Redemption Song (Daniel Faust #2)(47)
“I’ll take it. Got something I can toss this into?”
He gave me a black Nike gym bag and stocked it with ammo, padding it with crumpled newspaper so it didn’t sound like an arsenal rattling around in there. Then we went upstairs to do the paperwork. Once he finished, I found myself the proud owner of a clean, legal firearm, courtesy of a nonexistent (but very friendly) South Texas gun-shop owner. I even had a cash receipt.
“This here’s your blue card,” Winslow told me. “Says your gun’s registered in Clark County. Of course it ain’t, so don’t let any legal beagle dig too deep into it. Anywhere else in the state, you’re golden as long as you’re carrying open. You should have your boy Paolo do you up a bogus concealed-carry permit if you wanna cover all your bases.”
“You’re the man, Winslow.”
“Just don’t blow your damn foot off. I’d feel bad. C’mon, let’s see what we’ve got out back. I’m assuming you’re gonna want a cage?”
“A…like a roll cage?”
He rolled his eyes. “Like a safe little four-wheeled box you sit in, instead of feeling the wind in your face like a real man. I don’t see you on a chopper, is what I’m saying.”
“I don’t even know how to ride one,” I said, following him out the back door and into the fenced-in lot. The rocky gulch behind the garage was a graveyard where the sun-bleached corpses of dead cars waited to have their last useful parts stripped.
“This here’s my surprised face.” Winslow’s expression didn’t change. “So how many heads are you huntin’, anyway?”
“Who said anything about hunting heads?”
“You come in needing wheels and firepower. You got no money, but neither one can wait. You want a piece that’ll hold off a small army while you get your business done, and you’ve got a certain look in your eye. I’ve seen that look on other men before. You know what it says?”
“What’s that?”
“That you’ve got some blood to spill. And there ain’t nobody on God’s green earth gonna stop you from spilling it.”
I nodded.
“Sounds about right,” I said.
“I’ve been doing a little restoration project,” Winslow said, leading me between the wrecks. “Now that it’s done, I been wanting to sell her, but…not to just anybody. A man’s ride is part of who he is. It should say something. Send a message before you even shake his hand.”
We stopped in front of a green oilcloth tarp shrouding a car’s low-slung angles. Winslow took hold of the tarp and yanked it free, letting it flutter to the oil-stained pavement.
The car beneath was sharp, hard, and blacker than a moonless summer night. Vintage Detroit steel, with a widemouthed grill and a long, sleek hood. It was the kind of car that hung out in back alleys looking for a knife fight.
“A Barracuda?” I said.
“Hemi ‘Cuda,” Winslow said. “Four hundred and twenty-five horsepower. Take you zero to sixty in six seconds, and she’ll pull a fourteen-second quarter-mile. The body and engine’s a 1970 original, rebuilt from a wreck. Transmission, brakes, tires are all new. You could drive this baby through the gates of hell and right back out again.”
“Funny,” I said, “that’s almost what I have in mind.”
He tossed me the keys.
Twenty-Four
The air changed around Richfield, and that was when I knew they were onto me.
I’d headed out of town on I-15 North with the Barracuda’s engine purring and the duffel bag on the passenger seat. The car felt like a caged panther, flexing its sleek muscles and aching to sprint. I crossed the border into Utah, driving through St. George and Cedar City, the desert slowly giving way to scrub pine and towering rocks. I kept my eyes on the road.
About three hours out of Vegas, I merged onto I-70 heading east toward Denver. I felt strange, long before I hit the border. At first I chalked it up to a shift in elevation or temperature, making my ears feel stuffy and my nerves off-kilter, but that wasn’t all of it. The air tasted different. I felt like an astronaut, taking off my helmet on a planet with an atmosphere almost, but not quite identical to the one I came from.
It was three in the afternoon by the time I rolled into Richfield. My stomach and the Barracuda’s tank both edged on empty. The town couldn’t have been any more middle-American, a sleepy burg in the middle of Utah surrounded by farms and factories, about a hundred miles from anywhere in particular. I fed the car first, rolling into a gas station that hadn’t changed its look since 1955. I asked the attendant to recommend something that would stick to my ribs. He pointed me toward Norma’s, a corner diner about two blocks away.
A little chime jingled over the door as I walked into the diner with the duffel bag slung over my shoulder. It was that twilight hour between lunch and dinner, so the place was far from crowded. Judging from the parking lot, I figured most of the patrons were long-haul truckers, grabbing a bite when and where they could. A girl with an acne-spotted face and a sunflower yellow dress, looking sixteen or seventeen, gave me a wave from the counter.
“Welcome to Norma’s! Sit wherever you like. I’ll be over in just a minute.”
I made myself comfortable in a booth by the window and sat the duffel bag next to me with the zipper in easy reach. A laminated menu lay on the Formica table. I flipped through it until the girl came over with a pot of black coffee.