“Could be. We was all out drinkin’ beer Wednesday night. Maybe they was took then.” He grinned proudly. “I mean to tell ya, we sure couldn’t see much after closing time. No way!”
Cowboy stood in the background, leaning against a huge tractor with tires higher than his hat.
“Billy,” I said, “the plates stolen from you and your friends showed up in Dallas on three Harleys. Outlaw bikers.”
I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought about the plates on the bikes owned by Becker and Frog. “Uh, Billy, have you heard about any other plates stolen around here?”
“No. Just Bubba, R.L., and me. ’Course, there’s lotsa bikes in the county and I don’t know everybody.”
“That’s another thing. Any outlaw bikers live around here?”
“Don’t think so. I mean, hell’s bells, you see outlaws passing through every once in a while. That’s all.” He grinned at me. “You know how it is, though. Them outlaws are like ants; they all look alike.”
“Okay. Where is this bar where the plates were taken?”
“Bout halfway between here and Hughes Springs," he said. “Now, I don’t know for sure that’s when it happened, mind. Probably, though.” He nodded his big head a few times. By the time he finished, he sounded positive. “Musta been then.”
“Thanks, Billy.” I pointed at his bike. “Is that color Candy Apple Red?”
“Just red, far as I know. Why?”
“When I was a kid,” I said, “Candy Apple Red was the color. Every hot rod had to be Candy Apple Red. It was like a requirement.”
Billy Dolan shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
Cowboy levered himself away from the tractor and said, “Come on, old-timer. This ain’t no trivia game.”
We left Billy Dolan to his polishing.
“I feel like an idiot,” I said to Cowboy. I told him about forgetting the other two bikes. “The one Mimi shot might have had stolen plates. And I bet the one I got had a bike stashed behind the Dew Drop. If those plates were hot, too, we’d have a better idea where their base is.”
“My, my,” Cowboy said. “This investigation stuff is complicated, ain’t it? Glad I don’t have a license for it. Too much responsibility.”
“Shut up, Cowboy.”
“That’s no way to talk to hired help, Rafferty. Don’t you know nothing about industrial relations?”
We stood by the side of the highway, watching the light traffic, squinting in the sun. I wondered what to do first. For a change, there seemed to be a variety of choices.
We could go back to Dalton and check for additional reports of missing motorcycle plates. We could look up Billy’s friends Bubba and R. L. We could get a motel room—if there was a motel in Conover—and answer the phone calls I had received from the newspaper ads. At the same time, I could call Ed Durkee about the other two bikes.
Or we could stand by the roadside, watch dusty pickups and lost tourists go by, and hope something good fell in our laps.
And that’s what happened.
Rafferty’s Rule Thirty-four: Sometimes good luck accomplishes more than hard work.
“Well, don’t that beat all!” Cowboy said, staring across the two-lane highway at the tacky drive-in opposite. I looked, too, and saw the black Harley at the same time the rider spotted us.
He had pulled off the road onto the gravel drive-in lot before he saw us. When he gunned the bike, he nearly lost it. The rear end slewed one way, then the other. A rooster-tail of stones and dust sprayed head-high. Then the bike hit the road surface again and it jerked violently upright. I thought it would go over onto its side.
Good luck only runs so far, though. The biker saved it at the last minute. He did a tight U-turn in front of a Chevy with a roof rack and roared back the way he had come, headed away from Conover.
Cowboy and I were on the move by then, too, and we were fast enough to cut off the same Chevy. It had out-of-state plates, and it stopped dead, probably wishing it was back where it came from, where people didn’t drive like these crazy Texans.
I pushed the reluctant Mustang up through the gears while Cowboy knelt on his seat and rummaged through his soft sports-bag on the backseat. “How ’bout that, Rafferty?” he said. “We in business, after all!”
“You recognize him?” I shouted. The windows were open and it was noisy as hell at seventy-five. Two hundred yards ahead, the bike still pulled away slightly.
“Uumph,” Cowboy grunted as we bottomed out in a dip in the road. “Hairy one on the left of that skinhead dude.” He poked my right thigh with something. “Don’t drop that,” he yelled.
When I found an instant to look down, there was a Ruger Blackhawk wedged under my leg.
At ninety, the Mustang reminded me how badly it needed a front end alignment. The steering wheel bucked and jerked nervously. I kept my foot on the floor anyway. The bike was still two hundred yards ahead, but we were holding that position.
Cowboy turned around and dropped into his seat. His arms were full of shotgun pieces. “Rough ridin’est goddam car I ever saw,” he bellowed. “Why’nt you ever buy new shocks?” He fought against the motion and assembled his shotgun. Up ahead, the bike had to wait behind a yellow Subaru until an oncoming truck passed. We picked up fifty yards.
“Lift up your leg,” Cowboy called. I did, and he pulled the Ruger free, checked the cylinder, then put it under his own thigh. He poked the shotgun barrel out the open window, rested the butt in his lap, and melted bonelessly into the worn seat. “Okay, Rafferty,” he called, “you can catch him now.”
“If you’re sure you’re ready.”
We screamed along like that for five miles. I couldn’t haul in the bike and he couldn’t get away. I tried not to think about what the chase was doing to the Mustang’s innards. Or to the right front tire I had been meaning to replace.
The bike wouldn’t go any faster than the Mustang, but it sure could stop. When I realized he was slowing, I stood on the brakes. Even so, we almost hit him.
Then, cursing myself for stupidity, I accelerated and tried to hit him. Too late. He was on the loud pedal, too, turning smoothly into a side road. I wallowed through the corner with the tires yowling, off-line, and caught in the wrong gear.
“You ain’t quite ready for Daytona yet, ace,” Cowboy said.
I snarled an insult at him and flogged the Mustang after the biker.
The new road was paved, but once you’d said that, you’d covered all its good points. It was narrow—about a lane and a half—and twisty and hilly and the shoulders were in terrible shape. But for all the difficulty I had with that goat track, it seemed to be worse for the bike. We started to catch him.
“Won’t be long now,” Cowboy shouted.
“I want him alive.”
“Yeah, I figured that. You’ll just have to get me closer, that’s all.”
The rider looked back at us each time we came to a straight stretch. I thought he was the one who had nudged Turk and laughed at Fran and me, but I couldn’t be sure with the slipstream blowing his long hair around his head.
A left-hand bend tightened up suddenly. I had to straighten the wheel and brake savagely for ten yards to make it around. Then I missed a shift coming out of the corner. After that, the gearbox growled more loudly than normal.
A mile farther along, where the road skirted a wooded hill, we picked up ground on the bike. Rapidly. Blue smoke came from the motorcycle’s exhaust and, for the first time in miles, the rider sat bolt upright.
Cowboy crowed. “We got him! He blowed it up.”
He hadn’t, though. He slowed to a crawl, bounced the heavy bike in and out of the ditch, and faded into the tree-covered hillside at full throttle. I got a quick glimpse of his back wheel spewing dirt and grass clumps, then I was too busy getting the Mustang stopped to watch.
Cowboy leaped out, carrying the shotgun. He ran back to where the bike had disappeared. I started to back up, but the Mustang bucked and stalled. There was a evil hissing sound un
der the hood.
Cowboy fired twice with the shotgun. Shredded leaves drifted away in the wind and a wrist-sized branch twenty yards uphill jerked and hung askew.
“Shit!” Cowboy said. “I can’t see for the scrub.”
After a few moments, when the ear-ringing blasts had died away, we could hear the bike, growling and farting and screaming somewhere in the woods as it clawed its way up the hillside.
Cowboy slapped his leg with his hat and swore, “Look at that hill, Rafferty! How steep you reckon that is?”
“I don’t know. Forty degrees? Fifty? Who the hell cares?”
“Well, goddamn it, did you see how he got away? Did you? It ain’t fair!”
“Calm down, for Christ’s sake.” The hissing from the Mustang was louder now. I opened the hood and stepped back quickly when steam billowed out. Cowboy trudged over and leaned against the trunk. He was a picture of dejection.
“Cowboy,” I said, “don’t worry about it. If one biker is here, they’re all here. We’ll find them now.”
“It ain’t that. It’s that goddamned motorcycle. Did you see it go up that hill?” He looked at me with mournful eyes. “Rafferty, there ain’t no way in the world a horse could do that!”
Chapter 21
It was after six o’clock before the Mustang had cooled enough to be driven. When we got underway, the transmission sounded terrible. Surprisingly, all the gears worked.
There was a motel in town, after all. Conover Court had twelve rooms butted together in a single wing that ran back from a brick office and manager’s house. The house was neat and newish. The motel wing was timber. It needed paint.
The manager was an oafish glad-hander with thinning hair and metal-rimmed eyeglasses. He gave us Room Six, in the middle of the wing. It had twin beds, a small bathroom, a bedside table, and two uncomfortable-looking straight chairs. It was clean. It was also noisy.
“What the …” Cowboy said.
Television game show squeals and applause came through the plasterboard wall. The Davis family won something. They sounded fairly excited about it.
“Country motel version of cable TV,” I said. “A set in every third room.”
“Well, I ain’t gonna listen to that crap all night,” Cowboy said. “Gimme that key.”
He returned with the key to Room Twelve and we moved to the end of the wing. It was the same inside, except quieter. Sometime in the last year or two, the local hardware store had discounted their paint stock. The salmon color had been a big seller.
Cowboy went out for beer and hamburgers. I phoned Hilda in Dallas.
“Hi, big guy,” she said. “How goes the quest?”
“Not so bad. We found one of them.” I told her about it and she seemed relieved at the anticlimax. “How are you?” I said.
“Okay. I took Fran to that Zifretti boy’s funeral this afternoon. She cried.”
“I don’t know if that was such a good idea,” I said. “See anybody strange there?”
“Only that cop you know. The one who dresses like Nathan Detroit.”
“Ricco.”
“Right,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, probably. We seem to have the bikers cornered in this end of north Texas, so I guess there’s no harm done.”
“Cornered?”
“Never mind, smart-ass. How’s Fran now?”
“Oh, she’s fine. She’s a little worried about a job interview tomorrow, but she’ll be okay. Remember Beth Richards? The woman who bought that Georgian bookcase? She may give Fran a job in her gift shop.”
“Good. Thanks very much.”
“Nothing to it,” she said. “I think I like Fran, now that I’ve gotten to know her.”
“Something wrong with this phone,” I said. “Aren’t you the broad who hates living with other women?”
“I said I liked her. I didn’t say I want to take her to raise.”
“Fair enough. Look, babe, I’m going to be stuck out here for another day or three. I’ll call you tomorrow night, if I can.”
“Okay. Be careful.”
“There’s another way?”
After we ate, and after Cowboy called Mimi to check on the new foal, we cruised through Conover. It didn’t take very long.
There were three carloads of teenage boys making the rounds, too. They would start near the motel, drive the mile and a half into town, around the square, out the highway, U-turn, and repeat the circuit.
“Did you do that as a kid, Cowboy?”
He nodded. “We called it cruising Main.”
“We called it dragging the gut, as I recall.”
“Well, it ain’t got anymore sensible since those days,” Cowboy said. “Let’s quit.”
“Quit? Why, we might get to pick up Mary Lou Hoffstetter. I think she’ll put out.”
Cowboy grinned. “Yeah, guy told me she blew the whole football team after practice last week.”
“Mary Lou did that? And all I’ve been asking her to do is my algebra homework.”
“Aw, you goody-goodies never get laid. Everybody knows that.”
“Not only that, I better quit playing with it, too. I think my eyes are going.”
Who says you can’t relive the good old days?
We tried the drive-in and drove to the beer joint Billy Dolan had mentioned, but didn’t see any sign of bikers. On the way back, third gear sounded like a blender chopping walnuts, so we gave up for the night.
“Outlaw bikers oughta stand out like a dog’s balls in a piss-ant burg like this,” Cowboy grumbled from the bathroom. “Opposition’s out there somewhere. Why can’t we catch ’em? It just don’t feel right.”
We slept with our shotguns on the floor beside our beds.
In the morning, Cowboy went cruising again, while I used the motel phone to work through the newspaper ad responses. There were two from the Conover area.
The first was a screechy housewife who wanted to know what right I had to bad-mouth motorcycles; didn’t I know lots of honest folks enjoyed trail-bike riding; her Leroy was third runner-up in last year’s Dalton County moto-cross and you wouldn’t find a nicer boy anywhere, besides which he got good grades and didn’t hang around beer joints or read dirty books. So there.
The other call had come from a woman named Arbetha Fullylove. She wanted to talk, too, but she wanted to do it her way.
When Cowboy returned, we checked out of the motel and drove to the Abyssinian Faith Tabernacle. It was a tiny caricature of a turn-of-the-century church, spotlessly white and toylike in the exact center of a small lot two blocks west of the town square.
A tall, dignified black man in a white shirt met us at the door. He took us inside to meet Arbetha. There were rows of folding chairs instead of pews. We sat up front, near an old piano.
Arbetha Fullylove was a brown pixy with a round, seamed face. She was eighty, at least, and she wore an immaculate black dress with imitation pearl buttons down the front. A zipper had been sewn in and a loop of red ribbon threaded through the zipper tab. Her hands were thick-knuckled and heavily veined. She held them in her lap and they shook continually.
“Reverend Daniels thinks ah’m a silly old woman,” she said. “But when ah seen your ad in the paper, ah figured somebody got to do somethin’ ’bout those men works for Greedy. Else folks do, why, they gonna hurt someone real bad one day.”
Daniels patted her twitchy hands and said, “Arbetha, you be careful about such accusations.” His voice was low and melodic.
“Be careful, bah!” she said. “Mebbe you think ah knocked mah-self down mah own front steps?”
The reverend pursed his lips and didn’t say anything.
“What’s the matter you, Reverend? Whose side you on?” the old woman said.
I looked at Daniels. He leaned back in his chair and frowned. I guess we were both trying to figure out whose side he was on.
“Tell me about it,” I said to Arbetha Fullylove.
“Greedy sent them motor-sickle
men to scare me off,” she said indignantly. “Imagine! Forty-two years in that house, since way back afore Albert died, and he thinks ah’d sell out now.”
“Who is Greedy?” I asked.
Arbetha cackled. “Greedy’s greedy, thass who’s greedy. That man got the sickness of greed runnin’ right through his hell-bound body, yes, sir!”
Reverend Daniels said, “T.J. MacCready is a local businessman.”
“White trash, thass all he is, Reverend, and you knows it!”
Cowboy said, “MacCready’s got an office down from the post office. Noticed it this morning. His sign says Investments and Property.”
Daniels nodded. “That’s correct. Mr MacCready owns a lot of property around Conover.”
“Okay,” I said. “Now, Mrs Fullylove, you said MacCready wants to buy your house?”
“He shore do! Offered me twenny-four thousand dollars cash money fer it, too. That’s a powerful lot, but ah cain’t leave mah home!”
“Why?”
“Cos ah live there!”
“No, I didn’t mean that. Why would MacCready want your house badly enough to use strong-arm tactics?”
“The good Lord only knows,” she said. “Ah don’t.”
“Mr MacCready owns all the other houses and lots on Austin Street,” Daniels said. “Certainly, he wants to buy Sister Arbetha’s property, but …” He shrugged expressively.
Cowboy said, “Tell us about the men who pestered you, gal.”
“Don’t you gal me, young man! I’se old enough to be your grandma.”
“I surely do apologize, ma’am,” Cowboy said.
Arbetha nodded shortly and shifted in her seat to turn away from Cowboy. “They was motor-sickle men.” She waved her shaky hands at eye level. “A great big one, bald as that po-liceman on the TV, And mean lookin’. T’other one was fat and dirty. Hair all over his face. They come around on a Sat’day ’bout two months ago. Jest walked in, struttin’ and talkin’ dirty, you know. They say things like, ‘Whyn’t you get outa this old dump?’ and ‘Niggers oughta go back where they come from.’ Stuff like that. That fat one, he pushed over a table in mah sittin’ room. And he done his business in the corner, like an old tom cat.”
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