Stay Vertical (13 page)

Iso sat up straight. “Pipe Dreams? I thought we were calling it The Strain Train. It rhymes.”

Before Zelov could protest, Lytton said decisively, “The Buddy System. Yup. I’ve thought about it. If I’m going to be the proprietor, that’s what I’m calling it.”

To his surprise, a slow smile spread over Zelov’s face. “The Buddy System,” he said experimentally, trying it out. “I like it.”

Iso nodded. “I do, too.”

Lytton explained, “It kind of rivals A Joint Effort. They both show cooperation, and it’s a co-op, get it?” Also, anything to irk the assholes over at A Joint Effort was fine by Lytton.

Zelov said, “I like your attitude. You’ll need to prove yourself to us first, you do realize that. Meantime, I’ll give you a tip. If the feds raid the store, jump to the other side of the counter and pretend you’re a patient. That’s what I was advised to do.”

Lytton laughed. It was his first genuine laugh in over a week. “Sounds good. So you’re just going to rely on word of mouth to ruin A Joint Effort, on people knowing and caring that their weed is organic?”

“Oh, hell, no,” said Zelov. “We play way too dirty for that. And this is how you can prove yourself to us.”

Lytton was fully prepared to “prove himself” to The Cutlasses. He knew this would be part of it. He couldn’t just walk up with a PhD from MIT and start running their dispensary. How would they know he wasn’t a mole for The Bare Bones? Lytton knew enough about outlaw biker clubs to know that most problems were caused by the nut that connected the handlebars to the saddle. He was an unknown element, a loose variable. They needed to be able to trust him.

“Sure. How?”

“We’re going to jack The Bare Bones’ next shipment of weed from the Ochoa’s farm.”

Zelov and Iso were practically glowing with pride at this brilliantly evil plan, but Lytton was always the one to play the devil’s advocate. “So you just walk out into the middle of a highway and take the truck? I hope the plan is more detailed than that.”

Zelov looked so gleeful, he had to have a good plan. “Oh, it
is
. The box truck full of Staples ‘office supplies’ will be heading west on two-sixty coming from their farm near Show Low on Tuesday afternoon. All you have to do is stick up some construction tape, get a guy with a stop paddle to stop the truck, and jack it.”

“At gunpoint.”

“Well, yeah. Otherwise, why would the guy get out of the truck?”

Iso said, “And you’re pretty handy with that Glock, from what I’ve seen. Thanks a lot. I couldn’t go to the hospital because how would I explain a gunshot wound, so I’m still just hobbling around.” He nodded at a pair of crutches leaning against the wall.

“To be fair,” said Lytton, “you
were
trespassing on my property with the intent to steal plants. And that’s not the first time you’ve tried to get in.”

Zelov looked at his right-hand man. “You
have
come up with some pretty outrageous stunts in the past, Iso.”

Iso glared at his president. “You were there too, man. He could’ve just as easily shot you.”

“I tried to,” Lytton said soothingly. “But you were quicker than my trigger finger.”

Zelov said, “How’s your man, anyway? That fellow with the white afro?”

“He’s okay. Like you said, more stunned than anything. You’re right. It was the most action he’s seen since the Clinton administration. I had to bribe him with a special edition Halo video game to calm him down.”

Zelov chuckled. “Don’t knock it. We could use some noobs, some average citizens like that in our upcoming campaign against The Bare Bones. I take it you’re not back-slapping buddies with that fucktard Illuminati?”

“Not at all. I was made aware of some…unsavory and unacceptable things he’d done against our father, and I made a break with them. Complete and final. No going back.”

Zelov picked up an unlit, half-smoked cigar and nodded. “Yeah, I’m sorry about what happened to your dad.” He implicitly acknowledged what Lytton was referring to. “Cropper was a great guy. It was an honor to be enemies with him, to go head to head with him. He had a great mind for business. Was always one step ahead of the next guy.”

“He could get pretty wild, though,” reminisced Iso. “Remember on that Laughlin run when he got so wasted he fell off the stage at the Great White concert?”

“Yeah,” Zelov said fondly. “Then he couldn’t find the handle to get out of the port-a-john. He thought we’d locked him in, but we were just standing there watching him beat up the plastic walls.”

Iso said, “Then he thought he was bidding on an ATV, but it was a romantic weekend at some bed and breakfast. Boy. His old lady was happy about
that
. He went over and told Tyke to stop climbing all over his ATV, but he’d won a wine tasting weekend at Ruby’s Hideaway or some shit.”

“Complete with couples massage. Those were the days,” sighed Zelov.

“Well.” Lytton knew he’d have to be oblique. No one in the biker world ever actually came out and
said
anything. It had to be implied. “Ford Illuminati just took from me the only chance I’d ever have of meeting my real father. So yeah, we’re not back-slapping buddies. Anything I can do to take him down is fine with me. I’ll take this truck job.”

“Good,” said Zelov, lighting his cigar. “We’ll discuss the details of the Ochoa truck run later. Me and Iso have to get over to a meeting.”

“Yeah,” agreed Iso. “A meeting.”

Out front of the Kevlar-reinforced mobile home, Zelov encouraged Lytton to “stay vertical” by way of goodbye. Lytton guessed that was a common way of saying don’t lay down your ride. Zelov wandered over to a stand of trees to talk in Spanish on his cell. Iso
was
still hobbling on his crutches and Lytton didn’t feel bad about it at all. He didn’t trust that guy and would refuse to do any jobs where Iso played a part.

For the first time in a long time, Lytton thought about Tina. Maybe because he was trying not to think about June, Tina busted her way into his thoughts. She was his girlfriend at MIT. It was assumed she’d become his fiancée after graduation. She was fun, exotic, and so bright he sometimes felt threatened by her intelligence, but it didn’t stop him from loving her. She was a mechanical engineer, and it was a given that wherever Lytton wound up taking a job, Tina would go, too.

Then the disaster with the scholarship board. It wasn’t so much that Tina thought Lytton had scammed them with his fake full-blood Native American status. It was more…
she
really had depended on it.
She
prided herself on being in love with a full-blood Apache Indian.
She
put corny dream catchers on their walls,
she
bought the expensive black pottery,
she
listened to that phony “native” chanting that was really done by white guys.

Lytton had been so blinded by love that he hadn’t noticed all of Tina’s adulation was based upon the idea that he was a dyed-in-the-wool bow bender, a genuine dirt worshiper. But the second the committee found out his father was white, Tina went into a state of shock from which she never recovered. She kept saying, “I can’t believe this.”

“Well, believe it,” he’d tried to tell her. “It’s a fucking inescapable fact.”

But she kept walking around in a daze, withdrawing from him, acting as though she didn’t know him—like he was a stranger. Had their entire relationship been based on the idea he was a John Redcorn? Now it didn’t seem that he was hip or trendy enough, and Tina wanted nothing to do with him. She finally admitted that her feelings had changed, she no longer wanted marriage, and she was taking that job with NASA.

That was another thing that set Lytton off, made him drop out of society, take Kino’s land, and plant marijuana. Now, though, as he hugged the curve around Lake Mormon, he felt ready to venture out into the world again. He wasn’t going to let his fucktard of a half-brother turn him into some twisted hermit. No, he was going to call his buddy Saul Goldblum at the Department of Health and schmooze him into fast-tracking his weed certification. There was supposed to be a “random” drawing of numbered balls bouncing around inside a machine to determine who was awarded the certification. It was a given that was all fixed, and Saul would be the guy to move his application along. Saul still thought Lytton was a full-blood Apache and Lytton had done nothing to dissuade him of this concept. He could get a special dispensation for that.

Lytton was feeling fine and independent as he roared up the final approach to his gate. His happy bubble was shattered all to hell by the appearance of a strange cage in the lot inside the gate, some sort of square, four-door Honda.

He assumed it was a new squeeze of Tobiah’s. The last one had bailed after catching him having cybersex on a riverbank with a busty woman carrying an enormous sword. Tobiah had tried to protest that it was only virtual sex, but she’d bailed anyway, even after finding out the busty woman was really Chad McFarlane of Bangor, Maine.

Lytton chuckled as he went in the front door. He hadn’t given Tobiah any shit about Chad McFarlane in a long time. He hung his keys up on the hall tree and sauntered down the hallway. Yes, a woman sat at the breakfast bar having a cheerful conversation with Tobiah. Lytton knew from the elated expression on Tobiah’s face that he’d found a new flame.

Lytton started saying, “Did you tell her about Chad—” He had to eat his next words, though, when the woman turned around, smiling broadly at him.

June Shellmound.

Lytton gulped, his throat suddenly dry as hell. “Tobiah,” he barely croaked.

JUNE

I
never wanted to seem like I was chasing anyone.

Lytton’s reasons for not wanting to see me again were solid and legitimate. I knew it wasn’t me, it was him.

But Ingrid had seriously smoked all the weed I’d gotten for her. She had actually had a few words of praise for it, rare coming from her. And Lytton’s next closest distributor was in Phoenix.

I was really only halfway chagrined that Lytton wasn’t there, because I honestly did want that weed. Lytton must have told Tobiah that he’d “broken up” with me, or didn’t want to see me again or whatever, because Tobiah had said,

“Come on in. But if Lytton gets home, you might have to leave.”

That was fine, I guessed. I’d spent the past week reinventing myself. It started out being for Lytton’s eyes, but it wound up being a favor for myself. I was sick of the hippie dippy flowing outfits, the racer-backed shirts with the built-in bras, the Birkenstocks.

First off, I’d gone into P & E to a high-end hairdresser. I reasoned I’d need a good cut for job interviews. I got sort of a modified layer, a Joan Jett meets Angela Gossow. It seemed to scream out for a cowboy hat, so while I was in the western store getting that, Emma pointed out some leathers that spoke to me. The jacket was killer, a soft brown calfskin with fringed back yoke and sleeves. Vaguely Native American-looking medallions decorated the front zipper. I couldn’t believe how much badder ass I felt wearing the hat and jacket, and I even bought the chaps.

“Where am I going to wear this, though?” Emma and I were sitting at an outdoor bistro sipping wine and eating flatbread. It never failed to amaze me what had become popular while I was gone. Kale was the new leafy green. Everything was flatbread this, flatbread that, although it was just pizza. I was wearing the leathers because I couldn’t resist it, but I really didn’t know where I could go with them. “Not to any interviews, that’s for sure. Most engineering companies are traditional as hell, and I’ll probably have to get a job in Flag.”

“Wear them to Lytton’s,” suggested Emma.

She was just irritating me now. “I
told
you. He doesn’t want to see me. Doesn’t want to have anything to do with Ford, and I guess I remind him of Ford.”

Emma pouted. “But he wants you. And he’s hot.” Emma had stuck around the Cottonwood area after high school, winding up doing admin for the P & E City Hall, so she knew exactly who I was talking about when I told her the story of Ford’s half-brother busting down the doors at the Citadel. “If you’re going to stick around here and hang out with me, I want you to have a hot boyfriend.”

Emma’s boyfriend Paul was an inspector for the Public Works Department. I was actually hoping to get a job with that department. Paul was not hot. He was the sort of little old lady who counted the yogurts in the crisper drawer yet made sure never to eat the last bite of anything to avoid having to walk three feet to put the empty container in the trash. I guess he made a good building inspector, being such an anal retentive, but he sure wasn’t hot.

“I want me to have a hot boyfriend too, Emma.” I stretched with my arms over my head just to sashay the fringes around. “I really feel different in this ensemble. I do feel like a whole new person. Now if I could just start living a whole new life. Look what I gave up.”

Emma wrinkled her nose. “A hole in the ground in Africa?”

She referred to our toilet. Or maybe to the shower. I made a face. “I mean my entire
existence
, Emma. You wouldn’t believe what a culture shock it is coming back where all the cars zip around and everything is flashy and shiny. Loud, I’m used to. Africans are loud. But I’m not used to the order, the cleanliness, the—”