Max Collins - Quarry's ex

Right now skinny Skull, the smarter and more dangerous of the two, was horse-laughing, showing off yellow teeth and a missing incisor in the midst of his scraggly Fu Manchu facial hair. Laughing so hard his leather vest was flapping over his hairy, bony torso. He had a broken, blood-weeping heart tattoo, by the way-on the wrong side of his chest.

So not that smart.

“You got a bogus call sheet, sweetcheeks,” Skull chortled, ponytail swinging. “Today’s shoot got canceled.”

Bandana-headed Juke saw an opening for a funny. “Like maybe your ass gonna get canceled!”

Both of them laughed at that. Higher than fucking kites.

Now I did start to blame myself-any time you’re bested by dipshit trash like this, who else is there to blame?

“What do you boys want?” I asked.

Skull slapped me. He had some rings on-one a skull ring, I’d wager-and it cut the corner of my mouth. I tasted blood.

“Speak when you’re the fuck spoken to,” he said, with a curl of the upper lip that I might have found comical in other circumstances. I chose not to point out that they had in fact been speaking to me.

Then they did something I found odd.

They let me sit there.

They went over to a booth and put the guns on the tabletop-they were seated by the window just to my left and over a ways, near the door-and they played cards for pills.

Each biker had little piles of what I figured were amphetamines. Like poker chips, the colors varied-pale shades of purple, orange, green. Those were the pills. Mixed in were bright orange capsules. I wasn’t paying close enough attention to determine if any of these were worth more for betting purposes. I did figure out they were playing draw poker.

In addition they were drinking cans of beer-Miller, champagne of beers, nothing too good for my hosts-and it didn’t take me long to realize they were holding me for somebody. I had a hunch I knew who that somebody was, but the way they had dug in-cards, smokes, beers, ignoring me-made me figure they weren’t expecting my real host for a while yet.

So there I sat with a stiletto strapped to my thigh and my arms pinned to me. I could almost reach my waistband with either hand, but I was in full view, and that knife was well below where I could reach.

“Guys,” I said.

“Shut-up,” Skull said.

“I gotta piss.”

“Go ahead and piss.”

“Just piss myself you mean.”

Juke said, “Don’t bother us! We’re busy!..Two kings.”

Skull said, “Three tens.”

“Aw, fuck you, Skull! Nobody’s that fuckin’ lucky.”

Skull took no offense, shuffling what looked to me like greasy cards. “I am that fucking lucky. You are looking at the lucky fucker who is that fucking lucky.”

I said, “I piss myself, fellas, it’s gonna smell in here. Worse than you two already do.”

That at least got their attention.

Both ugly faces turned my way. I had a better view of Juke than Skull, not that that was a privilege. But I did sort of enjoy how his face turned bright red under the wispy carrot-color beard and the way his little eyes popped in their pouches.

Then they turned back to their game, not mad enough to come over and cuff me or anything.

Absently, Skull said to me, “Shut the fuck up, asshole.” Then to Juke: “Wanna cut?”

“Bet your ass I wanna cut,” Juke said. “These all the cards we got?”

“These are all the cards we got. Hell, man, they’re your cards!”

“My cards maybe. But not my fuckin’ morning.”

I said, “You think the guy you’re holding me for wants to have to talk to somebody who smells like ten kinds of piss? Let me use the fucking can already.”

Skull sighed grandly and threw the cards on the table. “Jesus! You are more fucking trouble than you are worth.” He swiveled in the booth and glared at me. “You know the cans in here aren’t working. Water’s shut off. You were here the other day. You see a honeywagon out there? Not fuckin’ hardly. Hold your goddamn water…Aces and fours.”

“Fuck you, Skull! Shit! Jesus.”

Skull was laughing and hauling in pills.

“Then walk me outside,” I said. “Look, you want me to piss myself? I’ll piss myself. That’ll get you in solid with your boss.”

Juke said, “He’s gettin’ on my fuckin’ nerves, man.”

“You wanna walk him out for a piss,” Skull said reasonably, “walk him out for a piss. But he’s all yours. You gotta unwrap the Christmas present, and wrap it the fuck back up. Whole enchilada.”

“No biggie,” Juke said, and got up and came over quickly, saying back to his partner, “Anyway, I gotta piss, too. You know what they say about beer. You can’t buy it, y’can only rent the sumbitch.”

So Juke leaned over me, smelling like beer and weed and body odor, picking at the edge of where the duct tape had left off, like it was a scab. He found the place, and got the tape going and unwrapped me. Gun in one hand, he yanked me up off the chair by an arm and hauled me back through the kitchen and into the warmth of the outdoors.

Day now.

Sunny sky.

Warm, dry.

Behind the diner, scrubby desert stretched endlessly with the occasional cactus popping up like a hitchhiker thumb.

We stood side by side and he said, “First me,” and-his back to the diner-pissed a yellow stream with admirable arching trajectory. He was on my left, the. 38 in his right hand, and was aiming his dick with his left. Ambidextrous pisser, Juke was.

“Now you,” he said.

And I was afraid he was going to stand there next to me, and make it hard if not impossible for me to get at the weapon.

But like most men, he felt uncomfortable watching another man relieve himself, and took several respectful steps back. Juke was just that kind of guy. I could hear him zipping up back there and I unzipped and reached my hand deep through my fly and what I brought back was not my penis.

The click of the retracted blade coming out to smile in the sun was a very small sound in a very large desert, but it might have been a cannon shot. Even Juke heard it, but he did not have time to raise the gun-in-hand before I swung around and jammed the knife point deep into his throat, right under the adam’s apple.

He froze there, with a deer-in-the-headlights expression, if that deer were a dunce, anyway, and I moved behind him, the handle of the knife still tight in my fist, and I brought that blade around like I was carving a lid in a jack o’ lantern, getting myself behind him, so that when I finally released the blade from his throat, the arterial spray wouldn’t get on me. Instead, it cut a wide glittery scarlet stream in the sunlight, little diamonds winking off it, making the brief life of that spray a thing of beauty.

Not Juke’s fuckin’ morning.

I didn’t fuck around with Skull.

With the revolver in hand, I moved quickly through the kitchen and into the diner, the pathway putting me behind the counter like I was about to deliver an order. Skull glanced up from shuffling, with eyes that could not have been dimmer if the bullet had already crashed through his skull.

Well, maybe those eyes were a little dimmer, in the aftermath of the gun’s crack, the bullet thudding into the wood wall, and he slammed his head sideways onto the tabletop, looking like a schoolboy napping at his desk, spilling blood onto the pills and the cards. Dying, he shit himself.

He would.

I decided to leave him there. I didn’t see any percentage in moving Juke, either. Nobody was around, and the blood would still be seeping for a while. Not a long while, but a while. We were far enough out of town that my gunshot was about as notable as a coyote howl.

All I did by way of clean-up, or for that matter preparation for my upcoming guest, was go out where I’d dropped the stiletto near Juke and wipe its blade off on his bandana. Some spatter on my hand, from holding the knife, I wiped off on his t-shirt. Then I got my nine millimeter from the car, if only to know where it was, with no intention of shifting from the. 38 to my more familiar weapon.