Sinister Grin Press
MMXVI
Austin, Texas
Sinister Grin Press
Austin, TX
www.sinistergrinpress.com
February 2016
“The Black Goat Motorcycle Club” © 2016 Jason Murphy
This is a work of collected Fiction. All characters depicted in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without the publisher’s written consent, except for the purposes of review.
Cover Art by Frank Walls / Allison Murphy
Book Design by Frank Walls / Travis Tarpley
For Allison,
Cara mia! You believe in me more than I believe in myself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The guys. Ricky, Mike, James, Harv, Todd, Kevin, and Cody. Thanks for listening to my dumb stories for the past thirty-something years.
My family and friends, who I’m sure think I’m weird and maybe a serial killer. Thanks for putting up with me.
Rod, you read every word, without fail. Thank you.
Cargill. My brother. It’s hard for me not to say something snarky here, so I’ll just say thanks. You know why.
Grandma and Delilah. I wish you were both here to see this.
And to my junior high choir teacher, who screamed at me in front of the entire class, calling me warped and demented. You were right. It’s working out pretty well for me.
CHAPTER ONE
Friday, November 7
11:15 PM
The black and white tones of the television flickered across the trailer. The lights danced over vintage posters of the Day the Earth Stood Still, Message From Space, and The Blob. Next to them were action figures, some classic, some new. Stacks of DVD's and Blu-Rays. Vinyl of 1950's Hawaiian music, jazz, the Animals. Through the haze of incense and the clouds from his joint, Whitey grinned. It was kind of paradise. Sure, the place was cramped. Sure, it was messy. And maybe it was listing to the side a bit from the crumbling cinderblock foundation, but it was his. It was his little Shangri-La. It wasn't much and a hot woman hanging around would be great, but this was plenty. This would do.
He adjusted his second-hand recliner and took another hit, ignoring the ashes that flittered down into his shock white beard. It was Frankenstein Friday at Whitey Manor and he was into the fourth flick already, the Ghost of Frankenstein. Lon Cheney, Jr. was in chains at the police station. Hunchbacked Bela Lugosi shuffled around being a general bastard. It wasn't the best Frank-flick, but he dug it.
The trailer rocked with a gust of wind coming down from the Huachuca Mountains. Whitey eyed his action figures, making sure they didn't tumble from the shelves. Some of them were a bitch to get set up and he was proud of them. The wind carried distant yips from coyotes wandering the desert.
"Yeah. Come on closer, motherfuckers. I got something for you."
He slugged down some cheap whiskey from a Batman glass and listened. He turned the volume down. There was something else. Another coyote. Closer now. He leaned forward. The wind died down. There it was again. A yowl not too far from his trailer. It was in pain. He got one.
Whitey hefted his large frame out of the recliner, adjusted his overalls, and looked for his boots and shotgun. They were both in the kitchen, leaning against the work-in-progress motorcycle engine that sat where the table should be. Keeping an ear in the direction of the howl, he pulled his boots on and checked the shotgun. Both barrels were loaded. Flashlight in one hand, gun in the other, he headed outside.
With the flip of a switch the floodlights illuminated a stark halo around his place. Just his tow truck, his other motorcycle, scrub brush, and assorted trash. The coyote's howling had thinned to a whimper, but he had a bead on it. He raised the light and the gun and marched in its direction. He was sure the mangy bastards had run off with his dog. Conan, the miniature chihuahua, was fast enough and smart enough not to go too far away from the trailer, but . . . one night he'd gone out to piss and just didn't come back. Motherfuckers had made themselves a snack of his buddy and -
Whitey stopped. His foot hovered just off the ground, right at the threshold of where the light gave way to absolute darkness. A little drunk, he wobbled, but managed to step back. He lowered the flashlight. Right in front of him was one of the traps, a rusty maw of teeth with enough torque to snap his leg in half.
"Well, shit."
There were others out there. He had a loose reckoning of where he'd placed them, but in his booze-fogged brain, it wasn't clear. He stepped back and shined the flashlight. Its reach didn't quite make it to wherever the coyote was trapped. He could still hear it out there, struggling and whimpering. Whitey narrowed his eyes to see if he could make it out. About thirty yards from the edge of the light, there it was. Whitey stepped around the trap and made his way over to it. The thing lay on its side, thrashing. The leg was mangled, a bloody tether of meat and bone. It was sickly looking - patchy hair and a face that looked like it had been dragged down ten miles of bad road. It looked up at him and snarled. He leveled the shotgun at its head. Damn, he'd be doing it a favor. He fired. Its head evaporated into red mist. The thing jerked once and went still. The shot echoed across the desert.
Then the howling erupted. At first one, then three, then thirty. A dirge with an undercurrent of rage and it was all around him, as if the desert itself mourned the damned thing. Whitey whipped the flashlight up directly in front of him, into the night.
Other eyes stared back. Several.
He fired without aiming.
"God dammit," he muttered, embarrassed at the blind fire.
The howling stopped. The sound of feet padding through the dirt. Branches snapping. A bunch of the fuckers. He caught fleeting glimpses of canine legs, eyes, a flash of mane. They were scattering, but . . . he threw the beam wildly around the black, unsure of what he'd seen. One looked big. The coyotes around here were skinny, pathetic things. But this one looked darker, fatter. And it was walking on two legs. Whitey backed away and tried to catch it full on with the flashlight. It was too fast. They all were. He patted his overalls for more shells, knowing he hadn't grabbed any.
"Nope. Nope. Nope."
All he could think was Skinwalker. And if a Skinwalker wanted to run around near his trailer, that was fine. He wasn't going to fuck with it. No, sir. He'd never seen one himself, but had heard enough stories in his seventy-two years to want to avoid them.
He swallowed hard and decided that was enough weed for tonight. He backed all the way up to the door of his trailer, never taking his eyes off of the darkness beyond. The trap could wait until morning.
***
Tribes Memorial Hospital
Saturday, November 8
10:05 AM
There wasn't much to Tribes, Arizona. It was dying a languid death and had been for eighty years, since the closing of the mines. Now it was a collection of buildings that needed to be torn down - empty furniture stores, empty motels, empty grocery stores - all clustered into two blocks of rot around a neglected highway. Most of its population had slowly bled out since the 1940's, leaving businesses and homes to decay in the southwestern sun. A few clung to life. A gas station with a rack of faded magazines from the eighties, a vending machine that still sold Dr. Pepper in the bottle, and a diner that served ten types of fried grease. They were rest stops in purgatory - his purgatory.
Dr. Henry Renard sat in his SUV in the parking lot to Tribes Memorial. He stared at the hospital and felt his lip curl with loathing. It was built even after the town started to slide, embracing the 50’s futurism of the era, and for a whi
le, it was the premiere hospital in southern Arizona, even rivaling the facilities in Tucson, to the northwest. But the 80's saw the arrival of Colina Regional in Colina Vista, just one county over. With an MRI machine and nicer rooms, the rural population of this desolate hole forgot all about Tribes Memorial. Dr. Hank, as they called him, wished he could, too. He took a pull from the flask of bourbon in his coat pocket. He wished to hell he could forget this place. It was on life support and had been for years. He hadn't seen the financials, but surely it wasn't even remotely profitable anymore. They should just shut it down and set a match to it. Right now all it did was serve the urbane and cosmopolitan inhabitants of the Yucca Valley Trailer Park down the road. And until it shuffled off its mortal coil, he'd have to drive out here from Tucson. Every. Damned. Saturday.
Hank sighed. It was his own damned fault. That was what was so hard about it. He'd done this to himself. He coasted through college and did just enough in med school to pass. While his classmates spread out to fulfill goals and build practices, he just went with whatever was handed to him. Aloof, his colleagues called him. Uninvested, said the administrator at his last hospital. He thought lazy was more accurate and that shamed him. He could get by on the argument that a lazy man would never have gotten his medical license, that he was an achiever and that he just hadn't yet had the time to forge the path of riches and prestige most thought belonged to his profession. That's what he told his mom. That's what he told old friends who looked him up when they were passing through Tucson on a golf trip. And it was the lie he told himself.
Lazy.
Lazy and maybe an alcoholic.
On some bloodshot mornings (or afternoons), he'd think Time to start networking. Get it together. Clean up. Get the fuck out of here. Tomorrow. I'll start tomorrow.
And he thought it again now, staring down the barrel of his punishment. It wasn't punishment for anything he'd done. It was punishment for what he hadn't done. He'd been coasting along at Tucson Medical Center for a few years. No ladder climbing. No volunteering for extra work. So, in spite of his degree and his fancy coat, he was given the shit jobs. He was given Tribes Memorial every Saturday.
These people. They deserved this place. At first, he was amazed why they lived here. He was amazed why anyone would live here. The town was dead. There was no culture. There was no cell reception. There was nothing. But as he worked among them, mending their wounds and wagging his finger, he realized he was glad they stayed here. These people belonged here. The days were usually quiet and of course, excruciatingly boring, but when they did come in, they either had nothing wrong with them or had something so wrong that they should have seen him weeks before. Most of them couldn't maintain a conversation and if they were speaking the same language, it still seemed as though they weren't.
But fuck it. This was his fault. Maybe he deserved this place along with the rest of them. He checked his watch and frowned. Fifteen minutes late. Whatever. They could deal with it. Chewing some gum to mask the smell of booze, he stepped out into the morning sun. Time to dazzle the locals.
***
The smell in the lobby was one of mothballs and antiseptic, like a hospital inside an old woman's closet. The perpetually empty east wing – really just a hallway with eleven vacant rooms – loomed like a crypt to his left. The tiny gift shop, closed today, branched off of the lobby. And then the west wing to the right, which, unless there had been an overnight plague or explosion, held their one and only patient. No receptionist, of course. They didn't have one or the last one just didn't bother coming in. Either was likely. Just past the lobby, he could see Nurse Otero at the single nurse's station, the hub at the center of this pile of bones. Hank winced. She looked pissed, as usual. As he stepped through the doors into the glare of the fluorescents, she glanced up at him, scowled, and went back to sorting papers.
"Glad you could join us, Doctor. I'd rather not run this hospital with just Nurse Neal."
Hank forced a grin. "Yeah, that must be tough, dealing with that . . . how many patients now? Is it one? Or is it zero?"
He braced himself as she turned to lay into him.
"Two, actually," a man said.
It was Nurse Neal. He appeared behind her. Barely there. Unassuming. Nathan was a quiet kid and a hard worker. Hank liked him.
"Mrs. Solis came in. Third degree burns on her arm."
"You weren't going to tell me?" Otero asked.
"Sorry, ma'am. She just came in."
With an exaggerated sigh, Nurse Otero picked up her clipboard from the nursing station desk and leveled her gaze at Hank.
"Since our fancy doctor from Tucson is here, would he like to take care of Mrs. Solis?"
Hank held up his hands in surrender. "No, Simone, she's all yours."
Nathan motioned over his shoulder. "Umm. Bullet - I mean Jan - is already assisting her."
Over his shoulder, at the back of the emergency room, they could see Jan Boulet, leaning over a chattering Mrs. Solis.
"Did you tell her that this is my ER and she's an EMT?"
Nathan shrugged. "Well, she said she could take care of it."
Nurse Otero sighed again and stormed across the ER towards Bullet and her patient. Hank waited until she was out of earshot.
"She's lovely today."
"I think she hates you."
"I know she does."
"You love making it worse."
"I've tried to make it better. It doesn't take."
"Yeah, I don't think she likes anyone. Not even her kids."
They watched her dress down Bullet, her finger wagging as if scolding a child. The slender, stunning EMT dwarfed Otero. Next to Bullet, Otero looked like a kid in school marm’s wig and a bad sweater. Even from across the room, Hank could see a spark of rage behind Bullet’s stoicism.
"Does Otero even realize that Bullet is probably thinking of seventeen different ways to hurt her right now?"
"I don't think Otero cares."
"She should. I wouldn't fuck with Bullet."
"I thought you were going to ask her out."
"I was. Too much work, though."
Nathan laughed.
"I mean seriously," Hank said. "We get along well enough, but I can't crack that shell. I don't have the patience."
He leaned in and whispered to the kid, "Is it true she danced at the Blue Bunny?"
Nathan held up his hands as if to recuse himself. "I wouldn't know about that."
"Oh, come on. Surely you've heard something."
"Maybe. I don't know. I've never been in there. None of my business."
"Hmm. Maybe we should do some reconnaissance after our shift tonight. Go check it out."
"Ah, I don't know. My wife would kill me."
"Tell her you're with me."
"Then she'd torture me. Then kill me."
"That's what she thinks of me? That's my reputation?"
Nathan offered a sheepish grin. "Something like that."
Hank smiled, not entirely dissatisfied.
"Besides, I'm going caving in the morning," Nathan added.
"Up in Huachuca? Maybe I'll come with you. And never ever come back."
Nurse Otero called out to them. "Mr. Neal, have you checked Mr. Oliver’s vitals this morning?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Do it again, please."
"Yes, ma'am."
Nathan gave Hank a sheepish smile as he headed left to the west wing.
"From one old bitch to another,” Hank said to the kid.
***
Bullet took it. The words just glanced off of her. She nodded. Offered a few non-committal grunts, but really wasn't listening. She couldn't. If she listened to what Otero was saying, she might kill her. With her bare hands. She could do it, too, and Simone Otero probably needed a good smack. The woman, a full twelve inches shorter than Bullet, needed to be put in her place. Otero needed that one good smack and Bullet needed to do it. She needed to see it happen, needed to see the surprise on the woman's face. The -
did you actually just hit me?- shock that would spread just before Otero stormed away to her office.
"What are you smiling at, Ms. Boulet? Is something funny?"
"No," Bullet said, and that's all she could say. Yes, she smiled. She couldn't help it. She thought of driving her palm right up under Otero's chin. She'd done it before. Truckers. Locals. Soldiers from Fort Huachuca out on a drunken tear. There had been broken jaws and shattered teeth, but it was their pride that hurt the most. Of course, it always ended up biting her in the ass. Momentary catharsis and then an unceremonial termination. Maybe a court date. She'd pack her things into the back of her truck and think that she'd gotten it all out of her system. Until the next time.
Now, Otero was rolling again. She was vicious. She spoke in rapid-fire sentences and every word was clipped and enunciated as if it were important. Bullet tuned it out. She still held Mrs. Solis' arm, half-wrapped in a bandage. Elena Solis, the flesh of her arm burned to the elbow, just looked away. She didn't want to get caught in Otero's blast. At Mrs. Solis' side was her son, Rudy, a little shit if there ever was one. He was in awe of the spectacle. Again, Bullet found herself wanting to laugh. It was better than the alternative. If she heard Otero's words, if she really listened to them, those words would grab her by the bones. They'd set her blood on fire. And things would get unfortunate. She'd been through this before. Everyone in Tribes Memorial had. Let Otero strut. Let her assert whatever power she had, even if it were imagined, and then get back to doing your job. While Nurse Otero wasn't her direct supervisor, she could still get Bullet fired, a fact she reminded everyone of whenever it crossed her mind.
Back by the nurse's station, she could see Nathan and Dr. Hank chatting. Dr. Hank wore his sly smile and whispered to Nathan. That's all the kid needed, that sleazy guy in a white coat getting him into trouble. She called him the kid, even though they were about the same age. She liked him. She looked out for him. And she looked out for herself by avoiding Dr. Hank's advances. He wasn't lecherous. Not quite. He was just smarmy. Arrogant. Used to getting his way, like a doctor in an 80’s hospital drama. And he smelled like whiskey. Always whiskey. That part, she could appreciate. So far, she'd worked every day here sober as a priest. Maybe today was the day she broke that streak. She'd even thought to go drinking with the guy. He'd make a decent drinking buddy and would probably gladly buy all of the booze as some sort of display or ploy. But just joining him at the bar would give him the wrong idea.
The Black Goat Motorcycle Club Page 1