Biker (11 page)

A new Ford Taurus had pulled in next to the Desmo. A man in a light gray suit got out, giving the motorcycle an appreciative stare before unlocking the door to the Trans-Continental office.

“The insurance guy's here. I'll call you back in fifteen.”

“Okay.”

Pratt gathered the newspapers and put them in a wall rack on his way out. Traffic on the interstate had picked up. Pratt waited until a kamikaze Honda screamed by and dashed across the street full sprint. Lots of bikers heading north.

The name on the door was Ed Kazynski. Pratt pushed through into a reception/office area, the man in the gray suit looking up from his gray desk near the front. He was a big man with a large oval head, a ruddy complexion and the easy bonhomie of the born salesman.

“Is that your Ducati?” Ed Kazynski boomed.

Josh stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Yes sir. Josh Pratt. I'm a private investigator.”

Kazynski stood and pumped Josh's hand. “Well then I guess that's our Ducati!”

“That's right, sir. I'm actually on another case right now, and coming across this Desmo was a fluke.”

Kazynski frowned. “Our man in Madison said he had someone working on this full-time.”

“That's true, sir. An investigator named Hank Meyer.”

“Well this is a lucky break for us. Do you need anything from me?”

“A receipt. And I could use a ride to Sturgis.”

Kazynski looked at his calendar. “Why don't you bring that motorcycle around to the back door. I'll run you up myself.”

Pratt rode around the strip mall to the back, where Kazynski had opened a steel door into the back of his shop. The Desmo slotted neatly through the door. Pratt left it in a crowded storeroom next to the ink erasers with the key in it.

Kazynski typed up a receipt and signed it. They headed north in Kazynski's Taurus.

Once on the interstate he floored it. A giant hand pushed Pratt back into his seat.

“Wow,” he said. “What's under the hood?”

“Twin turbo 3.5-liter V-6. It's the new SHO.”

The thrills did not last long as they came up on the end of a gelatinous line of traffic headed for the rally. It was Monday morning. They cruised at thirty-five between cycle cavalcades. State troopers with flashing lights stood by the side of the road.

“Normally this is a forty-five minute drive,” Kazynski said.

“These are the rains that let a thousand businesses flourish,” Pratt said.

“Buddy, you said it. Sturgis accounts for fifty percent of all South Dakota tourism. You got your Rushmore, you got your Crazy Horse, Corn Palace, Wall Drug, whatever. None of them hold a candle to the granddaddy of all cycle rallies.”

Krazynski's cell phone rang. He took it. Kazynski talked policy with a client as they inched forward. Pratt pulled out his own cell and called Bloom.

“The baby has been delivered.” Pratt gave Bloom the details off Kazynski's card.

The abrupt wail of a police siren three feet from their rear caused them both to jump.

A state bike cop was keeping pace. Kazynski lowered the window. Heat poured in.

“Put the cell phone away, sir. It's against the law.” The cop bent down to give Pratt the hairy eyeball.

“Gotta go, Danny.” Pratt hung up.

Kazynski hung up. “I know that, Officer. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken that call.”

The cop gave a slight nod. A whoop sounded from behind them. The cop glanced back down the long line of stalled cars and bikes and fingered the speakerphone pinned to his shirt.

“What's going on?”

“We got shots fired at the Chip,” announced a staticky voice. “The Aztec Skulls and the Vandals are going at it.”

CHAPTER 19

Without another word the cop clicked into gear and tore off down the shoulder. The whoop from behind was joined by a half dozen sirens from every direction.

Pratt glanced at Kazynski. The insurance agent looked pale and had begun to sweat.

“I'll get out here, thanks,” Pratt said, opening the door. “No need to fight your way through town.”

Kazynski smiled in gratitude. “'Preciate it, Josh. I'll see that the bike goes to the right people.”

With a salute Pratt shut the door and stepped out on the shoulder. He heard more whoops converging on the Chip to the north. The highway was a solid mass of chrome and metal, hirsute and overweight bikers sitting by the side of the road stripping off leather.

With gang activity tying up law enforcement and likely shutting down all traffic, Pratt would be better off walking. Pulling the bill of his gimme cap low over his nose, he strode north up the shoulder, passing numerous bikers and ordinary families on vacation who had elected to get out of their vehicles.

The temp was in the low eighties. Pratt was thirsty. He passed a family having a picnic with a cooler stuffed with soft drinks. Pratt stopped and pulled out his wallet.

“Like to buy one of those sodas from you,” he said to the father, a portly man in a white Lacoste shirt and Bermuda shorts sitting on a blanket with his wife and two children, a boy and a girl.

The man waved Pratt's money away. “Just take one. We got plenty.”

“Daddy, is that a biker?” the little boy said, peering out from behind his father's shoulder.

“I'm a biker all right,” Josh said. “I just don't have a bike.”

He waved and moved on, popping the top. The cold Coke went down like a frozen avalanche. He drank it all, crushing the can into a flat disc, which he put in his rear pocket. Pratt saw Sturgis from a slight incline. It had been transformed into a glittering brooch with the addition of hundreds of thousands of chromed bikes.

“You got the right idea, brother,” a stalled biker called from traffic.

Twenty minutes later he was walking down Junction Street. Pratt made it to the Broken Spoke. He stopped, stretched and entered the bar. He used the facilities and ordered another Coke. Everybody was talking about the fight.

“I heard the Vandals started it,” said a dude at the bar wearing a wife beater that showcased his tribal tats. “Now they're scattered all over the plains and the Highway Patrol is rounding them up one by one.”

“Anybody killed?” the bartender asked.

“I heard three Skulls got shot but nobody knows if they died.”

The talk filled Pratt with a great weariness as he contemplated the futility and stupidity of inter-tribal warfare, as ritualized and pointless as any obscure government bureaucracy. The Bedouins had been locked in a debilitating feud with the Quad City Rockers for many years, which eventually led to the dissolution of both gangs.

Pratt hitched a ride with a vendor in a pick-up. The drive out to the Chip was glacial. The laconic vendor said, “Sturgis comes but once a year. And when it comes it brings good cheer,” before lapsing into calm resignation. Pratt fell asleep in the truck. He woke when two ambulances screamed by on the shoulder heading into town.

“Bad for business,” the vendor groused, chain-smoking Camels. It took forty-five minutes to reach the Chip from the Broken Spoke. Pratt thanked the man and jumped out at the gate, flashing his bracelet to the guard.

Six SDHP squad cars crowded the shoulder just outside the gate. Pratt made his way through the milling mob toward the main stage where he'd left his bike.

Three cop cars occupied the area in front of the main stage. Most of the bikes had been moved. Pratt waited at the yellow tape for a cop to permit him to retrieve his bike, which he'd left in front of the stage. He got the story while waiting.

The Vandals and the Skulls had a long-standing beef that began when three Skulls jumped a Vandal in Reno in 1999. They'd taken their feud to Daytona Beach and Laughlin, Nevada. They'd taken their feud to Canada and Mexico.

In the wee hours of the morning, while the Skulls partied in front of the stage, two Vandals with bandannas over their faces unloaded with Mac-10s, shooting four Skulls, two fatally. The Vandals split the scene before the cops got there. The cops hadn't released any names.

Nobody knew if the show would go on. Prior to this, there hadn't been a comparable incident at Sturgis in twenty years. The gangs had all learned to get along. The big worry was that the shooting would result in the Chip's being forced to close, losing a major chunk of change, and that the bad publicity would affect Bike Week for years to come. Most bikers were outraged and would have cooked the Vandals on a spit and served them up as barbecue.

Pratt rode/walked his way through the choking dust back toward his camp. Monster wasps vibrated the air as hands twisted throttles. Many bikers saw this as heaven but Pratt saw it for what it was, a pathetic gathering of perpetual adolescents clinging to a mock image of toughness, outlaws excluded. For them the toughness was real and often resulted in injury or premature death. They were pretty far down the list of enlightened species.

Pratt's camp was as he left it. There was virtually no theft inside the Chip. It was like Hong Kong in that respect. The Vandals had broken a sacred trust and henceforth would be cast out even among the lowest of the low. Maybe that was the point. The Vandals had lowered themselves to legendary status. Pratt was glad none of the Bedouins were around. It was one-thirty in the afternoon and the heat was fierce. He had barely crawled inside his pup tent when he lay down on the mat and crashed.

Every time he woke up he heard sirens wailing.

CHAPTER 20

Pratt woke to a howling cacophony of voices, bikes and country music. The sun barely hovered above the hills, lasering in at an angle, turning bikes to gold and leaves to emeralds. Pratt rolled over and checked his watch.

It was seven-thirty. He'd slept for six hours.

He checked his phone. Cass had left a “I love you, baby.” He called her back, got her phone and left her one.

Pratt crawled out, relieved himself against the barbed wire and prepared for the long haul to the showers. He felt stitched together with duct tape and baling wire. The morning incident had left powder charge in the air. More booze- and drug-crazed bikers howled at the full moon, already rushing the sun offstage.

Some loon kept shrieking, “Yeeeeeee-HA!” with a Southern accent. More bikers flying the stars and bars. Pratt stood in line for fifteen minutes for his turn at the shower. The water was lukewarm but at least he'd sluiced. He took two ibuprofens.

Dusk had fallen by the time he got back to his camp. It was going to happen tonight. He could feel the electric tide rising in his bones. He changed into a fresh shirt, underwear and Packers cap and packed his tank bag with water, gloves, a light backpack, maps, goggles and rain suit and headed back to the stage. He wore a pair of Gargoyles.

The sonic throom of the blues vibrated through the ground. Jonny Lang was opening for Lynyrd Skynyrd. Bikers were still pissed about Harley's 100th anniversary party where they'd booked Elton John. Why not just book RuPaul and be done with it? The Chip knew its audience better than Harley.

The cops had left and taken their crime tape. The Chip was back to normal, with several thousand people milling in front of the stage as Jonny Lang went down on one knee, face twisted in exquisite agony as he plucked a chord that would make a banker weep.

Pratt hung back near the concessions, purchased a smoked turkey leg, of which he could only consume half, and handed the rest to a starving biker. Pratt watched people for an hour. A lot of people were letting it all hang out when they shouldn't have let any of it hang out. There was something about biker cons and Sturgis in particular that erased the inhibitions of men and women of a certain age.

Pratt spotted the War Bonnet between Jake's Tattoo and Domino's Pizza, furtively trading with a wan blond who looked like she'd been left in the rinse cycle too long. Pratt hung back and observed.

Over the next hour, while Jonny Lang finished and Lynyrd Skynyrd came on, the War Bonnet did a dozen deals. Then he was out. Like before, he headed toward home base. This time Pratt would not be distracted.

The War Bonnet walked right by him. The War Bonnet had a pronounced occipital brow and a full face beard. The full moon lit the campgrounds like Stalag 17. The War Bonnet had a bald patch on the crown of his head that looked like an eagle's nest. He moved with a herky-jerky motion. People stepped aside for him. He broadcast bad juju.

The dusty road was chock-a-block with drunks, stoners, tweakers, shooters and trippers. Pratt was invisible. He followed the War Bonnet for a half mile through the campgrounds to an ivory LaFarge Motor Home parked in a copse of cottonwood, two rat bikes in front.

Pratt stood behind some cottonwood and alder as the War Bonnet knocked on the door. A second later the door opened. Lights went on in the motor home but Pratt couldn't see anything. The angle was wrong and the rear windows had their blinds shut. He knew what was going on. The vendor was replenishing his supply. The War Bonnets kept their stash in the motor home.

Fifteen minutes later the vendor left the motor home walking more spasmodically than before and headed back to the stage. Pratt stayed where he was. The blinds on the motor home went up and Pratt could see inside. There appeared to be only one dude. Of course there may have been more in the bedroom but with Lynyrd Skynyrd just tuning up that was doubtful.

If the trailer's a rockin', don't bother knockin'
.

The trailer was not rocking. Pratt watched and waited. The dude in the motor home seemed to be straightening up the joint. That open blind was going to be a problem. The War Bonnet peered into the darkness and closed the blind.

Don't think about it, just do it
.

Pratt let his gut go slack before heading to the motor home. What he was about to do made his asshole ride up between his shoulder blades and gave him the heebie-jeebies. He strode up to the door as if it were his own, glanced around once. Nada. The door hinged outward. Pratt knocked on the door.