The Brotherhood of the Wheel (32 page)

“Nothing personal, Jimmie,” Heck said, “but I don't believe too much in good guys anymore. Not like that. Sorry, man.”

“I understand,” Jimmie said. “The world does its damnedest to make it hard to believe. But a few folks still do. Ale did, for whatever that's worth.”

Heck looked back at his plate.

Jimmie continued, “After that night, they went their separate ways. A few Templars sacrificed themselves to arrest, torture, and death to save the majority, and to protect the treasures and secrets that remain hidden to this day. Each spoke of the wheel created subgroups, whole organizations, secret societies, that spun out from them, and still do even now. The Blue Jocks is a splinter group of the Brethren, Heck. Your granddad on your mom's side, Gordon, was a member of the Brethren. He founded the Jocks after he got home from 'Nam. Ale was one of the first members, and was president after Gordon. Ale was also initiated into the Brotherhood. Most of the secret societies, occult fringe groups, and such all trace back to one of the three spokes of the wheel.”

“What's the difference between them?” Lovina asked, taking a sip of her Cherry Coke.

“The Benefactors focus on accumulating and shepherding political and monetary power. They control the media, too, pretty much,” Jimmie said. “The Builders are linked back to the Scottish Masonic orders. They focus on the occult and the power of information. Their strength lies in the educational, occult, and religious institutions.”

“And the Brethren?” Lovina said.

“We're the grunts,” Jimmie said with a yellow smile. He reached into his jeans pocket to wrestle out his can of chaw. “Our order was founded on the original mission of the Templars—keep the roads safe and protect the innocent and the defenseless who travel them. We're the most important of the three spokes, the one that gets the least respect, and suffers the greatest losses.”

“How you figure that you're the most important?” Lovina asked. “Those other guys deal in money and politics, knowledge, and magic powers. How does acting like a bunch of road warriors make you guys more important?”

Jimmie pinched a rich, dark wad of tobacco out of his burgundy Copenhagen can and tucked it into his cheek before answering. “A civilization is only as healthy as its roads,” he said. “Merchants, politicians, scholars, pilgrims—they all need safe, consistent access from point A to point B to do what they do; otherwise, things start to fall apart. Do you have any idea how much the U.S. economy relies on goods moving across the nation by truck, airline, and train? That's all Brethren turf. Truckers, state troopers, outlaw bikers, mobile-home caravan cults, gypsy cabbies, airline crews, railroad men, sailors, teamsters—we have members and affiliate members everywhere, all of them sworn to protect the passages between. We've grown as the world has grown. We guard all routes of transport these days, not just physical paths—that includes the Internet, what they used to call the information super-highway, and telecommunication networks, too.”

“So you guys are like the Illuminati?” Heck said. “You control everything?”

Jimmie laughed. “Nah, far from it. That Illuminati stuff is all tangled up with the Benefactors' business, not ours, as far as I can tell. Gives me a headache to try to figure it out. We Brethren are usually outmanned and outgunned. We're the last to know and the first to go.”

“That sounds very, very familiar,” Lovina said. “Like being back in the army again.”

“Yep,” Jimmie said. “Damn close to it.” He raised his coffee cup, “Oorah!” he said.

Heck raised his glass of water. “Oorah,” he echoed.

Lovina raised her soda glass. “Hooah!” she said. They clinked their glasses together.

“You a dogface?” Jimmie asked Lovina. She nodded, taking a sip of her soda.

“One Hundred and First Airborne,” she said.

“No shit,” Heck said. “You at Kandahar?” She nodded again.

“Oh yeah,” she said.

“I heard tell from some old-timers that was some nasty shit,” Heck said.

“They were right,” she said, “and then some.”

“So being in this Brotherhood means getting FUBARed on a regular basis?” Heck asked Jimmie. The jukebox had moved on from the Moody Blues to Carl Perkins's “Blue Suede Shoes.”

“We look out for each other real good; it's only when you expect help from the other orders that things get fuzzy. Like tonight, I asked for some help from the Builders to figure out what these black-eyed things really are, and I got the runaround, but I laid the law down to them. We're soldiers, and the other orders may think we exist to fight and die so they don't have to, but we're damn good at what we do. They know how much they need us.”

“Fight and die against what, exactly?” Lovina asked. Jimmie and Heck exchanged a glance. “What's with the look?”

“This part I can attest to,” Heck said. “There's fucked-up things, monsters, that crawl in from somewhere else—lots of other places, it seems. I've seen some bizarre shit, all of it nasty and evil. They're drawn to the highways, the state and interstate roads. It also attracts scumbags—serial killers, lunatics, child abductors, road-ragers … no one knows why. My MC, the Blue Jocks, hunts those things, keeps them from hurting people.”

“And the Brethren deal with them, too,” Jimmie added. “It's one of our main duties. We call that world, the one living beside our normal world, ‘the Road.' The Road seems to attract all kinds of monsters, human and otherwise.”

“Like these Black-Eyed Kids,” Lovina said.

“Yep,” Jimmie said. “I'm afraid so. So now you both know what you're into. I aim to find who's responsible for taking these kids and turning them into monsters, and I'm going to shut them down. You in or out?”

“In,” Heck said.

Both men looked to Lovina, who was trying to process what she'd just heard. The trucker's story was tabloid bullshit, conspiracy theories and fairy tales—not a shred of proof, and yet she believed Jimmie Aussapile. She remembered her conversation with Russ. There were things she had seen in her life, things that made perfect sense in the context of Jimmie's story. She thought of Shawn Ruth Thibodeaux, and then of Delphine.

“I'm in,” she said.

“What do we do now?” Heck asked. “Wait for these Builder assholes to churn up some info?”

“To hell with waiting,” Jimmie said. “I'll get my own damn answers. Kids, we're going to Memphis.”

“What's in Memphis?” Lovina asked.

“The King,” Jimmie said with a smile and a wink.

 

FOURTEEN

“10-61”

You ask the right people in Memphis where to go after dark, where the action is, they'll tell you some juke joint like Wild Bill's, or a club like Alfred's or Alchemy. If you ask the wrong people—the kind of folks you don't want to know in the cold light of day—they'll tell you there's only one place to hang your hat when the sun's been run out of town: the after-hours club called TCB. Jimmie knew how to find the place. They left his rig and Heck's motorcycle behind in a Walmart parking lot and took Lovina's Charger out to an old boat dock south of Mud Island River Park, on the slumbering Mississippi River. It was after eight, and the lights of the city were blurry smears, echoes of color, on the ancient black waters.

A group of partygoers were huddled near the dock. Most of them were in good spirits and had obviously already had a few drinks. A laughing young man, wearing a cowboy hat, several glow-stick necklaces, and boots, offered Jimmie, Lovina, and Heck his flask. The cowboy's eyes were bright and glassy from some type of chemical.

Heck grinned and took a swig from the flask. “Thanks, pardner,” he said as the club-cowboy danced away, leaving his flask behind. Heck looked at Jimmie and said, “Shitty hat, good scotch.” He took another sip.

“Remember, we're on the clock,” Jimmie said. “Don't get too festive.”

“Explain to me again where we're going?” Lovina said as they walked closer to the water.

“TCB,” Jimmie said. “We're either meeting our contact from the Builders or I'm getting us answers through my own channels. Either way, we learn more of what we're up against and where we need to head next to shut them down.”

Lovina's phone buzzed softly. It was a text from Russell Lime: “
Got some info on symbol in video. Possible lead on Mark Stolar, too. Will call soon. I hate texting, BTW. I hate BTW, by the way
.” Lovina smiled and slid the phone down into her pocket.

There was the hollow hoot of a boat horn and a forty-one-foot Stern cigarette boat glided toward the docks. A burly bearded man in a black shirt and jeans tied the lines to the dock while a slender black man in an impeccable Brioni suit, the pilot of the craft, greeted the line of partiers. Jimmie, Heck, and Lovina slipped into the line. Each party in line produced a necklace with a charm on it, and the pilot nodded and let them on the boat. There were couches set up along the bow and stern to accommodate them. When it was their turn, Jimmie fished a small gold chain with a charm out of his jeans pocket and presented it to the pilot. The thin man nodded, smiled slightly, and gestured them onto the boat.

“Let me see that,” Lovina said. Jimmie handed her the necklace. The charm was a simple flat piece of metal with the letters “TCB” on it. The “C” on the charm was lower than the other two letters, and above it was a lightning bolt that looked like something straight out of a
Shazam!
comic book.

“That is some sad-ass-looking bling,” she said, handing it back to him.

Heck took another drag off the flask and then passed it back over to the laughing cowboy. “You get that out of a vending machine somewhere?”

“Keys to the kingdom,” Jimmie said with a laugh, and put the necklace away.

The passengers were all on board now. The pilot had to chase off a few folks who wanted to go but had no necklaces. The burly man in the T-shirt helped explain it to one drunk fella who tried to get on the boat. The drunk was politely but firmly deposited on the bank of the river, and a few moments later the lines were cast off. The boat rumbled out into the middle of the shadowy river, headed north.

The ride was short but very jovial, with the passengers drinking, laughing, and singing. The city began to give way to dark forests on either shore of the river, and the stars appeared, no longer hidden by light pollution. While dismissing offers of jugs of wine, joints, and key-chain grinders of cocaine, Jimmie returned to an earlier conversation with Lovina, who was peering out into the darkness.

“So Dewey Rears was looking into child disappearances and relating them to Black-Eyed Kid sightings?” Jimmie said.

“For almost eight years, until he disappeared,” Lovina said. “Maybe abducted by these BEKs he was hunting.”

“And you've got someone looking into the stuff that he had on his computer related to sightings?” Heck said, fishing out a cigarette and lighting up.

Lovina nodded. “There's a photo of my missing kids—Shawn Ruth and her friends—attacking your missing kids, Karen Collie and her friends,” she said. “That picture has been making the rounds of various occult and supernatural websites for years now. I think Rears was close to uncovering the source of these BEKs and who's behind them. Rears had another photo in his files that he labeled ‘Patient Zero.' Both our groups of missing kids had also seen that photo on occult websites. I think whoever started turning kids into these things abducted Rears and his friend Mark Stolar, maybe killed them.”

“I've been fighting long-leggedy beasties since I was sixteen with the Jocks,” Heck said. “These things feel … different, like something bigger is inside them, working through them. It's fucked up.”

“There's something else,” Lovina said. “Rears was mapping the missing kids and BEK sightings and linking them up to the interstate-highway system. There's a connection to this Road you guys were taking about.”

There was music playing up ahead on the riverbank. Lights broke through the dense cover of the Barnishee Bayou. The boat slowed and turned toward a long dock with several other craft already moored to it. There was a long, tiered wooden staircase with multiple landings that ascended to a large, old, plantation-style mansion up on the hill at the edge of the bayou. The dock and the stairs were wrapped in small blue and white Christmas-tree-style lights. People were lounging on the landings, drinking, laughing, flirting, and chatting, while “Smokestack Lightnin',” by Howlin' Wolf, growled through the swamp and made the windows of the old mansion tremble. Everyone disembarked the boat, and staff on the dock once again examined the necklaces. Jimmie's charm passed inspection.

“Where did you get that thing?” Heck asked, smoke streaming out his nostrils, as they ascended the stairs with the other new arrivals.

“From the owner of this joint,” Jimmie said. “We've helped each other out a few times over the years.” They reached the top. The back porch of the mansion was wide and wrapped around the whole house. There were tables and a bar out here. A heavyset black man in a suit and a top hat opened the door to the interior for Lovina. Heck and Jimmie followed.

“And who would that be?” Heck asked.

Inside TCB, the walls sweated from the heat of hundreds of bodies and the cool breath of the swamp at night. The cigarette smoke swirled like hurricane fronts seen on radar—milky spiral galaxies, masking voices, promises, and lies. Howlin' Wolf faded away, to be replaced by “Dust My Broom,” by Elmore James.

“Him,” Jimmie said, pointing up to the balcony that overlooked the barroom floor. The man leaning against the rail, surveying his kingdom, had coal-black hair styled in a loose pompadour with sideburns. His eyes were as blue as a robin's egg and flashed even from across the room, cutting through the fog of smoke. He was handsome—a cross between an angel and a thug, with a sneer threatening at the edges of his full lips. He was slender, dressed in a partially zipped black leather jacket, with no shirt underneath, and tight black leather pants.