I shot him in the left ankle. The blast knocked him down like it was supposed to do. It also made him noisy, which I thought was over-reacting. After all, I skipped the load off the pavement and he wore heavy motorcycle boots. He probably didn’t even have any broken bones.
When Goose stopped screaming, I leaned over him and jabbed the shotgun into his crotch. “Goose, I’m ashamed of you. It’s time you learned about the real world.”
“You shot me, man!”
“Of course, I shot you! What did you expect me to do, fall down and whimper because you threatened me? It’s very simple, Goose. Threat, click, boom. Hell, I gave you a break because I figured you were only shooting off your fat mouth. Otherwise, it would have been click, boom, dead.”
I dropped a book of matches onto his chest. “Goose,” I said, “light the bike."
“Fuck you, Clyde. That’s my hog! I ain’t gonna burn it.”
I stirred the Ithaca’s muzzle around in his groin. “You really want to sing soprano at your age?”
He whined a lot, but he ignited the matchbook and threw the mini-torch at his Harley. The spilled gas caught with a fine loud whoosh. Goose and I stepped—well, I stepped, he sort of scuttled—away from a blazing tributary.
The burning motorcycle cast shifting smoky shadows on the surrounding buildings. A car on a cross street a block away stopped, then accelerated away.
“Okay, Goose old buddy,” I said, “there’s only one more chore for you. Go back to the Dew Drop and tell Fran you don’t care if she talks to me. Do that tonight. Now.”
He gestured at his foot. “I can’t walk, you crazy bastard.”
The boot did look pretty scarred up. And his foot was apparently tender. He screamed loud enough when I kicked it.
“It’s not easy to get your attention, is it?” I said. “Goose, you’re a DeathStar, remember? You’re so tough, you can hop four blocks easily. I’ll even help you up.”
I thought Goose might try something when I tugged him upright, but the instant of muscle tension passed. When he was standing up, back-lit by the burning motorcycle, he seemed shorter than before. He gingerly put some weight on his left foot and swayed, breathing noisily.
“On your way, DeathStar. Tell Fran like I said. I’d give you a lift, but I don’t have time. Got to find a McDonalds before they close.”
When I idled past Goose sixty yards later, he was moving well enough. He was getting almost three feet to the hop, except when he overbalanced and waved his arms too much.
Eight blocks away, I passed a fire engine going towards the cul-de-sac. The men in the funny helmets looked very serious.
Personally, I thought it was funny as hell.
Chapter 8
The next morning, at Hilda’s house in Richardson, I made breakfast. Scrambled eggs with Mexican hot sauce, whole wheat toast, and coffee. I took the tray back to the bedroom, woke Hilda again, and handed her a plate. “Drop your cocks and grab your socks, we’re moooving out!”
“I beg your pardon?” she said.
“That’s an old military wake-up call. Barracks humor.”
“It does not translate well. There is a definite problem with gender.”
“True. I wonder what they say now, what with women soldiers and all?”
“I shudder to think,” Hilda said, and forked up a mouthful of eggs and jalapeño peppers. She could wake up one minute and start eating the next. Without having coffee first or anything. It was awe-inspiring.
“Let me get this straight,” she said. “Last night, you shot a Hell’s Angel and burned his motorcycle so a stripper would tell you about the gang. Do I have that right?”
“Sort of. He wasn’t a Hell’s Angel; he was just a local numb-nuts. I only shot him a little bit; nothing serious. And the girl isn’t a stripper; she’s more like a trainee drink hustler. Basically, however, you got it right.”
“Oh, well, that explains everything,” Hilda said. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to talk to the woman when the biker wasn’t around? And where’s my coffee? Oh, thanks.”
“Raising hell is a basic fact-finding technique. It always helps to thrash around in the bushes, throw rocks, and holler. It makes people nervous. Now, something will happen. And, of course, I’ll be able to talk to Fran without having to smell Goose in the background.”
Hilda clunked her coffee cup down on the bedside table. “You don’t think you’ve scared off the bikers, do you?”
“Jeez, I hope not. Old Goose did look a touch tight around the eyes toward the end, but I figure he’ll get his nerve back, or at least his buddies will, and they’ll come to me. Much easier than looking for them.”
“Sir Rafferty, one of these days you’re going to annoy the wrong dragon and get your butt kicked all over the castle.” She said it in a joking manner, but her eyes didn’t see the humor.
“I try not to think about that.”
“Me neither.”
“I have to run, Hil,” I said. “I want to be in the office when Fran calls.” I kissed her good-bye, then stopped in the bedroom doorway when she slipped out of bed and padded, naked, toward the bathroom. “Hey, good-looking,” I called. “If the antique business ever folds up, I know where you can get a job hustling drinks.”
Hilda made a rude noise and slammed the bathroom door. I went to work.
My office was on the second floor of an old building on Jackson Street, near Harwood. A radio station had occupied the building at one time. When the media mouths moved out, the owner rented each office separately.
We were a mixed bag of lower-middle-class self-employed. There was a Greek who ramrodded a gang of door-to-door aluminum cookware salesmen, a PR man with big brass letters on his door and no clients, a two-gal secretarial service, that sort of thing. We had a bail bondsman for a while, but it was too far from the jail, so he moved.
My office had been the radio station control room, where all the red-hot sounds blasted out for Big D’s rockin’ robins, hey, hey, hey. The room was strangely shaped and barren, but I didn’t need much. A desk, a phone, a jug of coffee, and me, so to speak.
Honeybutt was working at her desk when I sat down and put my feet up. Honeybutt was the secretary for an insurance agent next door. His office had been the radio station newsroom. There was a large plate glass window between our respective workstations, as we modern business types say. There were drapes on the insurance side of the window, but they were always open.
The floor level in my office was raised, so I looked down at Honeybutt. It was a worthwhile vantage point. In the summer, she wore short skirts. In the winter, she favored tight slacks. Her file cabinets were against the far wall and Honeybutt quite often needed things from the bottom drawers.
I never knew Honeybutt’s name. We winked a lot, but we had an unspoken agreement not to talk to each other. It would have ruined the relationship.
My phone rang at 10:23. “DeathStar Stompers, Incorporated,” I said. “Service with a smile guaranteed.”
“Mr Rafferty?”
“Yup. I thought about changing it to Mean Machine, but that’s already been used.”
“This is Fran Rosencrantz.”
“Fran who?” I asked.
“Fran Rosencrantz. You gave me your card last night.”
“Sure. Only, I thought your name was Zifretti.”
“I don’t want anything from that creep, especially his name. What happened to Goose?”
“Must have fallen off his bike. You know how dangerous those things are.”
“Yeah,” Fran said. She sounded tired. “So, if you want to talk, I guess it’s all right.”
“Good girl. Where are you?”
She gave me an address in Oak Cliff. I told her I could be there in thirty minutes. She said okay and yawned in my ear. I didn’t complain; I know show business people are late sleepers.
The address turned out to be a white frame house in an older, quiet neighborhood. It was a small, neat house with a porch. The lawn was very gre
en. Put a grinning kid and a soppy looking hound on the front steps and you’d have a 1953 Saturday Evening Post cover.
Fran had told me her place was around the back and so it was. She heard the car, apparently, because she came out onto a tiny landing where a set of white wooden stairs topped out at an apartment over the garage. She wore tan jeans and a loose blue shirt that looked like a man’s but buttoned like a woman’s. She looked different with clothes on; crisp and housewifey.
Fran had perked up since we had talked on the telephone. She hustled me into the apartment and clattered around the kitchen brewing coffee. She made kissy-kissy noises while she fed a canary in a wooden cage. She served the coffee in china cups with saucers. The cups had blue flowers on them. She arranged a dozen Oreos on a plate with a similar pattern. She was domestic as all get out.
We sat on a slipcovered couch in the cramped living room. “Nice place, Fran,” I said. It was true.
“Thanks. The Jamisons are sweet people. Most of the furniture is theirs. Oh, hey, they wouldn’t want to rent to a … see, they think I work nights at the phone company. I mean I don’t suppose you’ll meet them, but just in case, huh?”
“No sweat, Fran.”
There was one of those supermarket decorating and recipe magazines on the coffee table. I gestured at it and looked around the apartment. “You’ve done a good job. Congratulations.”
She nodded. “I’m trying. After eight years of living like a retarded junior high schooler, it’s not easy, but I’m trying.”
“I’ll bet. Look, Fran, as I said last night, I don’t want to give you any trouble. I do need your help, though. What can you tell me about the DeathStars?”
“What about them?”
“Well, anything about them. I’m just getting started. All I know about bikers is that they look bad and smell worse.”
“You got that right. It’s a crazy game they play. The club is everything, you see, and they have these elaborate rules about sticking together. They think it’s them against the world.”
“What do they have against bathing occasionally?”
“Oh, that’s part of it. They call themselves outlaws. They’re sure people hate them and are scared of them. Being dirty and crude and ugly makes that happen.”
“You don’t sound like anyone I’d expect to see on the back of a bike.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, putting too much garden-party lilt in her voice.
“Big change in your life, I suppose?”
She bobbed her head earnestly. “You can’t imagine. I feel like I don’t even know Fran Zifretti anymore. She was somebody else. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. How did you get involved with them?”
“Long story,” she said. “I got into trouble as a kid. Which wasn’t surprising, now that I look back. My folks split up when I was ten and Mom worked hard at drinking herself to death. From the time I was thirteen, I did my own thing. Well, one of my own things was shoplifting. I got caught too many times, so I spent a year and a half in reform school. They called it corrective education or some such, but it was still the slammer to me. After I got out, I met Tony. By then, Mom was so far in the bottle I couldn’t stand to be around her. So Tony and I got married.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she shook her head.
“Wow,” she said, “what a couple of dummies. We rode his bike to Bossier City, Louisiana, and found a JP. Everything was going to be terrific, we thought. Tony had a job in a gas station and—oh, I don’t know, I suppose we were just playing grown-up.”
“It happens fairly often. Sometimes it works.”
“Yeah. Well, it didn’t work for us, though it took a while to go sour. You see, when I met him, Tony hung around with a bunch of guys about his age—eighteen. Most of them had jobs, but not very good ones. Bagging groceries, pumping gas, washing cars—that sort of thing. Some of them still lived with their parents. Everybody rode bikes, though, and they started a club.”
“The DeathStars,” I said.
“Oh, no, not then,” she said. “It was just a bunch of kids with bikes and leather jackets, you know? Even so, it wasn’t the best thing to happen early in a teenage marriage. The club took a lot of Tony’s time. I was a little jealous, but it wasn’t too bad. There were other girls involved. Girlfriends of the guys. We’d ride around, party, race through drive-ins. You know, kid stuff. Then Guts Holman showed up.” She offered me the plate of Oreos and took one herself.
“The way you say that makes it sound like Holman suddenly dropped out of the sky,” I said. “Where did he come from?”
“I don’t know for sure. There was a story that Guts had been a Bandido. They’re a club in Houston. Big. Bad, too. The story was that Guts had been a Bandido officer and he quit or got kicked out or got away during a bust. Or something. But I don’t know about that. Guts liked to keep people guessing. He could have started that story around.”
“Okay. What happened after Holman hit town?”
“Guts took over the club. Tony and the other guys thought he was a tin god, what with him being an ex-Bandido and all. Guts taught them how to organize the club and he came up with the DeathStars name.”
“Star Wars fan, was he?”
Fran shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows? Anyway, things changed. Guts was club president, and the club got bigger because Guts brought in a whole new crowd. Older guys. Different guys.”
“Like Goose.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Like Goose. Tony thought it was great. He wanted to be an officer, but Guts said he wasn’t ready yet. Guts said Tony had to grow up, quit the kid stuff. And Guts made all the guys earn their DeathStar colors.“
I must have looked blank, because she said, “Their colors. The vests. The badges. He made them do things to earn the right to wear them.”
“What do you mean? Initiations, hazing? That sounds like kid stuff to me.”
“No,” Fran said. “Things for the club. Sometimes they fought with other gangs. Or they robbed 7-Eleven stores. Sometimes they had to pick up packages at the air freight terminal and deliver them to a house in South Dallas. It was drugs, I’m sure. Had to be. Some of us girls didn’t like that very much, but Guts turned part of the money back into the club treasury, so the guys thought it was great. Oh, and they’d boost cars, too. Never bikes—Guts wouldn’t allow that—but he had contacts to get rid of cars. They hijacked a truck once, but I guess they almost got caught, because they never did that again.”
“What did you think about the new club?”
“I didn’t like it at all. Tony and I argued a lot, because I saw what it did to him. I mean, the club had always been important to him, but after Guts came, the club took over his life. We never did anything unless it involved that damned club.”
Fran pursed her lips thoughtfully. “That was bad enough. What was strange—and scary—was how the guys changed in the way they thought about us girls.”
“How was that?”
“We weren’t people anymore. Just things. They had all these rules about protecting their women and not messing with each other’s girls. Things like that. But the rules weren’t really to protect us, the rules were there because we were … property, if you see what I mean.”
I sipped the last of my now-cool coffee, snagged an Oreo off the plate, and wondered how feminism had missed the vast untapped market of motorcycle gangs.
“Look,” Fran said, “I’ll give you an example. I was always pretty flat up top, right? Tony used to tease me about it. At first, that was all right. We were newlyweds and people get goofy then. Silly private jokes and games. Tony called me ‘Tiny Tits,’ but I didn’t mind because it was, oh, I don’t know, tender. In a way.” She sighed. “Then, after the club changed, it wasn’t so tender anymore. And one day Tony told me they’d had a meeting and the guys had offered to let him do the next three airport pickups—and keep some of the money—so he could buy me a present. A couple of weeks later, he took me to a doctor. I came bac
k with these.” Fran waved her hands at her improbable breasts. “Charming, huh?”
“Like buying new headlights for his bike, eh?”
She finger-combed her red curls and went on. “Yeah, but I had it better than some. I think it was because Tony and I were married. And Guts liked Tony a lot. Some of the other girls—wow, they got treated like dirt.”
“Worse than a mail-order chest?” I said.
“A lot worse. There was one time,” she said, “when the guys came out of a club meeting and Guts went straight to Wendy Cannon. She was a young girl, kind of fat, but pretty, you know? Anyway, she was Turkey Ludder’s girlfriend. And Turkey’s best buddy—a greaseball named Mack—wanted to share Wendy. Turkey didn’t care, apparently, so Guts okayed it. Wendy cared, though, and she said no. That was a big mistake. Guts ripped off her clothes and told Mack to jump on her bones.”
Fran grimaced. “Mack did it right in front of everybody. God, it was terrible. Wendy cried and screamed and the guys cheered Mack on. After it was over, they had another meeting and voted to give Mack a special badge.”
“Great friends you had, Fran.”
“I know,” she said, “but—hey, nothing like that ever happened to me. Honest!”
“I believe you. Next question. You seem like a decent sort. When all that mindless garbage started, why didn’t you get out?”
She folded her hands in her lap and rubbed her thumbs together. She studied them intently to make sure she was doing it correctly.
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” she said. “I left after Guts got killed, when the club stalled for a while. I told Tony to get lost, I filed for divorce, the whole bit. I should have quit sooner, but I didn’t. And the only reason I can think of … it was … I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was easier not to.”
She snuffled and turned to look at me. Her face was blubbery and soft. She looked very pretty at the time and I wondered why I had thought she was plain.
“Isn’t that a helluva thing?” she said. “I let myself be like that because it was easier!”
Rafferty's Rules: A Rafferty P.I. Mystery Page 5