Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(2)

Breakiron didn’t know what I meant, so I stepped around the corner of the building to call Allred Lee Chiles. The colorful eroded plateaus of Zion were flaming with color now. Chiles had shipped a special burner phone down to Bullhead for me to use, explaining that “circles only call within circles.” I guess he had like thirty different burners for thirty different circles of people doing different things for him. That way he minimized his exposure. Smart.

I knew very little about Allred Chiles. He had a lot of wives, some of them under seventeen, which was why he’d been sort of forced into this little enclave. He was excommunicated from the mainstream church maybe twenty years ago, and then shunned once again, a splinter of a splinter faction. Papa Ewey had told me that the more fractured Chiles’ group had become, the more out there with their rules and regulations. We didn’t care, of course. We’d run guns with Charles Manson if he gave us a good price.

“Mr. Chiles.” I had no idea what to call him. He wasn’t my damned prophet. I didn’t give two shits about the Church of Good Fortune.

“Mr. Fortunati.” It seemed I’d made the right choice, calling him mister. His voice was calm, brittle, and reedy, like you could knock him over with one breath. “I see you got my package, so you must have gotten my directions.”

“Ah, no,” I had to admit. “My President just told me to call you when I got to the Motel 6 in Avalanche.”

“Hmph.” I could tell Mr. Chiles was irritated. Now he’d have to give me directions all over again.

There would be no signs for the burg of Cornucopia. There would be an elaborate stone wall, due to Chiles owning a couple of quarries, and a guard stationed remotely downtown would buzz me through the gate. As long as I identified myself as Reed Smoot, I’d be let in.

“Why Reed Smoot?” I was stupid enough to ask.

“Just do it, or you won’t get in.”

I had the feeling his “ask no questions” approach was the way Chiles handled everything. And why the f*ck not? He was a prophet in his own way. He’d had enough vision to found this empire. He ran the show. He was the guy with three dozen wives. He must be doing something right.

“Okay. And what should my associate call himself?”

“Associate?” Chiles’ tone was downright nasty now. “I didn’t say nothing about no associate. Come alone.” Click.

Well. What the f*ck. I was used to doing dirty work like this with dickhead customers like Allred Lee Chiles. I could handle it. If you go around taking everything personally in this world, you don’t get very far.

Breakiron, however, took it personally.

“What the f*ck!” he fumed as I shaved in my room’s bathroom. “I was the one sent up here by Papa Ewey! I was the one entrusted with this run! You just came along for the f*cking ride. I should be Reed Smoot.” He flexed his stupid biceps, his inked sleeve of an engine that said “Highway to Hell.”

I rinsed off my razor in the sink. “You should be Reed Assmuncher if that is what Mr. Chiles tells us to do.”

Breakiron fretted. “Mr. Chiles, my ass. He’s been hanging out at Burning Man too much if he thinks I’m going to just sit on the sidelines and do nothing.” Breakiron thought everyone in Nevada and Utah hung out at Burning Man. I think the hippies who found him wandering in the desert were on their way to Burning Man, so it stuck in his memory banks.

But Breakiron didn’t follow my bike back down the highway to the abandoned diner where I was supposed to turn. Good God in an evil world, as I liked to say. The saying was especially apropos at the moment. That asshat Breakiron was enough to test the patience of Job. I missed my gal Chelsea with a passion so heavy it tore my chest in two, and I couldn’t even text her. Or could I?

I relaxed a little as I rode. Apparently this enclave of Cornucopia was nestled in a bunch of valleys surrounded by the same vermilion cliffs I’d seen earlier. The shale and sandstone were so multilayered it looked like a bunch of cakes that had uplifted and eroded over millions of years, cakes made of cinnamon, custard, red velvet. The Assassins went on runs up to Salt Lake sometimes, but I’d never been able to detour off toward Zion. We were always in too big of a hurry to wreak some havoc.

I’d always had an interest in geology, and I soaked up the views on the way to the stone wall that separated Cornucopia from the outside. The stands of cottonwood, still rangy and dull green this time of summer, would be brilliant yellow soon. Some ratty pinon pines had been planted to show the way to a mine—maybe an open pit copper mine—over the next rise. I started thinking once I completed this hardware run I could maybe take a day or two to explore the area. I’d seen a battered building back in Avalanche claiming it was a rock shop, but of course no lights could be seen through the dusty windows. It seemed like the booming suburb of Avalanche had died of natural causes—or been strangled to death—twenty years ago when Cornucopia had flourished.

I was soon to find out why everyone had bailed from the scene.

There was the rock wall Chiles had talked of. When I stopped to speak into the intercom, I noted another scoot coming like a bat out of hell behind me. Guy must’ve been doing a hundred, a hundred and ten on his ’71 Super Glide. How the hell did Breakiron know the gate would open when it did? But it did, and Breakiron was ripping it up so heavily he got through the gate before me. Flipping me off gleefully, of course.