Storm Prey

a toilet with a towel around his neck. That done, she lathered him up and, using a straight razor, gave him the most sensuous shave of his life, not only because he was scared of the razor, which added a certain frisson to the proceeding, but because either her left or right tit was massaging his either left or right ear, depending.
    “You think Mikey meant to kill that man?” Honey Bee asked.
    “No way,” Joe Mack said. “He’s just ... dumb.”
    Honey Bee nodded. Mikey was dumb. And violent. Unlike Joe Mack, who was just dumb. Mikey might not have meant to kill the old man, but he probably enjoyed it. Give him a month or two, and he’d be bragging it around, just like Shooter and the black dude in California.
    When she was done with Joe Mack, he washed off his face and looked at himself in the mirror. Christ: he looked like a German butcher, big, red, wind-burned nose sticking out of a dead-white face.
    “What do you think?” Honey Bee asked.
    “Ah, man ... Not your fault, though.” He rubbed his head. “Bums me out.”
    She went to the back door, peered through it. Lyle Mack was in the back, moving stuff around. She turned back to Joe Mack, hooked the front of his jeans. “You could come upstairs, later, if that’d make you feel better.”
    Joe Mack’s eyes cut toward the door. Lyle would be really upset if he found out that Joe was screwing his girlfriend. Maybe.
    “He’s way in the back,” she said.
    “Yeah, but still ...”
    “I don’t mean right this minute.”
    “Well ...” He stepped close to her, slipped his hand up under her skirt to her underpants. She wore white cotton underpants, and for some reason, that really wound his clock. “That’d help, Honey Bee. I mean, I’d really appreciate it. I’m feeling kinda low.”
     
     
    THEY BACKED away from each other when they heard Lyle Mack coming back. Lyle pushed through the swing door, took in Joe and said, “Whoa.”
    Joe Mack rubbed his head again and said, “I look like I just got out of the joint. I look like they been sprayin’ me down for head lice.”
    “Better’n taking a fall on the old guy,” Lyle Mack said. “You know, you look about ten years younger.”
    “Yeah?”
    Lyle Mack turned to Honey Bee and said, “I need you to run out to Home Depot and get some stuff. I got a list.”
    “I gotta get the wieners started,” she said.
    “I’ll get the wieners. I want you out of here,” Lyle Mack said. “Like, now. Don’t come back for an hour.”
    She looked at him for a minute, then said, “More trouble.”
    “I don’t want you to know about nothing, ‘cause then you can’t get hurt,” Lyle Mack said. He followed her around, being nice, gave her a squeeze—she was in a huff—and got her out the door and on the way.
    When she was gone, Joe Mack asked, “What was that all about?”
    “Cappy’s coming over,” Lyle Mack said.
     
     
    CAPRICE MARLON GARNER dreamed of flying alone out of Bakersfield, up through the mountains, straddling his BMW, wind scouring his shaved scalp, sand spitting off the goggles, slipstream pulling at his leathers; and then down the other side, in the night, toward the lights of Tehachapi, then down, down some more and boom! out into the desert, running like a streak of steel lightning past the town of Mojave, blowing through Barstow to the 15, then up the 15 all the way to the lights of Vegas, coming out there at dawn with the lights on the horizon, the losers heading back to LA in the opposite lane ...
    Pulling up to the city limits, getting gas, sitting there with the BMW turning over like silk, and then boom! back down into the desert, the BMW hanging at 120, the white faces of the people in their Audis and Benzes and Mustangs, like ghosts, staring out at the demon who whipped by them in the dawn’s early light ...
    The ride was the thing. The world slipped away—work, history, memory, dreams, everything—until he was nothing more than a piece of the unconscious landscape, but moving fast, a complex of nerves and guts and balls, bone and muscle and reaction.
    And he dreamed of sitting up on a high roof in Bakersfield and looking out over the town, the roofscape, the palm trees and mountains, the hot dry wind in his face. Sitting up there, it felt like something might be possible. Then you’d smell the tar, and realize it wasn’t.
    And he dreamed of the men he’d killed, their faces when he pulled the trigger. The BMW had come from one of them. He’d put the shotgun