Buried Biker (19 page)

“Come on, it’s me. Jesse. I was your cell buddy, just for a night. Last Friday.”

“Oh, yeah.” He rubbed his nose and looked at the concrete below his feet.

“You make bail?” I asked.

“Nah. They just let me out. Charges dropped.”

“Well, that’s even better. Your mom must have decided not to make a big deal of the whole thing.”

“I guess.” He looked at the envelope in his hand. “Where are you headed?”

“Home. I’m coming from the parole office. I got to report once a week.”

“How can you work if you got to report in the daytime like that?”

“Night job. Midnight to eight shift.”

He looked around. “I need a job.”

“Yeah. Jobs come in handy. Especially if you ever expect to need money for anything.”

He gave me a weak grin. “When I was gonna be released, they let me call my mom. She wouldn’t come pick me up.”

“What was she doing?”

“She was at work.”

“So she don’t want to miss work. It won’t hurt you to walk.”

“She says she wants me to move out of the house.”

“No surprise there. You’re not a kid anymore. And you beating up on her boyfriend can’t help
that
relationship.”

“I haven’t got any place to go. Or any money.”

“You had the right idea. Get a job.”

He looked defeated. “Jobs aren’t easy to come by.” He was right about that. “And even if I got something right away, it’d be a while before I got paid.”

“So go to the Rescue Mission. You can stay there. And look for a job. See if you can’t pick up some day labor.”

He looked puzzled. “Day labor?”

“Yeah. If you go down to the Mission, they’ll know who’s hiring casual labor. It’s usually hard physical work, and the pay’s not great, but you get it at the end of the day. Usually in cash.”

“Then what?”

“You do that and keep applying for jobs. When you get enough saved up, you look for a room or a place to share with somebody.”

He glanced around. “For now, I’ve gone back to being a spotter again. I just got ten bucks for calling in a car.”

Shaking my head, I said. “Not good. What kinds of cars are they looking for?”

“Well, like that black Lincoln there. It’s pretty new. It’s in pretty good shape, only a little dent in the hood. And they said they’re looking for Lincolns. So I called it in, and they said they had somebody right in the neighborhood, so he stopped and gave me the ten. If they pick it up, it’s gonna be another forty.”

I looked at the car he was looking at. My stomach got queasy. I was more familiar with that car than I wanted to be. Especially with the hood and how it got its dent. “You know whose car that is?”

“Probably one of the lawyers. They all drive flashy cars. So I told them the driver’ll be in the courthouse for a while. A few more hours, at least.”

Shaking my head, I said, “I know that car. A couple of police detectives drive it. I bet it was seized in a drug bust. And I bet they put a LoJack on it.”

Willis took a step back and covered his mouth.

I asked, “Do you know what the people you’re dealing with do with the cars?”

“No. And I don’t think I want to.”

“They either drive them straight down to the docks at the Baltimore harbor and load them right up to be shipped to Africa or South America, or they take them to a chop shop and break them down for parts.”

“But
I
wouldn’t be doing any of that.”

“Maybe not directly. But it’s conspiracy.”

“Not really.”

“Yes, really. Remember, we talked about conspiracy?”

He pulled his jacket closer and looked away.

“And the guy in the Audi, the one who gave you the tenner?”

He nodded. “I told him about you, too.”

I had to struggle to swallow my surprise so it didn’t show. “Me?”

“Yeah. He asked if I’d met anybody in jail who might want to make a couple of extra bucks, too. So I told him about you.”

Anger shot through me. “Don’t you remember I told you how stupid it was to get mixed up in this?”

“I guess. But I need the money.”

“For what?”

He shrugged. “Stuff?”

“Drugs?”

“A little. But I ain’t no addict.”

“You’re sure as hell acting like one. Don’t give no thought to the dumb things you’re doing. Getting somebody else—
me
—mixed up in this. You wanna go down for this stupid shit, nothing I can do about it. But leave me out of it.”

He turned away from me. “Too late. I done told him about you.”

I clenched my fists. Punching him out wouldn’t undo what he’d done. And might get me in real trouble. “What did he say?”

“Not a whole lot. He seemed to know who you were.”

I shoved my fist into my jacket pocket and turned to walk away.

“And he did say your girlfriend was going up to the Predators’ clubhouse, looking for you.”

I whirled around to face him and tried to make sense of that. I couldn’t imagine Kelly going up to the clubhouse, especially after what had happened to her. And wasn’t she supposed to be in a rehab facility? “Was it a woman by the name of Black Rose, by any chance?”

“No. He specifically said it wasn’t Black Rose. It was the other one.”

Couldn’t be. Not Kelly. My stomach lurched. Was she really looking for me? And why up at the Predators’ clubhouse?

“How many girlfriends you got, anyhow?”

“None, really.”

I turned, and this time I did walk away. I wasn’t going to listen to this nonsense. My throat closed at the idea of Kelly up at the clubhouse. Impossible she’d go there looking for me. He had to be lying.

I wondered if Old Buckles was trying to lure me up there, onto his territory where I’d be at a disadvantage. But that wasn’t his style. If he wanted a confrontation, he’d find me. And he wouldn’t be secretive about it. He wouldn’t worry if it was on the street in front of the police station or at my place or wherever.

I hadn’t gotten more than around the corner and a block away before the Audi swooped by again. The brakes squealed as it skidded to a stop a few feet from me.

Right next to the police station and the courthouse. Some people had no sense. Of course, if they had any sense, they wouldn’t have Willis “spotting” what he thought were lawyers’ cars while court was in session.

The window rolled down. “Hey, Jesse!”

It was Aaron. I
knew
he had no sense. “What?”

“I was just talking to Willis here about you!” He nodded to the passenger seat, where Willis sat.

My fists clenched again, but I forced my hands to stay at my side. “And?”

“He tell you that your girlfriend been looking for you up at the Predators’ clubhouse?”

“How do you know?”

“This guy by the name Funky Joe done told me.”

“He was probably talking about Black Rose. No way is she my girlfriend.”

“That chick that runs the backhoe business? Nah. I mean, she might be up there, the clubhouse is in back of her place, but he said ‘the other girlfriend.’”

Funky Joe owed me no favors after I’d left him flattened on the sidewalk at the hospital. Maybe
he
was trying to lure me up to the clubhouse.

Aaron rubbed his nose with his sleeve. “You been screwing one of the biker chicks, too? Wow. You get around.”

Why would I even listen to Aaron? He lied all the time, and his brains were so fried on drugs that even if he tried to tell the truth he might not be able to.

But this was
Kelly
we were talking about. “How come she was looking for me up there? I don’t go there, and she knows that.”

Aaron shrugged. “You wanna go ask Funky Joe?”

“Not especially. And I got no idea where he is.”

He grinned. “I do. He works at that bridge construction site out by the highway. A couple of the Predators do. I had to go by there anyhow.”

“Why do you got to ‘go by there anyhow’?”

He pursed his lips and tapped his cheek with one tobacco-stained forefinger. I think that was supposed to make him look wise, but he just succeeded in looking crazier than usual. “I got business to take care of with him. You could ride with me.”

I sized up the car. “And get caught riding in a stolen car?”

Aaron managed to look mildly insulted. “It ain’t
stolen
. I
borrowed
it.”

“From somebody who stole it?”

“No! I told you. I got some new business partners. They said they didn’t want me riding around in that old pickup of mine while I’m on business. So they let me use one of their cars.”

“Is their business boosting cars, by any chance?”

“They got lots of stuff going. I’m not sure exactly what they do. I take phone calls and pass on messages and deliver money. Like I just done now.” He nodded toward Willis. They made a good pair. One was dumber than the other, but it wasn’t obvious which was which.

“And they’re hooked up with the Predators?”

“Well, some of them might be. I don’t think the big boss is a biker, though. He just uses them sometimes. Protection, like, ’cause nobody much messes with them.”

None of this sounded good.

Aaron scratched a scab on his scrawny neck. “You wanna go talk to Funky Joe or not? I got to get there while they’re on lunch.”

“Don’t Old Buckles work the same job?”

“Yeah.”

So far I’d done all right with Old Buckles. I didn’t really want to push my luck with him. I figured my best plan was to stay away from him. My gut twisted.

Best plan felt lame. This was
Kelly
we were talking about
.
If she was really looking for me, I had to find out.

“Okay. But don’t think I’m gonna go up to the clubhouse with you. I just wanna ask Funky Joe about it.” Assuming that after our last encounter, Funky Joe would talk to me.

And if he was at the construction job, he couldn’t be trying to lure me up to the clubhouse.

Aaron grinned. “Climb in. Willis, you got to ride in back.”

Willis slid into the back while I walked around and got in the front passenger seat.

We laid rubber once again as we sped off. I looked uneasily back at the police parking lot, but I didn’t see anybody preparing to follow us.

Driving a car like this had to be fun. Aaron was enjoying it. He stared straight ahead through the windshield, his gaunt face intense.

We wound through a new section of McMansions that had been built out by the edge of town before the economy crashed. A whole bunch of them sported “For Sale” signs, and some looked abandoned.

A crew was at work in the front yard of one of them, laying pipe in a trench dug from the house to the street.

As we approached the construction site, Aaron took the last turn too fast. I closed my eyes, expecting the car to flip. But it hugged the ground and sent up a spray of gravel as Aaron skidded to a stop next to a cluster of pickups and two choppers parked next to the construction fence. He was living dangerously—if the gravel dented any of them, especially the bikes, somebody wasn’t going to be happy with him.

The only activity on the site was a backhoe operator, cutting into a mound of dirt piled partway down a slope to the river.

A man and a woman, both in pristine fluorescent yellow safety vests and hard hats, were carrying on an animated conversation just outside the construction trailer. The woman unrolled a large piece of paper, and they both examined it. She pointed at it, and the man jabbed a pencil where she pointed.

A handful of workers sat on concrete forms, hard hats next to them and lunch boxes open in front of them. Funky Joe was among them, and he looked up as we pulled in. He and another man stood and walked over to the car. They were also wearing yellow safety vests over insulated coveralls, but theirs were battered and dirty.

Aaron rolled down the window. “Hey, guys!”

Funky Joe leaned into the window. “Whadya want?”

“Just stopping by to see if you guys got anything more for me to do.”

The biker shook his head. “Not that I know of. But it ain’t me in charge.”

“Where is everybody else?” Aaron asked.

Funky Joe shook his head. “Damn TCI stopped work on this section, so a lot of the guys left. We ain’t working, we don’t get paid.”

“What’s a TCI?”

“Transportation Construction Inspector. She said the drainage slopes were off and that the silt snakes and fences were in the wrong place. Don’t see how that can be—there was another TCI here yesterday when we quit for the day, and he said everything was okay. You’d think if the guy last night passed it, it’d be okay for this woman this morning. Bitch.”