He was quiet again, then shifted his gaze to look at the other men in their booths. “The half that doesn’t take a walk will be looking to get back what they lost, one way or another, and you don’t want any part of how they’re going to do it. ’Cause there’s going to be more of this crazy meth shit. This is just beginning. The tollbooth where you get on the turnpike. There’s too much money in it to quit, and everyone who sells it does it too, and the ones who do it make big fucking messes. The girl who tried to shoot Roy was on it, which is why she tried to kill him, and Roy is on it himself, which is why he had to whack her forty fucking times with his asshole machete. Who the fuck besides a meth-head carries a machete, anyhow?”
“Don’t get me started on Roy. I’d like to stick Little Boy up his ass and watch the light shoot out his eyes,” Vince told him, and it was Lemmy’s turn to laugh then. Coming up with deranged uses for Little Boy was one of the running jokes between them. Vince said, “Go on. Say your say. You been thinkin’ about it the last hour.”
“How would you know that?”
“You think I don’t know what it means when I see you sittin’ straight up on your sled?”
Lemmy grunted and said, “Sooner or later the cops are going to land on Roy or one of these other crankies and they’ll take everyone around them down with them. Because Roy and the guys like him aren’t smart enough to get rid of the shit they stole from crime scenes. None of them are smart enough not to brag to their girlfriends about what they been up to. Hell. Half of them are carrying rock right now. All I’m saying.”
Vince scrubbed a hand along the side of his beard. “You keep talking about the two halves, the half that’s going to take off and the half that isn’t. You want to tell me which half Race is in?”
Lemmy turned his head and grinned unhappily, showing the chip in his tooth again. “You need to ask?”
The truck with LAUGHLIN on the side was laboring uphill when they caught up to it around three in the afternoon.
The highway wound its lazy way up a long grade, through a series of switchbacks. With all the curves there was no obvious place to pass. Race was out front again. After they departed from the diner, he had sped off, increasing his lead on the rest of The Tribe by so much that sometimes Vince lost sight of him altogether. But when they reached the truck, his son was riding the guy’s bumper.
The ten of them rode up the hill in the rig’s boiling wake. Vince’s eyes began to tear and run.
“Fucking truck,” Vince screamed, and Lemmy nodded. Vince’s lungs were tight and his chest hurt from breathing its exhaust and it was hard to see. “Get your miserable fat-ass truck out of the way!” Vince hollered.
It was a surprise, catching up to the truck here. They weren’t that far from the diner… twenty miles, no more. LAUGHLIN must’ve pulled over somewhere else for a while—but there was nowhere else. Possibly he had parked his rig in the shade of a billboard for a siesta. Or threw a tire and needed to stop and put on a new one. Did it matter? It didn’t. Vince wasn’t even sure why it was on his mind, but it nagged.
Just past the next bend in the road, Race leaned his Softail Deuce into the lane for oncoming traffic, lowered his head, and accelerated from thirty to seventy. The bike squatted, then leaped. He cut in front of the truck as soon as he was ahead of it—slipping back into the right-hand lane just as a pale yellow Lexus blew past, going the other way. The driver of the Lexus pounded her horn, but the meep-meep sound of it was almost immediately lost in the overpowering wail of the truck’s air horn.
Vince had spotted the Lexus coming and for a moment had been sure he was about to see his son go head-on into it, Race one second, roadmeat the next. It took a few moments for his heart to come back down out of his throat.