The bar was packed. The juke played country, loud. To the right, on the stage, a woman was dancing. She was wearing a short denim skirt and a white T-shirt. A red spotlight was on her. Her dance was slow and ecstatic. She swung her hips and ran her hands over her torso. The bikers thronged on the dance floor below her to watch. They clapped and whistled and raised their beer bottles. They shouted at her to bare her breasts.
Across the rest of the bar, the tables were full. A haze of cigarette smoke hung over them. Conversation was loud, and there were rising bursts of laughter. There were also cheers and whoops from the dance floor as the girl onstage slowly lifted her T-shirt to her throat.
Bishop walked slowly through the smoke to the gnarly corner. He was the last of the gang to arrive. The others were ranged around their table. Shorty was standing with one foot on a chair. His shaved head glinted in the hazy light. He lifted his chin to Bishop by way of hello. Charlie, the muscle boy, was tilted back in his chair, smoking. Steve leaned against a wall, his arms folded. His scarred face was expressionless. He watched Bishop approach through heavy eyelids, through canny, clouded eyes.
Cobra sat hunched at the table’s head. He was rolling a cigarette, working it with the fingertips of both hands. There was a map laid out in front of him, tossed there aslant. A tobacco pouch lay on top of it spilling scattered strands of shag. Cobra frowned down at the cigarette in concentration.
Bishop reached him, stood by him, resting one hand on Mad Dog’s former chair. The outlaw didn’t look up. Bishop waited, holding his helmet down by his side.
Finally Cobra was done. He moistened the cigarette paper with his tongue and sealed it and wetted the end between his lips. Now he did glance at Bishop. He smiled around the weed. It was a dead smile. The V-shaped crags of his face never lifted. His green eyes were dull and furious. His skin was papery, pale.
He’d found the note from Honey, Bishop thought. He knew she was gone.
“Change of plans,” Cobra said.
“All right,” said Bishop.
“We go in without the truck.”
Bishop made a show of looking round at the others. “Where’s Honey?”
“Honey.” Cobra drew the name out. He filled it like a vessel with the acid sound of his hurt and anger. “Honey’s gone.” He lit a match. It flared as he touched it to the cigarette’s twisted tip. “Honey left a note. ‘Can’t stand the heat. Bye-bye.’ ” He made a kissing noise, then blew smoke out in a gust.
The other men stood in silent sympathy—sympathy tinged with quick-eyed fear. They were afraid of Cobra’s sudden temper and his sudden bayonet.
But Cobra shrugged. “Well, the women. They do come and go. But we are who we are. That’s the way of it. They think they want in, then they go, and we do what we have to do. Yes? No? A show of hands?” He laughed flatly, joylessly. He studied the red-hot tobacco. He nodded as if at his own deep wisdom.
Then he looked up, and he was all business. “Here’s how we’ll do it now. We come in on our exit routes, five different directions. Park separate. Look at the map. It shows you where to go. We come together on foot at the warehouse corner. Just like before: I key in the code, we go in all at once. Guards give us trouble, we kill ’em then and there. They play along, we tie ’em up and cut their throats quiet before we go. I’m saying it again, okay? No witnesses. It’s not just the cops we gotta worry about on this, the dealers’ll be looking for us, too.” He checked their listening faces to make sure they’d heard. “Okay. Then we walk out. Separate. Nobody rides together till we hook up at the clubhouse and divide the cash.”
Bishop tilted his head to look at the map. He saw where he was supposed to park his bike. Saw where the others would park. “Sounds good to me,” he said.
The other men nodded.
Cobra breathed in more smoke. Held it, savored it. Let it drift up out of his lips. He studied the others, man by man, through the rising tendrils.
“Christ,” he said. “Look at you dickheads. You don’t know.” He smirked at them bitterly. “You don’t even give a shit. Do you? Nah. Just some money in a warehouse, right? Who cares? You don’t have a fucking clue.” He shook his head in pity for them. Leaned forward on his elbows, his hands wrapped together, the cigarette poking up through his fingers. “It’s the assumptions we’re going after. See? The assumptions we’re stealing away. Because it’s drug money from the oh-so-mysterious East. It’s a payoff. For smuggled cigarettes from the oh-not-so-mysterious West. Now do you get it? The drug boys wash their money and the tobacco companies beat billions in taxes. And you think the governments here and over there don’t know? They know. Sure they know. They go about their business, all very respectable, all very shirt-and-tie. But it’s all of a piece. Corruption, respectability. Hypocrisy, the status quo. All of a piece the whole world over.”
Cobra tilted his head, a coy, catlike gesture of superiority and secret knowledge. “Well, we are taking that piece apart tonight. We are taking that piece apart piece by piece until it’s all in pieces. And that’s what this is about. Okay? The assumptions. They assume their privileges, they assume the lowdown bedrock of their upright lives, they assume the whole system is clicking over and in place, and we are taking that apart. We’re injecting ourselves into the mix, we’re—” Then suddenly—since Shorty and Charlie and Steve and even Bishop were nodding openmouthed like husbands half-listening to their wives—he slammed his hand down—wham!—on the tabletop. “This means something!” he growled from deep in his throat. He glowered darkly at them all. “It’s important. We’re important. We’re the leading edge. The leading fucking edge of the new thing, you hear me? We’re…”
His shoulders sagged and his gaze grew vague and for a moment it seemed he had lost track of himself, lost track of everything. “The bitch,” he muttered. Then he went taut. Cast a sharp look at them, one by one. Shorty, Charlie, Steve. They had all gone ramrod straight at the sound of his slamming hand. They all went on nodding as Cobra’s eyes went from each to each. Then he got to Bishop—Bishop, resting a hand on Mad Dog’s former chair.
Bishop looked down at Cobra steadily. He understood that all this talk was really about Honey somehow. All this blather about what things meant and how important they were: It was all about Honey and the fact that she had left him, and the fact that he loved her, in his own way. Bishop looked down at him and there wasn’t much but scorn in his heart, scorn for Cobra’s weakness and the nonsense he rattled off, and scorn because he, Bishop, had taken the man’s woman from him and she had cried out under him and her tears had pooled on his chest. One way or another, Bishop thought, Cobra was over. Cobra was over this very night.
As for Cobra, he went on searching Bishop’s face. He searched his expression a long time. How much of these feelings he saw in Bishop’s heart, it’s impossible to say. In the end, he just answered with a grin—and managed a real grin this time, full of wickedness and irony, with the devilish angles of his face all raking upward in the force of it.
He shoved his chair back from the table.
“Let’s go,” he said.