But no one other than Harold ever took that dirt road. Not too surprising, really. Drive forty miles on that road and you reached the home of satanic patriarch Deke Lynch and his family. Deke called the place Hell’s Half Acre, but Harold preferred to think of it as the Radiation Ranch.
Spend some time with the Lynch clan out there in the middle of nowhere and your perspective was bound to change. Listen to Deke ramble on night after night about Satan and the government and a man’s responsibilities to his blood kin, and you’d begin to think that the Manson Family might have survived if only they’d been a little stronger in the family values department.
It got so that every time Harold drove down that dirt road and hit pavement, he’d get to feeling pretty strange. It was like visiting a world he had forgotten about, a world that had nothing to do with Deke Lynch and his wild brood.
Harold sat in his old Chevy. He was parked in a dirt lot about twenty feet short of the pavement. He always used this spot when he had to schedule a rendezvous. After a few months in the desert, the glitter and noise of Las Vegas made him as jittery as a caffeine fiend.
This place was so quiet. Tonight there were no drunks or newlyweds or college kids. And that was good. Safe. A place where a couple of guys could meet without being disturbed.
Harold popped the top on an Olde English 500 and looked at his watch. Tony was twenty minutes late. Where was the motherfucker?
Tonight of all nights. .
Tony would show, though. Harold knew it. Tony wouldn’t let him down. Because Tony was his brother.
Not in a biological sense. They weren’t connected that way.
But just like Deke Lynch and his family, Harold and Tony were connected by blood.
Harold sipped the Olde English and thought about the old days.
Corcoran State Prison. The badass unit. The one they called the Shoe. The one where they put prisoners who caused trouble.
Harold Ticks was in the Shoe for beating up some nigger queen who tried to turn him into a bitch. Harold broke every finger on the hand the nigger tried to slip up his ass, snapped each one at the knuckle joint just like fucking chicken bones while the nigger screamed like James Brown.
Tony Katt was in the Shoe for fucking up a runty guard who liked to give him shit about his little dick. Tony hit the hack while he was talking, hit him so hard that the hack’s teeth slashed through his upper lip, nearly severing it.
A couple of the hack’s teeth broke off, ending up embedded in Tony’s hand. The prison doctor dug those teeth from between Tony’s knuckles with a pair of tweezers. The word around the campfire was that Tony didn’t even flinch.
That was Tony. It didn’t matter how big his dick was-Tony Katt was nobody’s punk. Harold knew that from jump.
Everyone knew it. Even the runty guard with the ripped lip that never healed right. And all the other guards knew it, too. They knew that Tony Katt was a natural for their private gladiator wars, same way they knew that Harold Ticks would make one hell of a tag-team partner for the big white guy with the little bitty dick.
It worked this way: the Shoe had a brick-walled exercise yard. A control booth with a big barred window overlooked the yard, and video cameras were mounted everywhere. When the guards needed some entertainment, they gathered together in the tower and set up a fight between the prisoners. With the paychecks the hacks were pulling, it wasn’t exactly like they were up for pay-per-view boxing matches on TV. Besides, the fights at the Shoe were better. Bloodier. For the hacks, it was just like having a ringside seat in the Roman Colosseum.
Starting a fight was easy. All you had to do was mix the dark meat with the white meat. Toss a couple of Aryan Brotherhood boys into the yard with some cons who belonged to the Mexican Mafia or Black Guerrilla Family.
Toss four guys like that into the yard, and make sure every one of them was wrapped tight as jailhouse TNT. The cons might as well have been sweating nitro. The slightest little shove and someone was bound to go boom!
Harold remembered the day he got shot. Waiting in the yard with Tony. The hack with the ripped-up lip that wouldn’t smile anymore escorting a couple of Mexican Mafia guys into the yard. The hack pointing at Tony, whispering some little dick joke to the spies, who laughed their hard spic laughs.
The guard laughing, too, laughing through that frozen lip while he took his post with a rifle in his hands. .
The fight. .
The guard with the ripped-up lip trying to smile while he watched the Mexicans take it really hard-
Headlights washed Harold’s face. He glimpsed himself in the rearview mirror. His face was very pale.
A car drifted across the dirt lot. Harold hadn’t even noticed it take the exit.
But that was okay because he recognized the car as Tony’s Lamborghini.
Harold drained the Olde English, crumpled the can in his fist, and tossed it out the window. Tony’s headlights went out.
The ripe, pale moon hung behind the Lamborghini. Tony had paid $446,820 for the car. It was a 1971 Miura SVJ. There were only three others like it in the world.
The car looked too low to the ground to hold a guy the size of Tony Katt. But it did. Tony hauled himself up and out of it. He came around the passenger side of Harold’s old Chevy, holding a six-pack in one hand.
Olde English 500. Had to be. These days Tony might drive a Lamborghini, but some things never changed.
Tony opened the door and slid inside. He popped a brew and handed it to Harold.
Harold said, “You’re late.”
“Yeah. I had drouble gedding away.”
“Hey,” Harold said. “Are you okay? You sound like you’re sick or something.”
Tony flicked on the overhead light. The skin around his eyes was black and blue. His nose was a mess of thick white tape and Popsicle sticks. Bloodstained cotton poked from his nostrils.
“Dip me in shit and roll me in sugar,” Harold said. “What happened to you?”
Tony said, “Jack Baddalach.”
Harold could believe in a lot of weird stuff. Space aliens visiting Area 51. The Loch Ness Monster. Demons in Daddy Deke’s mine shaft. But Jack Baddalach, alive? When he’d been locked up tight with a rattlesnake? No way, man. No fucking way.
“Yes way,” Tony said. “No fugging ghosd did dis do my nose.”
“Maybe we should call the whole thing off,” Harold said. “I told Baddalach some stuff that I probably should have kept to myself. Just started talking, because I figured he was a dead man and I wanted to get him relaxed so he wouldn’t guess what was coming when I pulled off the highway. Anyway, he must have remembered the stuff I talked about. That must be how he connected me to you.”
“Spilt milk. Like you said, you figured the guy was a corpse. No use worrying about it. So the motherfucker showed up on my doorstep. So he got lucky and broke my nose. No way can he make me talk, no matter what he does.”
“It’s not just Baddalach.” Harold shook his head. “It’s this fucking family I’m dealing with. They’re getting nuttier by the minute. The only one I really trust is Eden, and I think she’s at the end of her rope.”
“For a chick you turned out, she sounds pretty special. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“Yeah. But this fucking family. I swear to God, Tony, it’s like
“We’re close,” Tony said. “Real close. Just one more day and we’ll both have what we want.”
Harold drained his malt liquor and reached for another. It was hard to understand Tony with his nose all busted and everything. Jesus, this asshole Baddalach was something. Harold wondered how in the hell the motherfucker had gotten past that big fucking diamondback. And now this-
“I don’t know,” Harold said. “This Baddalach is a bulldog. And he’s only one step away.”
