Bad to the Bones(25)
I wasn’t angry at my father for leaving. Not anymore. I was angry at Shakti for having allowed me to be violated in that way.
And oddly, I felt healthier, more fully whole, than I had in years. I was reclaiming those lost parts of myself, tying some of the remote sections of myself back together.
And I bawled like a baby. “Knoxie! I want Knoxie!”
I remember Maddy suddenly appearing on her knees next to me, trying to hold together the open side of her shirt, not doing a good job of it. Her ample boobs spilled forth, and she was like a comforting earth mother as she pulled my hands away from clawing at her wood.
“Bella? What’s wrong? Why do you want Knoxie?”
Ford was standing somewhere up there, stuffing his cock into his jeans, cinching his belt. “I’ll get Knoxie. She wants Knoxie, I’ll get Knoxie.”
“But why Knoxie?” Maddy asked softly. “Honey, why Knoxie? What’s wrong? How can Knoxie help?”
I really had no idea why I was literally sobbing for Knoxie. I barely knew the guy. It took me days, weeks maybe, to figure that out.
But when I did, that’s when I really started to regain my sense of self.
CHAPTER EIGHT
KNOXIE
It was a bad enough f*cking job, trying to pull that f*cking Safeway truck over.
Highway 17 was a big slab and it wasn’t easy to run a big-ass eighteen-wheeler off onto the shoulder without causing a few spin-outs of other cagers. Whoever the driver of the Safeway truck was, he was on the defensive from the get-go and determined not to let any bikers stop him from his appointment at Bihari.
Knoxie Hammett was going to stop him.
Riding point, Knoxie had to cane it, lane splitting like a motherf*cking arrow. As he stitched a line between cagers, someone driving a metallic blue box nearly spun out, but Knoxie kept flogging it, sneaking in front of the grocery semi and showing the driver his wheel. Little by little, the driver had no choice but to slow down. With Lytton and Turk as tail gunners flanking the truck’s rear axle, Ziggy Fulton driving the chase cage behind them, eventually the guy had to pull onto a soft shoulder.
But man, was he pissed.
As Knoxie removed his brain bucket, he could already tell the driver—a beaner with a Virgin of Guadalupe statue swinging from his rearview mirror—was fuming and swearing to his copilot in the passenger seat. In the side window, the hayseed naco driver even had his last name, Presención, in metallic lettering next to the usual Tweety bird and Mexican flag stickers. Dumb f*ck. Announcing he was, or worked for, the Presención cartel via a sticker was a pretty lame brained stunt to start with, so Knoxie was already predisposed to hate the guy.
As Knoxie approached, his hand on the Glock stuck into his waistband at the small of his back, the guy unrolled his window about one and a half inches to yell, “Gabacho! Why the f*ck are you forcing me over?”
Turk and Lytton were each coming around a side of the truck, Lytton on Knoxie’s side. Lytton made no bones about showing his iron menacingly, but the naco didn’t look any more afraid when he glanced in a mirror and saw it.
“Queremos inspeccionar su carga.” We want to inspect your cargo.
“?Por qué? ?Quién te ha enviado?” Why? Who has sent you?
“Nadie me ha enviado. Soy un ladrón de caminos.” No one has sent me. I am a highway robber.
The naco threw up his hands and swore some more about pendejos and gabachos and people’s mothers being whores. Knoxie tossed his head at Lytton to indicate he should go and throw the latch on the rear truck doors. Knoxie didn’t want to get into it with the beaners, but he needed to make sure they didn’t reach for their pieces either. Mild-mannered Safeway drivers wouldn’t need to run with semiautomatic hardware, but this naco with his cartoon Calvin pissing sticker and his virgin statue wasn’t mild or well-mannered. He even had metallic lettering telling the whole world he was from Sinaloa state, home of notorious gangsters and, more recently, poppy fields as far as the eye could see. Lytton had been telling Knoxie for years how, since the increasing legalization of marijuana in the States, the Mexicans had been ripping out their pot fields and replacing the plants with heroin poppies. It was the only profitable crop these days.
Knoxie hoisted himself up on the running board, the better to glare at the naco. He was wearing one of those powder blue polyester shirts that made the wearer resemble a member of a mariachi band. Knoxie noted a crushed, empty box of Tylenol on the console between the naco and the other courier. When he saw it was PM, he couldn’t resist shooting,
“?Toma pastillas para dormer y maneja?” Do you often take sleeping pills while driving?
“Sólo para evitar idiotas como usted.” Only to avoid seeing idiots like you.
Suddenly something hit Knoxie.
Bellamy, bitterly saying, “I was hardly in any gutter snorting cheese heroin.” Suspicious, Knoxie had recalled that cheese heroin was made of this Grade A-1 horse from Sinaloa, usually drenched in pesticides, and mixed with powdered Tylenol PM.
He banged on the window glass with the barrel of his Glock. Cars zipped past on the highway, but he knew from experience that drivers rarely paid attention to anything going on around them, even bandits with guns. “Lower the window. You got any more of those sleeping pills?” He tried to sound casual, even friendly, when he really wanted to put his barrel to the naco’s temple.