of spiritual-revolution talk that came out in some bullshit half-breed language, part pansy and part Ebonics. What disconcerted Vince was that when they met, Clarke already had a stinking case of meth mouth, his teeth falling out and his gums spotted. Vince didn’t mind making money off the shit but had a knee-jerk distrust of anyone gamy enough to use it.
And still he put up money, had wanted something to work out for Race, especially after the way he’d been run out of the army. And for a while, when Race and Clarke were hammering out the details, Vince had even half talked himself into believing it might pay off. Race seemed, briefly, to have an air of almost cocky self-assurance, had even bought a car for his girlfriend, a used Mustang, anticipating the big return on his investment.
Only the meth lab caught fire, yo? And the whole thing burned to a shell in the space of ten minutes, the very first day of operation. The wetbacks who worked inside escaped out the windows and were standing around, burned and sooty, when the fire trucks arrived. Now most of them were in county lockup.
Race had learned about the fire not from Clarke but from Bobby Stone, another friend of his from Iraq, who had driven out to Smith Lake to buy ten grand worth of the mythical true glass but turned around when he saw the smoke and the flashing lights. Race had tried to raise Clarke on the phone but couldn’t get him, not that afternoon, not in the evening. By eleven the Tribe was on the highway, headed east to find him.
They had caught Dean Clarke at his cabin in the hills, packing to go. He told them he’d been just about to leave to come see Race, tell him what happened, work out a new plan. He said he was going to pay them all back. He said the money was gone now but there were possibilities, there were contingency plans. He said he was so goddamn fucking sorry. Some of it was lies, and some of it was true, especially the part about being so goddamn fucking sorry, but none of it surprised Vince, not even when Clarke began to cry.
What surprised him—what surprised all of them—was Clarke’s girlfriend hiding in the bathroom, dressed in daisy-print panties and a sweatshirt that said CORMAN HIGH VARSITY. All of seventeen and soaring on meth and clutching a little .22 in one hand. She was listening in when Roy Klowes asked Clarke if she was around, said that if Clarke’s bitch blew all of them, they could cross two hundred bucks off the debt right there. Roy Klowes had walked into the bathroom, taking his cock out of his pants to have a leak, but the girl had thought he was unzipping for other reasons and opened fire. Her first shot went wide, and her second shot went into the ceiling, because by then Roy was whacking her with his machete, and it was all sliding down the red hole, away from reality and into the territory of bad dream.
“I’m sure he lost some of the money,” Race said. “Could be he lost as much as half what we set him up with. But if you think Dean Clarke put the entire sixty grand into that one trailer, I can’t help you.”
“Maybe he did have some of it tucked away. I’m not saying you’re wrong. But I don’t see why it would wind up with the sister. Could just as easily be in a mason jar, buried somewhere in his backyard. I’m not going to pick on some pathetic hooker for fun. If we find out she’s suddenly come into money, that’s a different story.”
“I was six months setting this deal up. And I’m not the only one with a lot riding on it.”
“Okay. Let’s talk about how to make it right in Vegas.”
“Talk isn’t going to make anything right. Riding is. His sister is in Show Low today, but when she finds out her brother and his little honey got painted all over their ranch—”
“You want to keep your voice down,” Vince said.
Lemmy watched them with his arms folded across his chest, a few feet to Vince’s left but ready to move if he had to get between them. The others stood in groups of two and three, bristly and road-dirty, wearing leather jackets or denim vests with the gang’s patch on them: a skull in an Indian