Red Thunder (6 page)

Still no motion from anybody. I racked a round and raised the muzzle
so it pointed at Homer's chest. That sound, of the slide being worked
on a shotgun, has the amazing ability to clear your mind. It sure
helped with this bunch. All six hands reached for the sky. I moved away
from the door and motioned to the two on the bed. They got up slowly,
the girl reaching down to get some of her clothes from the floor.

"Uh-uh!"
I shouted, scaring her badly. "Kick 'em over
here." She did, and I could see there was no weapon in them. The guy
did the same. I kicked the stuff back at them, and they started to
dress.

In no more than thirty seconds they had their stuff together, which
was just a little clothing, the pound of coke, and some free-basing
equipment in a cardboard box. They slunk out the door, giving both of
us a wide berth. We followed them out and watched them down to their
car, an unbelievably rusty '60s model Oldsmobile station wagon almost
full of bald tires and packrat junk. Aunt Maria came out of room 206
with a pair of sneakers wrapped in a dirty shirt. She threw it over the
railing and it landed on the hood of the car. Homer glared up at us and
gave us the finger, then backed out recklessly, put it in forward and
tried to burn rubber on the way out. The car was too old for that, but
it did put out an impressive cloud of white smoke.

"Now can I have the gun, Mom?"

"Where are you boys... sorry, where are you young men going?"

"Somewhere else to study," I told her.

"It better not be some bar full of snow bunnies."

"No way, Mrs. Garcia."

"I'm serious. You guys come home plastered and you can sleep it off in a pool chair, 'cause I ain't letting you in."

"We'll be good."

"Manny, you clean that desk and flush the paper towels before you go."

"I was just about to suggest that myself." She looked at me hard,
trying to tell if I was kidding her again. Mom doesn't have the world's
greatest sense of humor. At last she snorted, reached up and tousled my
hair—and I wish she'd stop doing that—then took the
Mossburg and headed back for the office and the gun safe.

"Hang on just a minute, Dak." I took a roll of paper towels from the nearby maid's cart and entered 206.

It still smelled of Homer and friends. I swear, there is a junkie
smell, and if you'd smelled it as often as I have you'd never mistake
it for anything else. It happens when they've been dusting or spiking
for several years. I don't know if it's from lack of washing or
something in their sweat. I'd smelled it on Homer, but if we turned
away every person who might be using the room to fix in, we'd lose half
our income. We have to pretty much overlook personal drug use, unless
you get violent behind it. No selling, and no refining, that was our
rule.

Twice we'd had to take down meth labs after they'd been running a
few days. That's a total disaster to a motel operator. Both times we'd
had to simply seal up the room and never use it again. After those
chemicals soak into the walls for a bit, you need a permit from the
Environmental Protection Agency to open the room again. It cost
thousands of dollars in cleanup, which we just didn't have.

I went into the bathroom—every towel and washcloth filthy, and
to look at them, you'd never have guessed they ever used a shower at
all—where I soaked a handful of paper towels. Dak was looking
down at the powder-covered desk.

"Don't even think about it," I said.

"I wasn't." He pretended to be offended. "That was some shooting."

"Don't tell her that, I have enough work keeping her out of trouble without you telling her what a great vigilante she is."

"No need to get snippy."

He was right. But I was feeling pretty awful, as I usually do when a
thing like that is over. Mom doesn't seem to have any fear in her at
all, but I sure do.

There was half a dozen baby Ziplocs scattered on the floor, what
they called dime bags. All of them had a pinch of powder in them. I
gathered them up and Dak helped me move the desk to be sure there
wasn't anything illegal back there. I flushed the bags and the paper
towels, waited to be sure it was all gone.

"You better make a note, you don't want no drug-sniffing dogs in this room."

"Not for at least a year," I agreed. "Now, do I have to frisk you,
or can I trust that you didn't pick up any of those dimes when I wasn't
looking?"

"Trust me."

"Okay." I turned and looked around, spotted the bullet hole about
six feet up the wall. With the .22 there had been no chance of it
passing through the wall into the next room. I stuck the desk pen in
the hole, but the slug had fallen into the space between walls. I'd
plaster and paint it that evening. No need to alarm guests with bullet
holes in the walls. That could endanger our half-star Michelin rating.

"Let's get out of here," I said.

"Suits me. Let's go someplace we can do this free blow."

I threw the roll of paper towels at him but he was already out the door.

DAK'S FATHER OWNS a car repair business a mile down
the road from us, four stalls with lifts. The big chains undercut him
on lubes and oil changes and tune-ups, but his lot is always full
because the people in the neighborhood know he can be persuaded to wait
for full payment if you're in a bind. He sells a lot of recap tires. He
is considered to be a magician by the people at Motor Vehicles, who
send him the cars nobody believes will
ever
pass the Florida emissions standards. He usually can patch them up enough to qualify for another year.

Behind the main repair shop there is a two-car garage that used to
hold stacks of used tires but now sports a sign: DAKTARI'S CUSTOM SPEED
SHOP. This was where
Blue Thunder
was conceived and born.

Dak turned down the narrow shell alleyway that ran beside the main
building and we roared through it and stopped on the cracked concrete
next to Blue. We were on a screaming red and yellow Honda trail bike
with me perched uneasily behind him. I don't know how girls can stand
riding like that.

"See how you like that one," Dak said, pointing to a nearly
identical bike, but with different colors. It looked okay to me. I got
on, started it, revved the engine, grinned at Dak. I had an old Suzuki
for a few months the previous summer until I sort of fell off and it
wasn't worth fixing. Okay, I totaled it, and it was a good thing I
landed in a ditch or I might have been hurt bad.

"You got a helmet for him?" I turned and saw Mr. Sinclair coming out
the back door. He nodded to me, went to put his arm around his son's
shoulders. Dak pretended to fight him off and they played that little
game of grab-ass you see some fathers do with their sons. It made me
jealous as hell, I'm ashamed to say. I'd never tell Dak.

As usual there were a couple bright but battered race cars parked
there in the back. I'm not talking about Grand Prix or Indy cars. These
were poor man's stock cars or sometimes the cheaper formulas. Racing
people like to come to Daytona. They like to live here, Daytona is a
magic zip code to put on your mail. Nobody who came to Dak's Custom
Speed was going to be out there in the Fabulous 500 without paying a
lot
of dues first. Unless you're a third- or fourth-generation Petty or
Earnhardt you're going to be working your way up through the Saturday
night dirt track circuit. You'll be scrabbling to pay for enough good
rubber to get through one more race, pounding out the dents with a
hammer, and painting it all over with a Wal-Mart spray can. This was
the kind of guy who came to see Dak.

Most nights after the garage closed, Mr. Sinclair was back here with
him. Keeping beaters on the road was his bread and butter, but working
on fast cars with his son was pure enjoyment.

Sometimes I wondered why Dak would
bother
with trying to
get into space. I mean, if I was in his place, would I want to change
it? His life seemed the next thing to paradise, to me.

Dak tossed me a helmet and I strapped it on.

"You boys aren't going too far on those things, are you?" Mr. Sinclair asked.

"We gotta check 'em out. Dad," Dak told him.

"Just remember they don't belong to you."

"We won't be out all night. So long." He waved at us as we sprayed some gravel around and zoomed out onto the highway.

I looked over at Dak and he was tapping one side of his helmet with
one finger. I didn't get it. He did it again, and then pointed at my
helmet and said something, but I couldn't hear him over the roar of the
bike engines. I was about to shout that to him, when I felt the helmet
where he was pointing. There was a knob there, which I turned.

"Can you hear me now?"

I turned the knob a little more.

"Cool," I told him, flipping out the little built-in mike.

"Only the best for the jerk owns these things. I may have fibbed a
little when I told him I needed a couple more days to finish up. Can
you dig it? Two radical rides like this, one for him and one for his
girlfriend. And a radio so he can coo sweet nothings into her ears."

I glanced down at the tank of my bike, which was an electric pink. I
guess that explained the Day-Glo peach color of my helmet. Well, at
least it didn't have any adorable kittens or bluebirds or stuff like
that painted on it.

WE GOT OUT of town fast, leaving the carloads of
tempting, reddening Yankee-girl flesh and cold Florida beer behind us.
We took smaller and smaller roads, pretty soon roaring down dirt
trails. We spooked two possums, three deer, and a skunk. We missed the
deer and the skunk missed us. It's getting so you can't go anywhere
without running into deer, sometimes literally. They say there's about
forty million deer in the country now. They're getting to be a real
nuisance, and it seems every year there's fewer people into hunting
them. Me, if I never taste another venison steak it'd be too soon. Mom
freezes enough every hunting season to carry us for six months. "Free
meat," she says, and who can argue with her?

It was a grand day to be alive.

I didn't really tip to where we were going until we went past the
backwoods Baptists, or peckerwood Pentecostals, whichever they were,
that I remembered from that night when we took the drunk astronaut
home. There was a freshly painted sign out among the dozens of others:

THE LORD DON'T BLESS GOVERMENT MEN!
"INFERNAL" REVENOOERS NOT WELCOM!

"I guess spray cans of paint don't have spellcheckers," I told Dak. He laughed. "So what are we doing out here? Studying?"

"We could do that, yeah, we could."

I doubted it. But I followed him off the road and down the long
driveway until we could see the house and outlying structures. What
you'd call a compound, I guess, except it wasn't fenced or anything.

It looked a lot different in the daylight. With most of the outdoor
pole lights burned out there had been a sinister aspect to it,
everything in deep shadows and only a few stars visible overhead
through the skinny pine trees. Now it looked unremarkable, much like a
thousand other backwoods Florida ranches, maybe a little more
prosperous than most.

One thing that hadn't been there when we arrived that night a week
ago was Alicia, sitting in a canvas lounge chair in shorts, halter top,
and big sunglasses, grinning at the surprised look on Dak's face.

"What you doing here, girl?" he wanted to know.

"What are you talking about? I go where I want to go, you know that."

"Yeah, but—"

"When I found out you were coming out here I figured I'd better see
what kind of game you were running on this man, keep your fool ass out
of trouble."

"Game? I ain't runnin'... how'd you know I was coming out here?"

"What, you were going to 'surprise' me?"

Dak looked a little sheepish, glanced at me, and I took the hint.
Let them work it out, I didn't need to listen in on this. I casually
strolled over in the direction of the swimming pool, but I couldn't
help glancing back at them, and I couldn't help smiling. Dak runs to
about six and a half feet. Alicia is about five-two, light brown with
pale blue eyes, what an old slave owner would have called a mulatto and
these days we call mixed-race. So why is it that when they argue, it's
Alicia standing there with her head thrown back and her eyes flashing
who is clearly in control and big gawky Dak who is trying to figure out
how he lost it again?

HOW DO YOU spell neglect? I'd start with last year's
350ix Mercedes sports model parked near the back door of the house,
looking like there was nothing wrong with it worse than a flat right
front tire... but being slowly buried under a layer of pine needles. It
would make you cry to see what the pine resin had already done to the
paint job.

I don't know, does having a better grade of car sitting up on blocks
and rusting out in your front yard qualify as being more prosperous?
Whether it was a fairly new Beemer or a forty-year-old Pinto it still
shouted redneck to me.

I wandered slowly around the house and grounds while Dak and Alicia
worked it out. The place was both a little better and a little worse
than it had looked in the dark.

The house itself was a few years overdue for a coat of paint. Let
that go too long and the termites could take it right down to the
foundation in a few years.

There was one of those 1980s-type satellite dishes, the ones about
the size of a flying saucer that cost ten thousand dollars or more and
didn't do half the job of the hubcap-sized dishes they
give
away now just to get your business. It was pointed about ten degrees
below
the horizon, maybe to pick up the ever-popular Earthworm Channel. It
must have been impressive and futuristic in its day, but now it was
draped with Spanish moss and caked with slimy-looking mildew. Mildew:
the Florida state flower.