American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,112

finish) to his shoulder (which he has done sometimes in front of his full-length mirror, occasionally shirtless and occasionally a little more) causes him to exude a primal musk that will send nearby men packing and will cause any women who happen to look upon him to be filled with an almost evangelical, foaming-at-the-mouth arousal.

Dee’s experiments with using his firearm as an aphrodisiac have yielded, sadly, pretty mixed results, since a) There isn’t a place nearby with available women where he can just casually walk around with an enormous, high-caliber hunting rifle, and b) Most of the good-looking girls are at the Roadhouse, where you don’t need the Mossberg to get laid, but around fifty to a hundred dollars or a couple of ounces of blow. And besides, Dee’s already had all of them anyways. (Also, Bolan gets mad as hell when Dee brings the Mossberg into the bar. He says it upsets the room.) This is not to say, though, that Dee has not considered using the Mossberg in some sort of kinky role-playing game with one of the downstairs girls at the Roadhouse, perhaps slowly strutting into the room, wearing nothing but oil, his cowboy hat, and a pair of aviators, with the Mossberg jutting out proudly from his hands like he’s stalking a beast in the jungle, and the girl would be on the bed cooing in pleased surprise as he enters her chamber, or whatever it is she’s supposed to do. He almost went through with it once, but all the girls there are gossips and he knows if word got out he’d never live it down. So unfortunately the Mossberg remains relegated to a mere prop in Dee’s fantasies, and though most people would find the idea of a naked man standing in front of a bathroom mirror with a hunting rifle in one hand and his lubed, erect dick in the other to be pretty sad, for Dee Johannes it’s actually getting to be a little routine.

Dee tries to forget these fantasies as he strides to his truck with the rifle slung over his shoulder. In the light of day they seem a little silly. Before he climbs into his truck, he reaches into his pocket to check the list Bolan gave him. There are two locations written on it:

313 Madison—creek behind it in the backyard

The lab—not sure

“Aw, goddamn,” says Dee. He sighs, pushes his hat back, and scratches his head. There is no place he hates more than the lab. He wishes he’d read the list before accepting this duty from Bolan. But it would have gone to him anyways. Dee is the only one strong enough and with a powerful-enough truck to transport the items he’s been sent to procure.

But it’s okay. He likes riding his truck all over this rugged country. And though he is aware that the denizens of Wink are dangerous—as was proven when he accompanied Zimmerman, Norris, and Mitchell to that house not too long ago—Dee is confident there’s nothing in Wink he can’t handle. The logic that results in this conclusion can be kind of fuzzy in places, but essentially it boils down to the fact that if a man has a large enough vehicle and a large enough gun, there isn’t much he can’t do.

Granted, Dee hasn’t actually ever shot anyone with the Mossberg. He also has not ever actually hunted with the Mossberg. He did shoot several trees and targets with it when he first got it in the mail, but this tends to make the gun pretty dirty, and Dee finds cleaning it incredibly tedious. So since then it’s been mostly dry-firing for Dee, which can’t be that different from the real thing because the fundamentals remain the same: you are still pointing your gun at a target, still pulling the trigger, etc. And dry-firing has yielded another nice bonus: he’s hardly gone through any of the expensive ammunition he bought with the rifle, so there are still boxes and boxes of it sitting on the floor of his truck cab.

When Dee pulls up to 313 Madison—a small, neat adobe home on the outskirts of Wink—he is still riding high on swagger. He considers walking up to the front door with the Mossberg slung over his back, but remembers that Zimmerman always says that’s overkill. (Zimmerman, like Bolan, considers the Mossberg to be both totally absurd and superfluous.) He reluctantly yields to his mental Zimmerman, and leaves the Mossberg sitting on the floor of