by Eyre Price
“I think a lot of people would have, but your boss didn’t like the rough cut I sent him. He said it needed more spice.”
“Spice?”
“The very next stop on the tour, he sent over some girls with a free supply of ‘spice.’” There was more to the story, but his guilt made him hesitate telling it. “I could’ve stopped it, but I was afraid to lose Filat’s financing. So I let it happen. And the next thing I knew everyone in the band was using worse than ever.” He sighed sadly. “There’s nothing more pathetic than some comatose, potbellied, middle-aged rocker shitting his leather pants. No one wants to see that.” He reconsidered what he’d said. “Not more than once anyway.”
Daniel thought to himself and chuckled. “The funny thing is that I was going to use my own money to finance the pilot, but then I met your boss and thought he was just a little shmuck. I thought I could use his money for the show and not have to touch my safety net. But now, I’m not only going to lose all my money anyway, but I’m going to lose my life too.” He stopped to consider the true absurdity of it.
“That’s why I’m certain there’s a god out there,” Daniel continued.
“How’s that?”
“Because life is so damn funny and humor doesn’t just happen, humor’s hard. I just can’t believe that all of this could happen just by chance. I mean, my son set up that little musical goose chase as a way to make me want to live again. And it worked. But because of it, I’m going to die. That kind of irony is just too perfect to be happenchance. It takes real effort.”
Moog was quiet for a moment. It wasn’t something he normally liked to talk about. “I hope He keeps his sense of humor for me.”
“You believe in God?”
“My gramma said so, but I don’t know. After all the things I done, I kinda hope there ain’t nothing there.”
“Well, I’ll know soon enough.” Daniel’s voice was quietly resigned.
“I still don’t understand why you’re going.”
“You have anything you’d die for?”
“Lots I’d kill for,” the big man hedged.
“That’s not the same thing.”
Moog knew it wasn’t.
“Well, I’d die for my son. And that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to face up to that crazy Russian and settle this account without involving my boy.”
“Is that why you saved me back there?” Moog was uncomfortable with the thought. “’Cause I don’t know if I’m going to be all that much help when we get there.”
“You think he’s going to kill you too?”
“Mr. P.?”
Daniel nodded.
“Things got pretty messed up out here.”
“They sure did.”
Ever the professional, Moog was willing to take responsibility for everything that had happened on his shift. “And it was all on me.”
Daniel knew there was something else. “He won’t like what happened to Rabidoso, will he?”
“Well, I ain’t gonna tell him. And you ain’t gonna tell him.” The big man turned suddenly, like he needed to be reassured about that.
“No, I’m not going to tell him.”
Moog made a gesture with his oversized hand like he was dismissing all of those concerns. “I don’t know. Someone’s gonna kill me sometime. I guess it could just as easily be Mr. P. tonight. Shit, you know him; not even he will know what he’s gonna do until he does it.”
They drove in silence for a mile or two.
“If it helps,” Daniel started, “all the reasons I gave you are true.”
“About why you came back for me?” Moog clarified.
Daniel nodded. “I thought about not coming back for you, about just running.”
“It’s what I would’ve done.”
“In the end I figured you were just too good a man to leave in an alley like that.”
They drove on for another couple of silent miles. Moog was the first to break the silence. “It’s not completely lost on me, you know?”
“What’s that?”
“Why you did what you did. Why you’re going back now.”
“How’s that?”
“I got a kid of my own.” There was a note of solemnity in his voice.
“Really?” The question reflected Daniel’s surprise, but also a degree of happiness. “Where is—”
“She’s with her momma,” Moog explained. “I don’t really see her all that much. She’s better off without me.” That truth hurt him. “I send her money,” he was quick to point out. “Take good care of her and her momma.”
That didn’t surprise Daniel.
“I just ain’t fit to be no father.”
Daniel nodded. “None of us are.”
Moog nodded back. “In my whole life, it’s the only thing I feel guilty about.”
Daniel stared out at the endless highway. “I guess you do understand.”
Oregon. The Beaver State. The name brings to mind rugged, rocky Pacific coasts and dense evergreen forests.
Like so much in life, however, the reality of it all is very, very different. US 84 cuts down deep through an Oregon that is an endless wasteland, a barren landscape that resembles nothing so much as the dark side of the moon.
Mile after mile passed with the Monte Carlo’s speedometer quivering up near ninety, but without any features to mark their bearings, it seemed they were standing still, as if they could’ve opened their doors and stepped out into the gray nothingness.
Daniel’s eyes grew heavy, and then heavier. He tried to shake away the fatigue. He slapped his face and bit the inside of his cheek. He rolled down the window and then rolled it back up again. Nothing he tried did anything to free him from the sleepiness that threatened to pull him down in a warm, comfortable stranglehold.
The tires screamed and the steering wheel shook when he drifted over the shoulder and onto the rumble strips. Startled, Daniel pulled the sedan back onto the highway and nervously looked over at Moog. The incident hadn’t woken him.
Concentrating on his fight to stay awake and on the road, Daniel hadn’t noticed the bikers at first. By the time he did, they were right on his bumper, riding as a pack of four, with two pairs riding two abreast. Their throaty pipes rattled the windows with a predatory roar.
He sped up a little. And then sped up a little more. He pressed the accelerator until the Monte Carlo began to shake and shimmy. The bikes stayed right behind him. He remembered what had happened in New Orleans. And Chicago. And Cleveland. Stealing a check in the rearview mirror, it occurred to him that they were in very big trouble.
“Wake up,” Daniel called across the armrest.
Moog stirred in his seat, but only slightly. He said something that sounded like “Hrmmmph” and then fell back into the depths of sleep.
“Wake up!” Nothing.
Daniel reached across and poked the big man, who shot up out of his slumber with a reflexive reach for the pistol holstered beneath his left arm. “What th—”
He looked out the window and then over at Daniel. “What the hell is wrong with you? You don’t go just poking a man when he’s asleep.” He made a point of pulling his hand away from his Desert Eagle’s grip. “Not a man like me.” He made some disgruntled smacking noises like a bear woken too early from his hibernation.
Daniel ignored the tantrum. “I think we’ve got company.”
“Company?”
Daniel motioned with his thumb and Moog followed the gesture to the back window. “What?”
“The bikers,” Daniel answered incredulously.
“Bikers?”
When he turned back to the window one of them had pulled up alongside them and was taking aim with a cannon almost as big as Moog’s.
A second later the Monte Carlo’s chassis dipped down to the pavement as Daniel stood on the brakes. The thread-worn tires squealed in protest and left rubber they couldn’t afford to lose on the pavement as the car fishtailed to a stop.
The shot from the biker
’s oversized hand cannon sounded like a clap of thunder, but the shot missed the mark.
The bikes growled loudly as they split in pairs, swerving to either side in a desperate attempt to avoid the sedan. Only three of them made it clear. The fourth clipped the Monte Carlo’s right rear quarter panel and dropped the bike straight down to the road. Sparks shot up from the wreckage like it was a dancing dragon in a Chinatown parade on New Year’s night.
The biker bounced off the pavement, went high in the air like he was made of rubber, twisted in midair, came down, and bounced again. He slid three hundred yards down the highway as Exhibit A in the ongoing debate over the importance of helmets. And proper riding clothes. And safe riding habits.
“Jesus Christ!” Moog screamed as he instinctively grabbed the dash.
Ahead of them on the barren highway, the three bikers had turned and come to a stop, lined three abreast across the highway.
Daniel turned to Moog. “What do I do?”
Moog’s answer was simple. “Get rid of them.”
“How?”
The big man just shook his head. “Don’t you ever get tired?”
“Tired?” Daniel didn’t understand the big man’s point or what it had to do with the three bikers who sat five hundred yards down the road menacingly revving their bikes, making them roar like wild beasts begging to be freed to attack.
“Of always asking for things. Asking for help. Asking for permission. Asking for forgiveness.” Moog made no effort to disguise his disdain as he pointed across the dash to the riders who were waiting for them. “Those guys want to kill your ass.”
Daniel looked nervously toward them and then back to Moog.
“Before you go and throw your life away, just once…when they try to push you ’round, stand up and be a Push Back Man.”
From the car’s stereo Elmore James made his guitar pay the price. And suddenly Daniel understood. He thought about the life he’d led. And the one he wished he had. He thought about everything Atibon had told him about Today music. Suddenly he knew why he’d come to the crossroads and he could admit what he’d wanted all along.
The Monte Carlo squealed again as he dropped her into drive and brought the accelerator down as hard as she’d tolerate.
The bikers answered the call and rolled back hard on their throttles, erupting from the point like three leather-clad missiles.
Moog pulled his Desert Eagle and turned to Daniel. “Now, what’s the plan?”
“Plan?” He stared down the highway. “Something will turn up.”
The big man smiled as the distance to the bikers closed quickly.
Shots from the bikers popped holes in the windshield, which each instantly connected itself to the others with an intricate spread of spider webs in the glass.
Return fire from Moog’s Desert Eagle popped holes in one of the bikers. He was dead before he hit the pavement with a sickening thud. Blood and sparks sprayed across the pavement.
The two other bikers kept coming. Closer and closer.
More shots hit the Monte Carlo.
More shots whizzed past the bikers.
And then, just as the two converging forces were about to collide, Daniel pulled the steering hard to the left and stomped on the brake. The car began to spin wildly around and around.
The bikers had been preparing to dodge the oncoming car, swerving to either side to avoid the five-foot span of the sedan’s hood. They hadn’t counted on the Monte Carlo spinning down the highway like a two-ton, Detroit-made, rotating blade of a meat grinder. There was no escape.
One rider hit the hood, slid across it from left to right, and then disappeared somewhere beneath the skidding wheels, smeared across the asphalt like a dollop of strawberry jam across a hot piece of toast.
The last rider hit the Monte Carlo’s trunk, took a tumble over it, then ricocheted off it, up into the air. He landed on the shoulder of the road and rolled down the pavement.
“Now,” Moog asked, “was that so hard?”
Daniel slowed then pulled to the side of the road and stepped out of the car. He left the engine running and the door wide open.
The horizon he looked out on was strewn with wreckage. Man and machine. All of it linked by lines of crimson blood, burnt rubber, and spilled oil like some gruesome connect-the-dots picture. Daniel took it all in with a cold eye and then began to walk toward the scene, his legs surprisingly steady and strong.
Daniel looked down on what had once been a man but was now reduced to a mass of wheezing and convulsing parts, not coldly, but with a certain detachment. The rider’s twitching hand suddenly reached up and grabbed hold of Daniel’s pant leg. “You didn’t come to the crossroads to die,” the shattered man gasped. “What you come there for, mi key.” The grip on his leg tightened with one final spasm and then fell lifeless.
Moog came up behind him and then stood next to him. “You all right?”
“You don’t have to go back,” Daniel told him without taking his eyes off the still-smoking wreckage. “I can do this myself.”
Moog looked past the carnage, out toward the endless horizon. “I got a job to do. And I’m going to see that through.”
Daniel just nodded.
“You know, you could too,” Moog offered. “You could head someplace,” the big man told him. “You could run now and I wouldn’t come after.”
Daniel looked down at his feet. The bloody mass wasn’t wheezing or twitching anymore. “You’re not the only one with something to finish.”
Moog turned back toward the Monte Carlo, waiting for them there with its doors open wide at the berm of the road. “Then let’s go.”
Daniel leaned down and pulled a .45 free from the corpse’s waistband. It felt good in his hand. Like it belonged there. “Yeah. Let’s finish this.”
It wasn’t quite midnight when they finally pulled the Monte Carlo up to the valet’s stand at the Hotel du Monde—twelve hundred miles and a handful of street-legal speed from Seattle.
Through the shot-out windshield, Daniel saw the kid in the maroon valet jacket jump back as the bullet-riddled sedan rolled to a stop and then shuttered like it was going through death throes. When he was reasonably sure the heap wasn’t about to burst into flames, the kid came around and pulled on the dented driver’s door. It took three hard tugs before it finally came open with the shrill sound of metal on metal, like opening a steel coffin.
Daniel got out and handed him the keys. “Don’t scratch it.”
“No, sir,” the kid said earnestly.
Daniel reached into the backseat and pulled out the cash-stuffed amp with his right hand.
“You want me take that?” Moog offered.
“I’d like to go up there carrying it myself.”
The big man nodded. “I get it.”
Daniel shifted the amp to his left hand and then reached behind him with his right to make certain his pistol was ready.
Together they walked to the far end of the hotel’s casino lobby, to the bank of elevators that serviced the penthouse. Moog pushed the up button and then turned to his traveling companion. “However this ends for you—” He wasn’t particularly good with saying things unrelated to his professional duties. He felt awkward, aware of his lack of eloquence. “I hope it goes how you want it to go.”
Daniel said, “Thanks.” And meant it.
The elevator doors opened, but Daniel put his hand out to stop Moog from getting on. “Before we go up there, there’s something I need to tell you.”
Moog watched the doors slide closed again. “What?”
“When this all started and you took me to Malibu—”
“Yeah?”
“I thought the money would be there. I did.”
“All right.” It didn’t matter anymore.
“But I knew the gun was in there too.” The relief Daniel found in the troubling revelation made it sound glib in a way he hadn’t intended.
Moog wasn’t entirely sure how to take it. Or if there was
more. “OK.”
“If the money had been there, my plan was to shoot both of you.” Daniel hung his head. “I’ve felt bad about that for a while now. I just wanted you to know that.”
“All right.”
“And I want you to know, with everything that’s happened—” Daniel pushed the up button, ready to go now. “I’m glad I didn’t.”
The doors opened and both men stepped into the car. They rode up in silence until the “P” on the light pad lit up and an electronic female voice announced, “Penthouse.” The doors opened. Moog stepped out.
And someone punched Daniel right in the face.
It took a minute for the lights to come back on in his head. By that time there was a heavily muscled man with a dragon tattoo wrapped around his neck standing over him, with his left hand clenching Daniel’s shirt front and his right balled up in a fist. “This is for New Orleans.” The punch fell so hard it seemed to shake the entire elevator car.
“This is for Shakey up in Chicago,” the man growled as his biker boot kicked Daniel in the ribs. Another kick.
Daniel tried to crawl away, but there was no place to go.
“And this is for today,” the bulked-up biker continued. “This is for Black Greg.” A kick. “And Lobo.” A kick. “Turtle.” A kick. “And Kingpin.” A kick.
“Dragon, that’s enough,” the potbellied biker Daniel remembered from New Orleans yelled as he grabbed his brother-in-arms by the arm. “The Russian didn’t want him touched!”
“Fuck the Russian!” Dragon shouted as he let another kick fly. Another kick, and then he suddenly realized the risk in defying Filat. “This ain’t over!” he promised.
Daniel coughed and the clump of blood and mucus it produced made him gag. “No.” He spat and then looked Dragon in the eye. “This is a long way from over.”
Potbelly pulled Daniel from the elevator car and patted him down, immediately discovering the pistol concealed at the small of his back and pulling it free. He tucked the confiscated gun into his own waistband and then pushed Daniel into the suite’s main living area.
Filat Preezrakevich was waiting there, sprawled out on an enormous couch that he shared with half a dozen young women in various stages of undress. A dozen more girls circulated in the bar area behind him like exotic zoo animals in lingerie.