all bad. But none of it has anything on the Charlie Manson shit we’re driving away from. Thing I can’t shake loose is how it stank in the place. After it was over. Like being stuck in a closet where someone took a shit. Not enough air, and what there was wasn’t any good.” He paused, turned on his stool to look sidelong at Vince. “You know what I been thinking about ever since we drove away? Lon Refus moved out to Denver and opened a garage. He sent me a postcard of the Flatirons. I been wondering if he could use an old guy to twist a wrench for him. I been thinking I could get used to the smell of pines.”
He was quiet again, then shifted his gaze to look at the other men in their booths. “The half that doesn’t take a walk will be looking to get back what they lost, one way or another, and you don’t want any part of how they’re going to do it. ’Cause there’s going to be more of this crazy meth shit. This is just beginning. The tollbooth where you get on the turnpike. There’s too much money in it to quit, and everyone who sells it does it, too, and the ones who do it make big fucking messes. The girl who tried to shoot Roy was on it, which is why she tried to kill him, and Roy is on it himself, which is why he had to whack her forty fucking times with his asshole machete. Who the fuck besides a meth-head carries a machete anyhow?”
“Don’t get me started on Roy. I’d like to stick Little Boy up his ass and watch the light shoot out his eyes,” Vince told him, and it was Lemmy’s turn to laugh then. Coming up with deranged uses for Little Boy was one of the running jokes between them. Vince said, “Go on. Say your say. You been thinkin’ about it the last hour.”
“How would you know that?”
“You imagine I don’t know what it means when I see you sittin’ straight up on your sled?”
Lemmy grunted and said, “Sooner or later the cops are going to land on Roy or one of these other crankies, and they’ll take everyone around them down with them. Because Roy and the guys like him aren’t smart enough to get rid of the shit they stole from crime scenes. None of them are smart enough not to talk about what they done to their girlfriends. Hell. Half of them are carrying rock right now. All I’m saying.”
Vince scrubbed a hand along the side of his beard. “You keep talking about the two halves, the half that’s going to take off and the half that isn’t. You want to tell me which half Race is in?”
Lemmy turned his head and grinned unhappily, showing the chip in his tooth. “You need to ask?”
THE TRUCK WITH LAUGHLIN ON THE SIDE was laboring uphill when they caught up to it around three in the afternoon.
The highway wound its lazy path up a long grade, through a series of switchbacks. With all the curves, there was no obvious place to pass. Race was out front again. After they departed the diner, he had sped off, increasing his lead on the rest of the Tribe by so much that sometimes Vince lost sight of him altogether. But when they reached the truck, his son was riding the guy’s bumper.
The nine of them rode up the hill in the rig’s boiling wake. Vince’s eyes began to tear and run.
“Fucking truck!” Vince screamed, and Lemmy nodded. Vince’s lungs were tight, and his chest hurt from breathing its exhaust, and it was hard to see. “Get your miserable fat-ass truck out of the way!” Vince hollered.
It was a surprise, catching up to the truck here. They weren’t that far from the diner—twenty miles, no more. LAUGHLIN must’ve pulled over somewhere else for a while—but there was nowhere else. Possibly he’d parked his rig in the shade of a billboard for a siesta. Or threw a tire and needed to stop and put on a new one. Did it matter? It didn’t. Vince wasn’t even sure why it was on his mind, but it nagged.
Just past the next bend in the road, Race leaned his Softail Deuce into the lane for oncoming traffic, lowered his head, and accelerated from thirty to seventy. The bike squatted, then leaped. He cut in front of the truck