Everybody Pays (27 page)

“Bullshit,” the young man said flatly.

“See for yourself,” Buddha told him, handing over a large black flashlight.

Several players crouched down as the young man played the light under the shark car’s bumper. Another man grabbed the flashlight from him, lay down on his back, and pushed himself underneath with the soles of his feet. “He ain’t lying,” he told the others when he emerged. “I never seen nothing like it. I mean, it’s supertrick under there all right, but that’s an independent rear suspension, period.”

“Now what you gonna do?” Buddha asked the young man. “You know there ain’t no way I can even stomp it down without blowing that rear out, right? I got a throttle stop behind the pedal, just to be sure.”

“So what’d you set it up like that for?”

“It’s for the curves, not the straights. For
hauling
stuff, get it? I never raced against no quarter-mile pro, like you. I gotta get lengths . . .
and
the bust.”

Princess suddenly emerged from the passenger seat. “Hey, Buddha, we gonna race or what?”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” one of them exclaimed. “What is
that
?”

Princess approached the crowd, grinning broadly. “Oh, man, this is gonna be great!”

“This ain’t no game for—” one of them started to say, stopping when his friend elbowed him sharply in the ribs. “Shut the fuck
up,
” his friend hissed. “I know who that is. Hell, I even know what this
all
is now. That’s the shark car.”

“The what?”

“Come on over here,” he said, pulling his friend into the darkness.

When the haggling finished, they agreed to a standing start with Buddha getting a two-length lead on a quarter-mile distance. The guy and his friend got some bets down too. On Buddha.

“Oh, man! We’re gonna race!” Princess yelled, pounding the dash in excitement.

“Will you fucking calm down?” Buddha snapped at him. “You’re gonna smash her all up. And you’re gonna
watch,
not race.”

“Huh?”

“Well, you heard Rhino. If anything happens, if the car breaks or something, then you guys gotta fade. Besides, the less weight I gotta carry the better.”

“But I won’t be able to
see
nothing!”

“Hey, look, this was your fucking idea. At least give me a chance to—”

“We’ll all stay,” Rhino squeaked.

“All right!” from Princess.

From Buddha, silence.

It was a good ten minutes before both drivers were satisfied with their starting positions. They were over the Border now, deep enough into the Badlands that some of the teenage vulture packs were watching from the shadows cast by burnouts and abandoned buildings. Money changed hands there, too.

The unmuffled roar of the Nova pawed at the night. The shark car was almost silent in response, Buddha disdaining throttle-blipping games, uninterested in impressing the crowd.

“Want bleach?” the starter asked, a kid in a Day-Glo–orange jacket.

“No burnouts,” Buddha said flatly. “We’re already staged. Tell that boy, he didn’t want to give me the bust, we gotta leave the same time, I said okay. But that’s fucking
it.
If he still wants to go, let’s do it. He wants to fry his tires for the fans, I got business elsewhere.”

The guy in the Nova listened. The starter waved his arms, as if holding off a threat. Finally, the starter took his position between the two cars. He took off his jacket and waved it at the Nova. The driver held up a thumb out the window. The starter pointed at Buddha, who did the same.

“How come we don’t rev it—?”

“Shut up, Princess,” Buddha said quietly. “We launch at nineteen hundred. I’m line-locked right now. Any more, we just sit here and spin. So we don’t
need
no fucking big noise, okay? Just watch that flag. . . .”

The flag dropped. The Nova lunged forward so violently that only its wheelie bars kept it from standing on end. But the shark car had already disappeared into the night. As the digital readout for the tachometer hit 6600, Buddha slapped home the plunger on the silver-nitrous bottle sitting on the transmission tunnel and the shark car shot forward like a staged rocket. The race wasn’t close.

Buddha wheeled his mount back to the staging area. He and Princess got out together. “Pay up,” he told the man holding the stake.

“That ain’t no car,” one of the watching teenagers told the others.

As in the poolroom, Buddha didn’t count the money.

“Told ya, James,” the skinny black kid whispered to his friend. They were both lying on their stomachs, hands gripping the edge of the building ledge, looking down.

“Man!” is all his friend contributed to the conversation, his eyes wide with fascination at the scene below. Which was . . .

A bodybuilder with a grotesquely overdeveloped physique bounced a basketball with his left hand several times, as if getting the feel of a foreign object. Then he reached across his body and gently tossed the ball to a point several feet above his head. As the ball descended, the bodybuilder stepped forward on his left foot and launched into a spinning back-fist—his clenched hand caught the ball as it bounced up from the concrete floor of the deserted basketball court and sent it flying in the general direction of the chain-netted hoop.

From somewhere in the darkness, a massive lump of . . . something . . . tossed another basketball toward the bodybuilder, who deftly caught it on the first bounce and repeated the same maneuver. Again, the ball soared toward the hoop, this time missing the entire backboard by a dozen feet.

“Aahhh!” the bodybuilder said. “Come on, Rhino, send me another.”

“We’ve used them all up,” a high-pitched squeaky voice responded. “Fifty balls. Now we have to grab them all and get back, remember?”

“Can’t we do it just one more—?” the bodybuilder pleaded.

“Princess, we had a deal,” the massive lump spoke. As the lump moved forward, the watching boys could see it was a man. A huge, shapeless man in a rust-colored jumpsuit that blended perfectly into the mottled light. This camouflage was meaningless in view of his partner’s appearance. Not only was the hyperdeveloped man wearing a neon-orange tank top over bright-yellow parachute pants and electric-blue sneakers, he was wearing enough makeup to cover a girls’ boarding school.

“Rhino, I’m telling you, I can do this,” the bodybuilder said.

“I know you can,” the massive boulder of a man replied. “And I’m helping you, just like I promised, right? But you don’t want to go to the gym because people might see you, remember?”

“Yeah! This has gotta be a secret. I hit this shot, we’re rich, right? A trick, just like Buddha’s always pulling.”

“Princess,” the massive man said, his patience matching his size, “if you hit it on a bet, sure, we could make a lot of money. But you have to hit it that
exact
time, understand?”

“Sure, I understand. Why else you think I’m gonna practice till I can do it maybe ten times in a row first?”

“You haven’t even—”

“And I been getting closer too, right?”

“Yes,” the massive man sighed. “Now let’s gather up these balls, okay?”

“They does this every night?” the boy called James asked his pal.

“Every night, bro. They comes about two, three in the morning, when it’s all empty-like. They does this for about an hour, maybe. Then they just go away.”

“White guys . . .”

“Oh, man, did you
see
them? Who’s gonna bother ’em? Besides, I was here once when the Rajaz came down.”

“How many of them?”

“Maybe a dozen, man. It was nasty. The one with the bald head . . . with all the girl’s makeup . . . he kept asking them if they wanted to play a little two-on-everybody. No lie! Anyway, one of the Rajaz, he shows them a piece, asks them if they know they in somebody’s turf. The monster-guy, he shows
them
a piece too. I seen one before, man. An Uzi. The monster, he got it on a chain around his neck, like it’s a little charm or something. The guy with the muscles, he just keep picking up the basketballs. Nobody say nothing. Nobody do nothing. Then the Rajaz booked, just like that.”

“That’s a pair of crazy monster motherfuckers.”

“You right, bro. But here they is again. And I don’t see nobody running them off the court, neither.”

“One thousand yards.”

”One klick,” the man in camouflage gear and matching cap said.

“Either you trying to play soldier boy or you trying to cheat. Either way, forget it.”

“Look, Buddha, I was just saying—”

“What you was just
doing
was adding two, three hundred yards to the bet. Next thing, you’ll want it right through the spade in the center too. Look,
Colonel,”
Buddha said, sarcasm dripping from his voice, “you want to call it off, then just say so, all right? What we
said,
what we
agreed
to, it was real simple. I said my man could hit a playing card at a thousand yards. That’s all. You said, if I recall exactly, ‘Bullshit!’ Then you started going on about putting my money where my mouth is . . . or were you too pitiful-drunk to remember
that
?”

“Watch your mouth, mister, You’re on—”

“What? Sacred Aryan ground? Private property? Thin ice? Look, clown, it was a
long
drive up here to this fuckforsaken little ‘compound’ of yours. And we didn’t make the trip to pick up a few spare Nazi flags, you understand what I’m saying? My man is a pro. You probably wouldn’t understand that, you being a ‘patriot’ and all. So let me explain the way it works: you pay twenty-five grand, he’ll pop somebody. Reach out and touch ’em. Long-range. It’s called being a sniper. And maybe if you’d served anyplace but fucking Stateside you’d have heard of it. Now, what
you
said,
you
said you had twenty-five grand. And what we were gonna do, we were gonna set up this target. One thousand yards. One playing card. Got one right here,” Buddha said, patting his breast pocket. “I call my man out of the car. He gets one shot. He drills it, we take your money. He don’t, you take ours.”

The Colonel looked over his shoulder at the half-dozen assembled men. Then back at Buddha. “Maybe we could just take your money without any of this other stuff. How would that be?”

“Uh, I don’t know,” Buddha said, stifling a yawn. “Tell you what . . . why don’t you use that GI Joe radio of yours on your belt, get in contact with your sentries, see how things are going on your fucking ‘perimeter’ first.”

The Colonel looked at Buddha carefully. Said “Watch him!” to his man, and thumbed the radio into life. “Alpha to Red Dog. Read me? Over.”

“They’re all sleeping,” a strange voice squeaked back through the radio. The Colonel’s mouth dropped.

“You better have the money,” Buddha said, stepping back a few feet. “Check your chest, chump.”

The Colonel’s prior military experience had been limited, but he understood the meaning of the red dot now cold-burning just over his heart.

“See, my man’s a lot
less
than a thousand yards off,” Buddha said. “So we got ourselves a new bet. Me, I bet you don’t have no twenty-five grand here. I bet you’re a fucking liar. I bet you figured it wouldn’t be much trouble to sucker some Fourteenth Amendment citizen like me out here, take my money, and . . . who knows what? You don’t know who
Cross
is, and you’re gonna overthrow the government? I don’t think you pitiful pieces of shit even know the difference between killers and murderers. You may have murdered a few people; that don’t make you killers. But, see, one of the people you murdered—you remember, that big-mouthed Jew you made an example of—he got some family. Now, that don’t mean nothing to us. But this family, they got money. And, like I told you, we’re professionals. So,” he said, pulling a .40-caliber Glock semi-auto from his jacket in a motion so casual as to seem magical to the watchers, “here’s your problem. You got me ‘covered.’ Only my man’s got your heart in his hands. And I got a few other men, already took out your dumbfuck guards. And I got this here piece on you, too. So what you gonna do, boys?” Buddha finished, addressing the assembled men. “Your ‘Colonel’ here, it’s his head we came for. He’s a dead man, no matter what. He stands there, his heart’s gonna go
poof
! soon as I give the word. He runs, I’m gonna put a few rounds in him, right up his spine. And the guys we got on the perimeter, they got this nice stuff. You don’t shoot it, you
launch
it, if you get what I’m saying. We got
paid,
understand? So what I want you to do, and I know this is fucking hard for you all, is just
think
for a minute. You
really
want to die? Because . . .”