by Roxie Noir
“West to the mountains, or east to the desert. Mountains is Mammoth, the ski resort town, and further up, Tahoe. East is... Nevada. Coaldale? Tonopah?”
I think for a moment. I don’t know La Carretera’s northern California operations all that well, but my gut is telling me that they don’t have the hold on rich ski towns that they might on small desert towns.
On the other hand, I know for a fact that rich people fucking love cocaine, and getting cocaine to rich people has been a major part of my job.
I lean over, quickly looking over the map, trying to decide.
“If we go west, we can go to Yosemite,” Tessa says, a forced lightness in her voice as she taps the park on the map with her finger.
“Why not? We’re on vacation, not running for our lives,” I say.
She rolls her eyes and I wish I’d kept my damn mouth shut.
“395 is too crowded,” I say. “Less people east. We’ll go that way.”
“Get on route 6 then,” she says, pointing at a sign up ahead.
We lapse back into silence. We stop in the next town to get gas. Tessa finds sunglasses behind the guns in the glove box and goes in and pays with cash.
I watch her walk into the store, and damn those shorts look good on her. When she comes back out, she leans against the SUV, arms folded in front of her.
“Are you hungry?” she asks.
My stomach growls in response, and I see her mouth twitch into a half-smile.
“I could eat,” I say.
She points at a bakery across the street.
“You want a sandwich?” she asks.
I look around. It’s just a sleepy mountain town, as unthreatening as a jelly donut. To our right, a guy in flannel and a down vest is walking into the convenience store. There’s a minivan parked across the street, and the bakery has a mom and two kids slowly walking out. The sun’s beaming down.
“Yeah,” I say, pulling out my wallet to hand her two twenties. She takes them, then frowns.
“How much money do we have?” she asks.
I cross my arms and lean against the SUV, grinning at her.
“Plenty,” I say. “No spare tire, though.”
“We don’t have a spare tire?”
“It’s full of cash,” I say.
I leave out and probably cocaine dust. That wouldn’t go over too well.
Tessa just nods and stuffs the twenties into her pocket. I can tell she’s still not happy about wearing the shorts outside, but she’ll live.
“I’ll meet you over there when I finish here,” I say.
The SUV has a gas tank the size of a swimming pool, so the damn thing takes forever to fill. I wash the windshield and the rear window just because I’m bored, and then the pump finally clicks off.
As I’m getting back in, I hear a motorcycle gunning down the highway, its roar drowning everything else out.
No. A pack of motorcycles, and they’re slowing down, their exhausts growling.
A black feeling settles over me, and I get into the SUV and watch the road through the rear view mirror as eight or nine bikes come into view, slowly driving up Main Street. From here I can’t make out the patches on their jackets.
Just drive the fuck on through, I think, my eyes glued to the rearview mirror. I don’t move, but all the same, a couple of them glance over and I can see their eyes linger on my big black SUV.
It may as well scream drug dealer, for fuck’s sake. Mentally I add that to Tessa’s stupid list: get rid of car.
The guy in front of the biker pack waves his arm and they all drive into the bakery’s parking lot, turning their backs to me for the first time.
On the back of each jacket is a grinning devil’s head, flames behind it.
It’s the fucking Diablos.
They mostly run pot and meth in Northern California, Oregon, and Nevada, but they’ve got a working relationship with La Carretera. Hell, I’ve called them and put them on lookout for people before. They caught a guy for me once, a low-level moron who thought he could just take a kilo of coke and I’d never notice.
By the time I got him, he was missing a couple teeth. The Diablos aren’t gentle, and now they’re walking into the bakery where Tessa is.
Fuck it.
I open the glove box and take a gun, check that it’s loaded, and stick it in the back of my pants before I start the car and gun it out of the gas station parking lot.
If I can get up enough speed I figure I can crash through the big plate glass windows in the front of the bakery, take out a couple of Diablos and then shoot the rest before they have any idea what the fuck is happening, and then I can grab —
I slam on the brakes and punch the steering wheel. The car honks.
Tessa’s in there, and this whole fucking thing is pointless if I run her over with the car.
An older white lady looks over at me, eyes narrowed, and I give her a half wave, trying to think of a better plan. I can see the bikers in their leather jackets inside the bakery, but I can’t see Tessa.
Where the fuck is she, I think. Come on, Tessa.
Nothing. I ease the SUV across the road and into the bakery’s side lot. I check my gun and get out of the car, and mercifully, there’s a back door to the place, a bored-looking Latino kid smoking right outside the door as I walk in.
“Hey man, you can’t —” I hear as I walk past him into the hot kitchen. Some dishwashers look at me funny but I don’t give half a shit, not when Tessa’s in a room with eight fucking Diablos who know there’s some kind of price on her head.
I push open the swinging doors to the kitchen, my right hand on the gun in my waistband, and right then, the women’s bathroom door opens and Tessa walks out.
“There you are,” she says, perfectly casual.
“Jesus,” I say.
She shoots me an acid look, then notices that I’ve got one hand behind my back and stiffens.
“What is it?” she asks.
“Get out,” I tell her. “Through the kitchen.”
None of them has seen us yet, and as much as I want to put a bullet in each of them to make sure they can’t come after Tessa, I know who would win that fight, and it’s not me.
“Two sandwiches for Sara!” A voice calls, depositing two paper-wrapped packages on the counter, and Tessa walks forward to grab them at the same time as the men’s bathroom door opens and a guy in a Diablos jacket walks out.
I look at him. He looks at me.
His eyes narrow and he tilts his head and I don’t fucking wait, I just go.
I grab his jacket lapels and shove him back through the door to the men’s bathroom. I think Tessa gasps behind me, but I’ve already got him up against the sink in the single-person bathroom, leaning backwards over it.
He spits in my face and some of it gets in my eye. In the second that I blink he manages to get in a body punch, hard, almost enough to knock the wind out of me and it loosens my grip on him.
“You wanna fight, you fucking wetback?” he snarls, and throws another punch, and even though I can hardly breathe I dodge it and now I’m on autopilot. I feel my fist connect with bone before I even know what I’m doing and I see a thin stream of blood on the ugly tile wall.
“Wetback, motherfucker?” I growl.
He throws an elbow but it glances off my shoulder, hard enough to leave a nasty bruise but not hard enough to stop me as I smash my left fist into his nose.
He spits blood and doesn’t answer, but he looks at me like he’s about to do something sly.
His hand isn’t even at his hip before I grab his head and drive my knee into his belly, then drop him on the floor next to the toilet where he heaves himself up to his elbows and then looks at me, panting.
“I got seven friends out there, you stupid Mexican,” he gasps. “And you got twenty-five grand on your head.”
Before I can say anything, the bathroom door opens and adrenaline shoots through me again as I grab the gun and cock it at the door, right at a pair of
big green eyes.
She gasps. I lower it.
“Sorry,” I mutter.
“Come on,” she says, jerking her head.
“You just gonna run when this cunt says so, you goddamn pussy?” the man on the floor says.
Everything goes white for a split second, and then I crouch on the floor and grab his hair with my left hand, pulling his head off the floor.
“What did you call her?” I ask quietly.
“Alex, come on,” Tessa says. Her voice is starting to quaver.
He spits blood again, and this time there might be a piece of tooth, too.
“Cunt,” he mutters defiantly.
I punch him as hard as I can right in the jaw and hear the crack of his teeth smashing together in his mouth.
“Stop it!” Tessa says behind me, as I drop him on the floor again and turn around. She’s got her forearm across her face, like she can’t stand seeing this.
“Come on,” I growl, and pull her out of the bathroom and into the kitchen. This time the dishwashers are staring. I’m sure I look like hell, but then we’re back outside and getting in the car and gravel goes flying as I pull out, getting back onto the highway.
In no time I’m doing ninety, passing big rigs and families on vacation in their minivans recklessly, the engine of this beast redlining. Tessa’s gone white with red spots on her cheeks, clutching the handle above the door.
We finally hit an open section of road and I look behind me in the rearview mirror. Nothing yet, but that doesn’t mean we’re in the clear.
“Slow down,” Tessa says.
I ignore her.
“If we get pulled over, either those guys will grab us while we’re sitting ducks or we’re gonna get arrested,” she says.
I grind my teeth together, but I ease my foot off the gas, because she’s fucking right.
“Change of plans,” I say. “We’re going west now.”
She just nods and pulls out the atlas, flipping to the right page. It’s silent except for the engine. After a minute, she hands me a sandwich.
“I’m sorry he called you a cunt,” I finally say.
“I’ve been called worse,” she says, head bent over the atlas. “You didn’t need to smash his face in.”
I flex one hand on the steering wheel, looking at my knuckles. They’re bruised, cut, and bleeding. That was a dirty fight.
“I think you broke his jaw,” she says, quietly. “He’ll be eating through a straw for months.”
“You’d rather get delivered to my bosses tomorrow, after they break both my legs and do god knows what to you?” I ask. I flex my hands again. They fucking hurt.
“He was down,” she says, and now she looks at me, eyes flashing. “You broke his jaw because you wanted to.”
“He called me a wetback and you a cunt!” I shout, jerking the wheel a little by accident. “You know who the Diablos are? They used to run underage prostitution rings out of Reno, fourteen, fifteen year old girls, and they all used to brag about sampling the merchandise.”
Now she’s staring at me, eyes wide.
“If they’d gotten you, they’d have —”
I stop short, because just the thought makes my hands twitch with fury.
“They’re a violent fucking gang who do bad, bad shit,” I say through my teeth.
“I’ve known you for two days and you’ve shot two people and beaten up two people,” Tessa says, her voice ice cold.
“Jose and Mike were —”
“I know,” she says. “But the guy in the parking lot? The guy just now? You like this shit, Alex.”
“I don’t like it,” I say, glancing in the rear view mirror. “I do it because I have to.”
“You get a rush from it,” she says quietly. “And you fucking love walking around, bragging to everyone about how tough The Scorpion is, how you’re fast and lethal or whatever, how many women are lining up to suck your cock.”
“You don’t know me,” I say. The engine RPMs are creeping toward the red again. “You don’t know the first goddamn thing about me. You don’t know what I do, where I’m from, whether I even like this.”
She points to a sign up ahead.
“Turn left there,” she says. “It’s a dirt road that’ll connect us to 395 eventually.”
“You sure?” I growl.
“Yeah,” she says.
28
Tessa
The SUV thumps off the highway and starts down the gravel road. We’re going faster than I’d like but it’s better than getting caught and raped by a biker gang.
Alex’s knuckles are cut and bruised and bloody, and I’m sure the blood isn’t all Alex's. I hear the crack it made again and just the memory of the sound sends a shudder down my spine.
He was already on the floor, I think again.
Alex flexes his hands again, looking at the damage.
“You don’t have to be afraid of me,” he finally says, his voice low and quiet.
“I’m not,” I say, not looking at him. “But I probably should be.”
I almost wish I were.
If I were afraid of Alex, I probably wouldn’t want to fuck him so bad. I probably wouldn’t have made a spectacle of myself this morning, pouring water all over myself like a woman in a Letter to Penthouse or something.
It worked, though.
Before I can get further on that train of thought, I look at the atlas again and pretend that I’m finding a route.
“I’m glad you’re not,” he finally says. “Most people are.”
“Is that because you live a hyperviolent lifestyle and earned yourself that reputation?” I ask, nastily.
“I do what I fucking have to,” he says. “I didn’t want to pull a bullet out of a guy when I was eleven. I didn’t want to watch my brother die when I was thirteen, but I wanted to be dead even less, so I fucking learned.”
His brother died?
He’s staring straight ahead when I glance over at him, rigid in his seat.
He didn’t mean to tell me that, I realize.
My eyes drop to the tattoo on his forearm: 5/2/84 - 4/13/2004. His brother was only a couple weeks shy of twenty.
“You make your own decisions now,” I say softly.
I think of the crack again and swallow hard.
The guy was already down.
“And I decided to handle that guy,” he says.
I lean my head against the window and look at the desert. It’s early afternoon, and a low rise is coming up on us, separating this dirt road from the highway. If we’re not careful, we could get lost out here.
There’s nothing else I can say to Alex, no way I can make him understand the unease I’m starting to feel around him now. This suspicion that he’s in this life because he likes it, because the violence and the power and having two guns in the glove box make him feel good, macho, whatever.
Self-defense — or defending a helpless woman wearing nothing but a bed sheet — is one thing, but violence for the sake of violence?
Breaking a man’s jaw?
Crack. I shiver again, then look over at Alex. He’s still looking straight ahead, glancing in the rear view mirror every thirty seconds or so.
“Are your hands okay?” I ask.
He flexes them off the wheel and looks at his knuckles like he hadn’t considered it before. They’re bruised and covered in dry blood.
“The fight got a little dirty,” he admits.
For once, I keep my mouth shut. The rise is between our dirt road and the highway at last, so we can’t see it.
“If you stop, I can get the first aid kit out of the back,” I say.
“I’ll be fine,” he says.
I nod at the road ahead.
“So when we get wherever it is we’re going, you’re just going to show up blood-stained with bloody knuckles?”
He takes his foot off the gas and the car slows quickly as he glances over at me, then smiles just a little and sighs.
“I hate it when you�
��re right, tiger,” he says.
My heart skips a beat, but I ignore it and open my door. We meet at the lift gate and I pull the big red duffel bag toward me, hunting through it for water and hydrogen peroxide to clean him off as he sits on the gate and looks at the road behind us.
“I broke his jaw because he called you a cunt,” he says.
I don’t look Alex in the face, I just take one hand and drizzle water over it. It’s gotta hurt, but he doesn’t even react.
“I thought he called you a wetback,” I say.
I take his other hand and pour water over it, the fat drops landing on the dirt.
He just shrugs.
“I’ve been called worse,” he says.
“So have I,” I say. “Pretty sure you called me a fucking cunt this morning.”
“You still mad about that, tiger?”
I’m not. I hadn’t even remembered that it happened until right now, to be honest.
Instead of answering I take his hand again and pour hydrogen peroxide over his knuckles. It fizzes, and I know it stings, but he doesn’t react at all.
He catches my look and half-smiles.
“It tickles,” he says. “This isn’t my first rodeo.”
“Seems like it’s not your twentieth rodeo,” I say. I pour a little more on and let it bubble, then gently pat his knuckles dry.
He laughs.
“It’s not that either,” he says. “At least I didn’t break any fingers this time.”
“You usually break a finger?”
“Not anymore,” he says. “I learned.”
He tilts his head and looks up at me, and I finally look him in the face. He’s got a bruise purpling on one cheekbone.
“I could teach you to throw a pretty good punch,” he says.
“What makes you think I don’t?” I ask.
“Make a fist,” he says.
“I’m busy bandaging your sorry ass up,” I say.
“Ten seconds,” he says. “Come on. You gotta know this stuff now that your lifestyle is so dangerous.”
“Whose fault is that?” I ask. “I should be eating lunch at my desk right now.”
“Isn’t this more exciting?” he asks.
“Sure, it’s more exciting,” I say. “I don’t think it’s better.”