American Elsewhere

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE




F*cked, f*cked, and more f*cked, thinks Bolan. He cracks open another bottle of Pepto, the third tonight, and pounds it. Triple-f*cked, he thinks. Quintuple-f*cked. Octuple-f*cked. More, perhaps, but his math skills are lacking.

Bolan sits on a column of boxes in the exact pose of Rodin’s Thinker, staring out at the large basement below the Roadhouse. Every square foot is filled with large boxes, and inside each of these boxes are four shrink-wrapped sets of encyclopedias. To the average eye these would appear unremarkable, but within the fourth set in each box, in a hollowed-out space starting at Uganda and ending at ultimatum, is somewhere around seventy thousand dollars’ worth of heroin. Where these encyclopedias go, Bolan isn’t sure. But people pay a lot of money to make sure they get there.

He is trying to do three things right now. The first is to calculate exactly how much money is currently in his warehouse. This involves maneuvering around some astronomical numbers, but he is pretty sure he has about twenty million dollars’ worth of heroin here at this moment, ten million dollars’ worth of cocaine, and about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of encyclopedias (which no one gives a shit about, of course).

The second thing he is trying to do is comprehend exactly where the encyclopedias and the heroin come from. The origin of the cocaine he knows, having arranged that deal himself with the funds generated from the heroin. But the heroin itself is a mystery. Before today he always believed (or perhaps chose to believe) that the man in the panama hat simply acted as a connection between Bolan and some foreign source. Yet after covertly sending out feelers into the networks of New Mexico, Bolan now knows that absolutely no heroin is being routed to the Roadhouse, especially not in any encyclopedias. It is only coming from the Roadhouse. Which means that these shipments he has Zimmerman pick up from many hidden caches in Wink are coming from somewhere local.

Perhaps Wink itself.

And that’s odd. Because last Bolan checked, there were no enormous poppy fields around Wink.

The third thing Bolan is trying to do is keep himself from thinking about a nasty suspicion he has: that the heroin he is distributing across the Southwest, and also throughout Wink, serves a purpose beyond making a lot of f*cking money. What that purpose would be escapes him.

But though Bolan doesn’t remember a lot from his school days, one little factoid has come swimming up in his brain more and more: his history teacher once told them that Greek oracles had to ingest some very funny mushrooms to act as conduits for whichever god needed to speak. Bolan does not believe in a god or gods, but this bit of knowledge has somehow gotten stuck in his head: people might need a narcotic aid to navigate realms of the unknown.

And to his regret, Bolan knows there are a lot of unknown realms in Wink.

Is it possible that the only reason he is making millions of dollars off of heroin is that the man in the panama hat needs a select few citizens of Wink to be high?

The idea is stupid, ridiculous, laughable. Why would he need them to be high? What purpose could that serve? Well, they would need to be, reasons Bolan, if they had to go someplace the man in the panama hat could not go himself, and do something he could not do. But if he wants that, why not distribute the heroin himself?

Well, thinks Bolan, because he’s being watched too. He needs someone outside, someone distant.

Yet even if all this is true—and every conclusion is one hell of a stretch—why provide a warehouse-load of illicit drugs? Why not give Bolan just enough to get the necessary people doped up? Why give Bolan millions of dollars’ worth of product?

That one is a tough nut to crack. But Bolan thinks he knows.

They don’t understand how people work. Not really. They couldn’t present just a tempting offer: they had to make it unbelievable, something he absolutely could not pass up. Subtleties of any kind are lost on them.

And all of these mental arguments, which take several hours to sort out, lead to one question Bolan is absolutely terrified of:

If the people in Wink are able to make a fount of endless heroin out of nothing… what else can they do?

There is a tapping at the door, and Bolan jumps and nearly topples off the boxes. “Christ!” he says. “What?”

Dord is standing at the threshold. He is pale and twitching: one hand keeps tugging at his belt loops.

“Yeah?” Bolan asks.

“Got a call from Zimmerman,” says Dord. “He found Dee.”

“Yeah?”

“He was unconscious. Someone beat his face in.”

“At the lab?”

Dord nods. Then he begins bobbing his head as if he’s forgotten the conversation entirely and is listening to a song. He’s obviously coked to the gills.

“Who the hell goes up to the lab except us?” asks Bolan. “Us and…” He gestures toward nothing with a nod. The man in the panama hat is such a presence in every conversation that he hardly needs to be acknowledged.

“Don’t know,” says Dord. “Zimmerman says Dee’s up but he’s not talking so good. Concussion, probably.”

“Christ.”

Bolan considers the conversation to be closed, but Dord keeps standing there.

“What?” asks Bolan.

“One more thing, boss,” says Dord. “It’s, uh—talking.”

“What?”

“It’s talking. Typing.”

“What is?”

“That thing in your office. The light’s on.”

“What! You should have f*cking said that first!” Bolan hops down off the column of boxes and sidles past Dord and makes his way upstairs.

He unlocks and enters the soundproof passageway. The stock ticker has printed out a long line of tape. It is the same word, over and over again, evidently repeated when Bolan did not answer:

MEETING MEETING MEETING MEETING MEETING

“What’s this?” says Bolan. “A meeting?”

A pause. Then:

YES

“A meeting between who?”

Another pause. Then the stock ticker types away:

BETWEEN YOU AND ME

Bolan pales. “You want us to meet? Then… well, come right up, I guess.”

NOT HERE TONIGHT AT GULCH BY HIGHWAY CROSSROADS

He almost chokes. “What? You want me to come to Wink?”

The machine is still. Bolan imagines it to be a hunched predator contemplating its next move.

Then:

YES MIDNIGHT

“But… I can’t… I can’t go there!”

The stock ticker is silent. It must not find that response to be worth an answer.

Then:

YOU WILL HAVE TO LOOK DOWN

Bolan stares at the tape. This has absolutely no meaning to him. “I don’t understand,” he says.

It barrels on without him:

YOU KNOW WHERE TO TAKE THE NEXT TOTEM

“Yes,” says Bolan. “They’re already on it. There might be a bit of a delay—my boy got his face caved in just today. But they’ll be at the canyon soon.”

The machine pauses for a long, long time. Longer than the machine has ever paused before. Bolan almost wonders if they’ve gotten pissed at him and given up.

But then it types:

I MAY NOT BE THERE

“What? At the canyon?” Bolan realizes this is wrong. “Wait, you mean at the meeting? Then where will you be?”

Another extremely long pause.

The machine types:

DEAD

Bolan is utterly flabbergasted to read such a response. “What the f*ck? Are you serious?”

It types:

AM ABOUT TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING DRASTIC

“Wait, like… more than what we’ve already done?”

It responds:

YES

“Well… then don’t f*cking do it!”

The machine types:

IF I AM NOT THERE TONIGHT YOU WILL STILL BE MET

“By who?” asks Bolan.

The ticker is silent.

“By who?” he asks again. “What’s going on? What are you about to do?”

But no matter how long he waits, he receives no answer.