CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Cayuse Motel stood alone on a long, empty stretch of the old state route that had been largely abandoned by motorists since the completion of the interstate. The motel itself had been left in disrepair long before the advent of the freeway, and I couldn’t imagine the local Indian tribe for which it was named would have taken much pride in their namesake.

I saw Griffin and Powell’s vehicle in my rearview as I approached the turnout, and the silhouette outlines of the three long guns—two Winchester carbines and a pump-action shotgun—that hung in the rack affixed inside Powell’s rear window. Loose stones from the gravel of the unpaved lot pinged along the undercarriage of my truck and I momentarily lost my two cowboys inside a gray cloud of loose dirt.

I pulled to a stop in front of a single-story structure constructed of concrete block painted over in sun-faded pink, and laid out in the shape of an L. The short end was comprised of an office and apartment for the manager, the rooms laid out on the long end. A freestanding structure of the same construction and vintage that had once been a Flying A station stood abandoned on the opposite corner, loose tar-paper shingles flapping listlessly in the breeze.

Near the door to the office, a handwritten sign had been taped to a window filmed by a layer of brown dust and fly-specks. The words No Vacancy were printed on it with a black felt-tip marker.

I stepped down from my pickup and walked toward the office, counting five motorcycles parked side by side outside the long row of rooms. I tried the handle, but the door wouldn’t open. I pounded my fist on the jamb until a light fixture switched on over the desk inside, and an elderly man with a sunken chest and bald head shuffled over and glared at me through a half-opened jalousie.

“We’re closed,” he said from the other side of the glass.

His left eye had been blackened and a knot the size of a walnut had swelled to the point that the skin split open and stood out on the crown of his skull.

“Sheriff’s office,” I said. “Open up.”

“I don’t want any dealings with you.”

“Most people don’t. Open the door.”

The sound of crunching gravel closed in from behind, and I turned to see Peter Davis’s piss-yellow van slide to a stop beneath a reader board sign that was framed in the shape of an Indian headdress. At one time the letters had been arranged to advertise the promise of free telephone and TV, but several had been damaged or fallen away long since.

I moved from the manager’s office and came up beside the driver’s side of the van and waited while Peter cranked down his window.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Following you.”

“I can see that. Go home.”

“This is all part of the story, man.”

The ashen-faced manager reappeared at the doorway wearing a pair of loose-fitting chinos belted high over his stomach and waving his arms over his head in exasperation.

“I told you two to get out of here,” he hollered at Peter.

“See?” Peter said to me. “What’d I tell you?”

“Stay in the van,” I said, and knew damn well he wouldn’t.

“What happened to your head?” I asked the old man.

“They happened,” he said, gesturing toward the row of Harleys tilted at an angle on their kickstands.

“They assaulted you?”

“What the hell do you think? There ain’t any stairs around here to fall down from.”

“How many of them?”

“How many what?”

“What have we been talking about? How many goddamned bikers are here?”

“Eight or nine, maybe.”

“I only count five bikes.”

“A few of ’em left.”

“When?”

“Not long ago,” he said. “I don’t really keep track of their comings and goings.”

“What did they look like?”

“What do any of ’em look like? One had a helmet like a Wehrmacht soldier, two looked like pirates, and the last idiot had his foot wrapped up in a bandage.”

Peter and Sly had crept up on my right flank while I’d been talking, and were committing the entire conversation to film.

“Would you two please give me some room?” I said.

They backed up three paces and kept rolling.

“Which rooms do they occupy?” I said to the old man.

“Dig the manure out of your ears, son,” he said, shaking his head at the obtuseness of my question. “All of ’em.”

Heat shimmers rose up from the parking lot as I looked across. Three Charlatans in full road regalia had exited their rooms and stood beside the row of bikes, arms chained with blue tattoos crossed upon their chests.

“I’m going back inside,” the manager said. “And I’m locking the door behind me. Don’t come back unless it’s to tell me you caged those gorillas. I’m done.”

I made a circling gesture in the air above my head and pointed at Jordan Powell still sitting behind the wheel of his idling truck.

“Follow me.”

We drove the short distance across the lot, parked close behind the line of Harleys and blocked them in. Powell and Griffin stepped out of the cab, removed the carbines cradled in the gun rack while I unshipped my Colt from its holster.

“Afternoon, fellas,” I said.

The largest of the group stepped forward, hooked his thumbs inside a leather belt strung with a knife sheath and a length of metal chain that looped along his hip.

“You looking for someone?”

“Might be,” I said. “Who’ve you got?”

He grinned and glanced in Samuel Griffin’s direction.

“You brought your nigger with you this time,” he said. “How nice for you.”

“That’s not a term that gets used in my presence,” I said. “You do not want to utter it again.”

“I was trying to compliment you, Sheriff, on your affirmative action hire.”

Powell cocked the lever on his rifle, tucked the stock into his shoulder, and sighted down the barrel.

I addressed Samuel without taking my eyes off of the biker.

“Sam, you have my permission to chain drag this man across the parking lot if he makes one more racist remark.”

The squeal of a rusted door hinge caught my attention, and a bearded face peered out through the opening, the security chain stretched tight, still fastened to the wall. Powell swiveled and drew a bead on it.

“Get back inside, or this man will open fire,” I said.

Beard made a grab for the chain lock, and Powell splintered the frame with a 30-caliber slug. The door slammed shut as a whiff of smoke drifted from the mouth of Powell’s barrel and the odor of spent powder filled the air. He jacked the lever and a brass jacket arched into the gravel.

“You got a name?” I asked.

“Fuck off,” the big one answered.

He sucked on a wood matchstick he drew from his vest pocket, and rolled it across his teeth.

“I’ve got to call you something if we’re going to engage in conversation,” I said. “I think I’ll call you ‘Wallace.’ You seem to share the governor’s views on racial matters. He’s in a wheelchair now.”

Griffin thumbed back his hammer. This situation was escalating with the rapidity and lethality of a prison riot. In my peripheral vision I saw Sly and Peter moving sideways in a slow arc behind us, filming the scene as if they had scripted it, as if they were immune from harm.

“Back the hell off, Peter,” I said. “I mean it.”

I dipped two fingers into the pocket of my shirt and shook the folds out of the photo of Emily Meeghan.

“Have you seen this girl, Wallace?”

He slid a pair of mirrored shades from his face and made a show of examining the picture.

“Can’t say for sure,” he said. “Gash all tends to look the same to me after a while.”

An ambiguous thought had been troubling me for some time, but I could not put a name to it until now. The man I called ‘Wallace’ had eyes that were lit up from inside like he was plugged into a wall socket, and the planes of his face twitched with the static electrical buzz of the amphetamines that surged through his Bloodstream. But there was some other agenda operating inside his head. The collective IQ of his companions wouldn’t break double digits, and it was clear to me that he was in charge. Now the thing that had been troubling me had begun to take form, and I wondered where the rest of the Charlatans were. Lloyd Skadden had been warned of a massive rally of outlaws, yet I had only encountered this small band.

“I believe this girl is here with you now,” I said. “Care to study on the picture again?”

He passed it back to me without a glance, adjusting his scrotum with his free hand.

“Now that you mention it, she does look familiar.”

I felt the rough crosshatch press into my palms as I gripped the Colt tight in my fist.

“I’m going to ask you this only two times,” I said. “The first time is going to be polite: Is she inside that room behind you?”

He smiled and shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. Griffin and Powell saw it too.

“I think she’s grown fond of the attention she enjoys from the boys,” Wallace said. The two standing beside him broke into grins. “Although she was a little hesitant at first.”

“You’ll need to stand aside,” I said. “All three of you. Hands out to your sides, palms out.”

They complied, and I patted them down for weapons. None carried firearms, but the collection of fighting blades was impressive. I tossed the entire haul of boot knives, karambits, and switchblades into the bed of my truck. Then I came back for the ignition keys to their Harleys and slid them into my pocket.

“You got a warrant?” Wallace asked me.

“I’ve got a boot-heel warrant,” I said. “Would you like to take a closer look?”

Griffin and Powell moved toward the men, the carbine stocks still tucked in tight at their jawlines. The two cowboys loose-herded the bikers into the shade of the motel’s roof overhang and lined them up along the wall. The grins had disappeared from their faces.

“Do you see the guns these men are directing at you?” I said. “They’re Winchester model 94 repeating rifles. They fire 30-caliber bullets that will pass through your internal organs and leave a hole on the way out that’s the size of my fist. There are eight rounds in each chamber, so there’s fifteen left. If you can’t do the arithmetic in your heads, it works out like this: Five holes apiece. At this distance, I guarantee that these men will not miss.”

I moved toward the locked door of the room at their backs, felt the knurled surface of the hammer of the Colt against my thumb, and cocked it. I reeled back and planted a solid kick beside the handle, and the door gave way in a shower of chipped pressboard and plaster dust, ripped the chain from the anchor bolts, slammed open, and bounced against the wall.

I shouldered past the threshold and into the darkened room, illuminated only by a narrow strip of daylight where the cheap vinyl curtains had parted and the rectangle of light that now shone through the shattered doorway. One Charlatan stood at the side of a filthy and disheveled bed holding a Polaroid camera, a bandana tied tight across his brow. He had been snapping images of his porcine companion as he thrust himself between the upraised knees of a female whose face I could not see, his road-soiled jeans and underwear pulled down and pooled around his boots. The fat rapist rolled off the girl and gaped into the black tunnel of the Colt’s barrel, his eyes wild and unfocused and deranged with rut. The warning shot that Powell had planted in the doorway hadn’t been enough to distract them from their recreation.

The room was dense with the raw, glandular odors of copulation and sweat and a charred, pungent chemical smell I could not identify. The girl on the bed lay battered and prone, immobilized, one wrist shackled to the bed frame with a pair of steel handcuffs. Her face and chest were marbled with bruises, her abdomen spattered with drops of perspiration and dried semen and the blistered scars from burning cigarettes.

She stirred and tried to sit upright, but was caught short by her manacles. Despite the dimness of the light and the physical damage inflicted on her face, I knew without a doubt that I had found Emily Meeghan.

The biker wearing the bandana bounced the Polaroid off the mattress and made a swift turn on me, a push-knife locked inside his fist. I held the Colt in a two-handed stance and stared down the sight and into his jangling eyes.

“I will drop you where you stand,” I said. “I shit you not.”

The twin edges of the blade reflected in the band of light that streamed in between the curtains and he moved it slowly back and forth, like the searching head of a snake.

I cocked the hammer on the Colt, and the ratchet of the mechanism snapping home appeared to awaken him from a trance.

“Last chance,” I said. “Drop it on the floor.”

I tried to whistle for Powell, but my mouth had gone bone dry, and I fought the urge to empty my entire cylinder into this guy’s bandana. I hollered out for Powell instead, and the biker dropped his blade. The fat rapist had slid off the bed and onto the floor where he was struggling to pull his pants up over his pink and pockmarked buttocks.

Powell appeared in the doorway and leveled his rifle at the half-naked man on the floor. Together, we directed them to kneel on the carpet and press their palms flat to the wall. I relieved them of their knife blades and keys, then went to unlock the cuffs that still bound Emily Meeghan.

She rubbed the raw red indentations where the cuffs had bitten into her wrists and passed a vacant gaze over the room. I had seen the look before, in the eyes of combat veterans and the victims of sudden and unspeakable horrors.

Powell covered the bikers while I handcuffed the rapist then stepped outside to collect ropes from the cabs of our trucks.

“Get down on your faces,” I said and went to work hog-tying them both. I looped a second length of rope around a single leg of each man, securing each one to the other.

When I was finished, I hoisted them to their feet and herded them outdoors, hobbling like drunks in a three-legged race, and tossed them facedown into the bed of Powell’s pickup.

I stepped up beside Samuel Griffin while Powell finished anchoring the two captives to the cargo hooks of the truck.

Fat beads of sweat had popped out on Samuel’s forehead and darkened the seam of his hatband. His Winchester was leveled at Wallace’s chest, and when I looked at Sam’s face, he gave me a wink that told me he still had things under control.

Fear has an odor, like vinegar and sweat and milk that’s gone sour in the bottle. Despite the façade of bravado, it clung to the three bikers like a second skin.

I uncocked the Colt and breathed a deep breath, slid the gun inside my holster. The engraved scrollwork on the frame and barrel was a hallmark of my grandfather’s time, when men such as these would have been bounced off the limb of a tree. I thought he might well be looking down upon me now, with disgust and contempt at my cowardice in not having done exactly that already.

I returned to the motel room and helped Emily cover herself with a bedsheet, averting my eyes out of respect and the deep-seated shame for the barbarity she had endured at the subhuman hands of the worst examples of my gender. She hadn’t spoken a word, and neither had I as I carried her outside and lifted her into the passenger seat of my truck. Sly and Peter sidled up behind me, their distorted images reflecting off the curvature of the windshield.

“What the hell is the matter with you?” I said. “You get out of this girl’s face with that thing.”

I took the five sets of keys I had liberated from the Charlatans and walked to the edge of the parking lot. Across the paved road, the forest was dense, impacted, and choked with a tangle of wild berries, thistle sage, and nettle. One by one, I pitched each set into the bramble, where I knew it would take hours to find them, if they ever did find them at all.