by Dusty Sharp
He dialed Tillman. He knew the number by heart.
The line rang once…twice…the other end picked up.
“Dice? Where the fuck have you been? What’s goin’ on out there?”
Austin waited a moment before answering. “Dice has developed a bit of a speech impediment. He’ll have to fill you in later.”
The line was silent for almost a full minute.
“Austin? Is that you? What…where are you?”
“You know goddamn well where I’m at, Tillman. Or close enough anyway. You sent these fucking amateurs after me! Did you really think that was a good idea?”
“I only sent them to find you! Smooth things over! Goddammit what’s happened out there?”
Austin shook his head, a small laugh escaping him. “You can’t shit an old shitter, Tillman. They weren’t here to talk, they were on a hit. So let’s cut the crap. What’s done is done. The question is where do we go from here?”
After a moment Tillman said “Those men…your brothers…are they dead?”
“Don’t get all sentimental on me, asshole. Those weren’t my brothers. They might be flying Rattler colors but I’d never seen ‘em before. Probably part of your private little hit squad you’ve been using for the shit you’ve been mixed up in. But even if they’re patched in and legit, I turned mine in yesterday morning, remember? So don’t be giving me this brothers bullshit.” Austin paused for another puff of his cigar, blowing the smoke toward Dice’s bloody face. “Dice is still suckin’ in cold air and blowin’ out hot. But I’ve customized him a bit. Gave him a purty smile and turned him into a southpaw. The other three are dead.”
“Jeezus Austin! Those were patched brothers! Barstow originals!”
“Yeah I figured so. They’re dead Barstow originals now. You can figure out how to break it to their prez when you call him to clean up this mess.”
“Clean up? What the fuck are you talking about? That’s not my mess, Austin!”
“The hell it ain’t. You chose this. When I left Riverside yesterday I told you I’d go quietly, that you’d have to save that ‘blood in, blood out’ crap for someone else. I told you I’d leave you to your bullshit. Keep my nose out of your business. I thought we had an understanding. Then you sent these ladies up here to party. You did that, Tillman.”
Austin could just about hear the gears turning in the other man’s head, through the cellular phone connection. Finally Tillman said, “Well it sounds to me like you’ve got three dead bodies up there, son. And your fingerprints all over everything. Not to mention you’ve left a witness alive, though I’m sure you could cure that right quick. And even though there isn’t a cop within 50 miles of that godforsaken shithole right now, an anonymous call to the San Berdoo sheriff will have an army of them headed that way in no time. So it looks to me like its your problem, Austin.”
Austin sighed. “Are you really that fucking stupid? Do you think I’m that stupid? Hang on a sec…”
Austin dug around in his pants pocket, came out with a small object, which he held up in front of Dice’s ruined face. “Hey fuckface, what do you see here? Tell Tillman what I’m holding.” Dice’s face turned up, his eyes looked back and forth, and focused on Austin’s outstretched hand. “Tell him!” Austin held the phone up to Dice’s face with his other hand.
“Ith…ith a…a…fumb drive.”
“Did you hear that, Tillman? It’s a thumb drive. And it’s got everything on it. And I mean everything. Footage from the surveillance cameras at that lot where you keep those ocean containers. Phone recordings. Copies of your secret ledger where you wrote down who went where. It’s all in there, asshole. Enough to put you away, and half the club too. The half that have been in on that shit with you.”
“That’s a bluff. I’ve got a dozen of those in every drawer in my house. That one could have some college kid’s homework on it, for all I know.”
“Well you’ll be able to see for yourself. I’m slipping it into Dice’s pocket right now. Check it out when he gets back to town. It’s all on there. But don’t worry, I’ve got copies. Fucking-A do I have copies!”
The line was silent for a moment. Austin almost thought Tillman had disconnected, until he heard him say,“So you’ve got your little thumb drives everywhere and I’m just supposed to go on forever, hoping you’ll never release them? Is that how it works?”
Austin laughed. “Well, you’ll have to take my word for it. But unlike you, my word is good. You don’t fuck with me, I’ll keep those files hidden. Oh, and just in case you’re wondering, I have a copy sitting on an encrypted server with a deadman switch, meaning if anything happens to me they automatically get released, even if I’m dead.”
The line was silent for a moment.
“Goddammit. Fuck. So what then? I just let you ride off into the sunset?”
Austin looked toward the east, where the sky was just beginning to fade from black to purple over the distant peaks of the Old Woman Mountains. “Sunrise, asshole. I’m riding off into the sunrise, and you letting me has nothing to do with it. But like I said, you need to get some boys out here to clean this mess up. Sun’s gonna be up in a couple of hours. If I hear that the sun rose on a bunch of dead bikers littering the streets of Amboy, fuck it I’ll send those files anyhow. So call your boys over in Barstow, tell them whatever you’ve gotta tell them, suck whatever cock you gotta suck, but get a crew out here fast to mop this shit up. There are two here between the buildings and another one in the bushes about a mile east of town. Dice can point them out. Oh, and Dice is gonna need a doctor.”
Austin ended the call and dropped the phone in Dice’s lap. “Your girlfriends will be here soon,” he said, and walked away.
Kelbaker Road
The sun was just cresting the distant peaks as Austin and Gene passed over I-40 on Kelbaker Road. Austin was driving Gene’s truck. Gene was riding shotgun. Literally. His trusty 870 was tucked down into the footwell beside his left leg.
Austin had returned to the back of the café to find Gene up and walking around. He’d been at the hose spigot, cleaning the pass-through bullet hole in his side. Austin took another look at it and figured they’d have his down-low doctor check him out once they got to Vegas. The bleeding had mostly stopped, so Austin applied a fresh dressing to the wound, fed Gene a handful of antibiotics he’d found in the medicine cabinet in their trailer, and called it good, for now. Austin had visited each of the dead Rattlers to make sure he had all of his shit. He breathed a sigh of relief when he found his Loveless Chute knife in the alley near Babyface’s corpse. He’d retrieved his tactical folding knife from the site where he’d scuffled with Dice (the blade was nicked, but it wasn’t broken as he had feared). And his sling-blade was once again tucked back into his wallet, its chain dangling at his side.
Gene had called Doris over in Ludlow to tell her everything was OK. He lied about the details but said that he’d be back in a couple days, and for her to sit tight until he returned. Amboy could remain a ghost town until then, as there wasn’t much traffic through there anyhow during the dog days of summer.
The battered carcass of Austin’s motorcycle was strapped down in the back of the pickup truck. They’d found a couple of thick planks behind the café to use as ramps, and a come-along to winch the broken bike up into the truck. Getting that heavy bastard up into the truck took just about everything an old man with a gunshot wound and an ex-biker, scraped and bruised from head to toe, could muster. But after about an hour of struggling it was finally loaded.
Before heading down the highway they had stopped a couple miles from town, just past another one of those drainage culvert rises. Austin had climbed up into the bed of the pickup truck with Gene’s binoculars, his eyes trained on Amboy as the white-washed buildings began to glow pink in the early morning light. The temperature was already starting to move off of its overnight low, somewhere in the low 90’s. It was going to be another scorcher.
After a short wait Austin saw a small convoy a
pproaching Amboy from the opposite direction. He counted four motorcycles, a roll-back flatbed tow truck, and a cargo van. They all rolled to a stop in front of the motel office building. He could barely make out a lone figure stumbling away from the edge of the building to greet them. Dice. Austin had swung back into the cab and pulled away, heading east on the Mother Road.
It was well over 100 degrees as they approached Interstate 15 at Baker. “Breakfast?” Austin asked.
Gene reached into the bag sitting on the seat beside him and pulled out another piece of jerky. They had grabbed it and a couple of Route 66 root beers before leaving Amboy. “Nah, I’m alright. I’d just as soon get on up to Sin City if its all the same to you.”
“Was hoping you’d say that,” Austin replied as he swung the pickup truck onto I-15 north.
They rode in silence for a few minutes. They were just starting the long climb up the Baker Grade when Gene turned and said, “so, is it over?”
Austin thought a moment, keeping his eyes on the road, then shook his head. “No. I don’t think so. Shit like this is never over for a guy like Tillman. And to tell the truth, it wasn’t over for me yet either, despite what I’d told Tillman when I left Riverside.”
“Do you think he’ll make a move on you? What about your insurance?”
“Insurance only works if everyone is sane. I don’t think he’s smart enough for his own good. Even if I was gonna do like I’d told him and lay low, I pretty sure he’d just keep coming at me anyhow. He might think the deadman switch is a bluff anyhow. Might figure all he’s gotta do is kill me, to make this go away. Maybe he’s not sure, but thinks the odds are good enough to roll the dice. But it doesn’t really matter, this isn’t over, whatever Tillman might do or not do.”
Gene watched the desert roll by for a few minutes. “So what are you gonna do?”
“Kill him first.”
Gene jerked his head around, staring at Austin. “You said your word was worth something.”
Austin sighed. “He’d already broken any trust he had with me, Gene. I told him what I needed to, to get things moving back there. But there’s no such thing as honor when you’re dealing with a man like that. And after he sent those men to take me out, the gloves are off. My conscience is clear. And I won’t be safe until he’s been put down. You probably won’t be either, if they figure out I had a hand back there. And like I said, I had no intention of letting this thing go anyhow, even before he sent those girl scouts out here.”
“Well, aren’t you headed in the wrong direction?”
“I’ve got some things to take care of up in Vegas. And you and I both need to get patched up. I’ll be there a few days then figure out what to do. I was going to head over to Frisco to see what’s got Hank’s panties in a wad, but that might have to wait a bit.”
“So what in the world was this Tillman mixed up in that made a tough guy like you finally say ‘enough’?”
Austin looked over at Gene and studied his face for a moment. And then he turned his eyes back to the road, took the last swig of his root beer, and said “You don’t want to know.”
A Few Notes
The bar where the narrative starts, the Old Dale Saloon, is fictitious. But the name is an homage to the nearby Old Dale Mining District, an interesting place to explore. The rest of the places Austin passes through on his night ride from Twentynine Palms to Amboy are real, and presented as they are today.
Twentynine Palms is indeed an enormous Marine Corps training base, sprawling across a huge swath of the Mojave Desert. With apologies to my Marine friends—Austin needed to beat someone up at the start of the story, and Marblemouth and his buddies were convenient.
The abandoned homestead shacks of Wonder Valley are correctly described. In recent years a movement has been underway to knock them down and clean up the sites that aren’t inhabited. While I feel for those who live there in the present, and their desire to erase blight in the area, I think the removal of the shacks is erasing a bit of the unique history of the area. If you’re lucky enough to travel through there any time soon, check them out as they may be gone before long.
I only briefly mentioned the salt ponds of Bristol Dry Lake and the Amboy Crater with its lava fields. These are a pair of fascinating points of natural and human history in the area that deserve further study by anyone interested. Amboy Crater is a small, extinct volcano that is actually quite young in geologic terms. There is a short hike to the rim and down into the crater. The salt flats of Bristol Dry Lake provided Amboy its early history, as the town originated as a supply outpost to service the salt mines of the area, long before Route 66 came through.
Amboy is as I described it, mostly, though there are a few more buildings, nooks and crannies there than I’ve used in the story. I deleted some of the chain link fencing that’s currently in place, to give my characters more freedom of movement. And I took some liberty with Gene’s line of sight from the top of the water tower. In reality, there’s a utility building that would have probably blocked his view from the shot he made.
Amboy is fascinating as sort of a mid-century ghost town, where most ghost towns in the west are dilapidated wood buildings from the mining days of the 1800’s. Amboy’s fortunes hinged almost entirely on the bounty that the Mother Road brought it. And just like a rich vein of gold-bearing ore that eventually plays out, Route 66 also played out, along with the businesses and communities that depended on it. Next time you’re in Amboy, take a moment to read the historical plaque affixed to the wall next to the entrance to the café. It was placed there by my brothers of E Clampus Vitus, Billy Holcomb Chapter 1069, back in 2006. Satisfactory!
I could have set Austin’s little adventure in any of a hundred different places. But it was fun writing it where it is, riding along with him and re-living my own visits to those places.
The story also hints at past and concurrent events that concern Austin’s cousin Hank. Close but distant, the two cousins have each led interesting lives, both separately and also in a few joint adventures set in the past, which will be told about elsewhere. This story serves as the first of Austin’s solo stories, but it also hints at yet another, forthcoming adventure with Hank. What was that text all about anyhow?
Want More Austin Conrad?
If you’re jonesin’ to find out what’s next for Austin, sign up for my email list and you’ll be the first to know when his next adventure is ready to read! And if you think your friends might enjoy Austin’s stories, please share this link with them so they can get their own copy of No Time To Bleed for FREE! Both the email list and the free book are available at the following link:
http://www.dustysharp.com/free-books/
###
…one more thing, before you go…
PLEASE REVIEW MY BOOK!
Please take a moment to leave a review for No Time To Bleed, on the marketplace where you purchased it, and on any vook review sites you frequent, such as Goodreads. Reviews are the lifeblood of new and independent authors. Amazon’s algorithms use reviews to determine what books to show readers who are shopping for their next book. Your review will help make my book visible to more people, and for that I would be eternally grateful!
About The Author
Dusty Sharp lives in Southern California with his wife, Stephanie, and four English Mastiffs. He enjoys exploring the back-country of the desert southwest, and driving or tinkering on his Early Ford Broncos. Dusty enjoys good cigars, better food, and great beer. He has had a lifelong interest in the history of California and the west, and is a proud brother of E Clampus Vitus, Billy Holcomb Chapter 1069. His professional background is in marketing, having worked for many years in the RV and off-road vehicle industries. No Time To Bleed is his first published work of fiction.
e this book with friends