Текст книги "Heat"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 54 страниц)

Chapter Sixteen

Kane came around slow, his mind calm and syrupy with sleep. Light was coming in around the heavy drapes, and with it, the ever-present heat. He should get up now, switch on that rattling bastard of a climate-regulator, and avoid Heat for a few precious hours. It was a tempting thought to stay where he was another day, but time was trickling by as steadily as it ever did, and he knew he had to hunt.

Later, he thought. Later.

His hand splayed flat against Raven’s belly and he felt the metal he had put in her beneath his touch. He smiled, his eyes still shut, and pulled her against him. His Raven. His fascinating, ferocious, fuckable little Raven.

The scent of blood was in his nostrils. Kane opened his eyes and looked down, seeing first the deep lacerations on her shoulder where he’d bit her the night before. He really had to remember not to do that again. And he’d better do something about it now, he realized. With all the metal he’d put in her, she’d probably take very easy to infection.

He sat up and threw back the thin bedding, meaning to fetch his pack and stir up some antibiotics, and his whole body locked up tight.

There was blood on the sheets. Blood all over the sheets, spreading out from Raven’s hips.

Kane’s voice ripped from him in a roar, snapping Raven out of sleep. She started to roll towards him, but he was already in motion. He seized the bedding and tore it away from her in shreds, then pushed her back on her face and tried to see how bad the damage was. He had no surgical gear, none at all. Damn him, she was going to bleed out and die!

“What the—?” Raven reached down between her thighs and looked at the blood painting her fingers. “Oh,” she said.

“Lie still,” Kane told her, his heart racing. What did he have? What could he use? There wasn’t so much blood, really. It was still wet, she must have been bleeding all night, but it wasn’t a heavy flow. There had to be a way to dress the wound. To cauterize and close it, if nothing else.

“Kane, it’s okay,” Raven was saying. “This is normal.”

He gaped at her. His N’Glish was good, but that just couldn’t be what she’d meant to say.

“It’s not what you think,” she said, and gently pulled out of his grip. “This doesn’t have anything to do with last night. This is something else.”

Something else. Kane’s thoughts leapt first to disease, to the hemorrhagic fevers the mining laborers often caught. That he could fix. He sprang from the bed for his pack. When he turned around, Raven had wiped herself clean with a handful of sheets and had spread her thighs to show him the source of the bleeding.

Kane stared, physically dizzied by confusion. Slowly, he put his pack back on the hotel table. “Did…did something tear?” he asked. His eyes flicked to the bed, but he saw no metal ornaments free on the sheets.

“No,” she said. “It’s normal.”

He couldn’t process that, couldn’t understand how his clever Raven could even say something like that. “Bleeding is not normal,” he argued. “It’s never normal.” He regarded her with growing suspicion. “What are you hiding from me?” he demanded. And what had she exposed him to, knowing this disease was rooted inside her as he fucked her?

She saw the expression on his face and seemed thrown by it. She looked down at herself, daubed again at the slowly-welling blood, and then looked around the room as though for help. “I don’t know how to explain it to you,” she said. “But I can prove it.”

“How?”

Raven got up from the bed and started to dress herself. “You’re going to have to trust me, Kane. This is perfectly normal, and I can prove it.”

Kane followed her into the privy and watched, his guts in turmoil, as she wadded up tissues and staunched the flow of blood. She looked nervous, he thought, but how much of that was due to the hemorrhaging and how much to him, he couldn’t know. “Prove it,” he said finally.

“I can’t here,” she said. “We need to go to the store.” She turned to face him, her gaze steady and her chin bravely raised.

“If you’re lying to me, I am going to rip you open,” he said quietly, and he meant every word. His affection for her had congealed into a molten weight in his gut. The scent of blood was cloying in his nostrils; it was the smell of betrayal. If this was disease, then she’d hidden it from him hoping to have her vengeance by infecting him, and he meant to see her repaid.

She swallowed hard, but she never dropped her gaze. “I know.”

Kane held her with his eyes a minute longer, and then he turned and swiftly stalked away to dress. He shouldered his pack and went to the door, snapping his fingers for her to follow.

The heat of day beat down on him in a fury, but Kane scarcely felt it beyond his own churning emotion. He was primed for rage, holding it at arm’s reach by the merest shred of will. He did not believe her. He could not believe her. But he saw no lie in her eyes.

Kane sat silent and grim as death as Raven drove them away from the motel. He stared into the side of her face, tasting her edgy fear and her blood in every slow breath he took.

The place she called a ‘store’ was a great warehouse of a building, cool inside and brightly-lit, and stocked to the bursting point with goods, much of it food. Raven led him past several aisles of bright packages. She did not look around at him; her step was steady and sure. She glanced up at the director boards hanging over each double-row of shelves and finally aimed herself down one, Kane right on her heels.

At the very end of the aisle, she stopped. She took a thin, blue-colored box off the shelf before her and handed it to him. It hadn’t seemed to occur to her that he might not be able to read human, and in point of fact, Kane could, but it took a considerable effort to turn the alien characters before him into readable words. “Security plus,” he muttered, his eyes narrowed almost to slits as he grappled with the sideways writing. “Flexible to prevent leaks. Un…scented.”

He blinked several times, puzzling over the meaning of the words, and turned the box over in his hands. There was an image of a flower on the front, which was no help at all.

Raven took a different package from the shelf and opened it. She removed a small bit of paper and unfolded it, then showed it to him. There was a cut-away diagram of a human’s hips, clearly depicting a female’s genitals and hands as she inserted a torpedo-shaped object.

“What the hell?” It was all he could think of to say. He looked at Raven accusingly. “What’s the matter with you?”

“It’s called a period,” she said patiently. “It’s normal. It happens once a month, for about five days. I could tell you all about why, but you wouldn’t know any of the words. It’s completely normal. All this stuff here is sold, right out in the open, for us girls to use when it happens.”

“It…” He looked back down at the box in his hands. The flower on its face still baffled him. “It has nothing to do with what I did to you?”

“No.” Raven took the box from him and put it back on the shelf. She kept the one she’d opened under her arm. “It would have happened anyway.”

Kane inspected her closely. She didn’t seem pallid, or in great pain. He began to think she was actually telling the truth, for all that she was bleeding. “Are you all right?” he asked cautiously. “Is it safe to move you?”

She paused in the act of browsing the shelves for another box. When she looked at him, her eyes were strangely guarded.

He showed her his open hands. “I won’t kill you if it isn’t,” he said. “Tell me the truth. Will you die if I move you?”

“No,” she said, and slowly stood up. “I just have to be a little careful, that’s all.”

“Then you can die from it.”

She shrugged and dropped her eyes.

So it was dangerous. Kane looked hard at her skirt, as though he could see through it to the body beneath. Five days. He didn’t like the idea of waiting around in one place while she rested, but he didn’t want to put any more strain on her bleeding body than she could recover from. He’d done too much to her already, he knew. The piercings, all that invasive metal. The sex, the rough way he’d taken her. And he’d known better, damn him, he’d known it could kill a human! Now she was bleeding. Normal, she said, but there was such a thing as a trigger event.

But Heat was uncompromising, and the weather showed no signs of cooling. Kane was feeling the urge to hunt, to get his business done and get off this planet while luck was still with him. He couldn’t hunt without exposing himself to Heat; he couldn’t purge himself of Heat’s effects with Raven in this state, not unless he wanted to risk killing her.

For the first time, it came home to him exactly how it had felt to see that blood on the bedding, to think that he had killed her. Everything that followed, even his anger, had sprung from the same source, and if it had not been exactly fear, it had not been far from it. He didn’t want to lose her, and that being the truth, he needed to be careful.

“Get what you need,” he told her, already decided. He would let his Raven rest, build her strength as she struggled with this…period of hers. He would find another female for himself.

*

Fat Joey was just coming back to the center table with beers for the boys and so just happened to be looking out the window when the car pulled into Charlie’s lot and stopped. It didn’t park—that would have been strange enough—it just stopped, right there in the middle of the lot. It was blocking half a dozen bikes and both gang-owned cars, the SUV old Cook smuggled guns in and Heck’s busted-up Pontiac.

This car was fairly clean and fairly new, and was instantly and easily identified as not belonging to anyone in the Pack. Fat Joey, watching the car with the last full minute of completely relaxed interest he would ever experience, expected it to roll back and pull out again in the opposite direction. When the car’s engine actually stopped and a man stepped out of the passenger door, Fat Joey heard a low rumble of amusement from the brothers and knew he wasn’t the only one watching.

So this was good, he thought, setting down his beers and lowering his bulk into the comfortable recesses of his seat. It was hot as hell, even with Charlie’s ancient A/C grinding away in the window, and the boys were restless. Too hot to work, too hot to ride, hot enough that some of the low dogs had begun to bite at each other. Nothing rough yet, no knives, but that would change as soon as someone stupid went after one of the big dogs. A fight like that would be unthinkable in early spring or even winter—the Pack had been snowed in at Heck’s place for two and a half weeks once with no bloodshed—but it always seemed to happen in the summer. It was just the heat. The fucking heat.

Fat Joey glanced around the tables and booths at Charlie’s, taking a head count without consciously adding up numbers. He couldn’t have said how many of the Pack were present, but he knew they weren’t all there. Maybe a dozen low dogs, scrabbling at each other along the walls in the booths, ten brothers scattered out on the tables, and in the center of the bar, the Big Four: Fat Joey, Ratchet, the Cow-Boy, and Top Dawg himself, holding court over all. Apart from that, there were two bitches: Sue-Eye, who was almost as good as a brother when she had a knife in her hand, and Sheb’s bitch, Cammy. Sheb was down in So-Cal on a run, which made her the Dawg’s problem to pass out and he hadn’t named anyone yet, so Cammy was hanging close to the center table, not quite underfoot but close to it.

And then there was Charlie, tending bar and keeping one eye on the window and one hand close to the place he kept his shotgun. Old Charlie had been a brother, back in the day, and rode 66 with the Aces while the Dawg was still pissing diapers, and he was worth ten low dogs if it came to a fight. There were three bar whores working the booths in the heat, two of them former Pack-bitches, but Fat Joey didn’t count them. If it came to trouble, they might be allowed to jump in and spit on what was left of the guy when the Pack was done with him, but more than likely they’d be too busy spreading snatch for the victors.

Summer was like that—long days of nothing until your brains were half-baked and razor-edged with temper and then a quick fight, a good fuck, and back to nothing again. At least this time it was a stranger and not some Pack battle that could come back to kick you in the ass when summer was over and it was time to be brothers again.

The fella that had stepped out of the car was, at first glance, a joker in desperate need of getting the shit kicked out of him—a fucking weekend road warrior in oversized boots, black leather pants and a long leather coat that hung open on his bare chest. He wore a snap-brim fedora that shaded most of his face, especially the eyes. He had long faggoty hair, somewhere between yellow and brown, fine enough to snap out in the wake of each passing car. He wore his beard in that fucked-up fashion Fat Joey could distantly remember from history books, the kind that grew in low at the jaw, but left the chin completely bare. He looked like a movie-poster for one of those after-the-bomb shit-flicks.

The next thing you realized was that the motherfucker was huge, and when the Big Four saw that, they kind of quieted up and considered him again, even as the low dogs nudged each other and made faggot leather-boy jokes and got ready.

The stranger was in no hurry to come to the bar. He walked around the front half of his car and stood before the bank of bikes, the good ones, the ones the brothers rode, all gleaming chrome and glossy black. The man was big, taller than the Cow-Boy, which put him at maybe six-six or six-eight, and the fucker was broad. He had his full back turned to the bar and it was a big fucking back.

Fat Joey got up and got a little closer to the window and Ratchet came with him and they had a good look at the guy in silence.

The man’s head turned a little, just enough to show the plane of his cheek, as if he could feel the weight of their stares, or maybe hear the low laughter of the Pack rousing itself for a fight. Fat Joey couldn’t see the man’s face, but the thought struck him that the man smiled and it was a hard thought to shake.

Then the man turned around, facing the bar like a gunslinger, and he just stood for a while with his long coat rippling around his knees in the backwash from the highway. His bare chest gleamed with sweat, hairless (inspiring a new wave of faggot jokes), and the muscles there rippled with every subtle movement, but they still couldn’t see his face. In the shadow of his low hat, he had no eyes at all, and Fat Joey found himself oddly transfixed by the thin slash of the man’s mouth. He couldn’t decide whether it was smiling or not.

The Dark Man turned around again in a billow of leather and moved away to keep looking at the bikes, and Fat Joey’s mind unstuck itself and sagged back into a little cold pool of deep unease. The Dark Man still looked like a faggot, like a weight-lifting faggot maybe, but he didn’t move like one. He moved like the Cow-Boy. He moved like Top Dawg. He moved like a motherfucker that means it.

And when he moved, Fat Joey could see a gun tucked down in the side of the Dark Man’s pants like an afterthought, a little black toy the Dark Man wasn’t even trying to hide.

“What do you think?” Ratchet asked, chewing on a toothpick.

“Think he’s gonna come in here with his bad self,” Fat Joey answered. He moved his hand back on his belt and found the smooth grip of his revolver. “Think we’re gonna have to bust a cap in his faggot ass to move him on.”

Ratchet grunted, chewed his pick, and watched the Dark Man walk around the row of gleaming machines belonging to the big four and the highest-ranking brothers. “My daddy used to tell me stories about the man in the long black coat. It’s another name he had for Death.”

Fat Joey took his eyes off the window to look uneasily at Ratchet. “Why’d you tell me that, man?”

“No reason.” Ratchet continued to gaze at the Dark Man, and after a while, Fat Joey did the same.

Outside, the Dark Man turned his head and said something. The driver’s side of the car opened, and the muttering and derisive laughter of the low dogs rose to howls…but there was silence from the brothers and silence from the Big Four.

The driver was a bitch, and the bitch was a freak.

She had dark purple hair, a little longer than her shoulders, with two white stripes at her face, but that didn’t make her a freak. She had no shirt on and her bare tits were hanging out, two good handfuls, firm and perky the way he could vaguely remember Cammy’s being in the beginning. That almost made her a freak, but what pushed her over was the metal.

Her eyebrows were dark lines beneath steel tracings. Her ears were completely rimmed with loops. Her tits were pierced, not just her nipples, but her whole tits, sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight. Her waist was belted with chains hanging in web-thin strands from hoops in her skin. There were gems in a half-diamond around her navel and a gold hoop in the bellybutton itself. Seeing all this, Fat Joey was reasonably sure her pussy was pierced, too.

“What the fuck is that?”

That was Top Dawg, come at last to see what the big deal was, and Fat Joey and Ratchet moved aside to let him come between them. The Dawg’s eye went to the bitch first, and Fat Joey could all but see the gears grinding in the Dawg’s head as he thought about putting it to that cyber-snatch, but then he got a good look at the man with her and the Dawg started frowning.

Outside in the baking sunlight, the two strangers were still browsing the bikes. The Dark Man gestured curtly and the freak-girl came over beside him and that was the point at which Fat Joey realized the bike they were looking at so closely was his.

“What the fuck?” Top Dawg said again, and the man in the long black coat touched Fat Joey’s bike.

Not a pansy touch, or a timid poke like you sometimes got from fuckers at gas stations, the ones who want to call you brother and trade road stories because they had a Honda in the garage at home under a tarp. Those touches were bad enough, but no, this crazy motherfucker had his whole hands on the bike and the girl was talking and pointing like she was selling him the fucking thing.

Fat Joey glanced at Top Dawg, but the Dawg didn’t move, so Joey didn’t move. He stood, fuming, watching the faggot bad-ass grip his goddamn bike. He still wasn’t quiet in his mind about the way the Dark Man looked or moved, but he felt better being pissed off than uneasy, and he thought that shooting the Dark Man for touching his bike would solve both problems nicely.

“Go,” said the Dawg at last.

Fat Joey went, shoving the door open into the heat of high noon and stepping out onto the sagging porch. “Hey, you candy-ass motherfucker!” he roared.

The girl jumped and the Dark Man gave her one up to the side of her purple head without even turning around to see where the shout came from. He thumped his hand down on the bike’s dash and the girl dazedly answered, her eyes darting from Fat Joey to the Dark Man and back again.

There was something weird about the Dark Man’s hands. He kept them in fists most of the time, in or close to the pockets of his coat, but when he tapped at the dash, Fat Joey could see, just for an instant, something…sharp…

That was the last bit of fuck-upedness Fat Joey could handle. He was ready to skin, and if it hadn’t been for the Dawg watching him through the window, he would have shot the Dark Man right there in the parking lot, right through the middle of his broad, turned back. He thought about doing it anyway—his place in the Big Four was rapidly dimming in importance compared to the urge to blast this bad motherfucker out of existence—but he knew that Top Dawg was getting creeped out, too, and when the Dawg got creeped, the Dawg wanted to be in on the bloodletting. If Fat Joey just plugged this fucker right now, the Dawg might just be pissed enough to open a few holes in Joey.

It took nearly every drop of guts that Fat Joey had left to raise his voice to the Dark Man again.

“Get away from my goddamn bike or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

Now the Dark Man turned, and for a split second, Fat Joey was frozen. His legs shivered once, violently, as if his lower half had made one desperate jump back toward the bar and been outvoted by the rest of him. ‘Fuck it,’ Fat Joey thought suddenly. ‘He can have the fucking thing.’

The Dark Man started walking, not fast or slow, but steady and in a straight line for Fat Joey. He caught his girl by the arm as he passed her and dragged her along at that same even speed until she picked up her feet, and then he let her go and kept on coming. He mounted the wooden steps to Charlie’s, thumped heavily across the creaking boards—

–and went right past Joey and into the bar without glancing at him again.

The girl came after, as Fat Joey was pulling in his first breath after realizing he’d been holding it. Close up, she was nothing but pale, creamy flesh, gleaming metal, and the diamond flash of cut gems. Fat Joey had only a dim impression of purple hair and wide, terrified eyes as she darted past him in the Dark Man’s wake.

And that bothered him even more than the Dark Man’s disinterest, because the girl didn’t looked scared of Joey, she looked scared for him.

Fat Joey hesitated, his hand on the butt of his revolver, but he hesitated too long, and when he turned, the Dark Man was inside. He was standing before the bar, bold as walking talking God, and frowning at the wall behind the register. He acted like he was alone in the place, acted like the muttering crowd of the Pack was nothing but static on the radio. All his attention was fixed on the worn and faded map of American Route 66, peppered with black and white photos of brothers Charlie had known, back in the day. More creeped out that ever, Fat Joey came in off the deck and closed the door.

The Dark Man stood motionless as his girl huddled at his side, but stirred himself when Charlie approached. He said, “Do you have something like that for this place?”

The man’s voice was deep and gravelly, but utterly uninflected.

Charlie glanced back at the map, then at the Dark Man, and wiped the bar down with a rag. “Got Rand McNally.”

The Dark Man waited, as patiently as if still expecting an answer.

“Hey asshole,” one of the low dogs called, and the Dark Man by-God turned around. It was Hagen, of course. Only Hagen was stupid and ambitious enough to think of impressing Top Dawg by poking sticks at this dangerous stranger. Hagen grinned when he saw the Dark Man’s shadowed face and said, “The word you’re looking for is ‘road map’, ya stupid ass-banging motherfucker.”

The Dark Man continued to stare for a beat or two before he turned back to Charlie. “Do you have a road map?”

“Got Rand McNally, I said.” Charlie left the bar rag where it was on the counter and rested his hand a little lower down, nearer to the shotgun he kept below the bar.

Now there was an expression on the Dark Man’s face—a faint frown, ready to be anger.

“That is a road map, leatherqueer,” Hagen supplied, and the other low dogs nearest him ran a course of laughter across the room.

“Give me one,” the Dark Man said.

Charlie reached one out from behind the register and slid it toward him.

The Dark Man took it and turned towards one of the booths, in the back of the room where none of the Pack were gathered. He gave absolutely no sign of intending to pay.

Charlie grunted, eyeing the Dark Man’s back, and then said, “You want to run a tab ‘till the end of the day, fine. But you’ve got to get more than that. This place is for paying folks only.”

The Dark Man looked back, not at Charlie, but at the girl, and he was frowning openly this time.

“He says we need to get something,” the girl said.

“What?”

“He says we have to buy—”

The Dark Man shook his head curtly, cutting her off as effectively as if he’d slapped her. “What am I supposed to get?” He jerked his hand through the air as the girl opened her mouth and turned his back on her. “Just get it,” he ordered, and went to a booth.

“Keep in mind,” Charlie called after him. “You stiff me at the end of the day and I’ll bust lead in your ass, son.” He came up with the shotgun and hefted it casually but deliberately in the Dark Man’s direction.

“Fair enough,” the Dark Man said, and did not look around.

Neither did Charlie, who put his shotgun away and fixed his baleful bartender’s eye on the freak-girl. “You whoring here tonight, honey?” he asked evenly.

The girl shook her head, one arm twitching as though wanting to rise and cover herself.

“Map’s three bucks. Beer’s two bucks. I got bourbon and I got rye and that’s what I got. You wanna smoke, I got some of that, too. I got no food and the phone don’t work. Advice is free and I got some for you, honey-tits: Stay away from my girls and don’t give me shit or I’ll ventilate your purple fucking head. Now. What do you want?”

“T-two beers, please.”

Fat Joey’s unease deepened even more. He’d lived his whole adult life in gangs, from the age of twelve on up until now, and he’d heard the coarse rhythm of their words. Even whackos like Pitbull and book-reading types like the Cow-Boy had the same indefinable sound to their speech.

This girl, tattooed and pierced and bare-titted in a goddamn bar, sounded at least reasonably educated. The Dark Man, Mr. Movie Poster for the Apocalypse, sounded like he’d ought to be reading the damn news at ten o’clock.

Fat Joey looked around the bar again, and this time, he made a real head-count. Eight low dogs, four with knives, two guns, two unarmed. Thirteen brothers, two with knives, one with a gun, four with both. Ratchet had a pistol. The Cow-Boy had two, gunfighter slung over his hips. Top Dawg had a pig-sticker and a .45. Sue-Eye had her knife and Charlie had his shotgun.

And all of a sudden, it didn’t feel like enough. Not enough by half.

Fat Joey watched Charlie pull out two dark bottles from the ice chest and slap them down on the bar. The girl took them with a breathy, “Thank you.”

Polite. Educated. Pretty.

Cammy used to be like that. It got beat out of her in a hell of hurry. Sheb brought her in when Cammy was thirteen and looked eighteen. Now she was eighteen and looked thirty. Pretty soon, Sheb would show up with another bitch under his arm and Cammy would find herself shit out of luck, food for the low dogs or working for Charlie. Cammy was what life looked like when young girls were rode hard.

This girl, for all the metal and purple hair, looked more like a life begun in the safety of a house with four walls, a life that dipped into danger here and there on some nice, well-lit streets. A life that had only recently put her in the back pocket of the Dark Man. She did not belong here.

Fat Joey glanced around at Ratchet and then at the Cow-Boy. Both were silent, troubled, immune to the hooting laughter of the low dogs. He watched the girl nervously square herself to face the room. Her shoulders hunched, her eyes dropped, and she went swiftly toward the booth where the Dark Man waited.

There was a bad moment when Hagen reached out to flip the girl’s skirt up, showing the full curves of her naked ass to the whole room, and Fat Joey looked wildly around in time to see the Dark Man’s eyes, like silver slits in the shadow of his face.

But it was the Cow-Boy, in a strangely high and startled voice, who snarled, “Jesus Christ, get your goddamned hands off her, you stupid son of a bastard!” and Hagen jerked back as though he’d been stung.

The Dark Man kept watching until the girl reached the booth where he sat, and then his eyes slid to meet Joey’s own and there they stayed, considering him in silence.

Fat Joey could hear the low dogs loudly discussing the girl’s ass and the Dark Man’s mental state—high as a fucking kite was the popular vote—but these were distant sounds, almost tinny, as if the whole room were falling away from him. He became immediately and unreasonably convinced that the twin mirrors he saw gleaming at him were not really eyes, that the Dark Man had no eyes, that if Fat Joey could knock off that hat and crack the man’s head open he would see just a whole lot of nothing, or maybe some shiny mist filled with stars.

Fat Joey imagined he could audibly hear the last of his nerves snapping. He got away from the door, out from the path of the Dark Man’s eyes, and went back to the center table, trying not to look like he was hurrying, but not really caring if he was or not. Ratchet and the Dawg joined him and they sat together, turned so they could see the Dark Man’s booth. Fat Joey’s eyes were itching; he had to force himself to blink.

“What do you think?” he muttered to the rest of them.

“Fella ain’t high,” Ratchet replied. “Just bad news.”

The Dark Man had gone back to the careful study of his map as soon as Fat Joey had left the doorway, and by the time the girl had set the beers down and slid into the booth opposite him, he’d even managed to unfold it and spread it out over Charlie’s worn, cracked table. The girl was hugging herself, looking around the bar with her anxious, frightened eyes, but she didn’t appear to notice the crude offers of the low dogs and she didn’t respond when some of them blew kisses at her. The Dark Man tipped his head to one side and stared down at the face of his map, scowling and without the appearance of comprehension, his far hand pressed flat on the paper, and Fat Joey again found himself wondering what in the hell was wrong with the man’s hands.

The girl hesitantly reached across the table and turned the map, an action that created a new swell of guffaws from Hagen’s corner of the room, and now the Dark Man’s eyes moved over it, reading it, gradually losing the light of exasperation but none of the intensity in his face.

Suddenly, the Dark Man looked up—a swift, feral pounce of the eyes—and Fat Joey swung to see what he was seeing, his hand flying to the butt of his gun. It was just Charlie, who had moved to fetch out more beer and bourbon for the low dogs, and the old biker stared right back at the Dark Man without flinching as he put the bottles down. The Dark Man watched without blinking as the low dogs set to drinking, and then turned a little to examine to the bottles his girl had brought.