Throttle (Kindle Single)

Race dead on the hardpan, a smashed doll with only his leathers holding him together.
    Vince swept the pictures away. They were no help. The cops wouldn’t be, either. There were no cops, not in Cumba. If someone saw the semi chasing the bike, he might call the state police, but the closest one was apt to be in Show Low, drinking java and eating pie and flirting with the waitress while Travis Tritt played on the Rock-Ola.
    There was only them. But that was nothing new.
    He thrust his hand to the right, then made a fist and patted the air with it. The other three swung over to the side behind him, engines clobbering, the air over their straight pipes shimmering.
    Lemmy pulled up beside him, his face haggard and cheesy-yellow. “ He didn’t see the taillight signal! ” he shouted.
    “ Didn’t see or didn’t understand! ” Vince yelled back. He was trembling. Maybe it was just the bike throbbing under him. “ Comes to the same! Time for Little Boy! ”

    For a moment Lemmy didn’t understand. Then he twisted around and yanked the straps on his right-hand saddlebag. No fancy plastic hardcase for Lemmy. Lemmy was old school all the way.
    While he was rooting, there was a sudden, gunning roar. That was Roy. Roy had had enough. He wheeled around and shot back east, his shadow now running before him, a scrawny black gantry-man. On the back of his leather vest was a hideous joke: NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER .
    “ Come back, Klowes, you dickwad! ” Peaches bellowed. His hand slipped from his clutch. The Beezer, still in gear, lurched forward almost over Vince’s foot, passed high-octane gas, and stalled. Peaches was almost hurled off but didn’t seem to notice. He was still looking back. He shook his fist; his scant gray hair whirled around his long, narrow skull. “ Come back, you chickenshit DICKWAAAAD! ”
    Roy didn’t come back. Roy didn’t even look back.
    Peaches turned to Vince. Tears streamed down cheeks sunflayed by a million rides and ten million beers. In that moment he looked older than the desert he stood on.
    “ You’re stronger’n me, Vince, but I got me a bigger asshole. You rip his head off; I’ll be in charge of shittin’ down his neck. ”
    “ Hurry up! ” Vince shouted at Lemmy. “ Hurry up, goddamn you! ”
    Just when he thought Lemmy was going to come up empty, his old running buddy straightened with Little Boy in his gloved hand.
    The Tribe did not ride with guns. Outlaw motorheads like them never did. They all had records, and any cop in Nevada would be delighted to put one of them away for thirty years on a gun charge. One, or all of them. They carried knives, but knives were no good in this situation; witness what had happened to Roy’s machete, which had turned out as useless as the man himself. Except when it came to killing stoned little girls in high school sweaters, that was.
    Little Boy, however, while not strictly legal, was not a gun. And the one cop who’d looked at it (“while searching for drugs”—the pigs were always doing that, it was what they lived for) had given Lemmy a skate when Lemmy explained it was more reliable than a road flare if you broke down at night. Maybe the cop knew what he was looking at, maybe not, but he knew that Lemmy was a veteran. Not just from Lemmy’s veteran’s license plate, which could have been stolen, but because the cop had been a vet himself. “Au Shau Valley, where the shit smells sweeter,” he’d said, and they had both laughed and even ended up bumping fists.
    Little Boy was an M84 stun grenade, more popularly known as a flash-bang. Lemmy had been carrying it in his saddlebag for maybe five years, always saying it would come in handy someday when the other guys—Vince included—ribbed him about it.
    Someday had turned out to be today.
    “ Will this old sonofabitch still work? ” Vince shouted as he hung Little Boy over his handlebars by the strap. It didn’t look like a grenade. It looked like a combination thermos bottle and aerosol can. The only grenade-y thing about it was the pull ring duct-taped to the side.
    “ I don’t know! I don’t even know how you can— ”
    Vince had no time to discuss logistics. He only had a vague idea of what the logistics might be, anyway. “ I have to ride! That fuck’s gonna come out on the other end of the Cumba road! I mean to be there when he does! ”
    “And if Race ain’t in front of him?” Lemmy asked. They had been shouting until now, all jacked up on adrenaline. It