Toe Tags & TNT
Comedy Suspense Thriller
By Rolland Love
Smashwords Edition Copyright ©2010 By Rolland Love
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
“Inspired by a True Life experience. The adventure starts in Las Vegas and ends at the Bass Pro Shops in Springfield, Missouri.
“On a wild and frightening cross-country trip in a motor home, a dangerous psychotic old man kidnaps and hold hostage a motley crew. Wired with explosives, he creates a story that is BLOOD curdling hilarious.”
Reviews:
“Toe Tags & TNT by Rolland Love is not a book for the faint hearted. It is a strong, gutsy vivid rollicking tale about two young men and their adventures driving across America with a psychotic old man.” by Wendy Lang, author
This is not the first of Rolland Love’s books that I have reviewed. Each one I declare to be my favorite as I am reading it and this was no exception. In his offering Toe Tags & TNT Writer Love has produced another in his Mark Twain type fun romps filled with captivating players and marvelous detail. By Molly Martin—Scribe’s World
“Rolland, I LOVED this Wild and Crazy book, thank you for writing it.” By Stacy Eastwood, Information Technology
Chapter One
Randall pulled off the main highway and gravel crunched under the weight of our big rig as we stopped in front of a run-down restaurant with a hand-painted sign that read, Best Food Any Where Restaurant. Eat All You Can.
"What do you think about this place?" Randall asked, as I leaned forward to get a better view.
"No," I said, when I saw the peeling gray paint and a swarm of flies buzzing around the screen door. "I'm not hungry. You go ahead."
Randall sat back in the seat and drummed on the steering wheel with the tips of his fingers, an irritating habit he had gotten into when things did not go his way.
"Nothing else until Kingman," he said sharply. "That's sixty miles down the road, you know."
Randall's criteria when it came to choosing a place to get himself fed were simple: Is food being served, and if so, is it plentiful and cheap? Cleanliness, taste, and the possibility of food poisoning were not a concern.
It was hard to believe that a guy who had been such a jock in high school could get so badly out of condition. At college he had joined a fraternity where the primary goal was to drink beer and play cards—by graduation day he had gained close to a hundred pounds.
"Tell you what," I said, as I looked at a roll of gut the size of a loaf of bread hanging over the top of his faded blue Levis, "You go on in and eat. Breakfast is not a big deal to me."
"You sure?" Randall said, as he lowered his head and looked up at me through bushy brown eyebrows. His gaze was through vacant, unfocused eyes. He had played blackjack until dawn at a Las Vegas casino.
"Go on ahead. I need to lie down for a while. My hurt back needs a rest."
With a crooked little smile, Randall said, "Okay, Mark, I certainly will."
Six weeks on the road together had taken its toll on our friendship, which was too bad; we had been friends since we were five years old. I even wished I had not picked him to be the Best Man at my upcoming wedding.
Randall parked the motor home by a lone pine tree. It was the only vegetation in the sand-covered parking lot. I rolled down the window to get some fresh air. As he started to open the door and step outside, someone inside the building screamed. An old man wearing a faded red shirt and a blue baseball cap stumbled out the front door into the parking lot. He was muttering something to himself as he shuffled along beside the building until he reached the corner and disappeared from our view.
"He looks familiar," Randall said, "like someone I saw on that most wanted criminals TV show."
Seconds later the front door banged open again and a tall, thin cowboy wearing a black, wide-brimmed hat ran outside. "I'll get even!" he shouted back over his shoulder as he stomped away toward a rusted old pickup truck with an empty horse trailer in tow. "Nobody pulls that stuff on the Duke."
For some stupid reason, Randall burst out with a big laugh that stopped the raging cowboy cold. The bowlegged creature cocked his head to one side and looked at us in disbelief.
"Makin' fun are ya', Mister?" the cowboy yelled, as he pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt. "We'll have some real fun now."
I could not believe what was happening. The cowboys I had known in the past were as friendly as they could be. Randall had done it again. He had set us up to get killed.
"Tell him you're sorry!" I screamed in Randall's ear. "Do it now, damn it. Do it now."
"I'm sorry!" Randall yelled, his voice quivering as he fumbled with the ignition key and dropped it on the floorboard. We grabbed for it at the same time, and I smashed my mouth into the back of his head. My eyes filled with tears and I tasted blood.
"What now?" Randall gasped, rubbing the back of his head. "What are we going to do?"
The cowboy hunkered down like a scared rabbit when the restaurant door banged against the side of the building and a third man, with a shotgun cradled under his arm, lumbered out into the parking lot. "Where are you, Duke?" he bellowed, as he squinted his eyes against the glare of the early morning sun.
It was easy to see why anyone might be afraid of the giant standing less than a hundred yards away from our motor home. He was easily seven feet tall, broad in the shoulders and his stomach was huge. A thick, red beard hung to the top of his silky, black pajama bottoms. His chest was bare and what we could see of it was covered with tattoos.
"My God, what is it?" I asked, leaning across Randall's chest for a better look.
"Steroids gone wild," Randall said solemnly. "Probably another government experiment got screwed up.”
He could be right, I thought as I stared at arms the size of telephone poles and remembered some of the tales I had read about research projects that had gone wrong. I shivered, picked up the key from the floorboard and jammed it into the ignition.
"Let's get out of here, fast. Come on, let's go."
"Yeah, right," Randall moaned. "We're driving a thirty-five-foot motor home powered by a steam engine, remember? Just stay low. Maybe they'll kill each other."
The big guy pumped a shell into the chamber of the shotgun when he spotted his quivering prey. "I'm blowin' your head off, Duke! I told you not to ever come back."
A puff of dust boiled out from under the big guy's feet each time he took a lumbering step forward.
"I won't do it again," Duke said, as he walked backwards until he reached the truck. "Please don't shoot," he begged, as he climbed inside.
I leaned into the seat and grunted when a pain that felt as if someone had hit me in the back with a hammer shot up my spine. Adrenaline had my heart pounding.
In addition to my fear that I might not live long enough to leave the parking lot, I worried about my fiancée, Ann, and how terrible it would be for her when she found out that I had gotten myself crippled-up again. What if I had to be rolled down the aisle on a stretcher? Would I have the strength to perform on our wedding night?
"That skinny cowboy might make it." Randall loosened his grip on the steering wheel. "Oh no," he groaned, "Is the giant going to shoot?"
I leaned forward just in time to see the big guy shoulder the shotgun and pull the trigger. Boom! The shot wad exploded the back window in the pickup truck and filled the air with a shower of sparkling glass.
Duke lucked out. The main force of the pellets hit the passenger side and seemed to miss him completely.
"Look at the feisty bastard go," Randall said, as we watched the truck peel out onto the pavement with the trailer swaying from side to side. He headed down Highway 93.
Leaning out the window, his shaggy, blond hair whipping in the wind, Duke shook a fist and yelled, "I'll get even! Nobody alive cheats me!"
Randall tried to hide his 260-pound, five-foot-ten-inch frame from the big guy's view by slumping down in the seat. He looked at me wide-eyed and said, "God help us. I hope we're not next."
The big guy watched the beat-up old Chevy pickup truck until it faded away into the shimmering heat waves that danced up off the road. He pumped his shotgun and an empty red hull fell onto the ground as he stomped back toward the restaurant. He didn't so much as glance in our direction before he disappeared through the open door.
"My God," Randall said, "we must have become invisible."
"Come on, let's go." I clasped my quivering hands together to stop them from shaking. "What was that?" It sounded as if the back door of the motor home had been slammed shut.
I looked at Randall and we listened carefully. Silence. Randall started up the engine and recklessly pulled out onto the highway. The big rig swayed back and forth as we left the parking lot headed for Kingman, Arizona, in a cloud of dust.
Surely we've paid all our dues, I thought, as I took a deep breath and sighed, so thankful to be out of the potentially fatal situation. Little did I know that what we had just witnessed in the parking lot was only a small taste of what was yet to come?
"Spooky characters," Randall said, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The high-backed, red leather captain's seat squeaked loudly when he settled into the command post from which he would drive us home.
"Pretty bad boys all right." I looked into the side mirror and frowned when I saw that Randall was dragging along the pine tree. In his reckless haste to leave the parking lot, he had run over the scruffy little thing and jerked it out of the ground. It was caught under the rear of the motor home and looked like a plume of green exhaust. I thought about all the pine trees I had planted as a kid when I was a Boy Scout. The dark green branches bounced up and down on the asphalt pavement.
"How much longer to Kansas City?" I asked, figuring nothing short of an explosion and a fire would get me outside the motor home again until Randall dropped me off at my fiancée Ann's front door.
Randall looked at his watch and considered my question for a good long while before coming up with an estimated time.
"Twenty hours, more or less, if I can stay awake," he said with a chuckle. "Yeah. With the new faster speed limit, we should hit KC around ten o'clock tomorrow night. There's plenty of time for you to get ready for the big wedding next Saturday."
"That's not funny," I said, remembering the time he really did fall asleep at the wheel and totaled my car.
Randall raised his voice. "I know you're thinking about that one lousy wreck. Does that mean I'm branded for life?" After a long silence, in a much more civilized tone, he said, "Don't worry. I'll pull over if I get sleepy."
"I still can't believe the size of that big guy," I said, changing the subject. "He could have wiped us out with one swipe of a meaty hand."
"What I can't believe is the size of this lump." Randall rubbed the back of his head. "How's your mouth?"
"My mouth is okay. But my back is starting to bother me some. I think the painkiller is about to wear off."
Randall rattled the pill bottle in his shirt pocket and gave me a wicked smile. "I've got your Percodan right here. Do you want one now?"
"I will before I lay down," I said, thinking it seemed as if everything he had done for the past week had caused me misery and pain.
"You must not be in too bad shape then," he said, sounding as if he thought I was just looking for sympathy.
"Give me a break, man!"
Randall had put the metal tool chest by the side door of the motor home with the handle sticking straight up. I had caught my foot on the handle and hurt my back as I fell. "It hurts like hell," I mumbled, as I watched the badly crippled pine tree break loose from under the wheel weld and come to rest on the shoulder of the lonesome desert road. "I actually passed out, you know." I looked out the window and wished once again that I was home with Ann so she could take care of me.
"Yeah, I know. I was there remember? You lucked out with us only five minutes from the hospital. You'll be okay. Take a pill if it hurts. That's what drugs are for."
"It could have been a lot worse, I guess."
"Probably will be, if you don't take care of yourself. Remember what the ER doc said when he gave you a shot of Demerol? Stay flat on your back until you get to Kansas City."
"I'm headed for bed right now. I'm out of your life." I grabbed the back of the seat and eased myself up slowly to avoid more pain.
"You're doing the right thing, my friend. If you take care of yourself, I may not have to roll you down the aisle in a wheelchair come next Saturday."
Randall clicked on the radio and began to bang on the steering wheel with the flat of his hand when the beat of a Doors song poured from the speakers, and Jim Morrison wailed, "come on baby, take a chance on love."
Bad luck continued to hover over me every step of the way. As I started for the back bedroom, I caught my toe on the corner of a throw rug and fell down. I landed on a mop bucket that Randall should have emptied and put away after he cleaned the floor. As I lay on the carpet with soapy water soaking the front of my T-shirt, I thought about asking Randall to take me to the station when we got to Kingman so I could catch a train to Kansas City.
"What happened?" Randall said. "You need any help?"
"I need the Percodan." I grabbed the handle on the bathroom door, pulled myself to my feet and started back toward the front.
Randall scolded me. "You're determined to hurt yourself, aren't you, Mark? Here, take one of these and go to bed."
"You won't need those, you little peckerhead!" a gravelly-voiced old man yelled, jerking the bottle from my hand. I stared in disbelief. It was the same stoop-shouldered character that had run out of the restaurant and disappeared behind the building.
"My God!" I shouted, as I slapped my chest.
"What the hell!" Randall yelled. He jerked the steering wheel to one side and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road.
"Sit down, you little asshole," the old man said and shoved me back into the seat. I whimpered when he placed the barrel of a revolver beside my head. Smoke from a cigarette, which dangled from his ashen gray lips, curled up into deep-set, dark eyes that looked as cold as steel.
"Please don't shoot me, sir," I begged. "I'm getting married next Saturday."
When he looked at me and smiled, I thought I might have stirred up some emotion that would cause him to cut me a little slack.
The old man winked, exhaled a puff of smoke through his nose and said, "hells bells, son, I'm not doing anything special Saturday. I can be your Best Man." Laughing at himself, he managed to stir up a coughing fit that caused spittle to run from the corner of his mouth onto his bearded chin. "With your bad back and all, you may need some help on the honeymoon too."
In a feeble attempt to come up with an answer that would keep him from being my Best Man, and having been caught completely off-guard, I stuttered around until Randall finally jumped in and tried to save me. "Get over it, Mark," he said, as he looked over his shoulder at the old geezer, then back at me. "You know your fiancée called off the wedding. Poor Mark took it really hard. I'm afraid he may need professional counseling."
"I'll be all right," I said humbly, trying to support Randall's feeble attempt to put on a good show. "Ann and I...we had been together for so long. I just don't know what to do."
It was easy to see why Randall had thought the old man might be a wanted criminal. In addition to having a bloody gash over his right eye, he was wearing tattered clothing and had matted, gray hair that looked as if it belonged on a goat. He had a shifty look and carried a large caliber revolver with a hole in the end of the barrel the size of a dime.
There was a long silence before the old man said anything. When he finally spoke, he made it clear that trying to fool him ever again was not a healthy idea.
"Called off the wedding, did she?" he said. He grabbed Randall by the arm and stuck the raised front sight of the barrel up inside one nostril. He and the barrel of the revolver lifted Randall off the seat with ease. After he had Randall's neck stretched out like a snail's, the old man leaned over close to his ear and growled, "Bullshit, Randy Boy." After a short silence he calmly said, "You ever try to fool me again and you'll be on ice, a dead player that has to drop out of the game."
"I'm sorry," Randall blubbered, as he jerked his head to one side, freeing himself from the business end of the weapon. "Please sir, I'll never try it again."
"Hey," the old man muttered, "I've been fooled enough for one lifetime. Turn that damn radio off too. I can't half think with that rock-n-roll blastin’."
"I'm sorry it bothered you," I said, as I clicked off the power switch.
"What's that up ahead?" he asked, as he pointed at a deserted rest stop.
"It's a place to stop and rest," I said. "Go take a leak. Get a drink of water or whatever."
"I know that already. I mean the blue box. That's a telephone, right?"
"Looks like it. Why, do you need to make a call?"
"No I don't," the old man said with a smile, "but you do. You're going to call Ann. Pull this big machine into that parking lot, Randall. Me and Mark have got some sweet stuff to say."
"Oh please, sir," I begged, as my stomach tightened, "she's worried enough about the wedding. I don't want to upset her even more."
"So the wedding's still on," the old man said with a smirk, playing mind games with me.
"It's still on all right," I said, hoping I could talk him out of making me call her. "Please don't make me do it, Mister. I'll do whatever you say."
When Randall drove the motor home beside the pay phone, the old man leaned forward and looked deep into my eyes. "I nearly got married once myself. I was standing on the top of a mountain when I fell in love. I might tell you about it sometime, if you live long enough."
"Thank you, sir," I said in anticipation of him aborting the plan.
"I'll let it go this time. You boys ever cross me again, you're buzzard meat."
"Is it okay to go on now?" Randall asked. He pulled back out onto the highway when the old man gave him a nod.
Once we were headed toward Kingman again, the old man seemed to slip away into a trance. It was as if a switch had been turned off inside his head to stop the insanity of his mind from further ravaging his soul.
He leaned back in the yellow director's chair that he had dragged in from the combination living room and kitchen area. He had strategically placed it just far enough behind the high-backed, red leather front seats to be outside of our peripheral view. For the next thirty minutes, the three of us sat like mummies and stared down the road through a bluish gray haze of cigarette smoke that burned my eyes.
As I looked out across sand-covered wasteland, dotted with cactus and scrub brush, I thought about Ann. I saw her face as if she were sitting before me. I remembered how I used to run my fingers through her reddish brown hair. I wanted to kiss the lips that had given me so many smiles, hold her in my arms and tell her everything would be all right.
I looked at the old man out of the corner of my eye and decided what I must do—even though it would be like something out of a bad dream. If it meant that I had to become a killer, I was determined to get free.
Chapter Two
A loud thud, which sounded as if someone had smacked the side of the big rig with a baseball bat, startled me. The old man jerked his head around and looked out the side window. The wind had blown tumbleweed into the side of the motor home.
"Know what scares me more than anything?" the old man said, as he lit up another Camel and scratched his head.
"No," I said with some reservation. "What?"
"It's the way I used to be," the old man said with a smile. "I was bad dangerous back in the old days. Sometimes I even got scared of myself."
"Are you still that way?" Randall asked. "Dangerous?"
"No. No, I'm not," the old man said solemnly. He leaned back in the director's chair and looked out the window. "Now that I know I'm about to die, I'm not scared of anything. You know what I mean?"
"You're about to die?" Randall said, giving me a grim look.
"Yeah," the old man said soberly. "Probably be dead and gone in two or three months."
"What's wrong?" I asked.
He coughed. "Got me some breathing troubles. Don't you get depressed over it though. I mean, what the hell, people can only live so long."
"Why did you used to be so dangerous you even scared yourself?" Randall asked.
Much to my dismay, the old man smiled and said, "'Cause I liked to blow things up. I blew tons of stuff up during the war. That was my job when I was a Marine. I saved lots of lives during the biggest battle of all—even got me a medal."
"Oh, that's great," I said to myself, thinking how dangerous he could be if he got hold of some explosives. I looked out the window and watched a coyote zigzag through the scrub brush until it jumped down into a ravine and disappeared. I started to ask the old man which big war he was talking about, then decided not to chance getting him any more stirred up.
Hoping to direct him away from any further talk about blowing things up, I asked the old man what he did after he got out of the service. My diversionary tactic didn't work. He was too far gone, recalling the good old blasting-things-apart days, to pay me any mind.
"I know more about explosives than even the DuPonts. They made a nice living off gunpowder, you know." The old man sounded a little too cocky about such a serious subject to suit me. "Look at this, if you don't believe me." He pulled up his pant leg to demonstrate. There were two sticks of dynamite stuffed down inside his black leather boot.
The old man pointed at a red wire attached to the top of an oily, brown bundle that ran up the inside of his pant leg. After giving me a squint-eyed little smile that curled up the corners of his thick gray lips, he opened his shirt and showed us a detonator taped down over his belly button. "Anybody messes with me—I push the button."
"Oh my God," Randall moaned when he looked over and saw the device that could easily turn us into dog meat before we could blink an eye.
"No problem," I said. "We'll do whatever you say." I thought this situation looked very dangerous since all he had to do was accidentally bump into something and boom!
"That's good. Talk about a dog-lickin' mess! If I push this button, that's all she wrote. Like I said earlier, I don't give a shit for damn. I'm a goner anyway."
How in the world could such a terrible thing be happening to me? I swallowed a couple of times to dislodge the lump in my throat. Just when I was on the verge of becoming a happily married man, too.
"We won't cause any trouble. Will we, Randall?" I was thinking about how well-off we were when we thought the only thing we had to contend with was a deranged old man with a revolver.
"No sir," Randall said, "we sure won't. I can promise you that."
"You push me, I'll do it in an instant," the old man said, leaning forward as he looked at Randall, then quickly turning his head and glaring at me.
"Please, Mister," I begged. "We won't do anything to mess with you. Okay?"
"Mister!" the old man shouted. "Don't ever call me 'Mister'! Name's Harley. Just like the motorcycle. Mister! That's what I had to call them sons-a-bitchin' guards. Can I do this, Mister Roberts? Can I do that? I wish one of them was here right now. I'd poke this barrel up his ass. We'd see who called who 'Mister'."
Harley had gotten himself so upset that his hands were shaking. He mumbled to himself about how he hated the guards, and he called the warden a politically appointed retard. He lit another Camel, took a long drag of the cigarette and let the smoke drift slowly out through his nose. Sounding cranky and running right along the edge, he said, "Do we understand each other now, boys?"
"We sure do," Randall was quick to say. "We'll never call you anything but Harley again, will we, Mark?" Randall tried to ease the tension by introducing us. "My name is Randall and this is my friend Mark."
I did not know what set him off. It seemed as if we had reached an understanding about coexisting peacefully. Before I could answer, just out of the clear blue, the sadistic bastard pulled back the hammer on the revolver and squeezed the trigger. Boom! For a second, I thought he had detonated the dynamite. Pieces of headliner drifted down all around us, the cab filled with dust, and the smell of gunpowder permeated the air.
Randall slammed on the brakes and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, coughing violently. We rolled down the windows and gasped for air. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it pounding in the back of my throat. I looked down when I felt something warm and saw that a dark blue spot covered the front of my jeans.
Poking the barrel of the revolver into my ribs, Harley leaned across my chest and sucked in a deep breath of fresh air. "Didn't mean to scare you, boys," he sputtered. "Just wanted to make sure my weapon worked." Sticking the end of the barrel under his nose and taking a big whiff, he said, "Lordy, the smell of gunpowder before lunch help work up a good appetite. You know what I mean, Mark?"
"Why did you do that, Harley?" I asked.
"Didn't think you boys was takin' me serious," he said with a chuckle.
"We sure the hell are now," Randall said, as he coughed again and cleared his throat.
"That's just fine then. My mistake. By the way, I don't want to hear no cussin'. I heard enough ugly words said while I was in the joint to last me a lifetime. I mean it, boys. I won't put up with one lick of foul language. Bad words plant bad seeds, and you know what can happen then."
"Okay," I said, not having any idea what he was talking about, but not wanting to ask. "We don't like cussin' either, do we, Randall?"
"No, we don't," Randall said. "There was never any cussin' took place in our house."
"Mine neither," I said. "It doesn't take any talent to cuss."
Harley cocked his head back and glared at me as if I had done something wrong.
"What is it?" I asked. "Did I say something I should not have?"
"No, not really. But all this kind of talk does bring one very important thing to mind."
"What's that?" I asked.
"It has to do with murder. I don't really want to kill you boys unless you force me. But hey, like I said, I've got nothing left to lose."
After gently patting both of us on the shoulder, Harley leaned back in the director's chair and mumbled, "You know why I don't want to kill you? 'Cause murder can be such a bloody mess."
"We won't force you to do anything," I said. "Whatever you want, that's what we'll do."
"That's good. 'Cause I'll just blast you boys and drive this big eighteen-wheeler away all by myself."
"Have you driven a rig like this before?" I asked, wondering how anyone could confuse our motor home with an over-the-road eighteen-wheeler truck.
Harley scratched his head and seemed to be giving my question a lot of serious thought. "No. No, I haven't. I drove a tractor once, when I was a kid about twelve. How much difference can there be?"
"Did your dad own a farm?"
"A farm? Hell no! He never owned nothin' in his whole life. The tractor was at a construction site. The workers had gone home for the day. Dad just started the damn thing up and turned me loose."
"What happened after you turned it over?"
"You mean after the accident an' it caught fire? We ran like hell and jumped in the truck. Dad was drunk as usual. Drove right through somebody's yard as we escaped. Wiped out an entire bed of roses. Yeah, the old man was a real doozy. He went out for cigarettes a week later and never came back."
"You never saw him again?" Randall said. "That's too bad."
When Harley lowered his head and looked up at me through hooded white brows with tears in his eyes, I almost felt sorry for him for a second. Then I looked down at the revolver and wondered how I could possibly think about such a thing as sympathy.
"Yeah, well, my old man was just one of a bunch of ugly things happened when I was a kid. He toughened me up for stuff a whole lot worse to come, I guess."
Harley went on to tell us about an older brother named Lewis, who not only beat him up on a regular basis when they were young, but also framed Harley for the murder of his business partner. To add insult to injury, after Harley was given a life sentence, his brother and Harley's wife, who was also named Ann, of all things, ran off to Mexico together.
"I'm really sorry," I said, as I pulled a road map out of the pocket on the back of my seat and fanned my face. "Nothing that cruel should ever happen to anybody."
"You got that right. Some people are just born to suffer hell on earth, I guess. Does the smoke bother you?" Harley asked, sounding as if he were actually concerned about my well-being.
"I suffer from allergies. Dust and smoke sometimes cause me to have a bronchospasm."
Harley laid his hand on my shoulder and patted me gently. "You'll just have to get used to it, son. I’m hooked on tobacco and there’s not a thing I can do about it." Pointing out across the passing desert, he said, "You wouldn't know it by the looks of all that open space, but the world gets more crowded every day. Like my buddy Rodney King said, we've all got to try to get along."
Randall looked over at me and smiled with his teeth clamped together. He jerked his head slightly and rolled his eyes toward the back of the big rig. I knew he was trying to tell me something, but for the life of me I could not figure out what it was.
"Your buddy, huh?" Randall said, sounding a little too crusty for comfort.
The last thing in the world I wanted to do was have Harley get upset again. It did not take much to set him off, and it was a no-win situation.
"You must be some kind of celebrity if you know Rodney King," Randall said, barely able to keep from laughing.
"That's right, Mr. Randall. I sure the hell am a celebrity. Rodney and me, that black guy them cops beat up, you know who the hell I mean?"
"Yeah, I know. Language."
"What?"
"You said we weren't supposed to cuss so I said, language."
"That's right, you're not. I say what the hell I want."
Harley glared, Randall shrugged his shoulders and I swallowed deeply to clear my throat as Harley continued. "Me and Rodney were locked up in the same cell together for three days and nights. We got to know each other pretty damn well, Mr. Randall. Pretty damn well."
Harley leaned back in his chair, laid the revolver in his lap and began to sway from side to side while he hummed “Amazing Grace”. Humming and wheezing, high and low, he sounded like an old-fashioned squeeze box.
Leaning forward, Harley put his mouth up close to my ear. "You ever see the movie Deliverance? The part where the redneck bent the fat guy over a log?"
"Yes, I saw it," I said, feeling like a bird that had just been swallowed by a cat when Harley laid his hand on my leg.
"He squealed like a pig, remember?" When I didn't say anything, he moved his hand up my thigh a couple of inches and smiled.
My God! Is there no end to this insanity? If he was serious about trying to rape me, and it seemed as if that might be the case, I had to try to kill him first. I thought about the .22-caliber pistol in my suitcase. Then I remembered that we had used up all the shells shooting rats at the Las Vegas dump a couple of days before. I figured a .22-caliber bullet probably wouldn't stop him anyway.
I looked back over my shoulder. The butcher knife was beside the toaster. I could slit his throat with that. I remembered the excellent demonstration I had seen of how to cut through a jugular vein when I watched a recap of the O.J. Simpson trial. My concern was that he might still have enough strength left to get off a shot or detonate the TNT. If only my back was not hurt and I could move faster, I would do it.
"Why did you bring that up about Deliverance?" I asked, as I slid my shaking hands under my thighs.
"Don't play stupid, Mark. You're a nice-looking boy. So why the hell not?"
I felt sick to my stomach when the degenerate old bastard kissed me on the cheek. I rubbed his spittle away with my shoulder and groaned. When I raised my elbow, I thought about slamming it into his throat. I really might have done it, too, except that he leaned back in the chair before I could make up my mind. Now he was too far away for me to get the full effect of a hard blow. I could see me screwing it up and Harley getting off a shot at point-blank range, blowing my brains all over the windshield. The only good part would be if Harley made Randall clean it up as punishment for leaving the back door of the motor home unlocked.
I started feeling bad because I had been down on Randall. Even though he had really been screwing up, he was still my closest friend.
"What's the matter, Son?" Harley asked when I turned my head away. "Afraid to try something new?"
My mind had kicked into high gear as I tried to think of a killing plan that I would actually have the guts to try.
I could grab the revolver quickly and try to jerk it out of his hand, try to overpower him and choke him to death, or be really original: light the newspaper lying on the floorboard by my feet and shove it in his face, catching his beard on fire. While he was screaming and flopping around like a landlocked carp, I could push him out the door and leave him alongside the road, burning to death.
"Relax, Son," Harley said. "Life's too short to get so upset. Look at that, you're trembling."
"What did you say?" I asked spastically, turning my head around to face him when I felt his breath on the back of my neck.
"I said relax. You've got yourself so worked up you're shaking all over. Hell, I was only kiddin'. I'm not really that way."
"I thought you were serious," I said, taking a deep breath as I eased my head back against the seat.
Reaching over and gently touching the end of my nose with the tip of his finger, Harley said, "I'm not tellin' you I've never done it before. I'm just sayin' I'm not a damned rump ranger."
"Oh," I said quickly, wondering what his definition of deviate behavior would be if I was stupid enough to ask.
Looking at himself in the rearview mirror, Harley frowned and wrinkled up his nose. "Lockup's a strange place to be. Makes a body do weird things. Twists people around so they don't even know who they used to be."
"I've heard it's terrible," I said, as I looked down and saw a dark, red spot on the inside of Harley's forearm. I did not even want to take a guess about what medical ailment might have caused the lesion. I swallowed the bitter-tasting bile that filled my throat. I felt sick to my stomach.
I thought about my fiancée, Ann, again. I wondered if she would marry Bill Gilbert if something happened to me. The thought of him crawling into bed with her after she had saved herself for me was almost as hard to take as the thought of being killed by a lunatic like Harley. Even worse, what if I got Harley's disease?
I looked over at Randall, who had been quiet for a long time, and cleared my throat loudly. Turning his head around, he smiled and I smiled back. Cocking my head sideways as I looked down at Harley's arm, I cleared my throat again and rapidly blinked my eyes. I wanted to make him aware of Harley's condition, but before I could get Randall's attention, Harley started talking again.
"The wind has come up a lot, hasn't it?" he said, sounding a little anxious as he hunkered down and looked out the side window. "I wonder if it's going to storm."
I pointed up the road at a whirlwind chasing its tail out across the desert. It looked like a baby tornado as it swirled around stirring up a good-sized cloud of sandy, brown dust. I thought my acknowledgment of a change in climatic condition would be enough to answer his question without me actually saying anything, but I was wrong.
"You know another thing that bothers me about you boys?" Harley said, as he took a wooden kitchen match out of his shirt pocket and dug a big wad of wax out of his ear. "You don't pay close attention when I talk. That bothers me plenty. Know what I figure when people do that to me?"
"No," I said. "What do you figure?"
"I figure they're makin' fun of me inside their brain. I don't like being trapped inside someone's brain. I feel like I'm smotherin'. I was cooped up too long for any more of that shit."
"We'd never make fun of you, would we, Randall?" I said, trying to get him involved in the conversation to give me a break.
Randall shook his head, and Harley rambled on, talking about brains as if it were one of his favorite subjects. "Speakin' of brains, I've eaten about every kind of brain there is, except for buzzard. I've had hog brains, calf brains, sheep brains, squirrel brains and brains from something I didn't even know what the hell it was. It was back during the war. I was drunk at the time. You city boys probably never ate brain once in your whole life, I bet. Am I right?"
Randall looked over at me with weary eyes, and I solemnly said, "No, sir. Don't think we ever have. Right, Randall?"
"Right," he said painfully. "Don't think I ever have, for sure."
"You should eat 'em for breakfast. Make you feel smarter the whole day long."
From the way Harley tilted his head back and looked at me with his cold, black eyes, I figured he was trying to determine if I was making fun of him inside my brain. Not wanting to be accused of thinking about trying to kill him or something, I said, "I know how you feel about tight places. Almost drowned when I was a kid myself. Been claustrophobic ever since. I can't hardly even ride in an elevator anymore without getting in a panic."
Harley patted me on the arm and smiled. "Well then, you know exactly where I'm comin' from."
Harley licked his lips and continued with the simple-minded rhetoric that we had come to know and hate. "Even if you don't remember diddly-crap, remember this, boys. A man can climb the highest mountain. He can go where nobody's ever stood before. They'll call him a great mountain climber. That's until he goes down on some guy just one lousy time. Then guess what they'll call him for the rest of his damned life?"
Harley's voice had a bitter edge to it again. He seemed to be riding on the crest of another mood swing that would compel him to jerk us around like puppets on a string. He had to be killed. Not only for our sake, but also for the sake of every living creature that might cross his path.
I had never thought of killing anyone before. I wondered if I would have bad dreams and wake up in the middle of the night, screaming because Harley was chasing me down a dark tunnel or blowing me up or something. I remembered an old Alfred Hitchcock movie where a killer was never able to wash all the victim's blood off his hands. Would that happen to me?
I looked at Harley sitting there in the director's chair—old, gray and puffy, a revolver in his lap, wired with dynamite. He was a man about to die, who wouldn't give a second thought to blowing us away. There was no choice. He had to go. Surely in this case, it would feel more like I had only killed a rabid animal—not another human being. It would be like I had performed a public service, done my civic duty, or made a citizen's arrest.
"I'm sure glad I hooked up with a couple of studs like you boys," Harley said. "Hell, you'll pick up enough good-lookin' women to keep me busy. I've got no doubt."
"We're pretty shy when it comes to picking up girls," Randall said, and I agreed wholeheartedly.
"Oh yeah," Harley growled, "we'll see when it comes time to make a move."
"Look at that," Randall said, pointing up the road at a car with a tire leaning up against the rear bumper. "Looks like an older couple's had a flat. Maybe we should stop."
"Are you crazy?" Harley shrieked. "That's probably the FBI just made up to look like old people."
"Are you serious?" I said, wondering if there was any limit to his paranoia. I had seen similar symptoms in my Uncle Pete before he was taken away and treated for severe manic depression. Only he was not waving a revolver around and threatening to kill everyone.
"Damn right I'm serious. I'm not takin' any chances. Slow down." Harley leaned across my chest, rolled down the window and as we passed the car, he shouted, "Stay put. Help's on the way." Settling back into the squeaky director's chair, he mumbled, "Stupid law. They'll never outsmart me."
Randall had a pained expression on his face; his skin looked pale and clammy. "How far are you riding with us?" he asked.
I knew the question had not been well-received when I saw Harley flinch and his right eye began to twitch again.
"Why do you ask?" he wanted to know. "Don't want me around, do you?" He sounded like a little kid whose feelings had been hurt.
"It's not that," I assured him. "Randall was just curious. So am I. You know why?" I cleared my throat as I groped for the answer. "It's because...because I'm in charge of cooking the meals."
The instant I said that I knew I had made a big mistake. Trying to trick Harley was as stupid as putting your hand in a cage with a rattlesnake.
Harley pecked me on the shoulder with the barrel of the revolver, opened his shirt and pointed to the detonator for the TNT. He belched loudly and calmly said, "So you're the cook are you, Mark? Don't worry, Son. You'll have plenty of time to cook. I'll be around for at least two or three days, maybe longer if you guys keep treating me as nice as you've been."
The pain in my back was killing me. I had to take a chance and ask for a Percodan. Just as I started to open my mouth, Harley said, "I'm hungry, Mr.Cook. How about gettin' your scrambled-egg-cookin' ass back there in the kitchen and servin' me up some home-cooked food?"
"I don't have any groceries in the motor home right now, but when we get some I'll cook whatever you want." I looked at Harley and forced a smile, remembering my mother telling me one time that I didn't know enough about cooking to boil a pot of water.
"It don't matter. We'll just pull in and eat at Kingman. I need to pick up some smokes. I been wantin' to get me a nice chain saw too—nothing big, just something with enough power to cut through a good-sized tree without getting bogged down. Kingman would be a good place for me to start driving, too."
My heart skipped a beat when I thought about what serious trouble we had gotten ourselves into, and how life would probably never be the same again.
Chapter Three
Even though my back pain had gotten worse, I decided to wait until we stopped in Kingman before I asked for a Percodan. I would butter Harley up with kindness, make him feel as good as possible, and hope that he would take pity on my suffering and just offer to give me a pill. If all else failed, I would beg and even cry if I had to. Whatever it took, I would do. I couldn't ride all the way to Kansas City in this pain.
What worried me most was that Harley, having come from a correctional institution where he had access to a variety of mind-altering substances, would have picked Percodan as his drug of choice. Hopefully he was not hooked on the painkiller and wanted to hog it all for himself.
"I'm sure sorry I left the back door to the big rig open, Mark," Randall said. "I screwed up again. Seems like I've done that a lot lately."
"It's okay," I said, thinking how I would probably never trust him again.
Harley brushed a cigarette ash off his pant leg and leaned back in the chair. "Yeah, you could call leaving the door open a screwup, big time. Far as I'm concerned though, it was fate. I would probably be dead by now if it wasn't for you boys. Guess I owe you my life."
"Oh come on, Harley," I said when I looked over my shoulder and saw him pucker up.
"Well, you did," he said, sounding as if he were about to cry. "I'll never forget it either, unless you do something to upset me again."
"Where did you get the KU cap?" I asked, looking at the Jayhawk emblem on the front.
Harley gave me a puzzled look. "KU cap? What's a KU cap?"
"That funny-looking bird on the front of your cap. That's a University of Kansas Jayhawk; I've got a cap just like it at home. KU is where Randall and I went to college. We're engineers. We actually built the engine that's powering this motor home. We worked with the Environmental Protection Agency during our senior year after we received a grant from the federal government."
"Well, you boys are a lot smarter than I thought," Harley said, as he slapped his leg and laughed at his own joke.
"Yeah, we've been on a tour showing off our creation for the past six weeks," I said proudly. I was getting a little carried away thinking about how cool it was that we were able to get the funding for such a major project, actually build the damn thing, make it run, and get to go on the road, where we were praised everywhere we went as if we were a couple of heroes.
"Well good, I'm glad to hear it," Harley said, sounding jealous and not at all impressed. "Don't talk to me about it anymore, unless I say so. I've got a lot of other stuff to think about besides what a hotshot you've been."
"Fine," I said, feeling a little bit offended that he wasn't more impressed.
"You asked where I got the cap," Harley said, as he took it off his head and looked at the Jayhawk. "I shot some college kid to get it. Lucky it wasn't you."
Putting it back on his head, he pulled it down snugly until it touched the tops of his ears.
"Are you serious?" I said. "What in the world did you do that for?"
"Why, you say?" Harley asked, throwing his hands up in the air, acting as if I had said something to offend him. "Hell, college kids are a dime a dozen. Why the world not?"
Looking over his shoulder, Randall moaned and made a face. "You didn't really shoot a student, did you, Harley?"
Harley poked his finger down through a hole in the top of the cap and lifted it off his head. "Just look at this, if you don't believe me. See the hole in the cap? See the cap run?" Dancing it up and down in front of him, he laughed until he got choked up and went into a coughing fit.
Randall looked over his shoulder again and said, "We've seen it Harley. Put it back on your head, please."
That response was all the encouragement Harley needed to start acting like a comic. He pushed the end of the revolver barrel through the hole and held the cap up over his head, moving it back and forth like a conductor waving a baton. I thought he was a sadistic bastard when he said, "I was only kidding. I jerked it off a nail by the front door when I ran out of the restaurant. Needed something to cover my noggin. Gets chilly once the sun goes down. My blood's a lot thinner than it used to be when I was young like you boys. You know what I mean?"
"You had the right to take it, Harley," I said. Another sharp pain jolted my back, and I thought seriously about a suicide mission if Harley would not give me any medication and the pain became unbearable.
"Do they have real good food back there at the restaurant?" Randall asked. "Is that why they call it The Best Food Anywhere?"
"I wouldn't know. All I did was go in to rob the place. That's why I got all wired up with the dynamite. I figured that if someone got the drop on me all I had to do was show the TNT. Nobody screws with a crazy man holding his finger on a dynamite button."
"What happened?" I asked.
"Got caught up in a drug deal gone wrong. Stupid cowboy tried to pass ragweed off as marijuana. The big guy with the pea-sized brain tried to pay for the dope with phony money. Everybody got crossways with everybody. Bunch of dumb bastards."
"How do you know it was phony money?" I asked, figuring Harley had to be making up a lot of stuff.
"I saw the big guy make it on a copy machine. He ran off two or three sheets, cut them up with one of those big paper slicers and carried them right
out front. All of it plain as day."
"That's one of the craziest things I've ever heard," Randall said. "How would anyone in their right mind think they could get by with such a thing?"
"There you go," Harley said. "They weren't a bunch of mental giants."
"Did they know you had the dynamite?" I asked.
"No. Hell, no."
"You could have just blown the place up," I said. "Why didn't you?"
"Just as I started to make my move, you boys pulled up. Figured I'd hitch me a ride instead."
Harley waved the KU cap at a couple of teenage boys that passed us in a black pickup truck with steer horns mounted on the hood. "Look at 'em go!" he yelled. "I wish it were me, young again and acting crazy."
"Talk about something crazy, I sure thought the cowboy back in the parking lot was going to get shot," Randall said. He looked over at me and rolled his eyes. Putting his hand up to his throat, he stuck out his tongue. I knew he was trying to give me a sign, but like the rest of his signals, I didn't know what he wanted.
"I wish the skinny little prick had been shot," Harley said. "He called me an old man as I ran out the door. That's the second-worst thing to calling me 'Mister'. So I'm old. So is everybody, if they live long enough."
"Good point, Harley," I said. "Real good point. You've got a great head on your shoulders." More importantly, you have my bottle of Percodan in your shirt pocket, I thought.
I thought about Ann and how we had lain out in the hammock under the big oak tree in her front yard on the Sunday afternoon before Randall and I hit the road, how I laughed when she told me to be really careful. What could possibly happen to me?
"I'm just glad I didn't know those guys personally," Harley said.
"Why?" I asked.
"People judge you by the company you keep. That's why I'm so glad I ran into the likes of you boys. A couple of real upstanding citizens."
"Who owns the place?" Randall asked. "The restaurant that you went in to rob?"
"How the hell would I know? I was only in there about thirty minutes. Tell you what, boys. I don't want to hear any more questions about that stupid restaurant. Nothing else about dope, phony money, cowboys, or big overgrown assholes with shotguns. Nothing else, unless I say otherwise."
"I never meant to push you about it," Randall said. "I was just curious."
"Yeah, well, curiosity killed the cat, you know. Pass me that cup." Harley pointed to a big, forty-four ounce plastic travel mug with Lucky Lady Truck Stop written above a big red heart.