Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

When the old guy stopped bleeding, Black severed his left ear.

Black rolled the prospector’s body out of the Toy’s trunk. He returned to the shack to get the duffle and the shovel. Old man Whistler’s ear lay in the drawer. It had sprouted a hedge of tiny white spikes that were as thin as cactus thorns but as hard as teeth.

Black pulled the last white pin out of the cemetery map. Found a black pin in the desk. Stabbed it through Whistler’s ear and pinned the ear to the spot where the white pin had been.

Outside, the moon crested the ash-colored mountains like an enormous tombstone. Black took off his shirt and let the evening breeze caress his sweaty back. His sweat smelled like beer. He dragged the prospector’s skinny corpse through the graveyard. The dead man’s heels dug little ditches in the sand.

Black found the empty plot and was kind of surprised that it wasn’t marked with a big white pin. He started to dig. He felt a little better. The wind had dried his sweat, and the desert air smelled good. Dry and clean, like the sky. The baked-earth smell that had bothered him in the heat of the day was long gone.

He went down about two feet before the sand started to sift back into the hole. He rolled the prospector’s body into the grave, upended the duffle and poured diamond rings and gold teeth and silver crosses over the corpse, and covered it up.

The cool wind smoothed the mounded sand. Black tossed the empty duffle to the wind and watched it tumble past a row of blank tombstones. He thought about the ear pinned to the map in the cemetery shack, and he thought about the body that he had buried on that Baja backroad, remembered burying that body without a second thought. He wondered what it looked like right now, that body.

Black stared at the moon. Maybe he should make a marker for the prospector’s grave. Maybe he ought to dig the registration slip out of the old-timer’s truck and pin it to a cross so the skinny old guy wouldn’t go unknown. Maybe… He shook his head. That was the flip side all right, but he didn’t have any proof that it really existed.

What he had was the ear.

What he figured he didn’t have was a whole lot of time.

Black hesitated, then planted the shovel at the head of the grave.

The wind picked up, howling like something evil, something young and strong. Blasts of sand worried the anonymous tombstones. Black imagined the sound of hoofbeats — cloven hoofs racing sharp and fast over a stretch of blacktop somewhere south of the border.

He hurried to his car, wondering if he’d hear that sound.

Wondering if he knew what to listen for.

(For Tia Travis)

THE MOJAVE TWO-STEP

The desert, just past midnight. A lone truck on a scorched black licorice strip, two men — Anshutes and Coker — inside.

Outside it’s one hundred and twenty-five degrees under a fat December moon. Frosty weather in the twilight days of global warming… and just in time for the holiday season.

Sure, driving across the desert was a risk, even in such balmy weather. Not many people owned cars anymore, and those who did avoided the wide white lonesome. Even roadcops were smart enough to leave the Mojave alone. It was too hot and too empty, and it could make you as crazy as a scorpion on a sizzling-hot skillet. If you broke down out here, you ended up cooked to a beautiful golden brown — just like Tiny Tim’s Christmas goose.

But that wasn’t going to happen to Coker. He was going to spend New Year’s Eve in Las Vegas. The town that Frank and Dean and Sammy had built all those years ago was still the place he wanted to be. Hell on earth outside, air-conditioned splendor within. If you had the long green, Vegas gave you everything a growing boy could desire. A/C to the max, frosty martinis… maybe even a woman with blue eyes that sparkled like icebergs.

Let the swells fly into town in air-conditioned jets, Coker figured. He’d take the hard road. The dangerous road. The real gambler’s road. He’d ride that scorched highway straight down the thermometer into double digits, and the A/C would frost everything but his dreams. A little business, a couple lucky rolls of the dice, and his life would change for good… then he’d leave town with a jet of his own. Slice it up like an Eskimo Pie and that was cool, any way you figured it.

It was all part of the gamble called life. Like always, Lady Luck was rolling the dice. Rattling the bones for Coker and for his partner, too, even though Anshutes would never admit to believing in any airy jazz like that.

Coker believed it. Lady Luck was calling him now. Just up the road in Vegas, she waited for him like a queen. God knew he’d dreamed about her long enough, imagining those iceberg eyes that sparkled like diamonds flashing just for him.

All his life, he’d been waiting for the Lady to give him a sign. Coker knew it was coming soon. Maybe with the next blink of his eyes. Or maybe the one after that.

Yeah. That was the way it was. It had to be.

Really, it was the only explanation.

Check it out. Just two days ago Coker and Anshutes had been on foot. Broiling in Bakersfield with maybe a gallon of water between them, seven bucks, and Anshutes’ .357 Magnum… which was down to three shells. But with that .357 they’d managed to steal five hundred and seventy-two bucks, a shotgun, and an ice cream truck tanked with enough juice to get them all the way to Vegas. Plus they still had the Magnum… and those three shells.

Now if that wasn’t luck, what was?

One-handing the steering wheel, Coker gave the ice cream truck a little juice. Doing seventy on the straightaway, and the electric engine purred quieter than a kitten. The rig wasn’t much more than a pick-up with a refrigeration unit mounted on the back, but it did all right. Coker’s only complaint was the lack of air-conditioning. Not that many automobiles had A/C anymore… these days, the licensing fees for luxuries which negatively impacted the sorry remains of the ozone layer cost more than the cars. But why anyone who could afford the major bucks for a freon-licensed vehicle would forgo the pleasure of A/C, Coker didn’t know.

The only guy who had the answer was the owner of the ice cream truck. If he was still alive… and Coker kind of doubted that he was. Because Anshutes had excavated the poor bastard’s bridgework with the butt of his .357 Magnum, emptied the guy’s wallet, and left him tied to a telephone pole on the outskirts of Bakersfield. By now, the ice cream man was either cooked like the ubiquitous Xmas goose or in a hospital somewhere sucking milkshakes through a straw.

Coker’s left hand rested on the sideview mirror, desert air blasting over his knuckles. Best to forget about the ice cream man. His thoughts returned to the Lady. Like always, those thoughts had a way of sliding over his tongue, no matter how dry it was. Like always, they had a way of parting his chapped lips and finding Anshutes’ perennially sunburnt ear.

“Know where I’m heading after Vegas?” Coker asked.

“No,” Anshutes said. “But I’m sure you’re gonna tell me.”

Coker smiled. “There’s this place called Lake Louise, see? It’s up north, in Canada. Fifty years ago it used to be a ski resort. Now the only skiing they do is on the water. They’ve got palm trees, papayas and mangoes, and girls with skin the color of cocoa butter. Days it’s usually about thirty-five Celsius, which is ninety-five degrees American. Some nights it gets as low as sixty.”