The Suicide Motor Club (21 page)

He felt the seat of his jeans and found they were soaked in the butt like swim trunks.

His hand came up bright red.

He was shot bad.

Real bad.

Dying bad.

Lucky for him, he had friends who could help with that kind of thing.

NOW WOODS SQUEAKED THE HINGE OF THE F100'S DOOR AND STAGGERED OUT INTO
the twilight, holding his stomach. The sun was nearly down. An ambulance screamed up Fourth Street. Two women with short dresses and sneakers watched it go by, then resumed scanning traffic for lonely male faces. One of them glanced over her shoulder at Woods doing his lame, stomach-clutching two-step, said, “Hey, mister, there went your ride,” making the other one laugh. When he approached the room facing the shaded courtyard of the Banyan Tree Motel, he saw the blinds move and the door opened before he could touch the handle.

Cold, hard hands pulled him in.

The door shut behind him, making the curtains jump.

“What in the fast, hard fuck happened to you?” Luther said.

“Sh-shot me.”

Calcutta embraced him from behind, helped him sit on the bed, drooling despite herself and licking her wet hand where it touched his back. She scooted Woods so he was lying with his head in her lap; he went
ah ah ah
while she did it.

Rob stood watching, looking impatiently toward the door every few seconds. None of them felt safe in a city—they were better at running than hiding.

“That's disappointing,” Luther said. “Well?”

“I got . . . I got a file box.”

“What's in it?”

“Don't know. No time. I need help.”

“Did you get him?”

“Stabbed him.”

“He dead?”

“Stabbed him deep.”

“But is he
dead
?”

“Think so. He sh-shot me.”

“Yeah, I think we got that part. So that ambulance just went by could be for our boy, huh? Any chance he'll pull through?”

“He shot me.”

“He sure did, hoss. That's a bad'n, too.”

Woods, as pale as the trio around him, looked up from Calcutta's lap into Luther's reflective sunglasses, where he saw himself tiny and dying.

“I'm ready,” he said. “You can do it now.”

“Do what, ole hoss?”

“You know what.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. I just ain't real decided on that.”

“You got to. Please,” he said, his voice taking on an unattractive, whining tone.

Calcutta stroked his hair, looked coldly down into his eyes. His eyes stayed on Luther.

“You got to.”

“I don't
got
to nothin',” Luther said. “Thing is, they's already five of us dead. Your heartbeat's what makes you special. I drain you dead and then spit some back in, why you ain't special no more, but there your skinny ass is takin' up another seat in the cars, drinkin' part of our share. And I gotta tell you honest, you scout okay and you shoot okay, but you don't drive for shit.”

The sun was fully down now.

“P-please. I'm cold. I can hardly see you.”

“Well, I can understand a fella wantin' to see me, handsome as I am and all. All right, we gonna put it to a vote. What you think, Rob? Yes or no to old Woodsy-woods?”

Rob looked out the window, watching one of the hookers frown around a cigarette as she lit it. Without looking back he shook his head no.

“Fair enough,” Luther said. “Just to make it interestin', I'm gonna vote yes. Mostly based on all your past good deeds.” Luther directed his sunglasses at Calcutta. “Sweet cheeks?”

Woods smiled through his pain, relieved.

He closed his eyes.

“Don't put it on me, Luther,” Calcutta said.

Woods opened his eyes again.

“Whoa, there's a development!” Luther said. “But it
is
on you. We got us a tie, me and Rob. You are the tie
breaker
.”

“I don't want it.”

“Well, you got it.”

Rob said, “We should get out of here.”

“That ain't no lie. Well, Katherine Louise, what do you say? You don't say nothing, I'm gonna assume your tongue's all tied with true love and I'm gonna turn your paramour on your behalf.”

He bared his fangs and bent down to Woods, who grimaced with pain as he worked his ruined abdominal muscles to raise his neck toward Luther's mouth.

“No,” she said. “I vote no.”

Luther stood back up, directed his mirrored glasses at Woods's agonized, betrayed face.

“Well, there you have it, hoss. Tough break. Where're your keys?”

“Why?” he said, starting to cry.

“'Cause I don't feel like hot-wirin' it, dummy. They in your pocket or in the truck?”

“No. Why won't you
turn
me? Calcutta. N-night flower.”

“Night flower!” Luther said. “I like that!”

Rob smiled.

“I'll tell you why,” she said. “'Cause I don't want a husband, and if I did, I wouldn't want it to be some creepy kid who likes to . . . do all that shit you do. I ain't a night flower, and if I am I ain't yours. Now if you're dying, just hurry up, 'cause we got places to go.”

“That was the prettiest grace I ever heard,” said Luther.

Calcutta stuffed her fist in Woods's mouth and bit a weakly squirting hole in his neck.

Luther took the wrist.

Rob considered unpantsing him to get at the femoral, then settled for the bullet wound.

After Luther had wet his whistle, he talked.

Luther liked to talk while people were dying.

It was like reading them to sleep.

—

FUNNY THING ABOUT DEATH, WATCHING PEOPLE TRY TO GET THEIR MINDS AROUND
it. I mean, you and I both come to this moment in time believing ourselves the star of a movie that won't never end. Problem with that, though, is only one of us can be right. And it ain't you, is it? Nope. I'm watchin' your movie end right now. And the more people I watch get kicked out of what they thought was their own movie, the more I think mine's the real one. Maybe there's other real ones, and maybe I'm just sayin' that so I don't hurt my friends' feelin's while they're havin' their supper. Course I ain't dumb. I know there's a point I can't remember past, and maybe I didn't exist before then, least not in this form. And a thinkin' man might shoot forward from that and see a time when he might not exist once again. I confess I thought
like that after the war. Peein' through a tube and learnin' to walk all over again, them's what you call humblin' experiences. But gettin' turned, that was something else entirely. A weird zig when I was expectin' a crappy zag. I mean, if this is possible in my little movie house, what else is waitin' around the corner? Every day is any-fuckin'-thing-can-happen day. Martians might come down out of the sky and elect me emperor. The devil might pop up outta the ground and promote me to chief specialist whore-tester in hell, how do I know? I sure didn't see
this
comin'. Can you still hear me? Your eyes is stopped focusin' so maybe no. Maybe you're findin' out for real and true that all them fantasies you had about your own self livin' forever was lies. I don't mind so much they voted you out, I kinda knew they would. See, you're just a creature in my kingdom, created for my entertainment. And you ain't no fun no more.

—

WOODROW FULK'S VISION HAD LONG SINCE DARKENED, AND HE HAD PASSED INTO
a dream where his truck was picked up by a stovepipe-black tornado that lifted it into the sky; Luther's voice played over the radio as the tornado turned the truck upside-down and shook it. Woods held on to the steering wheel as long as he could, his legs dangling out the door and over the distant patchwork fields below, and at last he fell; not yelling or thrashing, just looking at the farms and woods of Michigan in something like bewilderment on his way down.

TRACY CALVERT MANAGED TO CRAWL OUT OF THE KITCHEN, BUT NOT FAR. HE LAY
down and bled on the carpet under the table. He was done. Everybody he loved was on the other side anyway, no point in sticking around. His vision went double, and he thought he saw Max, or Marzipan, sitting fat and hungry in front of him; he was lying in the cat's favorite begging spot, after all. Someone banged on the door, but that was annoying. He thought he felt Max's rough tongue on his nose, and he much preferred that to the banging, to the loud voice yelling “Police,” but then someone was flipping him over, lifting him up on a gurney. Kids. All young kids. A mask went over his nose and mouth and it got easier to breathe. Next thing he knew he was being wheeled out onto the balcony. A cop with his hand on his holstered gun spoke to him, but whatever he said went away as soon as he said it. It was rough going down the stairs. He closed his eyes and tried to die, but that didn't work. The sun was down now, and he knew that was bad but couldn't remember why. He floated across the asphalt and up into the back of an ambulance where a pretty girl in a uniform sat down next to him, talking to him, he was pretty sure she was saying nice things. The doors chunked shut. He tried to die again and couldn't, but at least the ambulance was speeding away from the
apartment, and then he remembered why the sun going down was bad. He got agitated.

“You just relax, we're going to help you.”

Where we going,
he tried to say, but indistinct mumbles were all he could produce. The pretty girl seemed to understand him, though.

“St. Anthony's.”

“Good,” he tried to say in response.

It felt like he had burning knives sticking in his chest and a donkey was sitting on it, too.

“You hang on, Mr. Calvert,” she said. “You're gonna make it.”

She tried not to laugh at his response, a world-weary “Oh shit.”

The ambulance sped south on Fourth Street, its sirens blaring, its lights beating red holes into the new night.

And then it slowed.

“Oh damn,” he heard the driver say.

The pretty girl looked out the window, where more red lights strobed her face.

She put her hand to her mouth.

“Who is that driving?” she said. “Is that Curtis?”

“I don't know,” the driver said, and then spoke into his radio.

Calvert's ambulance sped up again.

—

THREE MINUTES EARLIER.

Less than fifty yards from the Banyan Tree Motel, Luther walked up to a corner grocery and charmed a woman out of her car. He told her to sit down and forget she saw him, so sit she did, looking the other way, more concerned about keeping her legs together so she didn't flash anybody than about the strange bald man in the sunglasses driving off in her husband's 1962 Chrysler Imperial. Luther took a right, stayed in the slow lane, and crawled toward the Bay View Apartments, listening
for sirens. Very soon, an ambulance wailed in the distance, making its way south on Fourth Street.

He made a wide U-turn, earning several horn blasts, and he joined the several cars now pulling over on the far right of southbound Fourth. He waited with them, watched the ambulance approach in his rearview mirror. When it came near him, he pulled out in front of it and gunned the engine. Its trucklike horn blatted in concert with the siren. Luther's door rocketed past the careening nose of the ambulance, though just barely—he had accounted for the driver's likely attempt to pull left—and the big emergency vehicle plowed into the long trunk of the Imperial, spinning Luther into the northbound lanes, where he sideswiped another car and banged his head on the window, starring it.

“You all right, mister?” a man's voice yelled, but he was already out of the car, kicking a rearview mirror out of his way. He moved to the median, where steam was pouring from the ruined front of the ambulance, punched the bewildered ambulance driver in the head, knocking him out, then, simultaneously saying, “Forget me,” pushed a concerned citizen down on his ass. Hard. He opened the cracked rear door of the ambulance, ready to pull Tracy Calvert onto the street and kick his old brains out of his ears. Instead, a large, half-naked middle-aged woman with bottle-red hair moaned on the floor, an emergency worker half sitting on her, holding his bleeding head.

“Shit!” Luther said with some venom, seeing that the old man wasn't here. “Sorry, my mistake,” he said, shutting the door again. A big construction-worker type grabbed Luther by the collar, but Luther looked him in the eye and said, “Kiss me, sweetheart, then fuck off.” The man kissed him chastely on the lips and fucked off. Luther ran south, his back to the headlights of approaching traffic, hearing people shout after him. He approached a little Datsun with its emergency flashers on, opened the door, and pulled a smallish man out by the tie.
“Hi!” he said. “I'm a colored, when they ask.” Then he pushed the man down, got in the car, and sped away down a side avenue. Nobody chased him. He heard a siren in the distance, probably back on Fourth Street. He knew in his dead, black heart that Calvert was in that ambulance, but he didn't think he had a chance in hell of catching it in this little rice burner.

He swore a great deal.

He swore even more when he got back on Fourth Street and found himself delayed behind stuck-together slowpoke drivers no amount of honking would dislodge. By the time he found the emergency room of a likely hospital, it was a big Catholic deal with crosses and Jesus everywhere he looked, and he wasn't sure he could make himself go in there if he wanted to.

Old man like that was probably not going to do well with a deep stab wound. Probably dead. Not that that took much sting out of his failure—if he'd only waited another two minutes, he'd have had his man. What the hell were
two
ambulances doing on the street at the same time?

“Goddamn bad luck is all that is,” he said to nobody. He ditched the Datsun in the parking lot, then charmed a woman who turned out to be an art teacher into driving him back to the parking lot of some tourist trap called Sunken Gardens, right where he told Calcutta and Rob to meet him with the truck.

“What did you do with the kiddos today?” Luther asked the drooling young redhead.

“Taught them how to make paper,” she slurred.

“Huh,” he said, not sure if making paper was dumb or brilliant.

After they all had a mouthful or two off the woman, they sent her on her weaving way, saw her get pulled over by a cop no doubt looking for whatever poorly described troublemaker had caused all the ruckus, and even waved at the cop on their way north toward 275. They had a
four-and-a-half-hour drive back to Tallahassee, where, presumably, Cole and Neck Brace waited with the other two cars, their trunks and backseats full of all the gear they'd moved out of the truck to give the three vampires sleeping room for the race farther south.

They wouldn't be able to pull double-shift stunts like that without a daybitch. Woods's loss had cut their legs short and left them day-blind and unsafe.

Rob drove the F100 over the bridge and through Tampa.

He was probably going to be driving this pack mule from here out, and he wasn't going to like it.

Where they went after Tallahassee depended on what they could find out about the Bereaved, as Hank Calvert had called them before they drank him dead.

“Bereaved, my ass,” Luther said. “I'll give 'em somethin' to be bereaved about.”

He started going through the file box almost immediately.