Bitter Legacy: A Matt Royal Mystery (Matt Royal Mysteries) (28 page)

Jock, Logan, and I were dressed in jeans, plain white T-shirts, ball caps, athletic shoes, and windbreakers. We didn’t look much like bikers and hadn’t meant to. We wanted to stand out as different. We sat for a few minutes in Logan’s car, trying to get an idea of what to expect. Several people on motorcycles roared up, parked, and went in. Nobody left.

“I don’t see your buddies, Jock,” said Logan.

“They’re here.”

“Can you see them?”

“No, but they said they’d be here and they will.”

“I sure hope to hell you’re right,” said Logan.

I silently agreed with him. This was going to be interesting. We were planning to take Baggett out the front door, into the car, and to someplace to, as Jock said, have a discussion with him. I’d seen Jock’s discussions before, his interrogations to be more exact, and he wasn’t one to waste time with a lot of nonsense. The subject either talked immediately or Jock persuaded him to talk later. If Jock made a threat, he carried it out. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective and quick. The big problem was going to be getting Baggett out of the Snake Dance Inn.

The place was large, crowded with men and women in biker gear sitting at tables placed randomly on an ancient hardwood floor. There was an L-shaped bar across the right side as we walked in, three men behind it, dressed as their guests, slinging drinks to the women who served as waitresses. Several hard-looking men sat at the bar, drinking shots of liquor, not talking or looking around. They were dedicated to getting drunk in the quickest way possible. A woman sat at the short arm of the bar, near the corner, surveying the place. Her long blonde hair was dirty and tangled and hung past her shoulders, bangs down to her eyes, barely visible beneath a ball cap pulled low on her forehead. Her eyes were obscured behind opaque sunglasses. She wore jeans, biker boots, and a sleeveless blouse scooped so low in the front that it barely covered her nipples. She had a tattoo on her left bicep, a gaudy picture of a motorcycle, a similar one on the outside of her right arm just above the wrist. Curiously, a whimsical drawing of a yellow Vespa motor scooter was tattooed on her right breast, clearly visible in the low-cut blouse. A cigarette dangled from her
mouth, smoke rising. A half-full ashtray sat on the bar in front of her next to a glass of dark whiskey. She’d been here for a while.

A number of pool tables in the back were busy with games. The air was dense with smoke, the effluvium of scores of cigarettes held in fingers, mouths, and ashtrays, giving the place the look of a foggy day. A jukebox was playing loud heavy-metal music, its raucous and discordant sounds rising above the din of conversation, the sporadic guffaws of drunken men wearing shaggy hair and lots of tattoos, and the yelps of delight from the biker girls ingratiating themselves to men who would think nothing of beating them into submission were they to dare show the slightest glimmer of independence.

Logan had stayed in the car parked at the curb, engine running in case we needed to exit in a hurry. Jock and I stood at the door, taking in a scene that wouldn’t make any of the guests’ mothers proud. Jock whispered, “There he is. In the back on the left.”

I saw our quarry sitting at a table for four, deep in conversation with a large, shaggy man sitting across from him. Two chairs were empty. Jock and I walked toward them. Baggett looked up as we neared, his baleful stare turning to surprise when we pulled out chairs and sat down at his table.

He wasn’t a particularly big man, but he looked tightly coiled, like a snake about to strike. His arms were tattooed with abstract scenes of motorcycles, a little more artistic than the average biker. His hair reached his collar, brown and greasy looking, as if it hadn’t been washed in a while. He had a beard with a patch missing on his right cheek, a place where for some reason hair would not grow. His eyes were blue and he was squinting at us. A scar was visible on his left cheek, high, up near the eyes.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

“We need to talk,” I said.

“I don’t need to talk to you, asshole.”

“It would be in your best interest to engage us in conversation,” I said, smiling. “Believe me when I tell you that I mean you no harm.”

He laughed. “Harm? I’ll have your nuts cut off before you can get out of this bar.”

The man sitting at the table with us snickered. “You tell’em, Dirtbag.”

Jock was staring straight into the eyes of Baggett. “If you so much as move, I’m going to blow your balls off with the nine mil I’ve got pointed at them.”

Baggett’s face suddenly went dark, the merriment leaving as soon as it had arrived, a scowl replacing the laugh. “You’ll be dead before you get to the door.”

“Maybe so,” said Jock. “But you won’t be alive to enjoy it. You’re the first to go if things get nasty.”

“What do you want?”

The other man sitting at the table was still as a rock, afraid to move, his face frozen in a grimace of fear. I looked at him. “You’re not going to cause us any trouble are you? I also have a gun and your balls are not safe today.”

He shook his head. “Stay cool, man.”

I turned to Baggett. “Do you know who I am?”

“No, and I don’t give a shit.”

“My name’s Matt Royal.”

A look of recognition crossed his face, gone in an instant, but I saw it, knew he was shocked that the hunted had become the hunter.

“I don’t know that name,” Baggett said.

“Yes you do, and you’ve been trying to kill me, and now I want some answers.”

“You won’t get any from me.”

“I think we will,” I said. “My friend here is very good at getting people to talk. What we’re going to do, Mr. Baggett, is get up and walk out of here together. We’ll both have our guns in our pockets and pointed at your back. It you move wrong, we’re going to shoot you.” I turned to the other man at the table. “Are you a member of the West Coast Marauders?”

“I am,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice.

“If you don’t want your leader here to end up with a slug in his head, you’ll sit quietly and not move until we’re out the door. Do you understand?”

He nodded his head.

“All right,” I said to Baggett. “Get up.”

It started out okay. We moved through the crowd near the bar, passing
by disreputable men dressed in biker gear leaning against it, watching Baggett lead us toward the door. We had gotten most of the way there when I saw a glint out of the corner of my eye. A big man was moving toward Jock, only inches away, with a switchblade knife in the open position, going for the thrust to the chest, the one that would pierce the heart and kill a man instantly. I knew I didn’t have time to warn Jock, and Jock had no time to respond to the blade thrusting toward him in the hand of a tattooed man.

The night is full of creepy things, ghosts and goblins and nightmares and bears under the bed. We grow out of those fears, but there always remains some atavistic suspicion of the dark, some delicate tendril of dread that skips across our minds when there is no light, when the night closes in around us and we are alone with our thoughts. So it was with the old man.

Donna had gone to bed, leaving him in his chair with one last tumbler of Scotch, confident that he could make it across the room to the bed provided by hospice. And he could do that, but he could also make it to the pantry where the booze was kept, and he had done that. Now the bottle, half-full, golden in the light of the lamp shining through the whiskey, sat on the table with the tumbler. He sipped for a while, letting the warmth of the booze warm his stomach, knowing that he would pay a price the next day, dreading the fire that would eat at his gut, reminding him that he shouldn’t drink.

But what the hell. He was in his final days. Day, maybe. He knew death was close, very close. He could feel it. He only wanted to live long enough to finish the job, his final effort, and the one that would save his empire.

If anyone found out about his part in the deaths that came from that infernal black Indian’s meddling in things that didn’t concern him, it would be too late to prosecute. He’d beat the charge because he would be dead. There was nothing the law could do to him. He was worried about Donna, though. She was culpable, had been part of the plan, part of the orders that had gone out from this mansion by the bay. They would come for her and she would take his place in the maw of the unrelenting justice system that would grind her into nothingness.

He turned off the lamp, bringing the darkness in close, cloying in its ability to conceal the deprivations of age, the torpid state of his existence, the only illumination the rhythmic green flashing of the channel marker in the bay. He felt the mesmerizing effect from its constant repetition, each flash evenly spaced, equally bright.

His mind drifted into the past, that shadowy time of his youth, before he understood that life was brutal and that only the fiercest of men would survive and prosper. He had loved a girl then, a woman really, a slim beautiful woman with a lilting laugh and eyes that shone with a wisdom not common in one so young, a smile that lightened his heart and gave meaning to his life.

They’d met in the library of the university up in Gainesville. She was the daughter of a clothier, a widower, who owned a small chain of men’s stores along the east coast from Daytona Beach to West Palm. He was the son of a man of wealth and station and, some said, ruthlessness. But the young student couldn’t appreciate the decadence required to amass a large fortune. That knowledge was in his future, and when he met the girl in the library, he knew the stirring warmth of true love that perhaps only comes once in every lifetime.

In the days before birth control pills, a time of faulty condoms and mistaken understandings of fertility, pregnancy was a great risk that attended each and every coupling. The sweet girl with the lilting laugh became pregnant. When she began to show, when her belly got so big that she could no longer hide it under flowing dresses, she left school and went home to her father. He was a kind man who loved his daughter, and he took her in and cared for her and called the doctor when her labor pains came. Medicine was less refined in that time, less sure of itself, less a science and more of an art. Complications set in that were beyond the minimal abilities possessed by the doctor. The woman with the wise eyes did not survive the delivery, and the baby that was born of that glorious coupling in Gainesville was a freak, a child that should never have been conceived.

The young student had come to the house of the clothier to see his child and to bury his love. He left the child in the clothier’s care, went on with his life, and grieved for what he’d lost. He never visited the child, not even once, but he sent a check every month to the clothier who raised her.

He wondered, as he often did in these final days, how his life would have differed if he’d married the girl with the wondrous smile, if she had lived, if she’d birthed a normal child, and if he’d dodged the evil that had infused his life since the day of their parting.

He wiped a tear from his cheek, cursed himself for his self-pity, and crept carefully off to the hospice bed. Sleep, that cursed state that brought him only nightmares, took him gently onto another plane of existence. Outside, in the dark bay, the channel light winked on and off and on and off, consistent in its nightly cadence.

The sound of a pistol shot quieted the crowd, but I took little notice. I was in that nanosecond between the time I saw Jock’s assailant moving toward him with the knife and my reaction. A hole appeared in the temple of the man with the knife, a larger hole on the other side of his head spewing bone and blood and brain matter. He stopped cold, no movement except the fall to the floor.

Jock didn’t flinch. He grabbed Baggett’s hair, pulling his head back, his pistol coming out of his pocket and boring into the man’s back, pushing him toward the door. I saw a bearded man wearing a watch cap and a biker vest over a long-sleeve shirt and jeans turn toward the crowd, his pistol pointing outward. Three other men spaced around the room did the same. “Be cool,” said the one who’d shot Jock’s attacker. “Be cool, and nobody dies.” Jock’s buddies had shown up.

The biker who’d been at the table with Baggett had moved with us. As I turned toward the shooter, I saw the biker coming at me, a knife at waist height, out of sight of any of Jock’s men. I pulled my gun from my jacket pocket and was raising it to shoot my attacker. An arm snaked around my back, grabbing my right arm, pushing it down. Somebody was behind me, one arm around my throat and the other in control of my gun hand. I helped him out, pushing my arm all the way down to my side and pulling the trigger. The bullet entered the foot of the man behind me. He screamed and let go, but not before he ripped the pistol out of my hand. The one with the knife was a couple of feet from me, his weapon pointed at my gut. I didn’t have time to pick up my gun. The guy wasn’t a professional. He was a little clumsy, mad as hell, oblivious to the men holding guns on the crowd. He was trying for a kill, his rage overshadowing his
instinct for survival. Surely he knew that if he got me, he would be shot down like a dog in the street.

Another biker, a big guy with a lot of gut, was coming from my left, a knife in his hand. He was moving quickly, was no more than three steps from me, arm cocked to thrust the blade into my heart.

I pivoted to my right, turning inside the right arm of the first guy, my back to him throwing my right arm over his, pinning him to me. The fat guy was two steps from me, coming hard and fast. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure move toward us, coming from my left. A booted foot came up, lighting fast, striking the man in the wrist. The knife fell to the floor. The booted foot struck again, so fast I thought I might have imagined the first strike. The boot caught the fat guy in the jaw, snapping his head back. He dropped like a big lead blimp.

At the same second that the boot was flying, I head butted my guy in the face, twice, quickly, stepped forward and grabbed his right elbow with my right hand. He was reeling, his nose a bloody pulp. I pivoted to my right, still holding his elbow, grabbed his right wrist with my left hand. His grip was loosening on the knife when I raised his arm, my right hand on his elbow and my left on his wrist, and brought it down forcefully onto the back of a chair. I heard the bone snap and the man cry out in anguish. The knife clattered to the floor.