Santana was desultorily singing about black magic women in the background as she danced around the little stage that was surrounded on three sides by a bar…and patrons. Like a double-wide shuffleboard table, her stage was long, narrow, jutted out into the room, and was surfaced with good wood flooring. Ironically, she kept a can of shuffleboard wax at the entrance to the stage to keep the floor smooth and slick so she could do her trademark slides…a high kick that ended in a rapid hell-slide into the splits. Every guy in the place watched that kick, eager to see if there was any chance that her jewelled g-string might reveal just a little bit more than was intended.
Wednesday was usually her day off, but the bar was short a girl tonight…that insipid Janine, all boobs and no brains at all had called in saying she had locked her keys in her car…or maybe she had lost them…and she didn’t know when she would be able to get her brainless platinum bubblehead to work. So, the manager had called her to see if she wanted the hours, knowing she could always use the extra money, what with the private detective’s fees and all. Besides, Animal’s bike had crapped out on the run and he was stuck a day’s ride out of town, trying to get it fixed. Kraut, Animal’s cousin, came by two days ago to tell her about the breakdown and borrow some money for the parts Animal needed to get the bike back up. She was expecting him back sometime tomorrow afternoon…so she might as well put in an extra night’s work…nothing else to do with her time except brood.
Wednesdays were rather quiet nights and, at nine o’clock, it was fairly early yet…later, as the soldiers began straggling back to the base, they would be stopping off at the Body Shop, right outside the main gate, for a last beer and a hopeful view of some hopelessly unavailable pulchritude. It was not a night for the gowns and boas and gloves…it was a night for bikinis and G-strings and as little effort as possible…she saved the fancy duds for the weekend crowd and private parties, where the money really was. Moving her hips in time with the pulsing Latin beat, she sidled up to one of the customers and gave him a slow, sexy smile, one hand toying suggestively with the bra clasp between her breasts. Leaning forward, her hands covering the jewel-encrusted blue crepe cups, she quickly flashed the customer, winking slyly at his neighbour. When the man reached out to try to touch her, she shook a finger at him, smiling as she backed away, hips never losing their suggestive pumping in time with the music. Tease, tease, tease…she thought as she moved out of arm’s reach…that’s what the whole thing was about. So why did so many of the guys actually think the dancers were available?
She danced to the centre of the stage, out of reach of grasping hands, and played a slow game of peek-a-boo with her bra, the patrons’ eyes glued to her as she pressed her ample breasts together, bra clasp undone, only her hands holding the cups in place. She danced tantalizingly close to one man, then back to the centre where she came to a complete halt. Slowly, acting as if the very act of removing her bra in front of fifty strange men was the most erotic event of her life, she slipped one hand beneath a blue cup and, covering her breast with her hand, let the cup spring free on its elastic straps. She repeated the motion with her other hand, the bra falling to the stage floor where she kicked it out of reach of the souvenir-seekers in the crowd…damned things took forever to make and cost a fucking fortune! Arms crossed over her breasts now, playing more peek-a-boo games with the salivating crowd, she looked up as the door from the parking lot opened and a blast of chill evening air blew into the room.
She stopped moving as she watched the couple enter the bar, neither of them looking up at the stage. A thin woman under a fluffy bubble of bleached platinum hair was being helped out of her coat by a slender young man wearing a distinctive fringed leather jacket. The music continued pumping in the background as the blonde reached up to cup the cheek of the man helping her and his head lowered to kiss her. He raised his head suddenly at an unexpected sound.
“You bitch!” she screamed, leaping up onto the nearest bar barefoot, her spike heels standing eerily alone in the middle of the stage.
“You fucking, cheating, lying, low-life, scum-sucking, man-stealing bitch!” she screamed again, jumping down from the bar and covering the distance between them in two rapid strides. “You back-stabbing, two-faced, mattress-backed whore!” she shrieked, hitting the blonde girl in the chest with both hands, knocking the girl backwards and out of Animal’s protective reach.
“I gave you a place to live when you didn’t have any!” She grabbed the girl by the front of her tee shirt with her left hand and planted a strong fist in the girl’s face.
“I fed you when you were hungry!” She dragged the girl outside the doors, knowing that a fight inside the bar could get her fired and she needed this job. She dragged her out to the front of the building, spun her around, and laid a heavy, hard right to the girl’s mouth.
“You fucking whore, I loaned you my costumes! Helped you get a job!” The girl was trying to pull free so she released her shirt with a shove up against the building, then dropped down and laid a right cross to the side of the blonde's jaw. The girl tried to shield her face with her hands, but received a haymaker of a gut punch for her troubles and started crying.
“I helped you when you were down and out, you fucking slut, you two-bit whore, you slimy piece of shit…and look how you repay me!” The girl had slid down the rough wood siding, curled in a protective ball, her hands covering her face.
“Get up, you sorry sack of shit!” she screamed, scuffing gravel from the parking lot at her. “You sneaked off with him for two days…fuck! I even covered your shift for you today so you could hang around fucking my man…you lie and cheat and connive…but you aren’t woman enough to stand up and fight for him?”
Huddled against the building, her arms wrapped protectively around her head and face, the girl simply shook her head.
She kicked the girl in her exposed butt. “Get the fuck out of here, you cowardly piece of shit. Get out and don’t come back. If I see you again, I won’t stop until you can’t answer me.” The girl struggled to her feet and turned her battered, tear-and-mascara stained face to the crowd appealingly, but no one moved to offer her any kind of help. Slowly she walked…limped…away, her pale hair standing out from her head like dandelion fluff.
Fists still clenched, she stood trembling, more with rage than cold, although it was pretty chilly outside and she was nearly naked. She felt a shirt being thrown over her shoulders, twitched into place to cover her bare breasts, and one of the waitresses from inside pressed her shoes and her bejewelled bra into her hands. The comments and congratulations from the crowd behind her were just so much buzz in her adrenalin fuelled mind...she stepped back into the club. “Hey, beautiful,” Animal beamed from the bar, raising his glass and holding out a drink for her. “Looks like you won me, fair and square.”
She drained the drink, a double Canadian whiskey and water. “Fuck you, Animal!” she snapped. “Give me my house keys.”
He looked bewildered, then condescending and then placating. “But baby, it’s over now…I’m all yours…you won the…”
She grabbed the front of his shirt, tight, up near the collar. “Give me my fucking keys!” she snarled at him, “And give them to me now!”
“OK, OK,” his tone was conciliatory as he tugged away from her choking grip, “But I got a lotta my stuff there. How about we talk this over in the morning when I can get a short to carry…”
“Now, asshole. Give me the fucking keys now or I will take them off you and you won’t walk for a week.” Her voice was alarmingly calm and low.
He paled, looking down to see her knee…and that strong, muscular dancer’s leg…positioned precisely between his thighs. “OK,” he barely squeaked out, reaching into the pocket of his cutaway and coming out with a small ring of keys. She snatched them away from him and released his collar with a shove to the Adam’s apple that sent him into a paroxysm of coughing.
“Noon tomorrow,” she said softly. “Your crap will be on the front stoop. Take it and do not ever let me see you again.”
“Or what?” he sneered, stepping back out of range. “Just what do you think you can do, huh? I’m not like Janine, you know, I fight back. And I’m bigger than you are…I can stop any move you can make!”
She had already turned away, promising the customers that as soon as she cleaned up, she would be back to finish her set on the stage. She turned back, hands on hips, bare breasts gleaming sweat in the spill over from the stage lights.
She looked him slowly, sneeringly, up and down. “Or what?” she echoed. “Or what? Well, I’ll tell you what, motorcycle boy…if I see your sorry ass again anywhere in this town, I’ll shoot it…and you...dead, on the spot.” Slowly she turned away and, hips twitching suggestively, sauntered back to the dressing rooms.
Showing posts with label biker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biker. Show all posts
Thursday, March 15, 2012
1%
It was hot…damned hot! Big Tiny had gone back to their room, a lean-to attached to the side of Bronson and Shayna’s mobile home, for a siesta. He was sprawled out on their sleeping bags on the floor and she could hear him snoring all the way out in the kitchen. Since she was unable to sleep during the day…once she was up, she was up…she had stationed herself beside an open window, not that it did a helluva lot of good.
The house was quiet. Shayna was at the breakfast bar polishing her nails, Bronson was reading comic books in the living room, and the only sound besides Big Tiny’s snoring was the slow, rhythmic scrape…scrape…scrape of Bear sharpening his knife, an Arkansas toothpick of prodigious size. She didn’t like Bear…or his girlfriend, Judy, the psycho. Judy was out somewhere in her fancy car, spending the wads of money her Daddy wired her from Texas every few weeks, no doubt happy to keep his delinquent daughter as far from home…and out of the clutches of the local law…as possible. Judy boasted that she was out on bail, awaiting trial on a murder rap in some little podunk Texas town, a claim she did not doubt, given Judy’s hair-trigger temper and lack of impulse control.
When Shayna got up to turn on the swamp cooler, she peeled herself off the vinyl kitchen chair and went to the lean-to. She was bored…she needed something to do. After a few minutes she found the cleaning kit, went back to the kitchen and took the .9mm Astra out of her boot. She removed the clip, ejected the round that was in the chamber, then opened the cleaning kit and took out the pieces of the rod and began to screw them together.
Slowly, methodically, she cleaned the weapon, smoothing on the gun oil and polishing it with slow strokes as her mind wandered. Bear seemed intent on his task, and she reflected on how such an attractive man could be such a first-rate flaming asshole. You tended to grow up equating physical beauty with goodness, but this guy was the poster boy for bad news…even among his own kind.
The bikers she knew…and she knew quite a few…tended to have a rather rigid code where their women were concerned. Depending on the club you rode with, that code could be as flexible as the “citizen” society or it could be so strict that a man did not even speak to another man’s ol’ lady without permission. But, whether club member or not, the rule among bikers was that if you had a problem with a brother's ol’ lady, you took it up with the brother and you let him sort the ol’ lady out. Even loners like Bear understood and abided by this rule…it saved a lot of misunderstandings, disagreements, and broken noses...not to mention broken bones, stab wounds and bullet holes. Bear, however, for some reason believed himself to be exempt from the rule. She shook her head as she wiped the weapon down, nearly ready to reassemble it.
Bear didn’t like her tattoo. What was it with guys like him, anyway? What fucking business was it of his? Discreetly tattooed on her lower right butt cheek was the legend “1%”. That was it. Nothing more…and none of Bear’s business. She had discovered his antipathy one night at work, one of the few nights Big Tiny wasn’t sitting at the bar sipping orange juice while she danced. Judy was working as a cocktail waitress in the same place…she blew Daddy’s money a lot faster than Daddy wired it…so most nights both Tiny and Bear would spend the evenings hanging out while the girls were on shift. Bear, however, drank beer…and a great deal more than he could handle with equanimity, it often appeared. And he kept to himself.
As a dancer in the place, it was part of her job to smile at and be nice to the customers, chat with them, encourage them to buy more drinks and tip both the waitresses and the dancers. She couldn’t fathom Bear's hostility to her when she would walk by the bar stool he had taken as his own and smile at him in greeting. He returned her smile with glares of pure hatred, puzzling her.
And then one night Big Tiny dropped her at the front door of the club, and shouting over the panhead’s valve clatter, told her he’d be in a bit later, he had some errands to run. She nodded, smiled, kissed his wind-chilled cheek, and headed inside. She stripped to a G-string in this club, and teased and kidded with the customers from the stage, stopping by to chat with them later, after she had cooled down and changed into her costume for her next set. Walking past the eternally scowling Bear, she found herself stopped by his sudden dismount from the barstool, blocking her path. She stopped. He frowned. She smiled. He glowered. She tried to step around him. He blocked her path again.
“OK,” she said, stepping back a pace. “What’s the deal?”
“Ah don’t like yore tattoo,” he drawled, gesturing toward her right butt cheek.
She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how that is any of your business,” she said and tried to step around him again.
“You git rid of thet thang or I’ll take it off you,” he said, lowering his brows.
She saw red. “Who the fuck do you think you are, coming in here and telling me what to do? It’s none of your fucking business, asshole! You can boss your ol’ lady around all you want, but if you have a problem with me, you can take it up with Big Tiny!” And this time she shoved him in the chest, shortly and sharply with both hands, and when he staggered off balance, she swept past him.
Every night for the past two weeks he had straddled that barstool, making gestures at her while she danced, sometimes saying “Get rid of it, or else” or “I’m gonna take it off’n you.” Mostly she ignored him, but when she did speak, it was to again refer him to her ol’ man. Bear didn’t seem to get the hint. She even spoke to Judy, who she really did not like. “He says you aren’t a one-percenter so you can’t wear the tattoo,” Judy shrugged.
“Somebody else’s ol’ lady is none of Bear’s fucking business,” she reminded Judy, who shrugged again. “Doesn’t he realize that he’s a loner from another state riding in here and basically telling one of the locals what he can and cannot do? Big Tiny’s usually not real keen on taking orders from anybody except the club president…and Bear ain’t even in the club.”
Judy lit a fresh cigarette off the smouldering stub of the third one she had smoked during the conversation and shrugged again. “Look, if he wants his lights punched out, that’s his business, you know?”
She shook her head. “Some great fucking ol’ lady you are…stand by and watch your ol’ man dig himself a grave with his big mouth and you don’t even try to help him.”
Judy narrowed her eyes and squinted through the cloud of smoke issuing from her nostrils. “You think what goes on between you and Big Tiny is none of Bear’s business? Well, what goes between me and Bear is none of yours, so shut the fuck up.”
She started walking away, shaking her head. “Tiny’s gonna fuck him up if he doesn’t stop. If that’s OK with you, it sure as hell is OK with me.”
The pistol was clean, oiled, and reassembled. She slapped the clip into the butt of the grip, chambered a round, and set the safety, then put the weapon on the table in front of her while she disassembled the cleaning rod and repacked the kit. She took her glasses off and put them on the table, rubbing her tired, gritty eyes with the backs of her hands. Stuck in a suffocatingly hot trailer out in dry, desiccated desert is not where she had ever expected to find herself.
A thirteen-inch Arkansas toothpick suddenly quivering point first in the table in front of her wasn’t exactly what she had expected to find, either. She looked up from the still vibrating knife to see Bear standing opposite her at the table. Shayna, whose table now bore the deep impression of the knife point, was getting down from her barstool, nail polish brush still in hand, and advancing upon them, loudly voicing her objections to Bear.
Bear leaned forward and wriggled the knife loose from the table and gripped it in his right hand. “You gonna git that tattoo covered up?” he asked her in a low growl. “Or am I gonna cut it off?”
She projected a coolness she did not feel. Insides quivering with fear, she still managed to keep a calm face. “I told you, Bear, you gotta talk to Big Tiny. Why is it you only bring this up when he’s not around?”
Bear started advancing around the table towards her and she realized she was trapped against the wall, with only the hallway to the bedrooms behind her. There wasn’t enough time to push back the heavy wood and vinyl chair and sprint for the safety of the lean-to and Tiny. In a split second she looked from the freshly sharpened knife to Bear’s determined face and knew that he was not kidding, and he would have a chunk carved from her hide before Tiny could even be awakened…she reached for the gun.
It was her .9mm, she knew its feel in her hand. As her fingers folded themselves around the handgrip her thumb automatically flicked off the safety and in one fluid move, she lifted the piece from the table, swung it in Bear’s direction, and fired a single loud, ear-shattering round. She hadn’t even had time to put her glasses back on.
“Shit!” somebody shouted into the silence that enveloped the room after the discharge. She heard the clatter of Bear’s knife being dropped on the floor, and then there was an immediate explosion of light, colour, darkness, and stars as she felt herself and the heavy chair knocked over backwards. She had been punched in the mouth! A heavy body landed on top of her, but she had instinctively drawn up her legs as she and the chair went over, and the body managed to make contact between one of her heavy boots and some rather sensitive parts of the male anatomy. It was Bear and he was suddenly dead weight.
She pushed at him ineffectively...he was a heavy son-of-a-bitch, but a low moan in her ear told her that she hadn't killed him. She could feel her lip puffing up, and the tinny taste in her mouth told her she was bleeding. Bear started moving and she pushed at him again, struggling to dislodge his bulk when, without warning, his entire weight was abruptly lifted.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Big Tiny said, one massive hand inside the back of Bear’s shirt collar, raising him fully off her body. Tiny looked down at her. “You OK, mama?”
She shook her head “no” and put one hand to her rapidly swelling lip. “He punched me,” she said.
Tiny shifted his hold on Bear so that the smaller man was now backed against a wall, just one of Tiny’s hands holding him there by his neck. “Go in the bathroom and clean up, mama,” he said, his voice uncommonly gentle.
“But he…” she started to protest.
Tiny held up his free hand and nodded in the direction of the bathroom. “Trust me, mama, just go clean up.”
She left the bathroom door open so she could hear what was going on. It seemed like a pretty-one sided conversation to her. She heard Tiny say, very matter-of-factly, “You hit my ol’lady, you stupid, shit-for-brains motherfucker. Now I’m gonna have to kill you.”
She poked her head out of the bathroom door in alarm. Tiny had Bear backed against the wall and lifted six inches into the air by his shirt front, his feet dangling uselessly. Bronson was standing to one side of Tiny with the Astra in his hand and Shayna was standing next to Bronson holding Bear’s pig sticker. It wasn’t looking very good for Bear.
“But I’m not in the mood to do any killing right now,” Tiny said, almost to himself. “I’ll need to finish my nap first.” He paused for effect. “So I’m gonna let you go for right now. But if I see your face around this town after sundown tomorrow night…I don’t care if it’s next month or ten years from now, motherfucker, you are a dead man.” Tiny’s hand released its grip on Bear’s shirtfront and the man collapsed to his knees. “Now get the fuck out of here and don’t let me see you again.”
Bear stumbled out of the mobile home and strode stiffly out to his bike. His rage was a palpable thing, enough to warrant Shayna voicing a fear of retaliation against them for the humiliation that had been perpetrated upon him in their house. Tiny shook his head. “That asshole is a fucking coward. I been waiting two weeks for him to come to me with his beef, like a man, but all he ever did was wait until my ol’ lady was alone and then hassle her. He doesn’t have the guts to come back and bother you guys…he knows I’ll hunt him down and kill him…slowly…and with great pleasure.”
She was in the lean-to, laying back on their pallet of sleeping bags with a cold cloth on her fat lip when she heard the unmistakeable sound of Judy’s Cutlass 442. Her stomach clenched. As soon as Judy knew what went down, she’d be back here like a whirlwind of teeth and claws, and with this fat lip and the shakes from the adrenaline rush, she was in no mood to duke it out with Psycho Bitch. The door to the lean-to was suddenly snatched open and Judy stood on the threshold. But her eyes didn’t hold the expected fire of indignation and vengeance. In fact, the woman looked positively subdued.
“I can’t stay…Bear told me to get my stuff, we’re leaving town tonight,” Judy said.
She sat on the pallet, compress on her lip, and nodded silently.
“Will you do me a favour?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“I’m supposed to work tonight. Would you take my shift and tell Sam I had to leave town suddenly? He’s a nice guy and I hate to see him jammed up without somebody for the tables tonight.”
She nodded her agreement silently, expecting Judy to walk way, but the woman lingered awkwardly. “Look,” Judy finally spit it out. “I’m sorry about what happened here. Bear can be a fucking asshole at times, and I did try to talk to him about it. If it’s any consolation to you, the bullet came so close that he heard it whiz past his ear and he nearly pissed himself. He never thought you had the balls to actually try and shoot him!”
She smiled then, wincing at the stretch it put on her split lip. “Well,” she said, “It’s a good thing for him I didn’t have a chance to put my glasses on then, isn’t it?”
The house was quiet. Shayna was at the breakfast bar polishing her nails, Bronson was reading comic books in the living room, and the only sound besides Big Tiny’s snoring was the slow, rhythmic scrape…scrape…scrape of Bear sharpening his knife, an Arkansas toothpick of prodigious size. She didn’t like Bear…or his girlfriend, Judy, the psycho. Judy was out somewhere in her fancy car, spending the wads of money her Daddy wired her from Texas every few weeks, no doubt happy to keep his delinquent daughter as far from home…and out of the clutches of the local law…as possible. Judy boasted that she was out on bail, awaiting trial on a murder rap in some little podunk Texas town, a claim she did not doubt, given Judy’s hair-trigger temper and lack of impulse control.
When Shayna got up to turn on the swamp cooler, she peeled herself off the vinyl kitchen chair and went to the lean-to. She was bored…she needed something to do. After a few minutes she found the cleaning kit, went back to the kitchen and took the .9mm Astra out of her boot. She removed the clip, ejected the round that was in the chamber, then opened the cleaning kit and took out the pieces of the rod and began to screw them together.
Slowly, methodically, she cleaned the weapon, smoothing on the gun oil and polishing it with slow strokes as her mind wandered. Bear seemed intent on his task, and she reflected on how such an attractive man could be such a first-rate flaming asshole. You tended to grow up equating physical beauty with goodness, but this guy was the poster boy for bad news…even among his own kind.
The bikers she knew…and she knew quite a few…tended to have a rather rigid code where their women were concerned. Depending on the club you rode with, that code could be as flexible as the “citizen” society or it could be so strict that a man did not even speak to another man’s ol’ lady without permission. But, whether club member or not, the rule among bikers was that if you had a problem with a brother's ol’ lady, you took it up with the brother and you let him sort the ol’ lady out. Even loners like Bear understood and abided by this rule…it saved a lot of misunderstandings, disagreements, and broken noses...not to mention broken bones, stab wounds and bullet holes. Bear, however, for some reason believed himself to be exempt from the rule. She shook her head as she wiped the weapon down, nearly ready to reassemble it.
Bear didn’t like her tattoo. What was it with guys like him, anyway? What fucking business was it of his? Discreetly tattooed on her lower right butt cheek was the legend “1%”. That was it. Nothing more…and none of Bear’s business. She had discovered his antipathy one night at work, one of the few nights Big Tiny wasn’t sitting at the bar sipping orange juice while she danced. Judy was working as a cocktail waitress in the same place…she blew Daddy’s money a lot faster than Daddy wired it…so most nights both Tiny and Bear would spend the evenings hanging out while the girls were on shift. Bear, however, drank beer…and a great deal more than he could handle with equanimity, it often appeared. And he kept to himself.
As a dancer in the place, it was part of her job to smile at and be nice to the customers, chat with them, encourage them to buy more drinks and tip both the waitresses and the dancers. She couldn’t fathom Bear's hostility to her when she would walk by the bar stool he had taken as his own and smile at him in greeting. He returned her smile with glares of pure hatred, puzzling her.
And then one night Big Tiny dropped her at the front door of the club, and shouting over the panhead’s valve clatter, told her he’d be in a bit later, he had some errands to run. She nodded, smiled, kissed his wind-chilled cheek, and headed inside. She stripped to a G-string in this club, and teased and kidded with the customers from the stage, stopping by to chat with them later, after she had cooled down and changed into her costume for her next set. Walking past the eternally scowling Bear, she found herself stopped by his sudden dismount from the barstool, blocking her path. She stopped. He frowned. She smiled. He glowered. She tried to step around him. He blocked her path again.
“OK,” she said, stepping back a pace. “What’s the deal?”
“Ah don’t like yore tattoo,” he drawled, gesturing toward her right butt cheek.
She raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see how that is any of your business,” she said and tried to step around him again.
“You git rid of thet thang or I’ll take it off you,” he said, lowering his brows.
She saw red. “Who the fuck do you think you are, coming in here and telling me what to do? It’s none of your fucking business, asshole! You can boss your ol’ lady around all you want, but if you have a problem with me, you can take it up with Big Tiny!” And this time she shoved him in the chest, shortly and sharply with both hands, and when he staggered off balance, she swept past him.
Every night for the past two weeks he had straddled that barstool, making gestures at her while she danced, sometimes saying “Get rid of it, or else” or “I’m gonna take it off’n you.” Mostly she ignored him, but when she did speak, it was to again refer him to her ol’ man. Bear didn’t seem to get the hint. She even spoke to Judy, who she really did not like. “He says you aren’t a one-percenter so you can’t wear the tattoo,” Judy shrugged.
“Somebody else’s ol’ lady is none of Bear’s fucking business,” she reminded Judy, who shrugged again. “Doesn’t he realize that he’s a loner from another state riding in here and basically telling one of the locals what he can and cannot do? Big Tiny’s usually not real keen on taking orders from anybody except the club president…and Bear ain’t even in the club.”
Judy lit a fresh cigarette off the smouldering stub of the third one she had smoked during the conversation and shrugged again. “Look, if he wants his lights punched out, that’s his business, you know?”
She shook her head. “Some great fucking ol’ lady you are…stand by and watch your ol’ man dig himself a grave with his big mouth and you don’t even try to help him.”
Judy narrowed her eyes and squinted through the cloud of smoke issuing from her nostrils. “You think what goes on between you and Big Tiny is none of Bear’s business? Well, what goes between me and Bear is none of yours, so shut the fuck up.”
She started walking away, shaking her head. “Tiny’s gonna fuck him up if he doesn’t stop. If that’s OK with you, it sure as hell is OK with me.”
The pistol was clean, oiled, and reassembled. She slapped the clip into the butt of the grip, chambered a round, and set the safety, then put the weapon on the table in front of her while she disassembled the cleaning rod and repacked the kit. She took her glasses off and put them on the table, rubbing her tired, gritty eyes with the backs of her hands. Stuck in a suffocatingly hot trailer out in dry, desiccated desert is not where she had ever expected to find herself.
A thirteen-inch Arkansas toothpick suddenly quivering point first in the table in front of her wasn’t exactly what she had expected to find, either. She looked up from the still vibrating knife to see Bear standing opposite her at the table. Shayna, whose table now bore the deep impression of the knife point, was getting down from her barstool, nail polish brush still in hand, and advancing upon them, loudly voicing her objections to Bear.
Bear leaned forward and wriggled the knife loose from the table and gripped it in his right hand. “You gonna git that tattoo covered up?” he asked her in a low growl. “Or am I gonna cut it off?”
She projected a coolness she did not feel. Insides quivering with fear, she still managed to keep a calm face. “I told you, Bear, you gotta talk to Big Tiny. Why is it you only bring this up when he’s not around?”
Bear started advancing around the table towards her and she realized she was trapped against the wall, with only the hallway to the bedrooms behind her. There wasn’t enough time to push back the heavy wood and vinyl chair and sprint for the safety of the lean-to and Tiny. In a split second she looked from the freshly sharpened knife to Bear’s determined face and knew that he was not kidding, and he would have a chunk carved from her hide before Tiny could even be awakened…she reached for the gun.
It was her .9mm, she knew its feel in her hand. As her fingers folded themselves around the handgrip her thumb automatically flicked off the safety and in one fluid move, she lifted the piece from the table, swung it in Bear’s direction, and fired a single loud, ear-shattering round. She hadn’t even had time to put her glasses back on.
“Shit!” somebody shouted into the silence that enveloped the room after the discharge. She heard the clatter of Bear’s knife being dropped on the floor, and then there was an immediate explosion of light, colour, darkness, and stars as she felt herself and the heavy chair knocked over backwards. She had been punched in the mouth! A heavy body landed on top of her, but she had instinctively drawn up her legs as she and the chair went over, and the body managed to make contact between one of her heavy boots and some rather sensitive parts of the male anatomy. It was Bear and he was suddenly dead weight.
She pushed at him ineffectively...he was a heavy son-of-a-bitch, but a low moan in her ear told her that she hadn't killed him. She could feel her lip puffing up, and the tinny taste in her mouth told her she was bleeding. Bear started moving and she pushed at him again, struggling to dislodge his bulk when, without warning, his entire weight was abruptly lifted.
“What the fuck is going on here?” Big Tiny said, one massive hand inside the back of Bear’s shirt collar, raising him fully off her body. Tiny looked down at her. “You OK, mama?”
She shook her head “no” and put one hand to her rapidly swelling lip. “He punched me,” she said.
Tiny shifted his hold on Bear so that the smaller man was now backed against a wall, just one of Tiny’s hands holding him there by his neck. “Go in the bathroom and clean up, mama,” he said, his voice uncommonly gentle.
“But he…” she started to protest.
Tiny held up his free hand and nodded in the direction of the bathroom. “Trust me, mama, just go clean up.”
She left the bathroom door open so she could hear what was going on. It seemed like a pretty-one sided conversation to her. She heard Tiny say, very matter-of-factly, “You hit my ol’lady, you stupid, shit-for-brains motherfucker. Now I’m gonna have to kill you.”
She poked her head out of the bathroom door in alarm. Tiny had Bear backed against the wall and lifted six inches into the air by his shirt front, his feet dangling uselessly. Bronson was standing to one side of Tiny with the Astra in his hand and Shayna was standing next to Bronson holding Bear’s pig sticker. It wasn’t looking very good for Bear.
“But I’m not in the mood to do any killing right now,” Tiny said, almost to himself. “I’ll need to finish my nap first.” He paused for effect. “So I’m gonna let you go for right now. But if I see your face around this town after sundown tomorrow night…I don’t care if it’s next month or ten years from now, motherfucker, you are a dead man.” Tiny’s hand released its grip on Bear’s shirtfront and the man collapsed to his knees. “Now get the fuck out of here and don’t let me see you again.”
Bear stumbled out of the mobile home and strode stiffly out to his bike. His rage was a palpable thing, enough to warrant Shayna voicing a fear of retaliation against them for the humiliation that had been perpetrated upon him in their house. Tiny shook his head. “That asshole is a fucking coward. I been waiting two weeks for him to come to me with his beef, like a man, but all he ever did was wait until my ol’ lady was alone and then hassle her. He doesn’t have the guts to come back and bother you guys…he knows I’ll hunt him down and kill him…slowly…and with great pleasure.”
She was in the lean-to, laying back on their pallet of sleeping bags with a cold cloth on her fat lip when she heard the unmistakeable sound of Judy’s Cutlass 442. Her stomach clenched. As soon as Judy knew what went down, she’d be back here like a whirlwind of teeth and claws, and with this fat lip and the shakes from the adrenaline rush, she was in no mood to duke it out with Psycho Bitch. The door to the lean-to was suddenly snatched open and Judy stood on the threshold. But her eyes didn’t hold the expected fire of indignation and vengeance. In fact, the woman looked positively subdued.
“I can’t stay…Bear told me to get my stuff, we’re leaving town tonight,” Judy said.
She sat on the pallet, compress on her lip, and nodded silently.
“Will you do me a favour?”
“Depends on what it is.”
“I’m supposed to work tonight. Would you take my shift and tell Sam I had to leave town suddenly? He’s a nice guy and I hate to see him jammed up without somebody for the tables tonight.”
She nodded her agreement silently, expecting Judy to walk way, but the woman lingered awkwardly. “Look,” Judy finally spit it out. “I’m sorry about what happened here. Bear can be a fucking asshole at times, and I did try to talk to him about it. If it’s any consolation to you, the bullet came so close that he heard it whiz past his ear and he nearly pissed himself. He never thought you had the balls to actually try and shoot him!”
She smiled then, wincing at the stretch it put on her split lip. “Well,” she said, “It’s a good thing for him I didn’t have a chance to put my glasses on then, isn’t it?”
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