Cobra was laughing. Honey was telling him a story about a boy she had dated. The boy was named Harold, and the story had a sort of refrain to it, a running gag, “But Harold had to call his boss.” Every time Honey said this, Cobra laughed long and hard. Honey made silly faces, too, and big gestures in her efforts to entertain him. Cobra found this adorable. Sometimes he stopped laughing and just listened to her, just looked at her very tenderly and brushed her blonde hair back from her face with his fingers. His gaze traveled down her and back up again. She was willowy in her jeans and pink T-shirt. She had silken blonde hair and deep blue eyes all soft for him. She was so beautiful, he thought, she seemed almost separate from the background of the world, seemed almost to glow off the surface of things like the angels in paintings. He kissed her—had to kiss her—in the middle of a sentence and then went on looking at her as she told the rest of her story.
So for a moment or two after the stranger walked over, Cobra didn’t even realize he was there. He was laughing again. He repeated the punch line in unison with Honey, “But Harold had to call his boss!” He turned to reach for his beer. Noticed Shorty and Charlie staring, and looked around to see what the hell they were staring at. The stranger was just lowering himself into the seat at Cobra’s right hand.
Cobra was a lean, leathery man roughly the same age as the stranger, somewhere between thirty, say, and maybe thirty-five. He had a craggy face, V-shaped, with sharp smile lines graven in the cheeks and brow. All his features were sharp. His chin was pointed, his lips thin, his nose aquiline. His once golden hair, now darkening, was swept back hard. His eyes were piercing, emerald green, and you could see how smart he was just by looking in them. He was plenty smart, there was no question about that. And not just smart, he’d had some college, too. Plus he still read books from time to time—he could reel off enough of the world’s wisdom to get himself a blow job, anyway, from girls who liked that sort of thing in their outlaws. How much deeper than that his wisdom ran it was hard to say.
Anyway, he saw the stranger sitting down next to him. Gave him a long, grinning once-over, as in: What the hell do we have here?
The stranger drew a pack of Marlboros from his jacket, drew a Marlboro from the pack with his lips. Torched it leisurely with a plastic lighter. Nodded at Cobra’s grin, still smiling that ironical smile.
Cobra burst out with a short laugh. “Y’know,” he said, “that’s Mad Dog’s chair you’re sitting in.”
The stranger took a slow drag on his cigarette. “Is it?” he said, and blew the smoke luxuriously into the gray air. “I guess he’s just gonna have to sit somewhere else, isn’t he.”
Cobra turned to his buddies as if to say: You hear that?
They’d heard it, all right. Shorty’s shaved head had gone red from neck to dome. And Charlie, with those piles of bouldery muscles on him, seemed ready to fall on the newcomer like an avalanche. Neither man was smiling.
But Cobra smiled. He grinned; he went on grinning. All the sharp angles of his face, the crags, the lips, the eyebrows, arched upward. “You think so?” he asked the stranger. “I don’t know, dude. Mad Dog—he sure does love that chair.”
“Yeah?” the stranger asked.
“Oh, he’ll kill you for that chair, no joke.”
“You don’t say.”
“I wouldn’t lie to you. He’s on his way over here right now, too.”
“Is he? Well,” the stranger drawled, “I better talk in a big, frightened hurry then.”
Cobra let out another laugh. “I guess you better.”
But if the stranger was planning to talk fast, he sure took his sweet time about it. Smoked his cigarette some more. Took a meditative pull on his beer. Savored the mouthful. During all of which, the bikers and their women shared various glances of outrage, disbelief, and plain dumb wonder.
“Aaah!” said the stranger as he finally swallowed. He cocked his head in appreciation.
“Y’know,” Cobra said, “call it, I don’t know, a sort of sixth sense, but I’m guessing you don’t know much about Mad Dog.”
“Not a thing, to be honest with you,” said the stranger. “The name kind of says it all, though, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, the name’s just the beginning, trust me.”
“I get you.”
“You get the picture?”
“He’s a man named Mad Dog, and he loves his chair.”
“That’s it in a nutshell.”
“So I’ll get down to business. Angel Withers sent me.”
“Ah.” That caught Cobra’s attention. He thought it over. He squinched one eye shut and reached back to massage the space between his shoulder blades. “Angel, huh?”
The stranger waited. He planted his cigarette in his ironical smile. Tilted his chair off its front legs, casual, holding his beer on one thigh. Sitting like that, he caught Honey studying him. He let his pale gaze rest on her—coolly, as if she were something he admired on a shelf, some pretty figurine or picture that he might decide to buy or then again not. Honey’s cheeks colored. She twisted her lips and smirked and looked away. She made herself busy helping Cobra massage that space on the back of his T-shirt.
“This is the Angel Withers,” said Cobra then, shifting his shoulders under her hand. He sat forward, lacing his fingers in front of him, tapping his laced hands on the tabletop. “Angel Withers up in Pelican Bay.”
“Was.”
“That’s right, was.”
“He died of the hepatitis about a year ago. Just before I got sprung.”
“And before he died, he sent you to me.”
“Since he died, I haven’t heard much from him.”
“And he sent you why exactly?”
The stranger shrugged. “He said it might make sense if we rode together sometimes. He said it might work out for both of us.”
Cobra thought some more, rocked his head back and forth, considering. “Well. That’s interesting, I confess.”
“I thought so.”
“He was a good man, Angel.”
“One of the best, if you were facing him.”
Cobra studied the table, nodded. “Well, I’ll tell you the truth,” he said after a few seconds. “If he said it’d make sense for us to ride together, then I’m pretty sure it would. In fact, I have no doubt in my mind it would. If you were still alive, that is. Which it’s my sad duty to inform you that you’re not. Because here comes Mad Dog.”