeling the wind in your face like a real man. I don’t see you on a chopper, is what I’m saying.”

“I don’t even know how to ride one,” I said, following him out the back door and into the fenced-in lot. The rocky gulch behind the garage was a graveyard where the sun-bleached corpses of dead cars waited to have their last useful parts stripped.

“This here’s my surprised face.” Winslow’s expression didn’t change. “So how many heads are you huntin’, anyway?”

“Who said anything about hunting heads?”

“You come in needing wheels and firepower. You got no money, but neither one can wait. You want a piece that’ll hold off a small army while you get your business done, and you’ve got a certain look in your eye. I’ve seen that look on other men before. You know what it says?”

“What’s that?”

“That you’ve got some blood to spill. And there ain’t nobody on God’s green earth gonna stop you from spilling it.”

I nodded.

“Sounds about right,” I said.

“I’ve been doing a little restoration project,” Winslow said, leading me between the wrecks. “Now that it’s done, I been wanting to sell her, but…not to just anybody. A man’s ride is part of who he is. It should say something. Send a message before you even shake his hand.”

We stopped in front of a green oilcloth tarp shrouding a car’s low-slung angles. Winslow took hold of the tarp and yanked it free, letting it flutter to the oil-stained pavement.

The car beneath was sharp, hard, and blacker than a moonless summer night. Vintage Detroit steel, with a widemouthed grill and a long, sleek hood. It was the kind of car that hung out in back alleys looking for a knife fight.

“A Barracuda?” I said.

“
Hemi
‘Cuda,” Winslow said. “Four hundred and twenty-five horsepower. Take you zero to sixty in six seconds, and she’ll pull a fourteen-second quarter-mile. The body and engine’s a 1970 original, rebuilt from a wreck. Transmission, brakes, tires are all new. You could drive this baby through the gates of hell and right back out again.”

“Funny,” I said, “that’s almost what I have in mind.”

He tossed me the keys.

Twenty-Four

T
he air changed around Richfield, and that was when I knew they were onto me.

I’d headed out of town on I-15 North with the Barracuda’s engine purring and the duffel bag on the passenger seat. The car felt like a caged panther, flexing its sleek muscles and aching to sprint. I crossed the border into Utah, driving through St. George and Cedar City, the desert slowly giving way to scrub pine and towering rocks. I kept my eyes on the road.

About three hours out of Vegas, I merged onto I-70 heading east toward Denver. I felt strange, long before I hit the border. At first I chalked it up to a shift in elevation or temperature, making my ears feel stuffy and my nerves off-kilter, but that wasn’t all of it. The air tasted different. I felt like an astronaut, taking off my helmet on a planet with an atmosphere almost, but not quite identical to the one I came from.

It was three in the afternoon by the time I rolled into Richfield. My stomach and the Barracuda’s tank both edged on empty. The town couldn’t have been any more middle-American, a sleepy burg in the middle of Utah surrounded by farms and factories, about a hundred miles from anywhere in particular. I fed the car first, rolling into a gas station that hadn’t changed its look since 1955. I asked the attendant to recommend something that would stick to my ribs. He pointed me toward Norma’s, a corner diner about two blocks away.

A little chime jingled over the door as I walked into the diner with the duffel bag slung over my shoulder. It was that twilight hour between lunch and dinner, so the place was far from crowded. Judging from the parking lot, I figured most of the patrons were long-haul truckers, grabbing a bite when and where they could. A girl with an acne-spotted face and a sunflower yellow dress, looking sixteen or seventeen, gave me a wave from the counter.

“Welcome to Norma’s! Sit wherever you like. I’ll be over in just a minute.”

I made myself comfortable in a booth by the window and sat the duffel bag next to me with the zipper in easy reach. A laminated menu lay on the Formica table. I flipped through it until the girl came over with a pot of black coffee.

“Just what I needed,” I said, sliding over my empty mug. “Guy at the filling station said this place is world-famous for its pancakes. That right?”

The girl smiled. “Don’t know if they’re talking about us in Paris, but the food’s good and we serve breakfast all day long.”

“Good enough for me. I’ll have a full stack with a side of sausage, please.”

I nursed my coffee and watched out the window, not sure how nervous I needed to be. The heart of Utah was a long way from anything I called home.

The pancakes came out piping hot and dripping with butter. I drizzled fresh maple syrup over the fluffy stack and dug in. Bliss. After hours on the road, a gourmet meal served by a team of celebrity chefs wouldn’t have tasted better. The sausage links were plump and juicy with a sheen of grease.

The door jingled. I looked up to see a couple of college-age kids in pressed white short-sleeve shirts, black ties, and crisp black slacks. Mormon missionaries out to save the world. I didn’t give them another thought, until they sat down across the table from me like they belonged there.

“Sorry fellas,” I said, “don’t need my soul saved, just here to eat.”

“I’m Mack,” said the bigger of the two, his tight shirt showing off a weightlifter’s build. He gestured toward his pal, a pale kid with razor-cut ginger hair. “This is Zeke. We’re here to show you the road to salvation.”

I paused, my fork halfway to my mouth. Most Mormons I’d met were nice folks who didn’t go heavy on the preaching once they knew you weren’t open to it. Apparently the locals here took a harder line.

“Sorry, like I said, not interested. I’m trying to enjoy my meal here, and I’m sure the owners of this place don’t want their customers getting pestered, so—”

I started to wave for the waitress.

“Call that girl over here,” Zeke said, “and I’ll gut her like a fish.”

I put my hand down.

“Something tells me you two aren’t the finest of the Latter-day Saints.”

“Call it protective camouflage,” Mack said.

I stretched out my senses, slowly, trying to get a fix on the situation. Both of the men were human, but there was something off-kilter, like a dark blotch on their auras square above their hearts.

“Did you really think we wouldn’t see you coming?” Zeke asked me.

“Depends entirely on who ‘we’ is.”

“It is our honor,” Zeke said, “to serve the court of the great Prince Malphas.”

“You’re both human.”

Zeke nodded, his chin high. “Our prince enjoys using human servants on Earth. We can go places that others can’t, unseen and unnoticed. Our work is part of our oath in service to our infernal master, Satan.”

I nearly dropped my fork. “Say that again?”

“Human servants, so we can go where—”

“No, not that, the second part. The stupid part. You guys are actually Satanists? Like real, no-kidding, play your heavy metal album backward and bark at the moon Satanists?”

Mack blinked. Zeke looked like he was fantasizing about killing me.

“It’s not stupid,” Mack said. “We have a place of high honor awaiting us—”

“Yeah, it is. It really is. So this is how Prince Malphas ropes you dopes in. Don’t suppose he’s told you that nobody’s even
seen
Lucifer in over a thousand years? He took a walkabout and never came back. Hell had a civil war when he left, geniuses. How do you think the whole feuding-courts thing came about?”

“That’s not true,” Mack said.