Orbital Decay (29 page)

“So how did you end up here?” Joni asked, once we had all quieted down again. “I mean, it sounds as if you were doing all right with the Satan’s Exiles. What put you up here?”

Bruce gazed at the tabletop for a few silent moments, a frown on his face. We all realized that the funny stuff was over and if we wanted to hear any more, we had better stop laughing. We stifled our lingering giggles and sat quietly, waiting to see if Virgin Bruce would tell us the rest of the story. I figured out at once that if there was anything that he didn’t care to expose, it wasn’t a tall tale about a whore in the backwoods of Missouri, but something much deeper and not as amusing.

“This doesn’t get beyond this room, okay?” he said at last, staring at each of us in turn. We nodded, and he let out a sigh and continued:

“I didn’t get along so well with everyone in the gang. When I was initiated into the Exiles, the Treasurer was a guy everyone called the Fish, and don’t ask me why, except that he sorta looked like one. The Fish and I didn’t like each other from the word go—no real reason, I guess, just that we rubbed each other the wrong way—and he was the only one who voted against letting me in, but the majority ruled and I was let in. He still didn’t like it, but he stayed outta my way and I stayed outta his.

“The Exiles weren’t entirely clean. We all paid monthly dues, but most of the money we used for booze and gas and pot came from a kitty the Fish was responsible for, as Treasurer. He managed to keep it full by selling dope, dealing all sorts of shit to wholesale dealers in St. Louis. He’d skim off a percentage for himself, of course, and we all knew that and let it go, because it kept us in the money and the guys in the gang who did drugs had a constant, reliable source.” He paused, and added, “Not me, though. I smoked a little weed, but I didn’t have any use for coke or crank or any of the other heavy shit.

“About two months after I was initiated and started running with the Exiles, the Prez, whose name was Rodney and who everyone called Big Wad ’cause of—ah, never mind—got killed. He was coming back from a bar on the Landing in St. Louis one night on Route 40, probably drunk, and the semi he got in front of too fast wiped him off the road. Anyway, an emergency election was called under the club’s constitution, and guess who got elected?”

“The Fish,” I guessed.

Bruce gave me a shooting motion with his right hand. “Bingo. He had seniority, and he had lots of blow, which made the snowheads in the group happy, and so he got elected. And guess who was the only guy who voted against him? No, don’t even bother to guess.

“I was surprised, though. I thought the first thing President Fish would do would be to kick me out of the gang. As the Prez, he had the autonomous privilege to do that, no vote necessary. But he didn’t. In fact, he even started to chum up to me a little. I was edgy about his sudden friendliness, ’specially since I was the sole dissenting voice in his election, but after a few weeks I thought, well, what the fuck, maybe giving him some power has mellowed him out. So I stopped looking over my shoulder, y’know?”

Virgin Bruce stopped for a minute. He got up and walked to the refrigerator to get another can of fake brew, saying nothing until he had popped the lid and settled back in his chair. I could tell he was thinking over his words, and wondered again why he was telling us this story. Perhaps everyone has to lay down his or her particular burden sooner or later, because I had the sense he wasn’t telling us this solely to impress Joni.

“Then, a few weeks after he got elected, Fish came up to me during a party at his place, with a couple of his closest cronies at his side,” Bruce continued. “He comes up to me real casual and says, Bruce, there’s a job I need you to do. Yeah? I says, and he says, there’s a shipment which is coming in for me from down South, which arrived yesterday in Illinois. It’s a bunch of coke which is worth a few grand, and I need someone I can trust to go get it for me. I asked him why he couldn’t go make the connection himself, and he told me that his bike was in the shop and that was why someone else had to make the run. So I said I would do it.”

“You didn’t question him?” Mike asked. “You just said, ‘sure, I’ll do it’? To someone you didn’t like?”

Bruce glanced over at Webb with a condescending expression. “In this club, pal, if the Prez gave an order, there was no question about it. You did it. That was why he had his friends with him, to back him up and to act as witnesses in case I disobeyed an order from the Prez. Besides, like I said, I had stopped worrying about him. I really didn’t think he was going to screw me.

“So the next day I got on my bike and headed for a little town just across the Mississippi called O’Fallon, about twenty-five miles from St. Louis. Out in the farmland sort of near Scott Air Force Base. I followed Fish’s directions to a little broken-down place just off the I-64 ramp, where this skinny guy whose name I don’t remember was waiting for me with the stuff.” I wondered if Bruce really didn’t recall the name of his connection, or if he was simply covering up that point. “He was nervous, but so was I, so I didn’t think much of it. I handed him the roll of bills Fish had given me, and he gave me the stuff—two big plastic bags of white mindfuck, which I squeezed into a pair of saddlebags I had lashed over my rear wheel’s mudguard. Fish had told me that he would take care of the testing when I got back but that this guy was usually dependable, so not to sweat it. He and I had a quick beer together, then I hopped on my bike and away I went, back down a short stretch of highway to the interstate.”

Virgin Bruce rapped his knuckles on the table. “That, my friends, was when the shit hit the fan. I had barely hit the westbound lane of 64, doing the speed limit, when I looked in my mirror and saw an Illinois state trooper coming up behind me, coming off the exit I had just left. I barely had time to check my speed and start to sweat, when his lights came on and he started to speed up.”

“A trap,” I said.

Virgin Bruce nodded slowly. “A trap. The dealer in Illinois was being watched and I guess Fish knew it, and that was why he sent me. If I made it through, fine, he’d get his coke—and if anyone got popped, it would be me, not him. All that went through my brain as I gunned the throttle and took off down the highway with that trooper right on me.

“I knew I was in big trouble. Doubtless the trooper would be radioing ahead for reinforcements, and if there weren’t cops waiting on the Poplar Street Bridge into St. Louis, then there would be someone on the Illinois side, like in Centreville or East St. Louis. I thought, maybe if I can make it to East St. Louis, I’ll be okay, because the area around the interstate and the river was a combat zone and even the cops didn’t like to go in there because some nut might blow their car away with an Army surplus grenade launcher. If I can make it to East St. Louis, I figured, I’ll be fine, they’ll lose me in that ghetto.”

He shook his head. “Then they started firing on me. I heard the shots, and looked in my mirror to see that they had opened the sun window and one of the cops was braced in it and trying to line me up in his gun sight. I started to zigzag but there wasn’t any traffic to duck behind. It was in the middle of the afternoon and no one else was on the road.

“So I said to myself, Bruce, you’re in trouble. You’re holding enough dope to send you to jail for life, the exits ahead are probably blocked, and the cop on your tail has opened fire on your ass, so you’d better take radical measures
real quick.
I don’t really recall how I made up my mind, y’know. I guess it was just reflex.

“I twisted the bar to the left, gunned the gas, and went
right across the median
! Right across the left side of the road, in front of a truck, getting on the far shoulder. An overpass came up and I saw, in a second, what I
knew
I was looking for, a break in the wire fence along the road, near the top of the overpass. I
gunned
that mother and went off the road,
into
the weeds,
up
the embankment, and hit the hole in the fence doing maybe thirty-five.

“I hit the fence hard, man, scraped the side of it with my bike, and my Harley laid down on the road on top of the overpass. Scraped the shit out of my leg, but I got up, got on the bike and tore the hell out of there. Didn’t even look back to see what the cop was doing, just got the fuck out of there. I saw a little dirt road come up and I took off down it, kept right on going till I stopped about fifteen miles away and looked to see if anyone was still behind me.”

Virgin Bruce took a deep breath. “Well, I’d lost the cops, but that wasn’t the only thing I had lost. The saddlebags. I’d lost them too. They had torn loose when I laid the bike down, I guess. They were gone, with the coke in them, but I wasn’t about to go back and look for them because I knew the area would be crawling with cops by now. I’d gotten out of there with my skin, but a couple thousand dollars in cocaine was the price I’d paid for my escape.”

“I guess the gang wasn’t happy about that,” Joni said.

“Yeah, but how could they blame you?” Chang threw in. “You were only trying to get away from the cops, so…”

Virgin Bruce shook his head. “They did blame me, thanks to the Fish. I can’t prove it, but I think I know what happened. The Fish set me up for the bust. If I got busted, he knew that I wouldn’t rat on the rest of the gang.”

“But it wasn’t
your
coke!” Joni said. “You just said you didn’t even use the stuff! Why wouldn’t you have…?”

Then she stopped. Like the rest of us, she knew how seriously Virgin Bruce took being loyal to his “gang,” whether they were bikers or beamjacks. We had all seen how he had risked his own life, not to mention the ire of Cap’n Wallace and Hank Luton, to attempt to rescue Webb and Honeyman when the hotdog on Vulcan had blown out. Fish had picked his mule well. If Virgin Bruce had been busted by the Illinois state troopers, bamboo shoots under his fingernails or the rubber hose treatment wouldn’t have forced him into betraying his friends. Some might call it criminal. I called it being damned brave.

“I had on a wristphone so I called the clubhouse,” Virgin Bruce continued. “As my luck would have it, Fish picked up the phone. There must have been others in the room, because even as I told him what had happened, he began to threaten me, saying that he knew I had stolen the junk and that if I didn’t get it back to him in five hours, the gang would kill me. I have no doubt that he told the others that I had split with the coke. I didn’t even bother to argue. I just clicked off. That was the last I ever heard from them.

“I had gotten a job as a welder at the Big Mac plant in St. Louis by then—that’s McDonnell Douglas, the big aerospace contractor—and I headed there because I had some clothes and a few extra bucks stashed in my locker at the plant. My first intention was to grab the stuff and get out of town, not even return to my apartment ’cause the boys might be waiting for me there. While I was getting my junk, I spotted a poster on the bulletin board. Said ‘Career Opportunities On The High Frontier,’ showed a picture of Olympus. Skycorp was hiring out of Big Mac then.

“As luck would have it, one of the supervisors in the Space Division at the plant and I were on pretty good terms since I had fixed his bike the week before. I immediately went to him and told him that I wanted a job in space
now
, that I was sick of Missouri and the sooner I could go to work for Skycorp, the better. He made a call to Alabama while I was in his office and found that they were just about to interview and start training another bunch of beamjacks for work on the station, and that they’d be glad to take on a Big Mac employee at the last minute provided that he had the right recommendations. Chuck put in a good word for me on the phone right there, and twenty minutes later I was hauling ass out of the parking lot, heading to Huntsville. I had the clothes on my back, a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket, my bike, and nothing else but a gut full of fear.”

We were all quiet for a moment. “Why here, man?” Webb asked at last. “What made you decide on Skycan? I mean, there’s other places you could have hid out, so why did you…?”

“Why did I pick this place?” Virgin Bruce crumpled his empty beer can in his fist. “Mike, I have this nightmare, pal. I’m in a cheesy little hotel room somewhere—doesn’t matter where, in Mexico or Canada, someplace you’ve never heard of—and I hear a knock on the door. I get up to answer it, and when I open the door, the Exiles are standing there, with Fish in front of them. They all smile and say hello… and then they come in and kill me. That vision came to me when I last talked to Fish. I knew at that moment there was no place on Earth that was safe for me. So when I saw that poster in the locker room, I knew the only way out was to get off the planet.”

There wasn’t much any of us could say after that. Bruce looked at the cat, who was still playing on the table, and the rest of us looked at Bruce. It had taken a lot for him to break the traditional silence, but I suppose the time comes when even a marked man has to unload his guilt. I noticed that Joni had a little Mona Lisa-like smile on her face when she looked at him. That was maybe the first indication anyone had that our space station’s resident ice-goddess was falling for a scruffy, crude greaseball like Virgin Bruce. Opposites attract, so they say.

I was so fascinated with watching Joni’s eyes on Virgin Bruce that I didn’t notice someone climbing down the ladder from the catwalk, so I jumped a little when Jack Hamilton put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Hi, Sam, what’s going on?”

Everyone laughed a little at my reaction. I ignored them and looked up at the hydroponicist. Hamilton had been on the station for several weeks by then, and as with everyone living in reduced or zero g he had gone through some of the usual changes: his face widening a little, gaining a couple of inches in height as reduced gravity caused his spine to stretch. Like a lot of crewmen, he had cut the sleeves off his uniform shirt and begun wearing shorts. He now wore a baseball cap on his head, stenciled with the words “Fat Boy’s.” There was only one place where you could find a cap like that: Fat Boy’s Barbecue on Route A1A in Cocoa Beach, Florida, a favorite sandwich-and-suds joint for astronauts since the days of Shepard, Glenn, and Grissom. There had been a rumor circulating that Hamilton had some kind of thing going with a female shuttle pilot who made regular runs to Freedom Station, so that might have been how Hamilton got the cap. I hadn’t seen him wearing it in the station up until that point. Maybe she had sent it to him.