Warrior (Freelancer Book 2) (15 page)

Rick piloted the bus down M Street in Georgetown. If anything, Georgetown looked worse than before he left. The Summer of Love and Woodstock had plowed head-on into Altamont, and the human debris from that disaster was everywhere.

Kids ranging from college age down to eleven or twelve years old were drifting up and down the sidewalks, smoking cigarettes in doorways, or trying to catch some sleep in the afternoon sun. Rick thought that it must be tough to find a safe place to sleep at night, so a nap during the day could be a real lifesaver for these wanderers.

DC Metro police were cruising Wisconsin Avenue on their Vespas, blowing horns at the sleepers or, for those too tired or too stoned to react, parking the little scooters and walking over to deliver a sharp rap on the sole of the foot. The kids would pick up their backpacks, plastic bags, and surplus Army gear and rejoin the slow drift to another place to sleep.

The more alert were working the tourists for coins at the corner of M and Wisconsin. Through the open van windows, Rick could hear all the variations of "Got any spare change?"

He remembered a panhandler in Manhattan who'd given him a two-minute standup comedy routine before hitting him up for cash. Afterward, he had pursued Rick down the sidewalk and insisted that there must have been a mistake. Rick said the twenty was no mistake. His performance was better than most he'd seen at the improv clubs.

By comparison, these kids were barely trying.

As he crept along in the solid mass of traffic, he had time to notice the predators. They looked like the kids, but their faces were a little sharper, a lot more awake, and far more calculating.

Repeatedly, they'd come up to a kid, usually one who was alone, offer a cigarette, and then start a quiet and serious discussion. Rick knew that the pimps worked the bus station over on New York Avenue, so he figured these were the various cults out to "save" these poor young souls.

Most of the kids just took the cigarette and stared blankly in the general direction of their benefactor. Others had that desperate look of someone well past the end of their rope, and they listened intently.

Rick remembered what it was like. One year, he'd hitched down to the Daytona motorcycle races with just enough money to buy an infield ticket. Most of it was fantastic: the almost-solid sound of 100 race-tuned engines at maximum revolutions, swooping riders almost parallel to the asphalt in the turns, riders drafting and fighting for position. Other parts weren't quite as enjoyable: camping in the grassy area next to the track with hundreds of drunken Pagans, Warlocks, Banditos, and a mixed bag of Florida Outlaws, Mongols, and other hangers-on.

The worst was when he tried to take a nap under the boardwalk and got worked over by a platoon of Jesus Freaks. It felt as practiced and planned as an NVA ambush. Before he was fully awake, they'd offered him water, food, and cigarettes; and one particularly attractive girl was sitting on his backpack. They had never stopped smiling as they told him how happy they were, how miserable their lives on the street had been, what incredible love and affection they had for each other, and the glorious sense of joy when they accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

They'd all gathered around him in a warm huddle. Later he learned that this was called "snapping," so completely filling the potential recruits with love and warmth that they would suddenly "snap" into the group.

Rick just felt awkward and uncomfortable. He ducked down and out of the embrace, retrieved his backpack by tumbling its rider onto the sand, and escaped.

His childhood with an alcoholic parent had given him a thick armor against anyone who used love as a weapon. Even so, he could still feel the powerful pull of that promise of unconditional love and acceptance.

As he made the left turn to Wisconsin, Rick thought he'd given his trust to the Army and his loyalty to his country, and, even though he still had a positive attitude toward the U.S.A., his allegiance to any group much bigger than a dozen was pretty well used up.

He hauled the VW around an immediate left turn and into a narrow alley where Cosmopolitan Couriers had their garage, office, dispatch center, repair shop, and parts department. Parking illegally across from the entrance, he took a deep breath and went inside.

It was a mess. Well, it was always a mess, but this was extreme, even for Cosmopolitan Couriers. BMWs were lined up along the back wall three deep, and the left side of the space was filled from floor to ceiling with boxes marked with what looked like part numbers.

The only open space was the front desk where the dispatcher worked and the bottom of the stairs that ran up to the second floor. Cesaro, the immigrant mechanic who did all the repairs and maintenance on the bikes, was carrying one of the boxes down those stairs and staggered over to place it on the growing pile.

The dispatcher, an older man with an enormous mustache—Rick had never known his name—was hard at work. A multi-line punch-button phone was blinking silently, slips of paper were lined up precisely on the desk, and he was coolly giving commands into a large stand microphone.

Snarls of distorted radio noise that, as far as Rick was concerned, could have been Martians discussing the weather, came over. It must take practice to learn Martian, since the dispatcher calmly responded with new orders, directions, or advice.

Down the counter, Boyce Gassel, one of the co-owners of the courier service, was shuffling a pile of bills and invoices, muttering to himself. He didn't look up so Rick walked over, leaned on the old wooden counter, and said, "Hey Boyce."

Boyce's eyes flicked up for a second and went back to the papers in front of him. When his head snapped up and he scowled, Rick knew that he had realized that a man guilty of the sad and ugly death of one of his beloved bikes had dared to show his face.

Without warning, Boyce stood up and took a swing at Rick. Luckily, the counter shortened his reach, and Rick, who had expected something like this, stepped back out of range.

Boyce's face was bright red and he spoke in a low, venomous whisper, "You shitty little son of a bitch. How dare you walk in here after dumping Number 115 into a Metro dig? You were fired the instant that bike hit the bottom and don't even try to get your fucking back pay."

Remaining out of reach, Rick said, "I feel terrible about that bike. Seeing it down there was like a death in the family."

He held up his hands in a placating gesture, "Look, I'm here to pay you back."

Boyce grabbed for Rick's shirt but missed. "You bastard! That was my baby! It was the first Beemer I'd ever owned! This whole company is built around it, and you think you can destroy it and just pay me some fucking money?"

The dispatcher cradled a phone on his shoulder and said, "Bullshit, Boyce. You say every busted bike was your first bike. By now, I've got to believe you went and bought a hundred bikes at once."

Boyce glared at the older man and then turned back to Rick. "OK, so 115 wasn't the first. It was still one of my babies."

Rick nodded. "I understand that. That's why the first thing I'm doing, now that I'm back in town, is trying to make it right. I'll pay you full price for the bike."

"Are you kidding? That was a vintage jewel!" Boyce's voice was still furious, but Rick thought his face was a bit less flushed. "There is no amount of money that can make up for the loss."

Cesaro was passing behind Rick, carrying another box. "No way, Boyce, 115 was $1540 new and counting the parts and depreciation, it's worth $893.54. Maybe $900, but no more."

Boyce scowled at the mechanic. "What about having to hire a truck to lift it off the spikes where this bastard left it? What about my mental anguish when I saw it lying broken in that pit?"

Cesaro put the box on the pile and headed back upstairs. "I don't know about your anguish, but you know damn well that the Metro crane pulled it out and dropped it right in the bed of our pickup truck."

"Traitor!" Boyce shouted after Cesaro's departing back.

Rick pulled the ten hundred dollar bills from his pocket and fanned them out so Boyce could count them. "I figured that $900 was the price, but I'll add in a bit for your anguish. I've got a thousand here. Will that make us good?"

Boyce leaned back and began to pound out a rhythm on the counter with his hands. "You're not thinking you're getting your old job back, are you? Because that's not happening."

"Nope. I just want to make things right."

Boyce's hands suddenly went to a crescendo, stopped, and he thrust a hand forward. "OK, give me the thousand, and I'll let you walk out of here alive."

Rick was amused at the idea of Boyce beating him up; but he was already looking over his shoulder for too many people, so he stepped forward and held out the money.

Boyce snatched it out of his hand and began counting.

Rick glanced around and asked, "What's going on? Are you shutting down the business?"

Without looking up, Boyce said, "Hell no. We just lost the lease on this place. Fuck! You've made me lose count. Wait a second."

The dispatcher chuckled, "Only you could get lost counting to ten."

Boyce glared at him but kept counting. When he was finished, he tapped the bills into a neat stack, pulled an enormous roll of bills from his front pocket, undid the rubber bands holding it together, and added Rick's money. Rolling it back again, he looked around and said, "No, we just lost the lease. Some idiot is going to try to create a jazz club in here. Can you imagine? I mean, it was a stable before we showed up, and we've never gotten the stench of horse shit out of the floor."

Rick nodded and asked, "Where are you going?" "Up to Adams Morgan, where it's still happening. Georgetown is over, man."

Rick laughed. "Are you kidding? The only things up there are Columbia Station, the Omega, and the Ontario Theater." He shook his head, "And the Ontario's been showing nothing but chop-socky and porn since their little art-house experiment failed."

Boyce had already turned back to his papers, "It's going to be the next big thing. Now get your sorry ass out of here before I change my mind and beat you up."

Rick gave an OK sign to the dispatcher as a "thank you" and headed for the old double doors left over from the place's stable days. "I'll see you around, Boyce."

"Better not. I said I wouldn't beat you up, but my baby is calling for revenge, and I might just run you down if I see you on the streets."

"I'll lie awake nights worrying about you."

Gas lines were new.

There didn't seem to be any real reason for their existence—no one could point to any real shortages—but Rick heard every possible cause as he listened to the radio while he waited two hours to get to a pump: tankers parked out in the Chesapeake Bay waiting for higher prices, the president's price controls, or the worsening Arab-Israeli tensions. All he knew was that he was glad he had the VW. At 50 miles an hour, it could go all day on a single tank of gas. A motorcycle should be even better.

Rick sighed. A motorcycle would be better for many reasons. It felt like an eternity since he'd danced. Of course, there had been the night road race through the Black Hills a couple of weeks before, but the effect of that had faded. So, when he finally put the allotted ten gallons in the bus, he decided not to drive back to Ingomar Street but to try and find the Dawn Riders instead.

Their old clubhouse on H Street looked abandoned, the faded sign "Motor Mouse Couriers" now off-kilter, swinging by a single chain. Of course, it had looked abandoned when it was in operation, so Rick parked the bus, pounded on the garage doors, and walked around back. The gang's mechanic and
de facto
leader, Hector Martinez, had died last year helping to save Eve's life and, without him, it looked like the old clubhouse was closed.

It wasn't very surprising since, as far as Rick could tell, Hector had been the only member with a real job.

Rick got back in the VW and thought for a few minutes. Then he headed to an area of strip clubs, bars, and tattoo parlors in Upper Georgetown. A part of Cleveland Park, it had always been the best place to find a large group of bikers, assuming that anyone in their right minds would want to find a large group of bikers.

If they weren't watching the girls dance in Act 4 or the Good Guys, they'd be listening to local rock bands in Clancy's or the Keg. In any case, they'd be drunk and ready to fight.

Of course, there weren't all that many times when they weren't either drunk or ready to fight so no point in putting things off.

It was dark by the time he parked outside The Keg, making sure he was well away from the pools of light cast by the few unbroken overhead lamps. Turning off the engine and killing the interior light, Rick reached down between the driver's seat and the door and pulled out the lug wrench that came with all VWs. An 18-inch steel rod with a socket at one end on a 90-degree angle, it wasn't terribly useful for getting tires on and off. Rick had replaced it with an X-shaped universal wrench after the first flat tire, but it tended to be a handy item to carry around.

He slipped it into the right-hand sleeve of his denim jacket so that the socket was hidden by the cuff, and the rod lay along the outside of his forearm. It was only a precaution but, in his experience, bars like this were the places where you took precautions.

Prepared, he got out and walked over to Clancy's. "The problem with strip bars," he thought, "was that they had to light the place enough to see the girls (which was bad enough) but that meant you could see the cheap and chipped nature of the place and the unsavory faces of the clientele. Dark bars were always better. You could at least pretend you were in the kind of sophisticated place you saw in magazine ads."

He bought a beer and walked through the crowd, pretending to ogle the two tired, depressed, naked women slowly swaying on the platforms but actually looking for Dawn Riders. He didn't see any, but there were still three bars to go.

As he strolled over to The Keg, he could hear the sound that always meant a fight was starting. A rising confusion of shouts, threats, foot scraping and—well, it was just the sound of a fight. Rick had been a bouncer during college, and the sound was a messenger of trouble. He reached into the jeans pocket and pulled out his Zippo, wrapping the fingers of his right hand around it. While he didn't intend to get in a fight, in his experience fights in bars often didn't give you a choice.

Even from a distance, he could tell they were all bikers, their "colors" proudly displayed. As he walked closer, he recognized one as the Dawn Rider he'd exchanged insults with outside the old clubhouse back in December. Now, a couple of Pagans, easily recognized by the flaming sign of the Norse Sun God on their colors, were about to kick the snot out of him.

Pagans were one of the toughest gangs on the East Coast. Rick didn't buy the rumor that the "secret" knock on their clubhouse out in Prince George's County was to bang on the front door and then step aside before the .45 hollow point came through at chest height.

It wasn't that he doubted the Pagans would do something like that; he just didn't think they'd want to bother replacing the door all the time.

True or not, the Pagans were not people you wanted to mess with. On the other hand, Rick did need to get in touch with the Dawn Riders. As he watched, the confrontation made its inevitable progression from threats to insults, and the first fists were thrown. He knew the next step would be weapons and decided to see if he could even the playing field a little.

Walking up behind the Pagan on his left, an overweight guy with a Fu Manchu mustache and body odor that was almost a physical presence, Rick tapped him on the shoulder, and, as he turned, hit him with a classic rabbit punch, the Zippo-filled fist striking at the place where his jaw met his neck.

The Zippo kept his fingers from collapsing inward and put all the power of hours of weight lifting directly into the fat guy. First, his head snapped away from Rick, and then his massive body followed. He spun completely once and fell over the battered hedge that was desperately attempting to add a little class to the bar.

"Well, that's one who won't remember me," thought Rick. He turned to the other two just in time to see the Dawn Rider dropping to the ground without being touched. The Pagan looked a bit surprised as well.

Rick raised his arms, primarily to conceal his face—he really didn't want these guys to be able to identify him later—and advanced. His opponent was a tall guy in a dumb-looking leather cowboy hat. When he grinned in a manner Rick was sure he thought wolfish, he revealed about four remaining teeth. Clearly, the entrance of a new fighter had changed the rules because the biker reached into his back pocket and pulled out a large set of brass knuckles, which he quickly fitted on his left hand.

"Must be my lucky day," Rick thought.

He moved forward, careful not to trip on the Dawn Rider, and dropped his right fist a little. As he figured, the Pagan immediately launched a looping left at his face. Even without the brass knuckles, it could have done considerable damage. With them, it could shatter bones.

If it landed.

Rick snapped his right arm up and blocked hard at the man's forearm, leading with the tire iron in his sleeve. There was a snap as iron won the contest against bone. As the man's face clenched in pain, Rick jammed the leather cowboy hat down over the biker's eyes, spun him quickly, and launched him between two parked cars with a foot in the small of his back.

Neither Pagan was going to do much of anything in the immediate future, so Rick slid the tire iron up the pant leg of his jeans and let the sharp end drop into his boot. Then, he turned to the Dawn Rider.

To his disgust, the man had fallen into a puddle of his own vomit but, since he'd apparently passed out before the fight even started, didn't seem to be injured.

Stinking but not injured.

Rick rolled him over on his back, stepped on his toes to keep his feet braced, and pulled him upright. Then he stepped forward, flattened his shoulder into the man's gut, and carried him into the bar.

Inside were the usual dim lights, loud noises, and pungent aromas of a biker bar. Rick did notice that there were no stools or chairs, only large, tall tables that he suspected were firmly nailed into the floor. When he saw that the windows had all been replaced with glass brick, he knew that the management had taken all the precautions they could against seeing their property destroyed in the nightly warfare. One of the bartenders glanced over at him and noted the body on his shoulder. He nodded but prudently stayed behind the battered-but-sturdy wooden bar.

Rick spotted other Dawn Riders across the room near the stage where a young band was pounding out some almost tuneless Metallica cover song.

He went over. "Anyone in charge here?"

An older man with a braided beard took a drink of beer, belched, wiped his mouth, and said, "That sort of depends on what you want."

Rick heaved the man off his shoulder and placed him on his feet. Amazingly, he managed to stay erect. "I believe this is one of yours," he said. "I found him outside with a couple of Pagans debating whether to take him apart or just stomp him flat."

The bearded man looked at the weaving figure with a total lack of concern, "Yeah, that's 'Brains.' As in 'Shit for.'"

Brains finally lost the battle with gravity and fell backward into the arms of a brother Dawn Rider who, as soon as he felt the vomit on his shirt, allowed him to complete his trajectory to the floor.

The first man pulled on one of the little braids coming down from his beard. "Pagans? So you're saying we've got a beef with them, now?" He dug a booted toe into the side of the man on the floor. "All because of Brains having 15 or 20 too many beers?"

Rick laughed, "I don't think so. 'Street fighter' here passed out before he ever threw a punch."

"Why are you being so helpful?" The leader peered at Rick's face in the dim light. "Oh yeah, Hector's friend. The Army buddy who got his ass killed."

He held up a hand as Rick began to say something. "Don't say anything about it. Hector never did a damn thing he didn't want to do, and I sincerely do not want to know what exactly happened on 14th Street.

"I'm 'Preacher,' and I guess I'm about as much of a leader as this sorry-ass chapter has. I think Hector called you 'Zippo' so why don't we leave it at that, because I don't want to know any more about you. For one thing, people with guns come around looking for you, and, for another, I just don't give a shit."

"Fine with me." Neither man offered a hand to shake, but, when a muscular waitress who looked like she could go several rounds with Muhammad Ali brought a new round of beers to the table, Rick was given a bottle. He assumed it was originally for the biker on the floor.

Preacher looked down at Brains, now wrapped around the base of the table and snoring loudly. "So, I'm assuming you didn't just show up to save this poor idiot from having his skull broke. My guess is you want your bike back."

"Yep."

Preacher took a long drink of beer, belched, and finally said, "Well, I would be happy to get that piece of shit rice-grinder out of my sight. Of course, you realize there is rent due?"

"Why don't we consider Brains here as a down payment?"

"Why not? Because he ain't worth shit." Preacher sighed, "But I guess that's the burden of being chapter prez. I've got to worry about the worthless ones."

Another Dawn Rider raised his beer in a mock toast, "Because, we sure as shit don't."

The rest of the bikers laughed as Preacher just shook his head.

Rick asked, "Where can I pick up the bike? I stopped by Motor Mouse, and you've clearly moved on."

"Well, when your club president, who also happens to be the guy who paid the rent and held the lease, gets his ass killed…well, yeah, we figured it was time to wander."

"I had the same feeling," Rick said.

"We noticed." The biker said dryly, "It took a while but we found a new place. It's down in Southeast, right behind Pier Nine."

Rick was surprised. "The gay dance club?"

"Yeah, we're trading a bit of security for the use of a row house in the back. As it happened, two of our members were working as dancers in the upstairs lounge anyway."

Preacher shrugged. "Apparently, black leather works as well on the dance floor as it does on the road. As the Buddha said, 'whatever floats your boat.'"

"I'll drink to that." Rick raised his bottle. As he drank, he looked around the crowded bar. The two men he'd left in the parking lot were being helped through the front door. They didn't look like they had clear memories, or any memories at all, but it was probably time to leave.

"I'm out of here." He put his mostly full beer on the table. "When can I pick up the bike?"

Preacher wiped the foam off his mustache with a hairy forearm. "Well, let's see. What day is today?" He looked around at the other Dawn Riders but got only blank looks.

"It's Monday." The voice came from the floor at their feet.

Preacher looked down at the recumbent Brains, "That's what we keep him around for. Stupid as he is, he usually knows things like that." His attention turned back to Rick. "Tuesday is a big club night so we'll be around. In the meantime, we'll try and remember where we stuck that Japanese piece of shit."

"Sounds like a plan." Rick stuck out his hand.

Preacher just stared at it.

"Jeez, it's clean and everything, too." Rick held up his hand and examined both the front and back. "Forgot how friendly you guys are."

"You're lucky we don't kick the crap out of you." Rick turned and said over his shoulder as he left,