No matter how many doubts he had about the war, Dizzy Thacker wasn’t about to abandon the Unruly Members for a new gang led by Killer Keene. Dizzy had too little respect for the Killer, on account of the fact that the Killer not only wasn’t any good at poker, but didn’t even like it. But Dizzy also recognized that it would be a bad thing for the gang’s image if they lost one of their star shooters, so he had a private word with Pete Strauss, who was the Killer’s closest friend, the upshot of which was that Pete had a real heart-to-heart with the Killer, trying to persuade him that solidarity was the order of the day.
Unfortunately, Killer was just stubborn enough to take offence at the way the whole thing had been handled, and he said that if Pete wanted his bike and his firepower, he’d better get on the machine himself, and see what he could do with it.
Pete, alas, wasn’t bright enough to see that this would cause further trouble—he thought it was a great idea. So the next time the Members heard that the Cuts were planning a sortie, Pete Strauss rode out on Killer’s bike, wearing Killer’s helmet, figuring that from the lofty viewpoint of Homer Hegarty’s cameras, he would be the Killer.
The result of this reckless overconfidence was that Pete got into a running one-to-one with Hector Prime, which ended in a blind ravine in Pecosin, where Hector—thinking, of course, that Pete was Killer Keene— took great delight in blowing him away with a lightweight laser. Then Hector played to the cameras by taking the broken bike and the body back out to the highway, where he left them for the Members to pick up. They had to take the bike home on a trailer, pretty badly beaten up.
This incident, as you will appreciate, made the Killer blazing mad. He didn’t care much about poor Pete Strauss, but he really loved his bike, and getting it back in that sort of state was like a stab in the heart. All of a sudden, he recovered every last bit of his enthusiasm for the war, and he swore on network TV that the next time the Members caught up with the Cuts, he’d be looking for Hector Prime.
And so it came about that the next time the Members caught up with the Cuts way down south—the Cuts had had a couple of cash results, and were in the middle of an ammo deal with New Orleans mobsters—the Killer went after them like the devil possessed, and when he had figured out which one of the crowd was Hector Prime, he went at him full throttle.
If Hector Prime hadn’t been every bit as good as the Killer when it came to nursing his bike, Keene would have caught up with him on the road. But Hector was that good, and Killer’s machine hadn’t quite recovered from the battering it had got when Hector shot it down. So the Killer couldn’t catch him, and Hector made it back to Pecosin with a hundred yards still between the bikes.
Hector slowed down then, thinking that it was just about over, but it wasn’t. Killer kept coming, and when the gap was down to twenty yards Hector realized that the threat of ambushes and the possibility of deadfalls weren’t nearly enough to keep this Unruly Member at bay. They went clean through Pecosin and into the streets of Troy itself.
Afterwards, Homer’s helicopter crew reported that the two of them chased each other round the streets for a whole hour, but they were probably exaggerating. Killer Keene stated in an interview, though—in a floridly laconic fashion which was meant to be an imitation of Homer Hegarty’s style—that he’d “chased the chicken till the chicken couldn’t cluck no more” and then he’d “fried him till he snapped, crackled and popped.”
The hit brought Killer Keene’s score to twenty, and it made it look as if the Cuts were finally losing their grip on the war. The Memphis bookies were offering four to seven on the Members, and they weren’t getting too many takers.
Homer Hegarty needless to say, was over the moon, and licking his lips at the thought of what might happen next.
It seemed that the Unruly Members were on the crest of a wave. The Killer was back on the road and better than ever, the Cuts had lost their best fighting-man, and the fact that Keene had ridden all around the houses of Troy without getting blown to kingdom come suggested that there weren’t nearly as many booby-traps in those streets as they had feared.
Not unnaturally, some of the gang reckoned the time had come for a mass assault on Deer Stand Hill. Others said that would be a hellishly expensive way of bringing matters to a head, even if the Members won the day, but for once it looked as if the counsellors of caution—led, as usual, by Dizzy Thacker—might lose out. Adam Eden wasn’t one to rush in where angels feared to tread, but even he was infected by Homer Hegarty’s hype about the climax of the story being near at hand.
Dizzy could see that most of the Members were heartily sick of the war even though they were excited about it, and that what they wanted most in all the world was a plan to get it over and done with, however reckless. He figured that the only way to talk the gang out of a mass assault was to come up with a better idea—and he was clever enough to know that when it came to matters of strategy, there were others even cleverer than he. So he went looking for Minnie Verne, who was rumoured in some quarters to be his mother.
He found her, of course, in a poker game in the Twilight. She and the other pros were shaking down a couple of loudmouths from New York who had somehow picked up the idea that Memphis was a hick town where the true art of cardplay was unknown. The loudmouths learned better, and though they paid a lot for their lesson, it was one which they needed to learn.
When the carve-up was over, Minnie brought her winnings to the bar where she liked to indulge in a hit or two whenever the serious business of life could be temporarily set aside. Before she was completely pie-eyed, Dizzy explained the problem.
“You see, Minnie,” he said, “I still think it was a mistake to get involved in all this in the first place. We’ve lost too many men, and if we lose another twelve or fifteen the vultures will be queueing up to take over the territory and turn our scalps into liquid assets. And for what? A crazy chick who’d probably have upped and left Manny by now, if he hadn’t bet her on his lousy three queens. What the hell can we do?”
“Well,” said Minnie, in her own inimitable way, “you could start thinking like poker players instead of spaced-out headbangers. You could start thinking with your brains instead of your saddle-sores.”
Dizzy didn’t take offence, though there weren’t many people who could have said that to him with impunity. After all, Minnie wasn’t the same as some street scum who’d be insulting a gangman if he even looked at him. She was a poker pro from behind the Twilight’s screen.
“I tried,” Dizzy complained. “I tried to get them to play clever and play careful, but they won’t listen to anything but a plan that will help them chop the Cuts into little pieces for once and for all.”
Minnie thought about that for a few minutes, and then—just as Dizzy had hoped she would—she said: “There’s one old trick that just might work.”
“Tell me,” said Dizzy.
“What are the Cuts short of? Food? Bullets?”
“They may be a bit hungry,” said Dizzy, “but they just made a big ammo deal and we didn’t manage to hijack more than a couple of cases. If they’re nearly out of anything, it’s gas. They’ve been running all the way down to Louisiana in force, and they haven’t heisted a tanker in months.”
“So,” said Minnie, “if they were to hear talk over the radio about a convoy coming up from the Gulf, with half a dozen tankers along, they’d be interested. And if they were to hear that someone had shot up the convoy, and forced them to leave a tanker beside the road, they’d be very interested.”
“Sure,” said Dizzy. “You think they’re likely to hear something like that?”
“They would be,” she said, “if some very careful careless talk was put out over the radio, in one of the codes that everyone knows how to unscramble. It’d have to sound as if it came from some tinpot outfit chancing their arm, not one of the big Corps, but it could be made to sound convincing to someone who really wanted to believe it. And if the people who were doing the careful careless talking co
uld get hold of an old empty tanker, and paint it up to look nice and bright—well, how many men do you reckon could hide in a tanker, with chain guns and autocannons and that sort of stuff? And if the Cuts happened along just as the repair crew had got it in shape to move again, what do you think they’d do?”
“I guess they’d turf out the driver and the shotgun, and drive the thing hell-for-leather all the way back up Deer Stand Hill,” said Dizzy, thoughtfully. “And they might just discover that they’d set themselves up for a massacre.”
“I think that’s how a poker player might figure it,” said Minnie, who was looking distinctly owl-eyed now that the hit was boosting her brain into orbit. “Don’t you?”
Dizzy was a trifle owl-eyed himself, but he reckoned that she was right—and he took the plan straight to Manny Lee, who agreed with him. Then Manny took it to Adam Eden, and by the time Killer Keene got to hear about it, more than half the gang thought it was a really neat idea. Even the Killer recognized that it was not without charm, though it wasn’t really his style.
Like all good plans it took time and money to set up. Even empty tankers don’t come cheap, and running a scam over the radio needs care and attention to detail, especially when nosey parkers like Homer Hegarty are paying attention to what you’re doing. But it seemed like something worth doing properly, and Dizzy Thacker threw himself into the organization with a will. He even agreed to be one of the guys inside the tanker, along with Adam Eden, Manny Lee and a dozen soldiers. Killer Keene was left to head the bike squadron which would come in to mop up when the fighting started—which suited the Killer just fine, because he was a bit of a claustrophobe on the quiet.
When the night came, everything appeared to go just like clockwork. The Members couldn’t know, of course, that the Cuts had earwigged their carefully-laid out bait until the guys pretending to be the repair crew were signalled that a bike-gang was approaching, but when they did know they felt very pleased, and they went about their monkey business with a will.
The bogus repairmen lit out as soon as they were sure their presence had been noted, and the guys who were playing the driver and the shotgun made a perfect job of the surrender. The Cuts weren’t the kind of bastards who would cut their prisoners down in cold blood, because they knew full well that sort of behaviour only encouraged other potential victims to fight instead of surrendering, so the two of them were left to their own devices in the desert, waiting to be picked up as soon as the coast was clear.
When the tanker was half way home Killer Keene brought his chasers out, and they put up a first class impression of not quite managing to catch it before they peeled off at the usual place, just outside of town.
But after that, it all went wrong.
Nobody ever figured out exactly what had happened. Maybe the driver who brought the tanker up Deer Stand Hill had noticed something was wrong with the weight. Maybe the guys inside the tank had made a racket by dropping a cannon. Maybe the Cuts had a stoolie up in Memphis that nobody knew anything about. One way or another, though, by the time the Cuts got the tanker home they had welders standing ready with their gear already fired up, and they went to work on the rig to seal up the two hatchways which the men inside had intended to come out of.
When that was done, and Dizzy’s hit squad were walled up tight in their tin tomb, the Cuts drove the tanker into a clearing, and lit a fire underneath it.
They retired to a safe distance, just in case they were setting a torch to a vast petrol-bomb, but when he was sure it wouldn’t blow Perry Prime led his soldiers in to feed wood to the fire—which they continued to do until they were quite certain that everything on the menu was well and truly cooked. Perry said later that it was quite an education listening to the screams, which sounded really weird inside the tank.
Then the Cuts loosed off some of their guns, to make it sound like there was a battle going on.
When Killer Keene led his boys up the hill, according to schedule, the Cuts were ready and waiting, and they blazed away with everything they had.
One charge was all the Members got to make. When it was over, the survivors turned right around and rode like hell for anywhere they could think of to go.
Killer Keene got out—he was a real heel, but he always had the devil’s own luck—but there wasn’t enough of a gang left for him to call himself number one, and the fiasco made a very big dent in his media-boosted reputation. Without Homer Hegarty telling the public once a week that he was a real hot property his reputation soon began to wane, so he took advantage of what he had left to make his peace with the Corps, and started a brand new career as an Op.
He got blown to smithereens within a year by a dynamiter who was only worth a lousy couple of grand.
When Minnie Verne heard the news about Dizzy and the Lee boys she felt as sick as a parrot. She told Pop Sayers and Eddie Mars that it was damned unlucky for the Members to have had two rotten breaks like that. According to all the principles of probability, Perry Prime should never have had that six and that eight, and according to the same stern logic, her plan should have worked.
“Well,” said Eddie, “that’s what I like about poker. Sometimes, you do all the right things, and it just blows up in your face.”
“Damn right,” said Pop Sayers. “And what it all goes to show is that in the end it don’t matter a hoot how clever you are, because nobody’s got a god-given right to win.”
Mind you, it wasn’t all wine and roses for the winners, either. Perry Prime put a lot of hard work into taming Hellcat Helen, but as soon as he got her claws well and truly blunted he fell head over heels for a New Orleans stripper who called herself Aphrodite Venus, and turfed Helen out on her ear. After that he was known up and down the interstate as the unkindest Cut of all. He never got to sit at the screened table at the Twilight, and though he spent a lot of time trying to produce an action replay of his triumph over Manny Lee, he never got the cards again. Like all big bluffers, he proved in the long run to be a loser through and through.
In fact, when the people who could count began to tot up the score carefully, they realized that the game had had only one winner, and that he was the one guy who had never been in any danger of losing. That was Homer Hegarty, who got every lurid minute of that last horrific episode on video-tape.
He put it out on his show as the Tale of the Trojan Hearse.
Uptown Girl
by William King
Preparation is the key, thought Travis, checking the pump action on the shotgun. It can make the difference between life and death at times like this. He laid the gun gingerly across his knee and checked out the street through the window of the Honda Civic.
Late October winos staggered along, heading for a night’s rest under newspaper in the nearby alley. They were singing as if they hadn’t a trouble in the world. Only men who were drunk or high could afford to be so careless in the NoGo zones. The few other people abroad stared ahead aggressively. Most wore badges of fealty, colours; clothing that marked them as aligned with some gang. Small security they got from that, thought Travis, judging by their wariness. All that heavy jewellery, studded leather, painted dragons, tigerskin tops, doesn’t make them feel any safer.
He checked behind in the rear view-camera. The small monochrome screen showed a pretty hooker, not more than sixteen, talking with a grey-haired man in a long coat. The girl looked back along the street, nodded twice and then climbed into the man’s car. Not much changes, Travis thought. Been away fifteen years and all it’s got is worse. He went back to checking his weapons.
His .45 auto pistol was holstered on his right side. His hold-out gun was in his right boot. The nine-inch blade commando knife that he’d had since his days of covert operations in Nicaragua was strapped to his left thigh, riding above his heavy steel toe-capped boots and camo fatigues. He flexed his fingers. Servo-motors whined.
He looked at the picture of his target, a pretty blonde girl in a blue party dress, gold chain on her neck. Then he looke
d back to the doorway beyond which Slug assured him the Rippers had her stashed. If Slug’s got this wrong, thought Travis, I’ll tear his lungs out. I’m not paying the little weasel two G’s so that I can look like a dork. Still he consoled himself with the thought that Slug was usually a reliable informant.
From under the dash Travis pulled out his special selection. Would he need the frag grenades, the chuks or smoke canisters? Why not, he thought? If I’m going to rescue the heir to the Gruber billions I may as well do it in style. He draped the nunchuks round his neck, slipped the electrified steel knuckles into his pocket along with a handful of micro-grenades. Maximum overkill, he thought, is the only thing these Ripper punks understand. And let’s not forget old skinhead Voorman.
Slug had said that another Op had been round asking about the Rippers and the description had sounded like his old rival. Bald head, video-shades, dressed in black. Yup, definitely Voorman. Well, thought Travis, flexing his bionic claw, just let him try and steal this one. That hundred thou Old Man Gruber put up is mine. Christ knows I need it.
He checked himself out in the mirror, smoothed his hair to cover his bald batch, stroked his moustache. Looking good. He tightened his grip on the stock of the pump-action, sucked in his gut and stepped out into the cold night air. A light rain was beginning to fall.
He turned and locked the car, reading the sticker that Estevez had put in the window. It read: this car will explode if driven by unauthorized personnel. Travis shook his head and popped a stick of gum into his mouth. Sticker won’t do any good, Ramone, nobody in NoGo can read. He raised the shotgun over his shoulder and walked jauntily to the doorway.
“Surprise, surprise!” Travis yelled as he kicked in the door. Three punks went for weapons. Travis blew the table in half and shouted: “Don’t even think about it!”
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