Then the fifth card went over, which was a seven, not the same suit as the two and nine. That cut out all the possible flushes. Manny could see that the only way he could be beaten was for Perry to be holding six and eight, which would make a run with the five-seven-nine, and he didn’t believe that there was anyone in the world stupid enough to raise twice on six-eight with a flop like that on the table, so when Perry went in Manny raised the limit.
At this point Perry went blue in the face, as if he’d been caught with his pants down, but all of a sudden he started eyeing up the pile of chips which Manny had in front of him, and Manny suddenly realized that if Perry re-raised the limit, he might not have enough there to cover the bet. He also realized that neither he nor the three guys with him had enough kish in their pockets to make up the deficit. He did his best to look like a guy with no worries, but maybe he’d already given it away, because Perry went in with the big re-raise, and was suddenly wearing a big broad grin.
This put Manny in a bit of a spot. It was bad enough to be wiped out in a game with Perry Prime, but to get forced out by a big bet while holding the winning hand was at least twice as bad, and Manny just couldn’t bear to let that happen. So he called, and started counting out his chips. When the pile was gone, he was just three hundred dollars light, and he said he’d throw in the MG from his bike to make up the difference.
Perry said no, that it wasn’t good enough.
Manny figured this was just a stall, and it made him mad. Everyone watching the game knew that the gun would more than cover the bet, and he was sure that Perry was trying to weasel out. So he said he’d throw in the whole goddam bike.
But Perry said no again, and that he didn’t have to accept anything but honest plastic or good hard cash.
Now, you have to understand what was at stake here. It wasn’t just the money any more, or even the hardware. When Perry said no to the bike, he wasn’t just creating a problem for Manny—he was creating a problem for the Mob who ran the game, and for the game itself. The rule established by custom was that a guy who came up short on a bet was a loser, but the spirit of the rule was that if a guy had property to cover the shortfall, he was entitled to his showdown. What Perry was doing was possibly within the letter of the law, but it was dead against the spirit.
Manny could have asked the Mob’s manager for a ruling, and the Mob’s manager would probably have taken the easy way out, and given Manny the chips he needed in exchange for his MG, but Manny was a poker player, and his instinct was to ask for a ruling from the pros—from Pop Sayers, Eddie Mars and Minnie Verne. And they, whose duty was the sacred one of protecting the reputation of poker rather than the mundane one of making sure that there was no trouble in the Twilight, came up with a different compromise. They suggested that Perry ought to name something that Manny had which he would take, and that Manny should then decide whether he was prepared to bet it.
Manny said okay, figuring that he had already gone the limit when he offered to bet his bike.
Perry said okay too, and said that he would accept the call if Manny Lee would bet his old lady, Hellcat Helen.
This brought the house down, because an awful lot of chips had flowed across the table since anyone in the Twilight had made a bet like that. Perry, who had been the villain of the piece when it looked like he was being unsporting, was suddenly popular again. There was a hell of a lot of laughing, not least because Hellcat Helen had a reputation of her own, as a girl who could never pass a mirror without swooning with admiration, and as a person with a very filthy temper. Rumour had it that Manny was really hung up on Helen, but that she gave him an awful lot of punishment in the emotional department.
Manny looked at Perry, and Perry looked back, and all Manny could think of was that Perry must have figured that even though he had been caught running one bluff too many, he had just one chance of making Manny back off, and that this was it.
So Manny called the bet.
Poker has a history as old as civilization itself, and that history is littered with stories of guys who made extravagant bets in the belief that they couldn’t lose, and then found that they had. Life has nothing to offer which is quite as sickening, and those of you who know the game will appreciate just how sick Manny Lee looked and felt when Perry Prime turned over his six and his eight. It wasn’t just the sight of the cards, either, because Helen had just come out of the bar to see what all the noise was about.
Even if Manny had wanted to start a fight, he couldn’t. He had no firepower, and in any case, he was the one who’d appealed to the pros and set himself up for the sucker-punch. Whatever divine madness had made Perry raise twice while looking for an inside straight, he had certainly done it, and though he had no moral right at all to his outrageous good fortune, the simple fact was that Manny was beat. He had no alternative but to tell Helen that whether she liked it or not, she’d just been given a free transfer to the Prime Cuts.
And he had no alternative but to listen while she told him that she was a free agent, and couldn’t be bet on a poker hand, but that he was such a heap of shit that she was transferring herself, and that she hoped that next time the two gangs met in the desert the Prime Cuts would wipe the Unruly Members right off the map.
As Pop Sayers was later to observe, it could only have happened in the Twilight.
And, as Eddie Mars said in agreeing with Pop, that was what made poker such a great game—you never could tell which way the cards were going to fall.
Although, as Minnie Verne said in agreeing with Eddie, sometimes you just couldn’t help spitting blood when you did everything right and some flash bastard scooped the pool because he got lucky.
What happened next wasn’t really a war, at least in its early stages. It was more like a long-drawn-out grudge. But it became a war, partly because grudges do turn into wars when they extend too long, and partly because of the increasing attention, which it attracted from the media—mostly from a hack named Homer Hegarty, who liked filming bike battles from the security of a helicopter.
There were some among the Unruly Members who weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the fact that they were at daggers drawn with the Cuts just because Manny Lee had made a prize fool of himself. Dizzy Thacker, for one, didn’t like the idea of haring off into the desert looking for a fight. His notion of running a gang was more businesslike— a matter of organizing heists. He argued that just making a living was tough enough, with the convoys getting better arms and armour every year and the roads swarming with bounty hunters.
Dizzy had the reputation of being a man of judgment, and he certainly had a better chance of one day playing behind the screens at the Twilight than Manny had—but the Members’ Number One, though he called himself Adam Eden, was Manny’s elder brother, and once Adam had decided that anyone who didn’t get behind the Lees would be out on his ear, Dizzy and the rest came into line.
So every now and again—maybe once a fortnight or so—the Members would go mob-handed down to Alabama, looking to cause trouble, and woe betide any Cuts who got in their way.
It was much the same with the Prime Cuts; some of their men weren’t at all pleased about the trouble which Perry Prime had landed them in. But Perry was even better off than Manny; he had two big brothers, one of whom was King Prime and the other Hector Prime, and they were a close family. Once Hector’s doubts had been voted down by King and Perry the three of them showed a united front, and nobody was going to look for an argument with all three of them.
The Cuts weren’t based in a big NoGo area. Their territory was an ancient Indian hunting ground called Deer Stand Hill, which in more recent times had become the town of Troy, seat of Pike County. The region had been badly hit by the greenhouse crisis, and Troy had been left in a narrow strip of land which had desert to the north, swampland to the south and heavy pollution just about everywhere.
This meant that the Cuts didn’t have the same opportunities the Members had to stock up on essentials, but it also meant tha
t they could lay whatever booby-traps they wanted to in the streets of the decaying ghost town around their base, and whenever their soldiers got chased they knew that if they could get back to the town limits, where they knew every building and alleyway, nobody but a fool would follow them any further. So they didn’t suffer too much from the Members’ raids.
King, Hector and Perry thought for a while that the Members would simply get sick of the war of attrition, especially as they were operating such a long way from home, but after three or four months of having men picked off in ones and twos they were forced to recognize that they were in real trouble. The Members were a bigger gang anyway, and they found it relatively easy to buy the gas they needed.
For the Cuts, as a small-town out-of-state outfit, to go storming into the Memphis NoGo would be like a replay of the Charge of the Light Brigade. But they could make sure that their operations were well-planned, and they could improve their intelligence-gathering so that they’d know what the Members were up to, and that was what they tried to do. By being extra-careful they kept their losses low, and they even managed to catch the Members in a couple of neatly-laid ambushes, which had nearly evened up the casualty figures by the time another three months had gone by.
The Members didn’t take kindly to the fact that things had begun to go against them. They began to plan their own jaunts more carefully. They fixed up a hotline down to Alabama, and every time they got the word that the Cuts were out on the road they’d get on their bikes and get down there, intending to spoil whatever action the Cuts had going, and to spill a measure of blood if the opportunity arose.
Adam Eden and Manny Lee knew well enough that their connections in the Memphis area were a big advantage. They also knew that if they ever met the Cuts in an all-out pitched battle they could beat them, even if they lost a couple of dozen men doing it. They figured that if they could keep the Cuts cooped up, spoiling their hijacking operations, they could eventually force the Cuts to come out for that apocalyptic contest—the alternative being slow starvation.
As time went by, though, the Cuts survived and thrived. They confined their own operations to the south of Troy, which not only meant that the Members had to go further in order to take them on, but that the Cuts could ride out and home through Pecosin, a region of narrow ravines and stagnant streams, which was perfect for avoiding pursuits and setting ambushes. Every time the Members tried to form up for a battle it immediately broke down into a series of little skirmishes, each involving half a dozen bikes, and the Members soon learned better than to go recklessly chasing the Cuts into Pecosin.
While this situation evolved it was studied with keen interest by numerous observers—including the poker pros in the Twilight, who proudly figured that their Solomonic judgment was the root cause of it all. But the most careful observer of all was Homer Hegarty, who always appreciated a continuing story which he could use to keep the punters hooked. It was Homer, naturally enough, who started calling the affair the Second Trojan War or—when he was in a really punish mood—the Sickiad.
The poker pros and Homer Hegarty could see well enough how the war would unwind. Homer, of course, was keen to identify heroes—big, brave macho types hungry to use their MGs and reckless enough to put in that one last burst of fire when everyone else was backing off—but he knew that it wasn’t really about guts and charisma. It was the logic of the situation which laid down the tune they all had to dance to.
The Cuts had cut their losses to a trickle, and the Members hadn’t succeeded in putting a complete block on their activities, but they found themselves getting gradually lower on all the things they needed to keep going. The lower their supplies got, the more reluctant they became to come out of Troy unless they were pretty damn sure that they could hit a juicy target cleanly and get away with it before the Members came after them. This put quite a burden on their hackers and their radio ops, who had to figure out what traffic there was on the roads and exactly how difficult it would be to pull a heist.
In the meantime, the Members, though perfectly entitled to think that they were winning, were using up a hell of a lot of gas rampaging up and down the interstate, and their own heisting operations, which had been pretty small beer before, were beginning to attract special attention from the mercy boys who had to keep the convoys trucking, and from the bounty hunters who made their dough by knocking over any wild boys who caused sufficient annoyance to collect price tags.
Given all this, the Members could no more carry on indefinitely than the Cuts could, and the Prime brothers figured that if they could only hold out long enough, the Ops would start hitting the Members from behind, cutting off the head of the organization by going after Adam Eden, Manny Lee and Killer Keene.
Killer Keene was the guy that Homer Hegarty was slowing making into the star of the show. According to Homer, he was a genius with bike and MG alike, and Homer was supposed to be a connoisseur of such matters (though what he was really a connoisseur of was story values). The guy had been just an ordinary Member until Homer gave him the Killer tag, but thanks to Homer everyone had begun to see him as a key part of the Member operation, and a natural heir to the number one spot. Not unnaturally, the Killer himself fell harder than anyone else for this particular line of bull.
By the time the war had been going ten months, Keene had clocked up a dozen fatal hits, which was as many as all the other Members put together. Thanks to Homer, the big Corps had begun to pay attention to him and to bump up his price tag. Because he was only a biker, and most of his kills were other bikers, the price wasn’t high enough to tempt a really top notch Op, but smalltime fishers of men who spent too much time watching TV began to figure that it would be nice to reel him in. The first three who tried were out-of-towners who never had a chance, but the fact that they came at all gave heart to the Cuts and made the Members anxious.
Dizzy Thacker began to argue that it all had to stop. One way or another, matters had to be resolved, or the Cuts and the Members would both be ruined. There was even talk of a treaty, though it wasn’t wise to mention it within earshot of Manny Lee. It seemed to be only a matter of time before something cracked and real dissent broke out in the Member camp—but when that dissent finally surfaced, it took a form which surprised everyone, except maybe Homer Hegarty.
The Members were out on one of their spoiling raids, and Killer Keene was with a bunch of soldiers chasing four Cuts back to Pecosin. It had been a frustrating chase for the Killer, whose ego was sufficiently inflated by now that he expected to score every time he went out. He was so mad about not being able to get in a decent shot that he came further into the gullies than was wise, and led his men slap bang into a gang of bushwhackers.
The ambush wasn’t much—a couple of MGs backed up by three pistol-packers. The measure of the Cuts’ desperation was that two of the pistoleros were chicks, drafted into the front line because of the shortage of manpower. Even so, the Members shouldn’t have stood a chance, all lined up in the gully with the MGs firing from cover. But one of the MGs jammed and one of Keene’s compadres took out the other with a lucky grenade.
All of a sudden, and against all the odds, the ambush was a rout. The Killer and his boys stormed up the slope and began riding the bushwhackers down. They killed the three guys, but when they realized that the other two were girls they decided that it might be a clever move to take some prisoners. It may even have occurred to the Killer (though he was a notoriously slow thinker) that one of the chicks might be Hellcat Helen—they were both wearing helmets, and with the Cut bikers coming back by now with reinforcements there wasn’t time to investigate more closely. So two of the soldiers grabbed the chicks and carried them off like sacks of flour.
It turned out that neither of the girls was Hellcat Helen, but the other Members, who were waiting out in the desert, figured that they were in luck anyway, because they’d been away from Memphis for three nights running and they were in the mood for female company. But then a little dispute broke
out. Gang rules said that Adam Eden, as number one, was entitled to first crack at the tail of his choice, but when he took his pick, Killer Keene said that he wanted first crack at that one, and that as he was the one who grabbed them both, he intended to have it.
There was more to the argument than appeared on the surface, because although it was a trivial matter, it was an open challenge to the gang’s pecking order. Killer was finally falling for Homer Hegarty’s publicity, and was putting in a bid for promotion. He wasn’t actually shaping up to fight Adam Eden for the top spot, but he was demanding some token of recognition—something that would put him ahead of Manny Lee and make him number two. If Manny Lee hadn’t been Adam’s brother, he would probably have got it, but Manny was there and when it came to the crunch, Adam felt that family had to come before expediency. He said no.
He might have been forced to back down if the others had sided with the Killer, but there were a lot of guys in the gang who felt that Killer was getting just a little bit too big for his boots on account of being Homer Hegarty’s pet. So they got behind Adam, and Killer Keene was left with egg on his face—with the result that he got very hot under the collar. In fact, he got hot enough to say that in that case, the Lee brothers could settle their stupid quarrel without his help. Right there and then he got on his bike, and lit out back to Memphis.
By the time the rest of the Members came back home Killer had calmed down, but he could be stubborn when he wanted to be, and he had begun to tell anyone who would listen that he was sick of busting his ass in a war which he hadn’t started—and never would have started, because he didn’t give a damn about poker and never played it. He had made up his mind that he was taking a holiday, and he suggested that Dizzy Thacker and the others who’d had their doubts might do likewise, and might even start thinking about breaking out on their own, as a brand new gang under the leadership of you-know-who.
Route 666 Anthology Page 21