The Passenger (9 page)

“I believe we were up to ninety-one, Ray.
Ninety-one dollars, seventy-eight cents, when you bash your groupings,” said
Billy.

“Forget the seventy-eight cents, all
right? Forget the goddamn cents! That’s ... one hundred thirty-four. Emil?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Huh? Don’t
worry
about it? Jesus, Emil! We’re asking them to get us outa state
here, you know? And so far we haven’t got fifty bucks apiece!”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got plenty.”

“You got plenty. Fine. What’s plenty?”

“Your turn’s right here,” the lawyer
said. “Road to your left, just ahead.”

“Goddammit, Emil,” Ray said. “
What the fuck’s plenty
?”

* * *

She’d driven by one day, curious, but as
an Officer of the Court and “Little” Harpe’s attorney of record, she’d been
restricted from going any farther or seeing any more than she was seeing now—a
wide dirt strip maybe twenty yards across cut through open, uncultivated fields
on either side, rising up the slope of a mountain. No house in sight and no
gate. No structures at all. But any approach observable from above.

They drove slowly and in silence until
they crested the hill and that was when the first guard appeared along the side
of the road, a big man almost comically dressed in nightfighter makeup and
combat gear, his assault rifle held at port arms. There was nothing comic about
the rifle.

“Slower, Billy,” said Emil. “Stop if he
tells you to.” But he didn’t. He didn’t look interested in them at all. Didn’t
even bother to wave them on.

Nor did the second guard a quarter-mile
up, the field narrowing around them by then, gradually being swallowed by
scrub and pine.

At the top of a rise, with dense forest
pressing close now on either side, narrowing the road to a single lane
funneling them up the mountain, she saw a third guard dressed in biker’s colors
talking into his cell phone, saw
him shove
the phone into his utility belt and raise his automatic rifle. The guard
checked their license plate but didn’t even glance at them.

It was eerie. As though they didn’t
matter.

And maybe they didn’t.

The road narrowed even more. The woods
drew closer.

At the top of another rise two more
guards in military gear stood across from one another on either side of the
road, one black man and one white. Each had a sleek black Doberman on a short
leash.

“I hate those doggies,” said Billy. He
pronounced it
dawgies
.

“Shut up,” said Emil. “Slow down.”

Because this time the guards were
stepping toward them. The men stopped and turned their flashlights into the car
and then the black guard on Billy’s side motioned them on.

“This is pretty fucking weird,” said Ray.

Nobody contradicted him.

The road sloped downward and narrowed yet
further as though the woods were a fist closing in on them and at the bottom of
the hill stood a tall bald black man in dark neatly pressed suit and tie with
his hand raised and his assault rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. Billy
stopped the car. The man walked over to his side, taking his time. He stooped
and peered in, smiling.

“Welcome to Hole-in-the-Wall, gentlemen,”
he said.

The man had no trace of an accent at all.
The black man in the dark expensive suit
was from Anywhere, U.S.A. Their welcoming committee. Very civilized. Uh- huh.

“Directly on top of the next hill there.
Can’t miss it.

You can state your business to the
gentleman at the bar. Have yourselves a pleasant evening.”

He stepped aside and watched them pass
and Janet turned and looked back.

The man was following them on foot, his
rifle slung over his shoulder, moving at a graceful, easy pace.

* * *

Marion thought,
Humpty Dumpty.

Humpty
Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the
king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty together again.

It was something about the tree,
something about the huge ancient solitary oak tree in front of the house— the
mansion, really, Hole-in-the-Wall was a three-story, gabled, corniced, fucking
bay-windowed
porched
-in old mansion,
some hole! some joke
!—something about
that tree and the tire hanging from the chain that depended from a limb, the
skeleton of a big openmouthed dog or maybe a wolf, the wolf-dog grinning,
arranged seated on the tire with hind legs dangling, another fine joke, the
four thick nooses swaying in the wind hanging from another limb higher up, the
nooses not so funny, something about the tree had put that stupid old nursery
rhyme into her mind.

Humpty
Dumpty sat on a wall. ...

A marching song. A drum cadence. Her dad
had been VFW all the way.
Dat-da-dat-da-dat-dat-dat-dat
.
. .

As Marion herself marched along behind
Emil, as l hey all did, past the hogs and pickups and Land Rovers and Jeeps and
Mercedes and black stretch limos and
Rollses
. Marched
up the stairs to the porch, the suited black guard with the rifle ambling along
behind,
dat
-da
-
dat
, to the
dimly lit porch with heavy chains hanging
from the
eaves like a thick metal curtain, parting them, chains ringing in her ears like
strange dull wind chimes and the scent of oil and metal on her hands as she
touched them, stepping onto the porch hung with mobiles—inverted bone crosses
and rusted knives and studded belts and weathered leather collars—where six
wooden barrels filled with what looked like old automobile and motorbike parts
stood in an orderly row to her left and a smashed-in Wurlitzer jukebox lay on
its side to her right beside a broken plough propped up against the siding, its
handles carved into knobbed human phalluses and flanked by two painted wooden
signs— TREE FROG BEER and DWARF SNUFFING STATION NUMBER 103.

Somebody around here’s got a real strange
sense of humor, she thought.

She saw Emil hesitate at the door and
heard the black man behind them tell them to
go on in, folks
in his calm soft voice and so they did.

They walked into a fucking
party
is what they did.

She could feel her heart thud all of a
sudden fast and heavy, making her tits tremble, was aware of her eyes going
wide and her lips pulling up into a smile she had nothing to do with at all.

Daddy,
she thought,
if you could see your little girl now. You’d be fucking floored by
this.

Beyond the heavy oak door was an enormous
open space and the goddamn place was swarming. Motorbike headlights slung from
the rafters handled the lighting, streaming down on them like spotlights. She
saw bikers, skinheads, longhairs straight out of the goddamn Sixties, men in
tuxes and women in gowns all mingling and laughing. She saw a male tattooed
hand go to a
female pearl-draped breast.
She saw steroid freaks dressed for combat and guys naked and limp-
dicked
and emaciated all to hell. She saw martini glasses
and
Budweisers
and joints and in the comer to her
left, the sharp glitter of needles. She saw crude prison tattoos and elegant
multiple piercings. They had weapons all over the place. Handguns in shoulder
holsters. Shotguns and automatic rifles propped against the wall while their
owners roamed and drank and did whatever the hell they were doing.

The whole first floor had been completely
gutted, the walls knocked down to expose rough support beams that reached
twenty-five feet all the way to the ceiling—a ceiling draped and webbed thick
with a canopy of chains. At intervals they dangled to the floor. Six feet or so
up one of the support beams a naked brunette dangled too, suspended by ropes
wrapped around her wrists and elbows. She looked drugged out of her fucking
gourd and like she’d been up there quite a while. There were bloody welts along
her tits and thighs and the blood was already drying. Everybody just ignored
her.

They moved through the crowd toward the
bar, Emil first with her behind him and then Ray and then Billy behind Janet
bringing up the rear. Some asshole head- banger music was pouring off the
speakers. The floors were long wide slabs of polished hardwood, expensive as
hell she bet. By contrast the bar was crude and cut of rough naked oak with the
bark still attached where it wasn’t planed down smooth and it crawled the whole
length of the room all the way to the open staircase in back like a living
thing. The six beefy guys who were working it were dressed in formal white
starched shirts
and black ties. Directly
across from the bar a fire blazed in an open stone grate cut into the wall like
the huge open mouth of hell. It must have been over a dozen feet across.
Considering its size it didn’t seem to throw much heat, just the smell of wood
smoke.

She guessed that on the air-conditioning
bill alone this place could probably buy and sell her.

She saw bright primitive murals on the
walls, scenes she recognized right away from Revelations.
Daddy? Momma? You’d just love this shit! The Dragon. The False Prophet.
The Great Whore. The Beast. The Woman in Scarlet.
Religion?
In this joint?
Between the murals meat
hooks polished to a high sheen, dozens of them, substituted for what—in
someplace less bizarre than this—might have been stuffed moose or deer or
bobcat.
Somebody’d
painted the words
bilge rat
next to one of them. Under
another,
men are necessary for the gods.
Huh
? Beside a third, the
numbers 666. She sure as hell knew what
that
meant.

Jesus, she thought, who
are
these people?

She glanced back at Janet. Janet was
looking decidedly twitchy and tense, eyes darting around the room as though
she expected somebody to come out after her with a goddamn meat cleaver. Poor
baby.

Their bartender was a neatly dressed
Jabba
the Hut made flesh.

“Heineken,” said Emil. “Five of ’em.”

The bartender reached for the beers and
popped them.

“We need a car,” said Emil. “First we
need a place to stay tonight and tomorrow we need a car.”

The bartender shrugged. “You don’t get
anybody too pissed off at you, you can stand right where you are till
you drop dead or hell freezes over,
whichever comes first. I could give a shit.”

“What about the car? We need a car.”

“You can pay? Got money?”

“We can pay.”

She wondered how much Emil
did
have. Billy and Ray seemed freaked
about the whole money thing.

She watched the bartender walk the length
of the bar and stop in front of a black man who looked like the twin of the
suited guard who’d pointed them toward the house—right down to the shaved
bullet-shaped head and the assault rifle slung across his shoulder. The bartender
spoke to him and the man nodded and turned toward the staircase and the
bartender waddled back to his post.

“You’re Rothert, right?” he said.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“You’re the news tonight. Shot a cop.
That gives you three whole minutes of glory. Enjoy yourself. I could give a
shit.”

She heard a sudden commotion behind them,
raised voices and heavy footfalls and clanking, grating sounds and felt the
crowd shift around her and turned and saw two big men in studded boots and
leather pants and vests hauling a woman off the floor by a chain attached to a
pulley twenty feet away. The woman wore police cuffs and nothing else and the
look in her eyes was drugs and fear and then pain shooting through her wrists
as the men tugged the chain through the pulley and she could see that
somebody’d
shaved her completely, both head and cunt too.

They hauled her five feet or so off the
ground and then slipped a link of the chain through a hook set into
the floor and she hung there and the men
were smiling and saying something to one another and then they
weren’t
smiling, they were all pissed
off all of a sudden. With the pounding tide of music she couldn’t hear what it
was they were saying but they were pissed off all right and the crowd was
moving back in her direction even though some were laughing as though the two
men arguing were the center of an oncoming twister.

One guy had a short goatee kind of thing
and the other didn’t but they were matched pretty well physically, she
thought, big raw biceps and beer bellies so goddamn hard that when the bearded
guy gut-punched the other she could hear it over the music like a basketball
smashed down from a hoop. He doubled over and the man kicked him in the face
and sprayed the crowd with blood and spit. The man went over backward and
scrambled across the floor and came up with a length of chain, stood and
started flailing, catching the bearded guy across the back and then the
shoulders and then the head as he fell, going for the head over and over
again—and the crowd was wild by then and so was she. She could barely fucking
breathe. The bearded guy’s head was a mess but he must have had something
amazing left inside him because his hand swung up from the floor and he took
the other guy’s balls in his great big hand and squeezed. Then they were both
rolling groaning along the floor.