he leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and presently felt a little better.
“You got him, Cap.” Lemmy’s voice was hoarse with emotion.
“We better make sure,” Vince said. Although the stiff periscope arm and the hand dangling limp at the end of it suggested that would just be a formality.
“Why not?” Lemmy said. “I gotta take a piss anyway.”
“You’re not pissing on him, dead or alive,” Vince said.
There was an approaching roar: Race’s Harley. He pulled up in a showy skid stop, killed the engine, and got off. His face, although dusty, glowed with delight and triumph. Vince hadn’t seen Race look that way since the kid was twelve. He had won a dirt-track race in a quarter-midget Vince had built for him, a yellow torpedo with a souped-up Briggs & Stratton engine. Race had come leaping from the cockpit with that exact same expression on his face, right after taking the checkered flag.
He threw his arms around Vince and hugged him. “You did it! You did it, Dad! You cooked his fucking ass!”
For a moment Vince allowed the hug. Because it had been so long. And because this was his spoiled son’s better angel. Everybody had one; even at his age, and after all he’d seen, Vince believed that. So for a moment he allowed the hug, and relished the warmth of his son’s body, and promised himself he would remember it.
Then he put his hands against Race’s chest and pushed him away. Hard. Race stumbled backward on his custom snakeskin boots, the expression of love and triumph fading—
No, not fading. Merging. Becoming the look Vince had come to know so well: distrust and dislike. Quit, why don’t you? That’s not dislike and never was.
No, not dislike. Hate, bright and glowing.
All squared away, sir, and fuck you.
“What was her name?” Vince asked.
“What?”
“Her name, John.” He hadn’t called Race by his actual name in years, and there was no one but them to hear it now. Lemmy was sliding down the soft earth of the embankment, toward the crushed metal ball that had been LAUGHLIN’S cab, letting them have this tender father-son moment in privacy.
“What’s wrong with you?” Pure scorn. But when Vince reached out and tore off those fucking mirror shades, he saw the truth in John “Race” Adamson’s eyes. He knew what this was about. Vince was coming in five-by, as they used to say in ’Nam. Did they still say that in Iraq, he wondered, or had it gone the way of Morse code?
“What do you want to do now, John? Go on to Show Low? Roust Clarke’s sister for money that isn’t there?”
“It could be there.” Sulking now. Race gathered himself. “It is there. I know Clarke. He trusted that whore.”
“And the Tribe? Just . . . what? Forget them? Dean and Ellis and all the others? Doc?”
“They’re dead.” He eyed his father. “Too slow. And most of them too old.” You, too, the cool eyes said.
Lemmy was on his way back, his boots puffing up dust. He had something in his hand.
“What was her name?” Vince repeated. “Clarke’s girlfriend. What was her name?”
“Fuck’s it matter?” Race paused then, struggling to win Vince back, his expression coming as close as it ever did to pleading. “Jesus. Leave it, why don’t you? We won. We showed him.”
“You knew Clarke. Knew him in Fallujah, knew him back here in the World. You were tight. If you knew him, you knew her. What was her name?”
“Janey. Joanie. Something like that.”
Vince slapped him. Race blinked, startled. Dropped for a moment back to ten years old. But just for a moment. In another instant the hating look was back, a sick, curdled glare.
“He heard us talking there in that diner parking lot. The trucker,” Vince said. Patiently. As if speaking to the child this young man had once been. The young man he’d risked his life to save. Ah, but that had been instinct, and he wouldn’t have changed it. It was the one good thing in all this horror. This filth. Not that he’d been the only one operating on filial instinct. “He knew he couldn’t take us there, but he couldn’t let us go either. So he waited. Bided his time. Let us get ahead of him.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about!” Very forceful. Only Race was lying, and they both knew it.
“He knew the road and went after us where the terrain favored him. Like any good soldier.”