Biker

by Baron, Mike;

  Stay cool, Josh. Don’t freak yourself out. Light touch on the bars and keep your eyes down the road. Fucking Taco was right on his taillight. If Pratt had to brake there’d be a collision. The convoy entered a thickly wooded area, trees coming right up to the ditch. The deer was the most lethal animal in North America. It caused 235 fatalities a year. It leaped in front of traffic in every state, but particularly in Wisconsin. Pratt nervously eyed the tree line. Any deer stupid enough to ignore their rolling thunder deserved to die. Pratt did not want to join them. They were clustered so tightly together that if one went down they all would.

  Pratt laid off the throttle. Taco pulled up alongside and shouted, “Twist it, homes! We ain’t fallin’ behind!” Taco opened his throttle and shot forward, his bare-bones 102-inch chopper exploding with torque and sound, 130-decibel Bronx cheer. Pratt struggled to keep up but at least he was now the tail and didn’t have to worry about being back-ended by some cokehead.

  They roared through a tunnel of trees, leaves and twigs jumping in their wake. They entered a timeless space where nothing existed but the infinite road and the sensation of speed. No thought, no self, only the droning groove of the engine through seat and handlebars into the bones and the wind whipping past. It brought back memories of countless nights running with the Bedouins. My pappy said, “Son you’re gonna drive me to drinkin’ if you don’t stop drivin’ that hot rod Lincoln.” Pratt couldn’t get it out of his head. The night smelled rich with loam and pine. Moonlight dappled the road. The forest dropped away and they were once again in farmland, clusters of lights like tiny freighters on the rolling prairie. Somewhere south of Janesville the smooth blacktop changed abruptly to tattered asphalt as they crossed into Illinois.

  The convoy turned off onto winding gravel. Pratt caught a glimpse of the street sign: Jorgensen Road. A farm up ahead. Robles slowed down. The bikes clustered at the gate. There was a dude with a sawed-off. He was Mexican, had a shaved skull the shape of a howitzer shell and wore a ground-length duster. Robles hung inside the gate while the others roared into the farmyard. Pratt pulled up. The dude with the shotgun eyeballed him with thinly veiled disgust.

  “Who’s this?” he grunted.

  “He’s with me,” Robles said.

  Howitzer waved them through. There were a dozen-plus bikes parked on the hard-packed earth outside the barn, plus a half dozen pick-ups and an old Ford van. Fifty yards away and up three steps was the two-story wood-frame farmhouse, lush planters hanging incongruously from the veranda. The sound of a locomotive emanated from inside the brightly lit barn before breaking down into its components. Men shouted and dogs snarled. It was the opposite of music. The keening yowl of a dog in pain cut like a knife.

  Pratt pulled in next to Taco, reached in his tank bag and tossed a coffee can lid on the ground. He kicked the stand out onto the lid. He followed the Skulls into the barn where three dozen men, most in leather and colors, surrounded a fighting ring that was a fifteen-foot square enclosed by a four-foot wood fence. The floor of the ring was covered with straw, much of it stained black from blood. Outside the ring, men tended their dogs, thick-shouldered scarred pit bulls who’d known neither love nor tenderness. A panting, downed dog lay on the straw. Its owner entered through a gate, grabbed the gasping animal by the scruff of its neck and dragged it out of the barn whimpering in terror.

  Seconds later there was a gunshot.

  Pratt looked around and wished he hadn’t. A man beat a dog with a heavy leather strap. “You! Worthless! Piece! Of! Shit!” The dog lay on its back, an arc of yellow piss hitting its belly in terror. Pratt forced himself to look away.

  It was just dumb luck. Lowry hadn’t known about Pratt’s biker past. The fund raiser had serendipitously called on the one private investigator in town who knew what had happened and where to go. Luck. That’s all it was. Pratt would keep telling himself that in the days to come.

  Pratt had never liked dogfights, and the Bedouins never had a thing to do with them. But a lot of bikers did.

  Pratt loved dogs. He’d loved Barkley most of all. He remembered the day when Duane, his father, brought home the squirming ball of fur and handed it to him. “Here. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.” It had been Pratt’s tenth birthday.

  The pup had chewed its way through their rented trailer, chewing one of Duane’s good cowboy boots. Duane came home shit-faced, saw the boot and went after Barkley with a .357.

  “No Duane!” Josh shouted, grasping the dog and leaping out into the trailer park, where he hid in the equipment shed all night until his father passed out and it was safe to sneak back into the house. Duane was still passed out when Josh got up the next morning and took the 7:00 bus for school after stashing Barkley with a friend.

  Pratt missed Barkley more than Duane.

  About half the crowd was Latino, the rest redneck trash like him. No women. A man built like a Sherman tank, arms blue with ink, dragged his snarling “Staffy” into the ring. As if they could rub the stink off what they did by calling their pit bulls Staffordshire Terriers. A freak in Oshkosh B’Gosh coveralls, skin scarlet with rosacea and ’roids, followed restraining a lunging beast, its fur streaked with blood where teeth had gouged furrows in its flesh.

  Pratt had seen enough. He looked around. Money was changing hands. All eyes were on the ring. The Skulls snorted ice and tossed back Jell-O shots from a Coleman cooler. Pratt edged out the door. Nobody gave a shit.

  The yard was lit from a pair of flood lamps mounted high on the barn. The air was cooler outside. The soundtrack of hell emanated from within. The old Ford van was parked sixty feet away in shadow, off by itself. As Pratt approached he heard whimpering and scratching from within.

  The rear doors contained no windows and were not locked. Pratt opened the doors with a nerve-wrenching shriek. A raw animal stench, part shit, part fear, nearly knocked him down. The back of the van contained three rows of cages on each side in which small dogs and cats had been imprisoned without water or bedding. The floor was covered with tools. One cage held a Yorkie with a sequined collar. Another held a marmalade cat. Two schnauzers yapped at him in desperation.

  “George and Gracie I presume,” Pratt said reaching for the cages. He eased them out and set them on the ground.

  “HEY ASSWIPE,” penetrated Pratt’s head like a particle beam. “WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?”

  CHAPTER 4

  The coke had left Pratt jittery. He rode that jitter and the frisson of fear and excitement he got from the Voice. A familiar fury amped up his nervous system, a willingness to engage, an I-don’t-give-a-fuck ethos. His mind worked strikes, take-downs, submissions. Ignoring the Voice, Pratt scanned the floor and spied an ax handle.

  “HEY MOTHERFUCKER I’M TALKING TO YOU,” the Voice blasted. Pratt slammed the van doors shut, shoving the caged schnauzers behind him with his foot. He held the ax handle by his left leg and looked at the Voice.

  A skinhead the size of a Kodiak bear wearing a black leather vest that highlighted his massive biceps and pecs strode toward Pratt in steel-toed boots. An unreadable message in blue Gothic script splayed across his chest. The tat on his left arm showed a rattlesnake winding through a skull. The tats on his right arm were so thick they looked like a screen. He had a metal stud in the center of his chin over a Billy goatee that looked like a woman’s pussy hair. A patch on his vest identified him as a Mastodon out of the Quad Cities. The Mastodon’s homeboys boiled out of the barn joined by most of the house, high on ice and Jell-O shots.

  Heart going boom boom boom Pratt held his right hand up like a traffic cop. “Stop!” he commanded.

  The Mastodon stopped, an expression of utter disbelief on his concave face.

  “I’m a private investigator. All I want are these two dogs. Let me have them and I’m out of here.”

  How was he going to get them out of there? Bungee them to the back of his bike?

  “You ain’t a cop?” The Mastodon was incredulous.

 
“I’m a private investigator. All I want are the dogs.”

  “I DON’T THINK SO MOTHERFUCKER.” The Mastodon advanced, eyes blazing with incendiary rage and joy.

  “Kick his ass, Barnett!” someone called.

  “Beat down!”

  Cell phone cameras appeared.

  Mumbling obscenities Barnett came at Pratt like a linebacker.

  Bending like a sprinter Pratt ran straight at the big man, swerving and ducking at the last minute as he whacked Barnett’s left knee with the ax handle with the satisfying smack of Barry Bonds knocking one out of the park. Barnett sank like the Twin Towers. Two Mastodons calved like icebergs from the crowd, one swinging a chain, the other gripping a Bowie knife the size of Rhode Island. Pratt stepped backwards onto Barnett’s head, grinding it into the dirt.

  Thank you, God, they don’t have guns.

  That could change in an instant. Pratt had heard a gun. He’d thought about bringing one. He wished he had one. The Mastodons split, the one on Pratt’s right grinning as he swung the chain in a figure eight. They planned to catch Pratt between them. Pratt danced backward to the van, flung the door open and grabbed a two-pound steel wrench. The chain guy rushed and lashed out, bringing the heavy chain down in a vertical arc meant to bash Pratt’s skull. Pratt juked to the right and threw the wrench ass over teakettle with as much spin as his thick wrist could deliver.

  The chain guy’s mouth went oval an instant before the wrench struck him in the middle of his forehead with the jawed end. The chain guy staggered back two steps and sat heavily on his ass.

  “Uf-da!” someone said. “That’s gotta smart.”

  “Yo Barnett.”

  Barnett sat up clutching his knee. “Shit!” he spat. “What’s the matter with you assholes? Fuck him up!”

  The other Mastodon danced forward, knife moving in a tight little pattern. The freak was between Pratt and the van so Pratt did something he’d seen in a Punisher comic book. He scooped up a handful of pea gravel and hurled it in the knife man’s face. The dude instinctively threw up his hands. Pratt rushed in with a kick to the nuts that lifted the hapless Mastodon off his feet. He fell to the ground howling and curled up like a shrimp.

  “Hay-zeus,” someone reverently intoned.

  An anaconda-like arm snaked around Pratt’s neck. He grabbed hold of the elbow with both hands to work a little breathing room but by then a couple more Mastodons had moved in to deliver kidney-rupturing body blows. Pratt kicked up and caught someone in the jaw.

  An instant later he was driven to the ground by the sheer force of blows. Now it was his turn to curl like a shrimp as bikers went to work with steel-toed boots. Pratt couldn’t see daylight. He tried to shield his head and gut as blows rained down like a meteor shower. Bone-deep pain churned through his ribs. Pratt had a very high pain threshold. He was near red line. A wooden bat bounced off his ribs with soul-stopping force and he began to wonder if he was going to make it out of there alive. A slick nausea ballooned from his broken nose and worked its way to his stomach.

  All for two dogs.

  The smack-in-the-face report of a shotgun instantly sucked the air out of the yard. Heads swiveled. “Back away from him. Get back or I’ll blow your fuckin’ heads off,” a woman said. Pratt incongruously registered her sexy contralto and wondered if her looks matched her voice. Gradually, grudgingly, the bikers backed off. One last kick to the kidney from Taco who held the bat.

  I’ll be pissing blood for a week, Pratt thought.

  Slowly, painfully, he got to his feet. Cracked rib. Jolts of pain radiated through his thorax like starving cats released form a cage. Loose jaw and lumps and abrasions up and down both sides. He turned toward the shooter. She stood atop the three stone steps leading to the farmhouse holding a pump-action Remington in parade position. His first impression: That body. Latino voluptuous. Huh! Good God!

  “He’s a fuckin’ cop, Cass!” Barnett said, hanging onto a brother.

  “I’m a private investigator,” Pratt said. “All I want is the dogs.”

  A rumble of discontent rolled through the barnyard. The night was young. There were dogs which hadn’t fought. Some bitched about the interruption. Others bitched that the fucking Skulls had brought an outsider.

  “Hey,” Cass said, setting the shotgun on its butt. “Hey! You know what? Y’all been here all day, fightin’ your dogs, pissin’ in my yard and suckin’ down my hard cider. It’s one thirty in the morning. Why don’t y’all get out of here? That’s it! Show’s over! Nice seeing y’all!”

  “You’re getting’ paid,” someone rumbled.

  “Yeah, until I say when. Well it’s that time of night, gentlemen! Pack up your pit bulls and go home.”

  More grumbling. Some of the boys were looking at the woman with ill-concealed lust, figuring their odds against the shotgun. Might be worth it A tawny-haired beauty of five six in ass-hugging jeans and Luchese boots wearing a flannel shirt tied off across her taut belly. Wide mouth and fearless green eyes. A scar along her chin line only made her more interesting. While bikers bitched Pratt edged his way out of the crowd toward the steps leading to the farmhouse.

  Damn, he wished he’d brought a gun.

  Too late for that. She’d likely saved his life. He had to stand by her. He turned at the base of the steps and faced the yard. Most of the bikers had gone back to their original clusters and with much grumbling were loading dogs into pick-ups.

  “You know bitch, we might not come back,” someone said.

  Cass half-lifted the scatter gun. “I reckon I can live with that heartbreak.”

  “Yo, bitch,” said an Aztec warrior. “Maybe we come back when you ain’t expecting. You ever think of that?”

  Cass put the scatter gun on target. “Bring it on, Salazar.”

  The Aztec shrugged and walked to his hardtail.

  Motorcycles cleared their throats, a mechanical cacophony that rose and rose until the ground shook and every bird had fled. They heard it in Chicago. One by one the bikes roared out of the yard up the dirt road, leaving a cloud of dust that hung in the air like the aftermath of some disaster. One by one the pick-ups followed until the last set of taillights disappeared in the cloud of dust and the last straight pipe coughed a mile up the road.

  Pratt turned and looked at the woman.

  “Thanks.”

  “Can you walk? Come on up and have some coffee.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Pratt followed the woman up the stone path, up three wood steps and into the old farmhouse. She walked with an unself-conscious metronomic sexiness. Stoked by exhaustion, adrenaline and post-coke jitters, Pratt was glad he’d worn a cup. He had a hard-on like a Saturn booster. A stitch in his side screaming with every step couldn’t put a dent in it.

  Every time he saw a woman he’d like to fuck he got a hollow, hammering sensation in his chest. Possibility and failure. This one had an ass like a ripe peach. Pratt knew guys who’d let the genie out of the bottle. He was afraid what his own genie might do, if he ever let it loose. He said a silent prayer.

  He didn’t care that the babe was hosting dogfights. He didn’t care if she was a murderer. He just wanted to fuck her.

  The woman opened the screen door and Pratt followed. It slammed shut behind him. She walked past a staircase through a living room outfitted in fifties shag into a lit kitchen with a well-grooved hardwood floor. The round kitchen table was made of oak with four oak chairs. There was a pot of coffee on the stove.

  She set the shotgun down in the corner, turned and offered her hand. “Cass Rubio.”

  She had a firm, warm grip. She smelled of jasmine and a touch of something tart. “Josh Pratt. This your farm?”

  “I’m a renter. Have a seat. Would you like some day-old doughnuts?”

  “Yeah sure, why not.”

  Cass set a white bakery box on the table. “You sit while I get the first-aid kit. You looked dinged-up pretty good.”

  “I think I got a cracked rib.”

 
“Poor baby.” Cass entered a bath off the kitchen and returned with a white metal box marked with a red cross. She set it on the table and opened it. She used a cotton swab dipped in rubbing alcohol to mop up the cuts and abrasions on his face. She applied a jumbo Band Aid that covered half his forehead. Her fingers were cool to the touch and each time she touched him she sent a jolt of electricity straight to his groin. He shifted and adjusted to hide his erection. Of course it was all fantasy. A genuine looker like this wouldn’t tumble for a grimy ex-con.

  “Take off your shirt.”

  Pratt peeled off the vest and shirt. She stared at the dragon tattoo winding around his torso. “You’d make a nice mural for a Chinese restaurant.” She touched the crude cross on his bicep. “This doesn’t fit.”

  “The price was right.”

  She touched his ribs and he winced. “You could play the xylophone on these. This must be the rib, huh?”

  She poked again and he flinched, gasping. Her scent was pure sex, something she got at Walmart named after a celebrity.

  “I don’t have enough bandage to do it right so I’m going to have to use duct tape.”

  Pratt nodded. Cass opened a kitchen drawer and took out a spool of gray tape. She wrapped it around his ribs and over the shoulder so that he felt he was encased in high-flex body armor.

  “How’s that?” she asked when she’d finished.

  Pratt shifted. “Great. I can barely move.”

  “You should see a doctor. I only had one year’s nurse’s training.”

  She brought him a mug of coffee and plunked whole milk in a carton on the table. They sipped coffee and ate day-old doughnuts.