The Prince Of Deadly Weapons Read online

  Tommy set the box down by his computer. "I'll take care of it later."

  "If you do it now, and something is wrong, I'll—"

  "It's cool, man. Thank Nathan."

  "I'd feel better knowing I hadn't fucked up."

  Tommy wanted this guy out. Wanted it done. Wanted to get him on his way. He took the box and went to a worktable at the rear of the hangar. He scraped through a toolbox till he found a razor.

  When the box was half open Dane started Tommy's way and his brother let that flame just rip. A ten-inch laser of blue-white burning whoosh cut across Dane's path.

  Dane stepped back.

  "Sorry, man." Shane got the flame down to a harmless idle. "I heard you were on a subway platform in Rockerville when some freak threw chemicals in your face that made you go blind."

  Tommy had opened the box. He'd looked inside and with an expression of pure boredom closed it back up.

  "I wasn't exactly blind then," said Dane. "But I am sensitive in certain kinds of light."

  "I better put this torch over here then," Shane said as he set it down.

  "Things are cool," Tommy said. "Thank Nathan."

  Dane was turning a thought when Shane nudged him and then pointed the tip of that cutting wand at the poster with Michael Jackson pasted onto the body of a hermaphrodite who was doubling as the Wicked Witch of Oz. "Remember that scene in the movie? When the old bitch gets water flung on her and she starts to melt. All that smoke coming off her and shit. That must have been like what it was for you.

  "Of course, what happened to you was a lot worse. I'm sure you wouldn't want to go through that again. I know if it was me, I'd be blown out."

  Shane then started to say "I'm melting… I'm melting!!"

  His voice was complete creep shit and Dane went at him. He rammed Shane into the cowling and grabbed that angle grinder with his free hand. He thumbed the grip switch and that carbonate wheel went up to 12,000 rpms before Tommy could shout, "Don't do—"

  The grinder had no protective shield. It was just a pure four-inch pneumatic saw that could undo your skull in less time than it took to blink.

  The blade was smoke-heating the flesh that protected Shane's jugular. "I'm not gonna play some jerk-off fool's idea of a joke."

  "Put that fuckin' thing down! Now!" Tommy ordered.

  "Having something thrown in your face like that can breed demons. It can make you want to drink too much and dress in black. Play Mad Max on The Yellow Brick Road."

  "Put it down."

  "They say people who have a few demons tucked away inside them usually like to edge up other people's lives. Give them a little taste."

  "I'm telling you."

  Dane let the blade scar the cowling inches from Shane's throat. It made a blistering squeal and sparks flew everywhere. Shane's body locked.

  "A little magic from the dooms linger. Was that your phrase? Well," said Dane, "I just came into your crib and took it."

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  SANCHO MARIA WAS serving bar to an Edward Hopper placement of characters when Dane came in. He slid onto a stool near the door where he could not only be alone, but watch the Boyz' hangar.

  He did his first beer in two swallows, then he looked down at his hands. They were still trembling; thank you anger, thank you rage. There was a twisted irony to the saying, You have the whole world in the palm of your hand, that was not lost on him. So much for second sight.

  Sancho Maria brought him another. His lips parted in a brief smile, and they talked. But she had been a corrections officer too long, she had been married to Paul too long, not to feel a person's bad weather coming on like a storm.

  Alone again, Dane kept slipping that hangar a look over his shoulder. Things were quiet, but he couldn't see into the shadows.

  When Sancho Maria was bringing a tray of drinks to a table she passed behind Dane. She leaned over his left shoulder and tucked a cigarette into his shirt pocket. Then she tapped him on the back. It was done tenderly, with a mother's touch, as if she was somehow, without knowing details, signaling to him, through his body, that things would be all right.

  The moment, inconsequential as it may have seemed, brought up a flood of meaning and feelings and Dane tried to get a hand on hers before she pulled away, to let her know that he had heard her.

  * * *

  PAUL WAS at the restaurant counter ranting to a row of hangar rats how the small coffee shops of America were being wiped out by those "ass lick in' Star buck froufrou phonies, with their lattes and fat-free milk" when Sancho Maria called him to the bar.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE THE restaurant, under a stand of eucalyptus, Paul found Dane sitting at a picnic table. Dane hadn't gotten nearly close enough to even-hearted when he heard, "You drink my beer, you smoke my cigarettes, and not one fuckin' hello… well, hello anyway!"

  Paul swung onto the picnic table. He sat above and beside Dane. Dane looked up. Paul was cracking his shell-shaped knuckles. "The old lady thinks something is bothering you. And you know what kind of radar cunts have for that shit. Well?"

  Dane turned his pitched stare toward the tarmac. A single-engine plane was propping toward the runway. There was a blanket of silence otherwise with Paul watching the boy and the boy's veiled expression concentrated on the Fenns' corrugated hangar.

  Paul waited. The kitten he'd found weeks ago was slow-cruising the grass. "Look at her," he said. "You know who's gonna feed you, don't you, you dirty little bastard." The cat leaped onto the picnic table and landed air-light. He scooped her up by her black nape. She hung before his face while he advised, "Don't fly too high, don't fly too low." Dane flicked ashes onto the dead air. "I keep saying it. Hoping somebody will listen, besides me." Paul glanced at Dane again. He seemed more intent on the cloacal shadows of the Boyz' hangar. "Nothing like talking to yourself when you're among friends."

  Dane leaned back. "Remember, you asked me once if I had any aphorisms appropriate to my own life?"

  The kitten was in Paul's lap. He was tweaking her belly while she playfully bit his fingers. "What the fuck is an aphorism?"

  "A saying. Like, 'Don't fly too high…'"

  "Yeah… yeah. I got it."

  Dane leaned forward. He smoked. He ran a hand through his black hair and started. "Speech is silver, but silence is golden." That single prop was coming around to the runway behind them with its propeller growing louder. "I am a slow walker, but I never walk back." The plane took off, cutting the air as it climbed. Dane waited, his forearms resting on his thighs, his boot toes lifting and dropping until the quiet folded in over that wild noise and he could finish. "Strike harder and twist the links, where others' skills have failed, he can still invent resource."

  Dane sat as he was for a minute or so, his boot toes lifting and falling, taking an occasional drag on his cigarette, flicking ash into the dead air. Paul said nothing, but he recognized the unsettling energy Dane was giving off. It had been, at one time, his own defiant and self-destructive trademark.

  "What's the matter?"

  Dane looked up. Paul was staring at him like a parent who was trying to read right down into his child's wiring and see if there was a way to shut off all those Cain-flexed emotions.

  "I can see," said Dane, "for you, those aphorisms didn't personally 'kick.'"

  "You want to talk?"

  "I think I have one that will give you a little boost." Before he started Dane glanced at the Fenns' open hangar door. It was just gauzy black space, and no sign of Tommy or Shane.

  "Never eat at a restaurant called Mom's… Never play cards with a man named Doc… And never, ever, ever, ever sleep with anyone whose problems are worse than your own."

  Dane looked up to find Caruso grinning. " 'Never sleep with anyone whose problems are worse than your own.'" He held the kitten in one hand while he pointed at The Burrow with the other. "Talk about dead on."

  "That would go for Sancho Maria too."

  "What do you think I fuckin' meant?"

/>   Tommy showed. He wasn't carrying the box, but slung over one shoulder he did have a gym tote large enough for it.

  "What's so interesting about the Rocket Boyz?"

  "I had a little slip and slide with them a few minutes ago."

  Shane came out of the hangar and started to roll the doors closed. He was talking rapid fire to himself.

  "What about?"

  " 'Cause I wouldn't sit through their lounge act."

  "What were you doing over there anyway?"

  "I was doing Nathan a favor."

  Shane got the hangar door locked. He and Tommy stood on the tarmac facing each other. Tommy, it seemed, was trying to get his younger brother's anger under control.

  "Look at them, Dane. They're screw heads. Strictly bad shit. I know they deal. And they fly across the border into Mexico doing who knows what else. I don't understand why they haven't been busted by now on something."

  "Well, the clock's still running."

  When the Fenns started across the tarmac Dane stood quickly and the kitten, startled, leapt from the table to the ground and sprinted down the walkway.

  "Let me tell you something, Dane. To give you a little hit of what those Boyz are about. Their father was a dealer. I did time with him. The cops pulled a bust on a mobile home he was shacked up in where they had one of those nine-seven-six phone sex lines running out of. That stoned fucker had such a lock down mentality he shot it out. There in the house. And over what? A lousy sex line. The boys were about ten and watched their old man give up the ghost right there on the living room carpet.

  "I tell you this so you know what kind of gene pool they come from. They got the same lock down mentality as the old man. They're gonna get the needle one day, mark my word."

  "I guess I better not bring a box lunch if I'm gonna mix it up with them."

  "Don't do that."

  The Fenns were not walking toward their plane, but instead, were making for a white Bronco that was sitting on jacked-up wheels. "Paul, do you think the human tragedy is the failure to exact change, or is it not trying?"

  "I was in stir long enough to know life never gets that fuckin' articulate."

  Tommy handed his brother the gym tote, then opened the driver's side door. Dane started down the walkway and Paul followed.

  "With all that reading you did in prison, did you ever wonder what was in Theseus' head, why he took that walk through the labyrinth?"

  Paul's eyes narrowed. Dane was making toward his pickup.

  "What do you think, Paul?"

  The Bronco's engine revved, the dual mufflers kicked out bull-horn widths of smoke.

  "Where are you going?"

  Dane swung the driver's door open and slid down into his pickup. The Bronco was moving now, Dane turned the engine over.

  "You haven't answered my question."

  "And you haven't answered mine."

  Paul tried to grab the door and keep it from closing but Dane was too quick.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ESSIE WAS IN the yacht club kitchen with the chef detailing Nathan's menu for that night when an important call was transferred down to her by the receptionist. She took the call in the manager's office, which was no bigger than a file card with a desk of stacked invoices.

  "Delivered," said Dane. It was a raspy connection but his voice came through like cool machinery. "And the Boyz are hip to what they're carrying."

  The office had no door. Essie went around the desk to get as far back in that cubbyhole as possible so she could talk. "How do you know, and where are you?"

  The dishwashers were right against the wall behind her so between the water hose spraying those clacking plates and glasses and the cooks and waitresses yelling over each other Essie had to cup her ears to hear Dane as he shorthanded the moments from when he first walked into that hangar to following the Boyz' Bronco as it humped its way east on Route 160 out of Rio Vista.

  Head bent and turned away from the office door she asked, "What are you gonna do following them?"

  "Get someplace we can talk. Call me on my cellular."

  The phone clicked shut on an unanswered question. She stood and looked out the office doorway through smoke rising off the stove to another open doorway which framed the private dining room where she watched Nathan slip a video into the VCR that sat on a hutch shelf against the far wall.

  She made her way across the hot noisy kitchen handing about her purse for her cellular to call back Dane and then on into the silent, cool dining room where a worker laid out crystal goblets and fine china plates with the Discovery Bay insignia imprinted in gold.

  Nathan worked the remote and the video taken of the tribute that night on the river boat cued up perfectly to the beginning of his speech. That moment now played quite differently.

  "Dane called," Essie told Nathan, "to say he delivered your package."

  Concentrating on the screen Nathan answered, "It wasn't my package, it was Charles.'"

  He seemed preoccupied, as if caught up in the urgency of something else. She moved slightly to get a better look at his face. He was watching his speech, adjusting the sound till it was just so.

  Was that a secret face she stared at? Was all this just so much sales pitch and pretense? Or was there a chance he knew nothing about what he had just been part of?

  Her hand found the cellular in her purse. "Nathan. I'm feeling a little off… would you mind if I took a break?"

  * * *

  COMING OUT of Rio Vista Route 160 rode the eastern bank of the Sacramento. But here the river thinned since it no longer benefitted from the current that flowed south out of Steamboat Slough.

  The Bronco was maybe a thousand yards ahead of Dane burning well past the speed limit. He looked at his gas gauge. It was dangerously low and he had no idea how far they were going or where.

  Through a slatted grid of old growth and olive trees Dane could just make out a watery light held in place by those high-leveed banks as he told himself, promised himself, swore to himself, that he would not allow himself to be someone things just happen to.

  A gray stream of clouds was moving against the sky above Stockton and the Delta. Dane caught a snapshot of himself in the rearview mirror. His features stared back at him angular and taciturn, and for that brief instant he considered what he really was for attempting this.

  * * *

  I'M GONNA turn that skank motherfucker into my bitch."

  Shane's shoulders hitched unmercifully while Tommy rode the steering wheel as the highway wound north coming out of Isleton.

  "I'm gonna burn a trail all the way up that yuppie prick's asshole."

  "You're not gonna do anything," said Tommy. "You understand?" He put a warning hand right in his brother's face. "We got a life now. We got a plane. Money. A future. And I'm not letting you go pull some reckless tribal shit like the old man."

  Shane kicked the dashboard, drove a fist into the door, rammed his back against the seat. He did not like being compared to his old man. "When the time is right I'm goin' out to that shack he lives in and—"

  While his brother ranted Tommy hit the horn and rode its blowing sound over his brother's hardline bullshit.

  "Fuck you!" screamed Shane. He slammed a fist against the glove compartment lock and it jawed open. He manhandled the junk inside looking for a joint.

  "Don't you light up, not with what we're carrying."

  Shane was beyond obeying. He was riding that vintage Fenn rage. "Then why do we got a joint inside the car anyway?"

  When Tommy saw the flame on Shane's lighter he warned one last time, "I shit you not. Don't—"

  Shane's stare was straight arm defiant, all flush and fury in a show of no quarter. Shane lit the joint and as he did his brother backhanded him catching the joint in his sweep. Sparks shot outward as Tommy swerved the Bronco right off the road where it skidded on the open gravel shoulder as Shane swore and screamed and tried to get the burning cinders off his skin.

  * * *

 
DANE WAS coming out of a curve just past Tyler Island Road when he saw reeks of smoke and dust on the shoulder where the Bronco's tires had locked up.

  The Boyz were a mere hundred yards ahead of Dane and he had no cover on his side of the highway and the only chance he had of not being spotted was to do a wheel-spinning down shift that hooked his pickup over the white line and hard across opposing traffic toward a girder bridge that spanned the Sacramento to Grand Island.

  He had barely cleared the shoulder before an oncoming truck horn tore into the air as he steered the Rampage down an angled swale of windblown sedge then up a short rise of eroded earth and onto the bridge.

  By the time that pickup had sped over the crisscrossed girder shadows and found a place to stop Tommy was moving around the front of that Bronco carrying a tire iron.

  * * *

  IVY WAS in the yacht club lobby putting in a little social time with one of her clients when she saw Essie through glass doors cross the arbored walkway toward the parking lot, an unlit cigarette in one hand, dialing her cellular with the other.

  There was something about the way Essie walked and looked that had a feel of panic and tribulation to it.

  * * *

  THE TIRE iron came down on the hood of that Bronco with punishing force. "Get out of the car, you white trash faggot."

  Shane was locked in and not moving and the tire iron slammed down just above his head and put a black crease in the roof line.

  "You little fag shit. You gutless fag shit."

  Shane looked like something frozen behind glass. The hard-ass dooms linger turned shit scared mannequin. When Tommy lost it, when everything inside him went overboard, Shane knew. He was not gonna trade blood with the hallucination that had taken over his brother's body and whipsawed the tire iron right at the car door.

  * * *

  DANE WATCHED the assault persist through twisted shapes of undergrowth that ran the length of a guardrail he hid behind. His cellular began to ring as Tommy whaled that tire iron at the Bronco's flank causing at least one car to slow, the passengers to stare.