American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE




“See, you’re missing the point,” says Bolan, and he pounds the table with a finger, though he is careful to avoid touching any of the blood. This is difficult, because the top of the table is soaked in it. “The point is, I don’t give a f*ck about our investments anymore.”

Dord frowns. “You want to walk away from all this money ’cause Norris got tagged?”

“No!” shouts Bolan. “Because of what I saw inside that goddamn cave! Haven’t you been f*cking listening?”

“We’ve all seen our own fair share of spooky shit,” Mallory drawls from the corner. She is leaning up against the corner because she’s so soused she can’t figure out how to lean against just one wall. This is nothing new: ever since going to fetch the last rabbit skull, she’s maintained a steady, stumbling drunk. “But what I saw certainly didn’t make me want to stop. I don’t want to go back to them and tell them no.”

“Yeah,” says Dord. “Me neither.” He shifts uncomfortably in his chair: he has not yet told them about his own experiences up in the mountains, and what he found in that ravine. But then, none of them have really talked about what they’ve seen: all three of them have come to the unspoken agreement that, whatever it is they’ve encountered, it is surely the most horrifying thing to have ever happened in their lives.

“I’m not saying we tell them anything,” says Bolan. “I personally never intend to meet one of them again in my life.”

“I bet they can make that hard if they want to,” says Mallory.

“Well, I can make being found hard too, if I put my mind to it,” says Bolan. “My decision’s final. The Roadhouse is done. Everything’s done. It’s over with. I made my buck and I’m out. As of this moment, I am now unemployed, as are all of you.”

An uneasy silence fills the room. Mallory and Dord glance at one another.

“It’s not the unemployment I’m worried about,” mutters Dord.

Bolan sighs. “Me neither.”

He wishes Zimmerman were still here. This night has been a nightmare of logistics, never at the right place at the right time. First Bolan had to drive the girl in the white hat up to that canyon below the mesa (and never in his life has he been happier to have someone walk away from him without a glance back), and then on the way down his cell phone lit up.

It was Zimmerman again. He’d returned with Norris to the Roadhouse, but Norris was in quite a state: the entire conversation was overlaid with his screams in the background, plus Mallory and Dord’s panicked bickering.

“The kid’s bad,” said Zimmerman.

“How bad?” Bolan asked.

“The sort of bad we can’t take care of,” Zimmerman said. Then, lower: “If we don’t get him to a hospital, I’m gonna have to send Dord out to start digging a hole somewhere now.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah,” said Zimmerman. “Yeah.”

And for the first time Bolan heard something in Zimmerman’s voice that he’d been hearing in his own for the past week or so: he was tired. Not just sleep-deprived, but tired of living this way, tired of the paranoia, tired of the dead drops, of the secret messages and invisible warfare and byzantine hierarchies. You can only stay terrified and confused for so long. After a while, it unfolds and flowers into despair.

Bolan bit his lip. F*ck it.

“Then take him to a hospital,” he said.

A long pause. “You sure?” Bolan was not surprised to hear Zimmerman’s doubt: since beginning their contract with the man in the panama hat, whoever and whatever he was, none of them had gone more than a hundred miles from the Roadhouse, usually only to towns not much bigger than Wink, and definitely never for anything beyond business. Their agreements bound them to this place.

“Yeah,” said Bolan. He thought for a moment. I guess if I’m going to start having regrets, he thought, I’d prefer to have all of them at once. “And while you’re gone, stay gone.”

Silence, save for Norris’s groaning.

“Do you understand?” Bolan asked. “Go and keep going. Don’t come back.”

Again: “You sure?”

Bolan turned a corner. The headlights slashed over tree trunks, stones, and then, without warning, a five-year-old boy and an old man, digging a hole by the side of the road with their hands. Though both of them were dressed quite nicely, they were covered in filth, as if they’d been sleeping in a landfill. When his headlights hit them they looked up and stared like raccoons interrupted while rooting through the garbage. The boy even bared his teeth, hissing.

He drove right by them. He didn’t wonder what they were doing. He was hardly even fazed by it.

This town starts out strange, then becomes normal, then becomes unbearable, he thought.

“Yeah,” says Bolan. “Go on. Get him out of here. You’ve both done enough.”

Zimmerman hung up. And that was it. Bolan’s most dependable man, and his longest-lasting business relationship, over with in just a handful of words. Zimmerman was long gone by the time Bolan returned.

He misses Zimmerman now. Here Bolan is, standing before their improvised operating table like a preacher at a lectern, trying to get his last two remaining employees (or at least the ones who aren’t just whores) to come over to his side. He cannot believe the two of them are not disturbed enough by what they’ve seen to do something.

“So you’re saying we just run?” says Dord.

Mallory brushes a sheet of ginger hair aside to look at Bolan.

He hesitates for a long, long time. Somewhere in Bolan’s heart, which has so far sat hidden deep within his chest, scarred, ignored, forgotten, he begins to feel a sinking sensation that he is about to suggest they do something that could be considered selfless.

Because Bolan is not stupid. And he does not think of himself as evil. He is definitely not willing to be complicit in whatever the hell the People from Wink are doing, not anymore.

Crime and sin are one thing, but this… he’d be a damn fool to do what they tell him to, having seen what he’s seen.

Why is it now, he sighs mentally, that I feel like being a f*cking hero?

“No,” says Bolan. “We’re not going to run. Something is about to happen here. Something… something way, way worse than transporting a little H.”

“Or a f*ckin’ lot of H,” says Dord.

“Shut up, Dord,” Bolan says absently. “I should have never helped them. I should have never said yes. And I don’t think we can stop them. Not now. Not us. But maybe we can make it a little harder for them.”

“What the hell are you saying?” Mallory asks.

He thinks back to the last few communications he’s had with the man in the panama hat. So often they were about just one curious topic—the newcomer, the girl in the red car Bolan hasn’t even had the chance to see yet, the one who is apparently quite proficient with firearms, the one person who seems to occupy so much of the attention of whatever is residing in Wink.

She’s important. And, yes, she shot one of his men. Yet still: the spook in the hat wants her.

“We are going to run,” he says finally. “But we’re going to go get someone first.”