Bull Mountain

by Brian Panowich

  “The last time I had to straighten you out. I hit you right here.” Gareth held the edge of the broken bottle to the side of Angel’s nose. “Do you remember, Annette?”

  Angel struggled to push her head down deeper into the pillow and out of the bottle’s reach, but Gareth pushed down harder. She squeezed her eyes shut as she felt the glass press into her skin. She screamed through his hand, but no one could hear her. Blood spilled onto the sheets on both sides of her head, forming Rorschach wings on the cotton as he dragged the broken glass across her face.

  When he was finished, he got off her and tossed the bottle to the floor. He walked back to the mirror and stared at the blood smeared across his arms and chest. He turned on the faucet and held his hands under the water until it was scalding.

  Angel pulled herself to the floor and slowly crossed the carpet toward the door.

  “Aw, now where you going?” Gareth said, and she stopped cold. “You don’t wanna be my friend no more?” He squatted down and looked at her with the curiosity a hunter would give a wounded animal. “You can’t leave until you get paid,” he said. “I mean, you are a whore after all, right?” He swiped up the two twenties he had laid on the table earlier, crumpled the bills in his hand, and stuffed them into Angel’s mouth. She gagged. He stood her up, opened the door, and threw her battered figure into the second-floor guardrail right next to where Val was standing.

  “What the hell, Gareth?” he said.

  “Get this bitch outta here,” Gareth said, and closed the door.

  Within minutes he was asleep.

  2.

  Val came back out on the breezeway with a bath towel, a wet rag, and a thousand dollars in cash. “Hey, can you hear me?”

  Angel shrank back from his voice, lifting her shoes and dress to block her face from this new threat.

  “Don’t be scared, girl. I’m not gonna hurt you. I want to help you, okay? I want to help.” He held out the towel. She hesitated but finally lowered her shoes, snatched the towel from his hands and covered herself the best she could. The left side of her face was on fire and it hurt to breathe. Her ribs felt broken.

  “You’re . . . his . . . friend,” she said between short, stuttered breaths.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “He cut me . . . my face.”

  Val went to touch her cheek, but she winced and pulled away. “It hurts.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Here, put this on it.” He handed her the wet rag. “Keep pressure on it like this.” He took her hand in his and pressed the rag down on her wound.

  “It hurts so bad.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Can you help me? Can you call the police, or an ambulance or something?”

  Val scanned the parking lot below them, then cupped his mouth and sighed into his hands. “No, ma’am. I can help, but I can’t do that.”

  “Can I use your phone, then, or something, please? I can’t stay out here like this. Please? You said you wanted to help.”

  “I do, but you can’t use my phone. If you call the police, or if they send an ambulance here, you’ll need to explain yourself, and then someone is going to get killed.”

  “Someone needs to get killed.” Angel propped herself up against the rail as best she could and dabbed the edge of the towel under her bloody nose. Val held a finger to his lips.

  “Keep your voice down and listen to me. I won’t call the police, or an ambulance, but I will call you a taxicab. You can get dressed and wait down by the street. I’ll tell them where to pick you up.”

  Angel looked around on the ground until she spotted the twenties she had spit out lying on a steel grate next to her.

  “Don’t worry about the money,” Val said. “I’ll take care of it. Just wait for the cab and get yourself to a hospital.”

  Angel fidgeted under the towel, trying to pull her panties on with her free hand. Val averted his eyes. He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a thousand dollars in hundreds, and held it up for her to see. “Can you do that?” he said. “Can you go wait down by the street and then get yourself some help?”

  Angel nodded.

  “I’m serious, girl. If you send the police or anyone else here looking for the man in that room, things will not end well for you. Things will not end well for me, either. Do you understand?”

  She nodded again.

  “Say the words.”

  “I’ll go to a hospital and I won’t call the police.”

  “Or anyone else.”

  “Or anyone else.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise. Just let me put my clothes on before the rest of the world sees me like this.”

  “Of course,” Val said. He helped the girl to her feet, trying to hold the towel in place to save what little dignity she had left, but it was useless. She gave up on the panties, kicking them off her leg, and tried to slip back into the black dress she’d thought she looked so pretty in a few hours ago. She started to cry again.

  “Can you help me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Val helped her slide the dress up and over her shoulders, and it enveloped her like a shadow. She turned and lifted her hair, and Val secured the straps behind her neck. When she turned around to face him, she looked up and took the rag from her face.

  “How bad do I look?” she said.

  Val wiped the tears from the undamaged side of her face. “You are a beautiful girl,” he said, and tucked the fold of cash into the girl’s hand. She lowered her eyes and pressed the rag back to her face.

  “You’re not a very good liar,” she said, and still holding her shoes, limped her way toward the stairs. She knew she would never be beautiful again.

  CHAPTER

  12

  BRACKEN LEEK

  2015

  1.

  “Can I bum a smoke?”

  “Can I bang your wife?”

  Moe thought about that and tugged on the soul patch sprouting under his bottom lip. “If I say yes, then can I bum a smoke?”

  Tilmon reached back into the stash under the steering wheel, grabbed his pack of Camel Lights, and shook one out for his partner. Moe lit up and went back to studying their route on a laminated map. The piece-of-shit GPS never worked this far out in the sticks. Tilmon watched Moe smoke from the corner of his eye. “How long we been doing this?” he said.

  Moe looked up from the map and took a drag, tapping his ashes on the floorboard. “Doing what? Riding Highway 27?” He looked at his watch. “About two hours.”

  “No, I mean, how long we been riding together?”

  Moe looked at his watch again, as if he’d set a timer at the beginning of their partnership. “Shit, man. I don’t know. Almost two years, I think.”

  “Almost two years.”

  “Yeah, about that. Why?”

  “I’m just curious.”

  Moe smoked his cigarette down to the filter and tossed the butt out the window. They burned up another mile of interstate before he bit. “Curious about what? The map? I like looking at the map.”

  “You can look at the map all you want. That doesn’t bother me.”

  “Then what’s up with the cryptic line of questioning?”

  “What line? I asked you one thing.”

  Moe’s ears started to burn. “For real, why?”

  Tilmon slid his sunglasses up his forehead and pinched the oil off his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll tell you. Two years we been riding together and in all that time I can’t think of one time you brought enough smokes to make the trip.”

  Moe stared at him blankly. “Are you being serious right now?”

  “Yeah, I’m being serious. Can you think of one time in two years you didn’t have to bum off me sometime during the route? Just name one time.”

  “Go fuck yourself
, Tilmon.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t get all shitty about it. I’m just pointing something out. We both patched in about the same time, so I know we make about the same money, but not really, ’cause I got to carry your habit as well as my own. That shit adds up, man. If you think about it, it’s kind of a shitty thing to do to a partner of almost two years.”

  “How much, Tilmon? How much you want?” Moe lifted his ass off the seat and pulled his wallet from his back pocket. “I got seventy . . . seventy-three dollars. Will that cover it?”

  “Put your money away, Moe. I’m just trying to make a point. Look . . . we’re losing Romeo.”

  Moe looked out the window at the large sideview mirror and saw the black ’66 shovelhead Harley that had been tailing them pull over next to exit 118 to Broadwater Campground. Moe stuffed his wallet back in his pants and grabbed the radio handset.

  “Romeo, what’s going on back there, bro?”

  Static.

  “I gotta take a leak. Keep on truckin’ and I’ll catch up.”

  “Copy that. Bracken, you hear that?”

  The voice of Bracken Leek, riding the Heritage Classic in front of Tilmon and Moe’s box truck, came over the radio. “Yeah, I got it. Do what you gotta do, Romeo, and get your ass back in gear.”

  “Nothing to it but to do it,” Romeo said.

  Tilmon reached for his smokes. “Bro?”

  “Huh?”

  “A second ago, you called Romeo ‘bro.’ You can’t stand that guy.”

  “Yeah, well, he don’t hold two-year grudges over fuckin’ cigarettes.”

  Tilmon rolled his eyes. “Jesus, I’m sorry I said anything.” He held the pack out to his partner.

  “Shove those up your ass, Tilmon.”

  “Keep sharp, boys,” Bracken’s voice blared over the radio. “I don’t like being a man down. Keep your eyes open.”

  The men exchanged a curious look. The big man they were going to see practically owned the state police on this stretch. They’d been making this run uninterrupted for years. Bracken was getting old. Everything made the guy paranoid.

  “Moe, you copy?”

  Moe grabbed the handset. “We copy, boss. We’re good back here.”

  “Just confirm you heard me, and keep your eyes open.”

  “Copy that.” Moe slid the radio back into the cradle. “The fuck is his problem?”

  “No idea,” Tilmon said.

  “You two must’ve ate a bunch of asshole sandwiches before we left this morning.”

  Tilmon blew a lungful of smoke at him. “Give it a rest, dude. You know I was just messing with you. Mi Camel, su Camel. Here.” He held the pack out again. Moe reached out to grab it, but the sudden jerk of the brakes slammed him into the door frame.

  “What the hell, Tilmon?”

  “Oh, shit. Do you see that?” Tilmon said, and pointed to Bracken’s wobbling Heritage right before it dropped to its side and skidded off the two-lane highway in a screaming whirlwind of sparks and dust. Bracken covered his face and rolled across the blacktop into the tall saw grass. Tilmon slowed the box truck, but not enough to avoid the highway spikes someone had painted black and laid out across the asphalt. All four tires blew like shotgun blasts, and the truck fishtailed all over the road, slinging an un-seat-belted Moe all over the cab. He cracked his forehead into the windshield, spiderwebbing the glass, then thrust back down hard into the seat, taking another hard whack to the back of the head against the aluminum wall behind him. The truck finally came to a stop on the embankment, wedged in the dirt and tall grass. Tilmon sat frozen, both hands death-gripped to the wheel. Moe, who ended up mostly on the floorboards, held his battered head with one hand and wiped the blood from his eyes with the other.

  2.

  One of four men decked out in flannel shirts and clown masks tossed Moe into the saw grass on the side of the road. Another man pried Tilmon out of the driver’s seat and forced him onto his knees next to Moe.

  “You motherfuckers picked the—” A jolt of hot pain exploded in Moe’s jaw as one of the hijackers brought the stock of his rifle down on his face. Moe fell back into the dirt and weeds and ran his tongue over his freshly loosened teeth.

  “Until I ask you something, you keep your fuckin’ trap shut,” the man said, and looked at Tilmon. “You got something you want to say?”

  Tilmon did. He had a lot to say, but he liked his teeth so he kept his mouth shut.

  “Good boy,” the man said.

  Two more flannel clowns rounded the truck and tossed a road-battered Bracken Leek by his leathers to the ground in front of his men. His right leg was a mangled mess and he groaned when he hit the grass. Metallic blood-stink came off him, but other than his leg, it was hard to tell where, or if, he was hurt anywhere else because of the head-to-toe leather. It had most likely saved his life. Two of the hijackers patted down Bracken and his crew and took away their guns, stuffing them into their own waistbands. They zip-tied Moe’s and Tilmon’s hands behind their backs as the man in blue flannel, the one who appeared to be in charge, squatted down in front of Bracken. Red Flannel stood behind his boss with his rifle trained, while the other two searched the truck.

  “You the man here?” Blue Flannel said.

  Bracken propped himself up the best he could, nodded, and spit a little blood into the grass.

  “I thought so. This is a simple deal right here. Give it to me, and you get to go back to whatever shithole biker bar you came from, a little the worse for wear, but breathing. Or give me a ration of shit, and I let my boy here shoot you all in the face and we take it anyway. You choose.”

  The man in red flannel waved.

  “You know who you’re stealing from, son?” Bracken said.

  “It looks like I’m stealing from the goddamn Village People.”

  “Or the gimp,” Red Flannel said. Everyone looked at him. “You know, like Pulp Fiction. The butt-fuckin’ scene with Bruce Willis.”

  Everyone stopped looking at him.

  Blue Flannel shook his head and exhaled heavily through the latex Bozo mask.

  “Clowns,” Bracken said. “Good choice.”

  Blue Flannel lifted his rifle from his knee and pressed the barrel against Bracken’s forehead. “One more time, old man. Don’t make me spend twenty minutes tearing that truck apart in the sun. This mask is hot as balls, and I’m sure everyone here is ready to get out of the heat and head their separate ways.”

  Bracken spit more blood into the grass and wiped his mouth. “It ain’t in the truck,” he said. “It’s on the bike. The saddlebags.”

  Blue Flannel whistled for the other two hijackers. They hopped out of the truck and Blue Flannel motioned them toward the wrecked bike. “Check the bike.”

  “Roger that.” After a minute, without taking his eyes off Bracken and the downed bikers, he yelled over, “We good?”

  “We good, sir.” The two men stripped the bike of the saddlebags and loaded them into their pickup. Blue Flannel stood up and heaved his rifle over his shoulder. “That’s some pretty sneaky shit, Grandpa. Driving a box truck as a decoy. That way, idiot hijackers are prone to take out the big target and you ride into the sunset with the prize in tow.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Too bad we ain’t idiot hijackers,” Red Flannel chimed in.

  “That’s up for debate,” Bracken said.

  Red Flannel was about to say something else when shots rang out from the pine trees and pinged off the truck, inches from his head. Red and Blue Flannel returned blind fire into the woods while Bracken and his boys flattened down into the grass and ate dirt.

  “Bogies at your six,” one of the hijackers at the truck yelled, and fired into the trees. They all bolted toward their pickup, but Blue Flannel took two shots to the back and stumbled onto the asphalt. Purple stains bloomed out across t
he blue cotton and his rifle slid across the highway. His partner stopped briefly and emptied the rest of his magazine into the pine before jumping into the back of the already moving pickup truck and disappearing into the afternoon heat.

  Romeo appeared through the tree line, twin Sig Sauers in hand.

  “Holy shit, Bracken. Are you guys all right?” The young Latino biker looked down the deserted stretch of highway before tucking his guns away. He pulled a blade from his boot and cut away the zip ties.

  “Where the fuck you been?” Tilmon said, rubbing his wrists.

  “I took a piss, man. By the time I caught up, I saw all this shit going on, so I pulled into the woods and hauled ass this way.”

  “Long fucking piss, bro,” Moe said.

  “Goddamn. How about a thank-you? If I hadn’t stopped back there, there’s no telling what these putas would have done.”

  “Enough,” Bracken said. “Romeo, call some friendlies and get us the hell out of here.”

  “Already did it, boss.”

  “Then somebody go find out who the dead redneck is.”

  CHAPTER

  13

  CLAYTON BURROUGHS

  2015

  1.

  Clayton thumped a pencil on his desk and stroked his calico beard for almost an hour before snapping the pencil in half between his fingers and using the eraser end to punch in the number for the GBI headquarters in Decatur. He stared blankly at the blinking line-indicator light and sat through three levels of secretaries and underlings before the right person was finally connected. Clayton heard fumbling on the line, then a deep, scotch-warmed voice:

  “Finnegan.”

  “Charles, it’s Clayton Burroughs.”

  “Well, fuck me running. How’s my favorite backwoods lawman?”

  “Can’t complain. It wouldn’t do me no good if I did.”

  “You got that shit right. What can I do for you, Sheriff?”

  “Well, Charles, I had me a federal come in my office this past Sunday wanting to talk about Halford.” Clayton heard Finnegan chuckle.