The Brotherhood of the Wheel

by R. S. Belcher

  Max climbed into the black Charger. “We saved the universe,” she said brightly. “Any chance we could get Krystal burgers?” The door shut, and Jimmie couldn’t hear Lovina’s reply. Lovina turned the ignition, and the Charger rumbled to life. Lovina nodded slowly to Heck and Jimmie through her open window. They nodded back, slowly—the knowing badass nod. All three laughed at the realization. The car glided out of the lot, spitting a few gravels as it went, and shot down the two-lane. In less than a minute, they were out of sight.

  “You good to ride that thing home?” Jimmie asked Heck as he slowly climbed onto his T5 Blackie.

  “I still got arms and legs, so yeah,” Heck said. “I’m cool.”

  “You’re damn lucky you didn’t get burned to a crispy critter in that fire,” Jimmie said. “Don’t push that luck, Heck.”

  “Yeah,” Heck said with a dry chuckle. “Lucky. I’m good, Jimmie, promise.”

  “You did good. Ale would have been proud of you. I’m proud of you.”

  “So, we square on the whole squire thing?” Heck asked. “So I can get home and get on with dealing with Cherokee Mike?”

  “Go home,” Jimmie said. “You’re not a Brother yet, but you’re on your way. You are definitely on your way, squire.”

  They fist-bumped and then hugged. Heck climbed onto the bike. He slid his helmet on and paused to look at the dented, blackened Oni mask for a moment.

  “Hey, you okay?” Jimmie asked. “Whatever you need, I’m here for you, okay. Anytime.”

  Heck smiled; it was a ghostly thing.

  “You’re not alone,” Jimmie said. The words seemed to strike Heck like a physical blow. He looked up at Jimmie with lost, pleading eyes for just a second—eyes full of pain and fear, and something Jimmie couldn’t quite comprehend.

  Heck beat it all back down again. He grinned, nodded. “I know,” he said. “I know, and I’m thankful, Jimmie, more than you can know.” Heck started the bike with a kick, wincing in pain for a second. He looked back at Jimmie. “‘A civilization lives or dies based on the safety of its roads.’”

  “What?” Jimmie said.

  “A cultu vivit, nec moritur a viis suis salutem,” Heck said. “That Latin phrase, my first homework. It says something kind of like that, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmie said, a smile growing on his face. “Something like that. You got it right, Heck.”

  “Nice to get something right for a change,” the biker said. He slid the steel demon mask over his face. “Keep it between the lines, Jimmie.” He roared off without a backward glance.

  Jimmie was alone in the parking lot; a warm breeze kissed him as if to say, ‘Thank you.’ He sighed and walked to the semi. He climbed in and checked the clock on his laptop in the cab. No way in hell he’d make it in time to pick up his load in Arizona—no way. He slid some chaw into his cheek, adjusted his cap and headset, and started the rig. The big engine bellowed like a bull. He snapped on his music; it was Tom Cochrane singing “Life Is a Highway.” He rested his hand on the shotgun gearshift, slid the truck into gear, and slowly rolled out of the parking lot.

  He would make it, make his run—he’d get his load, get his paycheck. He had a mortgage to pay, diapers to buy, college to plan. His family was alive, the world was alive. It was seventeen hours to Arizona; he’d make it there in ten. There was always a way.

  He accelerated along the two-lane and saw a young girl, a hitchhiker in a white sundress and a jean jacket, on the side of the road ahead. She was smiling in the warm afternoon sunlight. She raised her pale hand to wave; then she was gone in the wake of diesel and dust.

  Jimmie grinned and shifted gears. The song of the highway, the hum of the engine, took him, carried him. The promise of the road stretched out before him. “Break 2-3, break, 2-3,” he said into his mike. “This is Paladin. I’m 10-24 and clear, c’mon.”

  And the wheels turned, on and on.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “10-07”

  “What the hell were you thinking, Cecil?” Deputy Director Guy Revees asked Cecil Dann. Reeves had a properly intimidating desk for a man in his position, a vast moat of mirror-polished mahogany. The window behind him gave a great view of downtown DC. Dann was sitting on the side of the desk where you were supposed to be impressed or terrified or both.

  “I was thinking about saving lives, Guy,” Dann said calmly. Two years ago, Jenna had had a very deadly, very close call with ovarian cancer. Since then, there were very few things in this world that Cecil Dann allowed to rile him too much. Losing his job wasn’t even on the radar.

  “Have you actually read this shit?” Reeves asked, holding up a report encased in a shiny plastic protector.

  “Yeah,” Dann said. “I wrote it. It’s all true, Guy.”

  “Immortal serial killers, Black-Eyed Kids who are the husks of missing children, vigilante truckers, and my favorite part—where you screw the pooch and shut down a high-rated, nationally viewed, live fucking TV show to save the world from some imaginary fucking asshole with antlers—who the fuck is he? Mr. Moose?

  “Look, Cecil, we’ve been friends since Quantico. I buried this report, but if word of all this happy horseshit gets out … do you have any idea what they will do to you, to your career?”

  “It’s all true,” Dann said. “It’s crazy as shit, and I know that, but it’s also the truth. It’s also a fact that my unit has taken down two of our most wanted highway killers in the last week—the Marquis and the Pagan. Even if you don’t believe the report, believe the results.”

  “Results?” Reeves reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of multicolored antacid tablets, dumping a handful of them into his palm. He began to pop them into his mouth like M&Ms as he continued talking. “There is no body. You said your contacts told you this Emile Chasseur died in a fire, so we have absolutely nothing to prove a damn—”

  Dann interrupted him by dropping a thick plastic evidence bag onto the desk with a resounding thump. Inside it was an old, brown-stained bone-handled hunting knife.

  Dann stood. “This is Emile Chasseur’s hunting knife,” he said, picking up his trench coat from the chair beside him. He retrieved a thick bound report and dropped it on the desk with another loud thump. “He used it in all his murders over the years. These are the forensic reports; I had them double-checked and verified by two different federal labs. The knife matches the wound patterns on the victims we could recover that information from—it’s the knife that killed the Pagan’s victims. It has some DNA from several of them tucked away under the hilt wrappings and the interior surfaces of the blade construction.”

  Cecil was walking to the door now, slipping on his coat to prepare for the warm spring rain outside. “And the recovered prints off the knife, while they don’t have a match in our computer system to a known individual, they are a perfect match for partials found at several of the Pagan’s crime scenes. Oh, and the estimated age of the blade is about two hundred years. That enough proof for you, Guy?”

  Reeves looked down at the knife and the report, then back up at Dann. He nodded mutely.

  “Good,” Dann said. “I’m taking the Pagan off the HSKI most wanted list and calling the case closed. We got the son of a bitch. I like these little talks, Guy. I’ll be in my office if you need to send the men in the white coats over. My love to Paula.” He shut the deputy director’s door and walked down the hall. “Mr. Moose, my ass,” he said to no one in particular.

  * * *

  Dr. Max Leher paced back and forth by the window to her Georgetown University office. She glanced back at her old friend and colleague Dr. Norman Pillar as he sat on the leather couch by her office door silently reading her findings. Pillar was a member of the Builders, too, and had been Max’s mentor in the organization after her grandfather died.

  “Well?” Max asked, almost humming with anticipation. Pillar set the document in his lap and sighed. “Max, that’s the fourth time you’ve done that in the last twenty minutes! You drink too many of tho
se damn energy drinks! This is a lot of data to take in.”

  Max crossed the room and knelt down so that her eyes could meet Pillar’s. “But do you think I’m right? Do you find the data convincing?”

  “The whole United States interstate highway system is an enormous occult circuit designed to capture and direct ley-line energy?” Pillar said. “It’s a hell of an accomplishment in occult engineering, I’ll say that! Rivals Stonehenge, the Serpent Mound, and the Sphinx. Do you have any idea who would build this, Max, or why—to what end?”

  Max shook her head vigorously. “No, no, not a clue—that’s for later! Right now I’m just asking you if you think it’s ready for me to present to the chairs of the Imperceptible Preceptory?”

  Pillar stroked his full white beard. When she was little, Max had always thought Norman looked like a skinny Santa Claus. “You’d be putting your academic reputation in the order on the line, Max.” He sighed again. “May I take this and read over it? I can give you my informed opinion in a few days.”

  “Yes, of course!” Max said. “Thank you, Norman. Thank you for having an open mind, at least.”

  “I’m just glad you survived your adventure with those unwashed gearjammers. Who was the idiot that thought it was a good idea to send you out with a bunch of Brethren mouth-breathers?”

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Max said. “And you stop that. I wouldn’t be alive, or have made this discovery, without those people. They’re my friends, and they do very difficult, dirty work.”

  “Sounds like you’ve gone native,” Norman said, and laughed. “Still, I’m glad you’re home, where you belong.”

  He hugged her and departed. Alone in her office, Max sat behind her desk and spun the chair around. She was excited, elated, and nervous as hell. She also felt restless. She patted the vampire skull she used as a paperweight. “What do you think, Yorick? I think we convinced him.”

  Max looked over to one of the myriad overflowing bookcases in her cluttered office. On it was the HellFighter spotlight, her TLC necklace, a toy from a Krystal-burger kids’ meal, and two photos she had taken with her phone and had printed out and framed. One was of her with Jimmie, Heck, Agnes, Ava, Barb and Carl Kesner, and Lovina—taken at Buddy’s during the meal in celebration of defeating Wald’s men. The other was of her and Lovina smiling, so near each other that both could fit in the picture—taken on the road back to DC.

  Max tried to pull her eyes off the picture of Lovina. It had been almost a month since they had spoken. She thought of calling her, then felt silly and strange, and very, very shy about it. She wondered if Lovina thought of her at all.

  There was a tiny jingle of a bell, followed by a small meep from a black cat. A jet-black Bombay pounced from a shelf to land in Max’s arms. She laughed and cuddled the now purring cat, stroking him.

  “All right, Pyewacket,” she said. “Enough pining for today. Let’s get back to work … right after I love on you for the next twenty minutes.”

  The cat’s only response was to purr louder.

  * * *

  On a park bench on the Georgetown campus, Norman Pillar flipped through the thesis that Max Leher had given him. He had a cell phone to his ear. “She knows,” Pillar said to the person on the other end of the phone. “She’s sussed out the general details of the highway project. I’m holding her findings in my hand right now.”

  “Any way to bury it?” the man’s voice on the other end of the phone asked. His voice was oil and silk.

  “No,” Pillar said. “She shared the findings with some Brethren, and she’s determined to bring it to the attention of the Builder council.”

  “We could eliminate the Brethren easily enough,” the voice said. “And Dr. Leher herself. Then destroy all her data before this spreads any further.”

  Pillar rubbed his face. “I’m not going to kill her,” he said. “Christ, she’s practically my daughter. Look, she is as pure an academic as you will ever find. She has no interest in the who or the why of the Road’s creation. She just wants to prove it exists, prove her hypothesis.”

  There was a long pause on the line. “If she becomes interested in the who and the why, we will all need to deal with this, especially if the Brethren get wind of it. Your people have as much to lose here as we do, and, if it is needed, Dr. Pillar, you will kill her. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Pillar said, lowering his head. Then he added, “The temple restored.”

  The voice on the other end replied with “The invisible hand,” and hung up.

  * * *

  “The good news is I’m not firing you,” Leo Roselle said from across the Formica table at the diner down the street from his office. He sipped his coffee and then dabbed his lips with a silk handkerchief that matched his rose-colored bow tie. He was in his white linen suit and looked as if he had just had it pressed, even though he was coming off a forty-eight-hour shift.

  Lovina sat across from him, sipped her iced tea, and waited for the “but.”

  “I’d end up getting poor old Russell Lime in hot water, too, if all this came out, and I’m not going to do that, especially with Treasure being in the state she’s in right now,” Roselle said.

  “Look, Leo,” Lovina said, “Russell didn’t do anything—”

  “Hogwash,” Roselle said. “But it’s very decent of you to try to cover for him. Okay, here’s how it goes. You are off Major Crimes, off investigative detail, as of right now.”

  “Leo, what the hell am I supposed to—” Lovina said, her voice rising.

  Roselle calmly kept talking. “The Center for Missing and Exploited Children has been reaching out to law-enforcement agencies,” he said, “looking for law-enforcement personnel who can act in the capacity as a liaison and case analyst between their agency and the center.” Lovina sat back in her chair. Roselle sipped his coffee for a moment. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought that might shut you up. You’ve got the job. You still work for me. Any more of this nonsense, any more freelancing without bringing me into the loop, and I will fire you. We clear, Investigator Marcou?”

  Lovina’s smile was radiant and wide. “Yes, sir,” she said. “Thanks, Leo.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said. “It’s going to be lots of long hours, lots of dirty work, sad, sick stories, ice-cold cases, and, most likely, lots of missing people you never, ever find. Lots of stories with no ending. Don’t thank me for that, Lovina.” Roselle looked even more hangdog than usual as he spoke, sad, almost weary. “In a way, I’m letting your devil run loose. I hope I don’t end up regretting it.”

  “You won’t,” Lovina said.

  Roselle stood up and examined the check. He fished a shiny silver money clip out of his pocket and pulled a few bills from it. “Good,” he said. “Take the next few days off. You start Monday.” Roselle dropped the money on the table. “Oh, and one more thing,” he said.

  “Yes?” Lovina said.

  “The wheel turns,” Roselle said, and touched her gently on the shoulder. He walked out of the diner, not looking back to see Lovina’s expression.

  * * *

  “It’s a boy!” Jimmie said into his cell phone. “Ten pounds four ounces!”

  “Damn, Jimmie—that’s great, man!” Heck said on the other side of the call. “Congratulations! Max won the bet, but that’s okay. I’ll win on the next kid.”

  “Bite your tongue, boy,” Jimmie said, smiling ear to ear. “No way in hell we’re going through all this again.”

  “That’s what they all say,” Heck said. “Hey, how did things turn out with that run? You guys going to be okay?”

  “Turned out the dock foreman was one of us,” Jimmie said, laughing. “He smoothed it all over. Made the run, barely on time, and got paid, so now we’re back to being about a paycheck away from homeless.”

  “That’s awesome, Jimmie,” Heck said. “Just keep on keeping on, man. All we can do.”

  “Today, I’m too damn tired and too damn happy to let it stick,” Jimmie said. “I
want you to come on down next week. We’ll cook out and you can meet the family proper, and we’ll talk about the next part of your squire training. You okay, kid?”

  “Right as rain, Obi-Wan,” Heck said. “Congrats again, Jimmie. Tell Layla and the fam I said ‘good job,’ but work on the whole birth-weight thing. Lovina and I owe the doc two cases of energy drinks now.”

  Jimmie laughed. “Okay, squire, I got to go. My folks just went in the room. See you next week. Take care, Heck.”

  The call ended, and Heck placed the phone on the bar next to him. There were a dozen empty shot glasses in front of him and two empty pitchers. George Thorogood was playing on the jukebox of the honky-tonk. “Set me up again, Ray,” he said to the bartender, and lit a fresh Lucky Strike.

  He took the Zippo, the flame still flickering, and held it over his arm, held it there until he should be in excruciating pain and suffering a serious burn. He snapped the lighter’s lid down, killing the flame, and looked at his arm. It was fine—not a mark, no pain. No pain—that was funny. He took a drag on the cigarette and then tossed back the shot Ray had just delivered. No pain.

  In a few more rounds, he’d get up and talk some shit to the rednecks at the pool table who’d been talking shit about his MC cut since he got here. He’d start the fight and finish it in a cell. He’d sleep then, finally, when the monster in him had been allowed to run for a spell and then was, appropriately, locked up in a cage. Just another Friday night.

  He glanced over to the cell phone. An odd thought crossed his fuzzy brain: What would Jimmie Aussapile say about all that? Heck laughed a little bit at that, but the thought stuck with him. A squire, someday a knight—Jesus Christ, what a joke that was. He picked up another shot and examined the dark amber whiskey, sloshed it about a bit in the glass. The beast growled to get on with it.

  He set the full glass back down on the bar and picked up the cell. He fumbled as he searched his contacts and hit the call button. After a moment, the call was answered.