Voice of experience right here.” Peaches didn’t need jokes, he was funny enough just saying what was on his mind.
Now Vince moved past the cored-out, red-eyed bunch, and took a stool at the counter beside Lemmy.
“What do you think we ought to do about this shit when we get to Vegas?” Vince asked.
“Run away,” Lemmy said. “Tell no one we’re going. Never look back.”
Vince laughed. Lemmy didn’t. He lifted his coffee halfway to his lips but didn’t drink, only looked at it for a few seconds and then put it down.
“Somethin’ wrong with that?” Vince asked.
“It ain’t the coffee that’s wrong.”
“You aren’t going to tell me you’re serious about taking off, are you?”
“We wouldn’t be the only ones, buddy,” Lemmy said. “What Roy did to that girl in the bathroom?”
“She almost shot him,” Vince said, voice low so no one else could hear.
“She wasn’t but seventeen.”
Vince did not reply and anyway no reply was expected.
“Most of these guys have never seen anything that heavy and I think a bunch—the smart ones—are going to scatter to the four corners of the earth as soon as they can. Find a new purpose for being.” Vince laughed again, but Lemmy only glanced at him sidelong. “Listen now, Cap. I killed my brother driving blind drunk when I was eighteen. And when I woke up I could smell his blood all over me. I tried to kill myself in the Corps to make up for it, but the boys in the black pajamas wouldn’t help me. And what I remember mostly about the war is the way my own feet smelled when they got jungle rot. Like carrying a toilet around in my boots. I been in jail, like you, and what was worst wasn’t the things I did or saw done. What was worst was the smell on everyone. Armpits and assholes. And that was all bad. But none of it has anything on the Charlie Manson shit we’re driving away from. Thing I can’t get away from is how it stank in the place. After it was over. Like being stuck in a closet where someone took a shit. Not enough air, and what there was wasn’t any good.” He paused, turned on his stool to look sidelong at Vince. “You know what I been thinking about ever since we drove away? Lon Refus moved out to Denver and opened a garage. He sent me a postcard of the Flatirons. I been wondering if he could use an old guy to twist a wrench for him. I been thinking I could get used to the smell of pines.”
He was quiet again, then shifted his gaze to look at the other men in their booths. “The half that doesn’t take a walk will be looking to get back what they lost, one way or another, and you don’t want any part of how they’re going to do it. ’Cause there’s going to be more of this crazy meth shit. This is just beginning. The tollbooth where you get on the turnpike. There’s too much money in it to quit, and everyone who sells it does it too, and the ones who do it make big fucking messes. The girl who tried to shoot Roy was on it, which is why she tried to kill him, and Roy is on it himself, which is why he had to whack her forty fucking times with his asshole machete. Who the fuck besides a meth-head carries a machete, anyhow?”
“Don’t get me started on Roy. I’d like to stick Little Boy up his ass and watch the light shoot out his eyes,” Vince told him, and it was Lemmy’s turn to laugh then. Coming up with deranged uses for Little Boy was one of the running jokes between them. Vince said, “Go on. Say your say. You been thinkin’ about it the last hour.”
“How would you know that?”
“You think I don’t know what it means when I see you sittin’ straight up on your sled?”
Lemmy grunted and said, “Sooner or later the cops are going to land on Roy or one of these other crankies and they’ll take everyone around them down with them. Because Roy and the guys like him aren’t smart enough to get rid of the shit they stole from crime scenes. None of them are smart enough not to brag to their girlfriends about what they been up to. Hell. Half of them are carrying rock right now. All I’m saying.”
Vince scrubbed a hand along the side of his beard. “You keep talking about the two halves, the half that’s going to take off and the half that isn’t. You want to tell me which half Race is in?”
Lemmy turned his head and grinned unhappily, showing the chip in his tooth again. “You need to ask?”
The truck with LAUGHLIN on the side was laboring uphill when they caught up to it around three in the afternoon.
The highway wound its lazy way up a long grade, through a series of switchbacks. With all the curves there was no obvious place to pass. Race was out front again. After they departed from the diner, he had sped off, increasing his lead on the rest of The Tribe by so much that sometimes Vince lost sight of him altogether. But when they reached the truck, his son was riding the guy’s bumper.
The ten of them rode up the hill in the rig’s boiling wake. Vince’s eyes began to tear and run.
“
It was a surprise, catching up to the truck here. They weren’t that far from the diner… twenty miles, no more. LAUGHLIN must’ve pulled over somewhere else for a while—but there was nowhere else. Possibly he had parked his rig in the shade of a billboard for a siesta. Or threw a tire and needed to stop and put on a new one. Did it matter? It didn’t. Vince wasn’t even sure why it was on his mind, but it nagged.
Just past the next bend in the road, Race leaned his Softail Deuce into the lane for oncoming traffic, lowered his head, and accelerated from thirty to seventy. The bike squatted, then
Vince had spotted the Lexus coming and for a moment had been sure he was about to see his son go head- on into it, Race one second, roadmeat the next. It took a few moments for his heart to come back down out of his throat.
“
“
“
By the time the truck swung through the next curve, though, Laughlin seemed to have come to his senses, or had finally looked in the mirror and noticed the rest of The Tribe roaring along behind him. He put his hand out the window—that sundarkened and veiny hand, big-knuckled and blunt-fingered—and waved them by.
Immediately, Roy and two others swung out and thundered past. The rest went in twos. It was nothing to pass once the go-to was clear, the truck laboring along at barely thirty. Vince and Lemmy swept out last, passing just before the next switchback. Vince cast a look up toward the driver on their way by but could see nothing except that dark hand hanging out against the door. Five minutes later they had left the truck so far behind them they couldn’t hear it anymore.
There followed a stretch of high, open desert, sage and saguaro, cliffs off to the right, striped in chalky shades of yellow and red. They were riding into the sun now, pursued by their own lengthening shadows. Houses and a few trailers whipped by as they blew through a sorry excuse for a township. The bikes were strung out across almost half a mile, with Vince and Lemmy riding close to the back. But not far beyond the town, Vince saw the rest of The Tribe bunched up at the side of the road, just before a four-way intersection—the crossing for Route 6.
Beyond the intersection, to the west, the highway they had been following was torn down to dirt. A diamond-shaped orange sign read CONSTRUCTION NEXT 20 MILES BE PREPARED TO STOP. In the distance, Vince could see dump trucks and a grader. Men worked in clouds of red smoke, the clay stirred up and drifting across the tableland.
He hadn’t known there would be roadwork here, because they hadn’t come this way. It had been Race’s suggestion to return by the back roads, which had suited Vince fine. Driving away from a double homicide, it seemed like a good idea to keep a low profile. Of course that wasn’t why Race had suggested it.
“What?” Vince said, slowing and putting his foot down. As if he didn’t already know.
Race pointed away from the construction, down Route 6. “We go south on 6, we can pick up I-40.”
“In Show Low,” Vince said. “Why does this not surprise me?”
It was Roy Klowes spoke next. He jerked a thumb toward the dump trucks. “Bitch of a lot better than doing five an hour through that shit for twenty miles. No thank you. I’d rather ride easy and maybe pick up sixty grand
