Biker (12 page)

The motor home shifted as the dude inside jumped. A second later the door opened two inches, dude inside peering down with an evil brown eye.

“What the fuck,” he said.

Pratt ripped the door open with his left hand and punched the guy in the balls with his right hand. The man immediately collapsed in agony. With a quick glance around Pratt leaped into the motor home, dragged the War Bonnet away from the door by his collar and shut the door. The Bonnet had a shaved skull and a ‘stache and for an instant Pratt thought he'd got lucky and found Moon.

Pratt looked down. This dude wasn't old enough to be Moon although his face bore all the signs of hard living, crackle-finish skin from a lifetime of smoking, pinpoint pupils from sampling his product. The War Bonnet curled up like a carpet worm, looking up with tiny rage-filled eyes.

“You're a dead motherfucker, you know that?” the Bonnet said through gritted teeth.

Pratt kicked him in the ribs with his pointy-toed boot. “Where's the shit?” he seethed. Blood rose in him like a gusher. He was Gut Wrench again. The violence fed off itself as his instincts urged him to finish the job. He plunged a knee into the man's bruised rib and pulled his boot knife.

Pratt stuck the point under the War Bonnet's chin. “Where's the shit?” he growled in a voice he didn't recognize. Green with pain, the man pointed at an overhead compartment. Pratt kicked the War Bonnet's legs apart, dug a buck knife out of the Bonnet's side pocket and stomped on the man's hand. Pratt grabbed a greasy cast-iron pan from the stove and brought it down sideways against the Bonnet's temple with a temple bell gong. The War Bonnet banged down sideways and lay inert.

Pratt ripped open the compartment. Inside was a patched-leather duffel bag. He yanked it out, set it on the sofa and ripped it open. Inside a jumbo zip lock contained about a pound of gleaming meth. There was a triple beam balance in the cupboard as well as a pack of little baggies and several sterile hypos.

Pratt looked around for CCTV. Nada.

Quickly Pratt stepped to the bedroom and threw wide the card paper door. The tiny room was empty, sheets in disarray, smelling of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. Pratt turned off all the lights, stepped over the inert War Bonnet and fled into the night.

CHAPTER 21

Pratt made a beeline for the nearest concrete privy, a hundred yards away. The beeline veered around campsites and trees. From ten feet the privy smelled like the devil's asshole, an acidic stench that peeled the bark off trees. Eyes watering, Pratt went up to the sprung wooden door and pushed it aside with his foot. Inside he could see the floor covered with feces, used condoms, toilet paper, rags and two feet poking out from under a pile of rags. Dude was folded on his side snoring like raw static.

How fucked-up was that dude, to fall asleep in the Chip's privy? Pratt didn't want to think about it.

Pratt couldn't even imagine using one of the privies, let alone sleeping in it. He tossed the zip lock of crank into the toilet. An instant later there was a moist splat. Pratt got away from there. There were people right there at the Chip who would gladly dive into that privy if they knew what was down there.

On the way back, his cell buzzed in his pocket. It was Cass. He was immediately resentful. Couldn't the bitch leave him alone? As certain as night follows day came the shame. She loved him, or at least she thought she did.

“Are you all right?” she asked breathlessly.

“I'm fine.”

“I heard about the riots. It's all over the news.”

“I wasn't around when it happened, babe. But thanks for your concern.”

“And then I read that a guy I knew died in a traffic accident last night.”

That would be Taco
.

“I don't know anything about it, babe. I can't really talk right now. I'm in the middle of something. I'll call you back.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

Pratt returned to his perch across the way from the trailer. Folded against the base of a tree he was nearly invisible. The lights went back on in the motor home. The first thing the War Bonnet would do was phone his supplier. Next he would phone the cave man and any other War Bonnets in the Hills.

The War Bonnets would seek vengeance. Pratt was pretty sure he would be hard to identify. He'd worn a cap and Gargoyles the whole time. Long sleeves covered his ink. They'd be perplexed. And furious.

Ten minutes later the caveman jogged up to the motor home, sweat popping on his bony face, panting like a winded dog. Caveman's eyes bulged from the exertion. Pratt half expected him to have a thrombo right there. One hand on his knee for support, the caveman knocked.

The door popped open and caveman went inside.

For long seconds there was relative silence as the War Bonnet explained the situation. Pratt could practically see crimson bolts of fury radiating from the motor home.

“Why do I have to go?” caveman wailed, followed by the smack of flesh on flesh.

“Because I say so, asshole.”

A window cranked shut.

Seconds later two War Bonnets rumbled up to the motor home on rat bikes, tossed down plates for their kickstands, got off and knocked on the door. They went inside. The bikes were rat bastard Harleys, one with twin leather saddlebags.

More shouting from inside. Glass breaking. Cries of anger and astonishment. “Motherfucker!” escaped the cone of silence.

It was only the third day. The War Bonnets couldn't afford to turn their franchise over to somebody else. They'd never get it back. So they had to come up with more crank for the rest of the weeklong celebration. Pratt believed the War Bonnets would send a rider. Pratt would follow the rider to the source.

About twenty minutes later one of the War Bonnets, not caveman, came out and got on the rat Harley with the saddlebags. The rat Harley had a brake light hanging off the right chassis near the axle, just above the vertically displayed license plate. No turn signals. The Bonnets weren't the type who signaled turns.

Eric, here I come
.

Pratt stared a hole in the Bonnet's colors knowing that each rugged individualist looked more or less like the next rugged individualist. The Bonnet started his Harley. Pratt ran for his bike.

Pratt pissed off a few people in his mad scramble to catch up with the Bonnet. Someone threw a full can of beer at him, followed by, “Hey asshole!” Pratt didn't turn. He kept on moving. He sympathized with the can thrower. He reached the front gate in twenty minutes and joined the queue waiting to get out. The Bonnet was two bikes ahead of him. It was nine-thirty.

A few minutes later he showed his ticket stub and got a yellow bracelet to wear back in.

The Bonnet turned west toward town and Pratt followed. The Bonnet trolled sedately through town before turning west on Highway 14 toward Deadwood.

Here we go again
, Pratt thought.

Traffic was intense even at the late hour, thousands of bikes roaming the Hills, motorized Conestogas hauling families hither and yon, trucks bearing bawling cattle and bales of hay. The Bonnet was in no particular hurry and went with the flow. Pratt was happy to lie back and keep an eye out for the low red brake light.

The Bonnet stopped in Deadwood to gas up at a Kum & Go. Pratt motored past and filled his own tank at a Conoco, lining up behind a full-dress Kawasaki with a teddy bear bungeed to the sissy bar. The dresser's owner tried to talk to Pratt, but Pratt smiled and said, “Gotta go. Have a good ride.”

He paid via credit card at the pump and waited in the shadow of a closed supermarket until the Bonnet passed him heading west. They were in Wyoming an hour before the sun cast low beams on the western horizon. There were enough bikers heading every which way to conceal Pratt for a while, but sooner or later that would thin out and he'd be on his own.

West on 90 through Gillette headed toward Buffalo. A wash of wind rolled over Pratt with every eastbound semi. The capricious wind threatened to blow him off the road. At other times it was meek as a clam. Sun and wind sucked water out of him like a giant ShamWow. Pratt thought of T.E. Lawrence crossing
Al Rub al Qali
—the “Empty Quarter,” on the way to liberating Aqaba. He rode to Maurice Jarre's stirring theme to
Lawrence of Arabia
echoing in his head.

When the camels die, we die. And in twenty days they will begin to die
.

They rode for hours beneath the blinding sun. Pratt drank water on the go, one hand on the bar. Three and a half bottles left. When the Bonnet stopped in Buffalo to fill up, Pratt held back, watching from a promontory on the edge of town until the biker moved off. His own tank was on reserve. Pratt had no choice but to gas up and hope to catch up with the lone Bonnet.

He watched from afar as the Bonnet turned south on 196.

Lonely 196.

Pratt filled up at the Last Chance Gas! at the edge of town and took off like a bat at dusk. Crosses with plastic flowers sprouted from the shoulder of the rough-hewn road. This was high desert, sunbaked rocks rising thousands of feet to the right—the Bighorn Foothills. The land was sand and gravel, worthless save for the hardiest of predators—rock-eating lichen, road-kill-eating turkey buzzards.

Buzzards and hawks gyred overhead. Maybe they were waiting for someone to crash. The occasional pick-up or truck passed him heading north. The road peaked gently and Pratt saw his quarry a mile ahead, an intense black presence against the rust and beige background, like the after-spot from staring at the sun or a morning floater.

The rat Harley's rear-views were worthless. The bike made so much noise the rider wouldn't hear a semi. Dude never looked back.

Pratt hung a mile back, pausing atop each promontory, sticking to the shadows. Forty-five miles south of Buffalo the Bonnet slowed and carefully turned west onto a gravel road that looked like it hadn't been traversed since the Civil War. Basketball-sized rocks littered the rutted path. The only signs of life were some scrub, ground-hugging juniper and Spanish bayonet, all coated with a patina of brown dust, and the omnipresent turkey buzzard. It was always up there, like the Air Force's 24/7 Early Warning Mobile Command Platform.

Pratt waited until the Bonnet had disappeared into the folds of the earth before easing his Road King onto the treacherous gravel. Pratt hadn't messed with his bike's baffles. He never dug straight pipes. He didn't need to hear the fucking engine to appreciate the sensation of speed. He shimmied up the gravel road using his boots, winding through a tight “S,” and shut off his motor. The cackle of the Bonnet's engine spoke clearly, reverberating off the rock walls.

Pratt cinched into the shade of a half dome, tossed out the coffee can lid and left his bike. He shimmied to the top of the rock outcropping, covering his jeans and shirt with dust. One hundred yards ahead the Bonnet had stopped at a barbed wire gate. The land beyond was desolate and unforgiving, part of the Great American Siberia that stretched from Minnesota to the Rockies.

The Bonnet got off his rat bike, opened the gate, rolled his bike through and closed the gate behind him, looping a length of wire over the wooden post. The dirt road wound into the foothills. Pratt hunkered on the hot rock, motionless in his desert camo hat. For a long time the Bonnet's engine echoed, fainter and fainter until finally it fell silent, the choking dust falling to earth.

Pratt shimmied back down the rock and sat in the shade, his back to the half dome. He pulled out a bottled water and drank it in one chug. He waited fifteen minutes. He looked around. The turkey buzzard circled high overhead, its widening gyres covering half its arc with rock. Pratt got on his bike, scooped up the lid and thumbed the starter. He followed the Bonnet through the wire fence, carefully locking it behind him. He rode into the hills dead slow using his feet to fend off rocks. Canyon walls turned abruptly vertical ahead. The Bonnet's tracks showed sharply in the sand.

Pratt stopped.

Pratt pulled his bike off the rutted trail, up a desiccated wadi filled with baseball-sized stones, around a mushroom cloud of ancient juniper and kicked the stand out on a flat rock. The bike was not visible from the rutted dirt road. Not even its chrome.

Taking the remaining three bottles of water connected by a plastic collar, Pratt shrugged into his daypack and stepped back into the canyon. He cupped his ears with his hands and listened for five minutes, hearing the sigh of the wind, the caw of an invisible crow and his own blood pulsing in his temples.

Pratt headed up the canyon, hat pulled low against the westering sun.

CHAPTER 22

Now Pratt really regretted not bringing a gun. He figured the road could not go on forever. It would eventually run into the Bighorns. Pratt pulled a map of Wyoming from his backpack. The dirt road was not marked. Wherever the Bonnet was headed could not be much further.

Sand made for difficult riding but easy tracking. Pratt was about to set his foot on some gray-beige rocks when the ground came alive and slithered away. Pratt watched the five-foot timber rattler work its way into the shade of a natural cairn. Even here there was life. Life that could kill you. Pratt looked up. He had almost developed warm feelings for the turkey buzzard, like they were in this together.

“See anything?” Pratt whispered. The buzzard circled.

A mile up the trail Pratt saw an old wagon wheel sticking out of the earth, the same dun brown as the trail. It had been there for decades, half-buried by a flash flood. What blind fool had tried to coax a wagon up this wadi? Someone driven by lust, greed or fear. Pratt imagined he'd unearth a skull if he dug. He automatically touched his cell phone. He pulled it out and opened it. Of course there was no service.

Pratt needed a horse.

The canyon zigzagged west. Pratt stopped at each turn to listen, smell and feel, laying his ear against the canyon's smooth brown walls. He had not heard the Bonnet's unmuffled exhaust since the man had disappeared into the hills. Certainly the road was not something to which most bikers would subject their rides, but a determined rider could work his way back here.