“The only, uh—All I can do if I, uh, if I get mad at some, uh, asshoe. Fu-fu-fuckin’ asshoe. If I get mad, uh, all I can do is bump, bump ’em with my wheelchair.”
“They send me out here again I’m gonna have to arrest you and your wheelchair. Load you both up and haul you to jail. They’ll cut you loose in the morning, but you’ll have to spend the night locked up with assholes. There’s no handicap facilities down there. You’ll be sittin’ in your own piss when the sun comes up. So why don’t you just go home and save us both a lot of grief? I don’t need the paperwork.”
“Fu-fuhkin’ asshoes,” he stuttered, spraying spit on his sunken chest. “What I’m ssssposed-supposed to do some asshoe fuh, uh, fuh, you know, if he…fucksss with me?”
“You’re the one who fucks with people.”
“Buh, ah, buh shit! If you wash, you was in this fuh, fuhkin’ wheechair…”
5Tac51, can you go?
“Wait one,” Hanson said to him, holding a hand up and taking his PAC-set off his belt. “What you got?”
A problem with some bikers at the Lone Butte Tavern, fifty-four hundred Foothill. It’s off your district, but you’re all we’ve got, and the barmaid just called for the third time.
“Yeah. I can go.”
Be advised that you’ll be Code 6.…
“Fine. From Seventy-sixth and Holly.”
“What I’m sssspisss…sup-osed to, if all, you know, all I, all I can…”
“If all you can do is bump ’em with your wheelchair?”
“Uh, uh…”
“Save your money. Buy a gun. Somebody fucks with you, shoot ’em.”
“But, but, uh, buu…”
“Steal some money if you have to. Or else stay out of bars. But don’t get me called back here tonight.”
“A guuu, you think, I, uh, a guu…”
Hanson nodded. “Yeah. A revolver. Something you can hide in the wheelchair that won’t go off by accident. I gotta go. I don’t want to have to come back and arrest you. Get some money. Buy a gun. But go home tonight. Please. Okay?”
“Oh-kay, Offi-Officer, buu…”
“Thank you,” Hanson said. “I appreciate it. Get some sleep. It’s a fucked up world.” Hanson walked around the patrol car and opened the driver’s door. “You know that better than I do.”
The Man in the Moon’s doughy face was lopsided, swollen, as if he’d taken a beating, bobbing through high, thin clouds.
Hanson looked at him over the roof of the patrol car. “But don’t shoot me.”
“Uh, uh, I, uh.”
“I gave you my best advice. Is that fair?”
“Oh, I, uh, yeah…”
“Okay, then. Good night. Go home. Go get some sleep.”
“Guh-good, uh, okay…”
Hanson got in the patrol car, shut the door, made a U-turn, and drove west on East 14th. In his rearview mirror he saw a flash of chrome from the wheelchair. Up ahead, the dark windows of abandoned businesses threw his headlights back at him.
A blur of movement.
Up at the next corner, across the street between the car wash and a burned-out storefront. He punched the gas, jumped the curb and bailed out of the car, running, but whatever it was was gone. He caught his breath next to a car wash wall with SANTANA FUCKED IVONE IN THE CAR WASH spray-painted on it.
He walked down the street and found two parked cars with the passenger windows smashed, glove boxes rifled, and a tape deck torn out of one of them. He’d let the owners call the police in the morning, but he followed the fresh footprints in the dust, leading away from the cars, down into a stand of brush and spindly trees fed by runoff water from the car wash, where he listened, studied the trees in his peripheral vision, looked at the stars. He skidded ten or twelve feet farther downhill, reached up, grabbed a tree branch, and bent it down until a pistol dropped into his other hand. The weather was warmer. People were washing their cars more often. The trees were greening up and were a popular place to ditch weapons.
It was an old top-break Harrington & Richardson .38, which had been dangling from the trigger guard, a six-shot revolver loaded with four mismatched rounds. The chrome plating was blistered with rust, the barrel and cylinders caked with oil and dirt, the grips gone and replaced with wraps and wads of black electrical tape. A gun that might not shoot at all, might go off by accident, or might explode in your hand. But it never hurt to have an extra throw-down gun.
He turned off his lights half a block away from the Lone Butte and pulled to the curb, where he got out of the patrol car and walked the quiet street toward the tavern. His OPD star and a pair of silver wings over his left pocket glowed in the streetlight. That morning he’d found his silver army jump wings in a dresser drawer. He’d polished them up and, after roll call, pinned them on his uniform shirt just above his silver OPD badge.
The Butte was a couple of blocks from the Hell’s Angels clubhouse. It was their turf, and they usually took care of their own problems, putting them in the hospital without bothering the police. Two dozen chopped and customized bikes were angle-parked in front of the place.
There wasn’t a butte within two hundred miles of Oakland. A warped wooden shipping pallet suspended on chains above the door of the bar creaked in the breeze. It had been painted with someone’s idea of a butte. It looked more like a rogue wave or a volcano, but it was real enough. It contained its own correctness. In some other world, certainly, there were buttes like that one, a desolate dark landscape, seen or remembered by whoever painted it, through an alcoholic blackout or seizure, in a skid row flop where the windows were nailed shut and the ceiling covered with chicken wire.
Something—thump…thump…thump—was pounding the heavy windowless door from the inside, like someone slamming a victim repeatedly, expertly, and rhythmically, against it. Hanson could feel it too, an almost sexual ache, in his arms and shoulders. It had been a while since he’d gotten to pound somebody that way. He pulled the door open and felt himself free-falling through a thunderstorm of sound and light.
We’re kickin’ ass and takin’ names,
Down and dirty, ain’t playin’ no games
A vintage jukebox was pulled out from the wall, its swollen plastic pipes and bubble windows throbbing with retro neon, turned up so loud Hanson imagined it torquing with bass notes, like a cartoon, side to side, across the floor.
Gonna hunt you down, kick in your door,
Biker soldiers goin’ to war—All right!
Guitars and keyboard pounding, buzzing, snarling and honking with feedback, chattering, ringing like bagpipes taking you out of the trenches and over the top and into massed machine-gun fire but who gave a fuck? Not Hanson. Everybody dies sooner or later. Hanson could taste his own blood. He grinned. Radio had sent him to the kind of place where he belonged. But the bikers in the Lone Butte weren’t Angels, they were Road Devils, some dipshit third tier membership from Sacramento that Hanson had never heard of. Reading their colors he saw they were a subsidiary club to the Angels who relied on the Angels’ protection for their survival.
Kickin’ ass and takin’ names…
The barmaid was in her early thirties, overweight, wearing a BUD LIGHT T-shirt. When he walked toward the bar, she looked past him to the door, expecting more cops. Too bad, lady, Hanson thought, just me tonight.
I said kickin’ ass and takin’ some names—Yeah!
“Hi,” he yelled over the music. “What can I do for you tonight?”
She sucked on the cigarette, looked again at the door. She leaned over the bar, cigarette held down at her side, and yelled into Hanson’s ear, “I was supposed to close almost an hour ago. We got hours posted over there on the door.”
“You asked ’em to leave?”
“Hell yeah,” she said, taking a drag on her cigarette.
“Who’d you talk to?”
“The big asshole with the blue beard,” she said, pointing to a huge biker wearing his vest and colors with no shirt, his gut hanging over his belt, heavy rings on all his fingers. The wraparound blue-mirror sunglasses plus the blue beard helped him look like a giant bloated insect. He had a pool cue in his hand.
Hanson smiled, nodding his head to the music.
“I told him twice,” she shouted. “Told him I had to close up. He laughed at me. I got a teenage girl at home.”
“I’ll go talk to him”—turning and walking into the noise, past bikers and their old ladies, moving his head and shoulders to the music, as if he’d been invited to the party, his silver badge and jump wings gleaming, flashing. On the other side of a pool table, one of the Devils smashed a beer bottle over his own head, laughing as beer and fresh blood foamed from his rat’s-nest hair down his neck.
Out on the road an’ in the wind,
Where it ain’t no law, ain’t no sin
A woman in a leather bra pursed her lips in a kiss as Hanson walked by, and another pulled her tits out of a tank top, squeezing them so that delicate blue veins showed through the skin, offering them to Hanson. He took a long look, then met her bloodshot cracker-blue, dilated eyes.
Kickin’ ass and takin’ names…Kickin’ ass and takin’ names…
The chapter president, with the blue beard, was leaning on his pool cue, watching another Devil shoot. On the far side of the pool table a kid in his teens sat watching, propping a beer up to his lips. He didn’t have to worry about his legs getting in the way because he had flippers instead of arms and legs, like a seal.
Kickin’ ass and takin’ names…Kickin’ ass and takin’ names…
Just as the president leaned in for a closer look, Hanson stepped up behind him. “Excuse me,” he shouted. “Excuse me,” Hanson yelled over the music, tapping him on the shoulder while the young man sitting on the pool table, holding his beer mug with flippers looked on with interest.
The president spun around and looked down at Hanson.
“The lady over there,” Hanson said, gesturing toward the barmaid, “wants you to leave so she can close up.”
“People in hell want ice water too,” the president said, turning away.
Hanson tapped him again.
“Goddammit, what?”
Another Devil walked over to watch.
“If you don’t leave,” Hanson shouted, absolutely happy, “you’ll be in violation. Of the law, sir. Trespassing. Then I’d have to arrest you. I’d appreciate it—be grateful, sir—if you’d take your people and go somewhere else.”
He looked at Hanson, looked at the door of the tavern. Looked at the other biker, who shrugged and shouted, “Just him.”
Somebody pulled the plug on the jukebox. In the silence the president’s voice boomed. “You fuckin’ guys. How stupid do you think we are? They send you in here by yourself, then when we start kicking your ass, the rest of the precinct comes through the door. Maybe if they sent a couple of big guys in here, throwing their weight around. A couple of motorcycle pigs. We might fall for it. Or three or four. I’ll tell you fuckin’ what, though…”
That’s when Hanson saw Pogo, the Angel Barnes and Durham had set him up to arrest that time at the Anchor Tavern. He’d been watching from the foyer to the men’s room. He walked over, gestured to Hanson—Just a second—and said something to the president of the Devils. The president looked at Hanson, shook his head.
“Let’s go,” he announced, circling his hand above his head. “Let’s get in the fuckin’ wind.”
“You’d better move your asses out of here,” the barmaid yelled, holding a phone aloft. “I called the police, a lot of—”
One of the bikers stiff-armed her into the wall behind the bar.
Hanson and Pogo followed the Devils outside and watched them start their bikes and thunder off, the kid with flippers holding on, behind the president, on the pussy pad.
“I better go, Occifer,” Pogo said. “Nobody’s blaming you for that shit back in the Anchor Tavern. It was those two biker cop assholes set it up.” He got on his bike, about to kick-start it. “And you’re something for luck, man. If I hadn’t been there, what did you think you were gonna do?”
“Watch ’em leave or arrest ’em, sir,” Hanson said, grinning, purely elated, the way he’d felt every time he’d survived a firefight. “They didn’t leave me no selection on that.”
“Shit,” Pogo said, grinning himself, showing all his meth-rotted teeth. “I could see that you were a standup motherfucker right away, back at the Anchor Tavern,” he said, kicking his bike to life. “Take care of yourself out here at night, Hanson.” He laughed, gestured Fuck ’em! with his fist and forearm, and was gone as sirens wailed, getting closer, from all directions—one, then two patrol cars coming around the corner with their overhead lights flaring, the first one Sergeant Jackson’s car.