Page 43 of American Hellhound
It was a small, tumbledown, once-white house with a sagging porch and an overgrown cluster of hollies screening the front windows. Set well back off the road, cypress trees blocked the view of the street. Ghost and Roman stood in a small clearing, bathed in the faint glow of the moon, encircled by darkness and shadows. There were no lights on in the house. Anyone could be watching them. The furtive rustle of leaves could have been a fox…or a person.
“Where the fuck are we?” Ghost paced a tight circle, unsuccessfully scanning their surroundings. “Where’s the buyer?”
Roman, casual and unconcerned, stood with his arms folded, shoulder braced against a leafless crepe myrtle in bad need of reshaping. “What? You got somewhere else to be?” In the moonlight, Ghost could just make his small, infuriating smile.
He thought of Aidan at home, who was supposed to take his antibiotics with dinner, so they didn’t upset his stomach. Thought of Maggie, with her rich-girl clothes and her kind smile. Envisioned the two of them together at his dinky kitchen table, heads bent close as they worked on some project together.
He said, “I got a desire to not get shot out here in the middle of nowhere. And right now, I don’t have a lot of confidence about the situation.”
Roman clucked his tongue. “Gettin’ to be a real asshole in your old age.”
A twig snapped.
“Shut up,” Ghost hissed. Louder, toward the tree line: “If you want your shit, you gotta come out and give us the cash.”
It was silent a beat. A heavy pause in which all the fine hair stood up on the back of Ghost’s neck. There was a deep, instinctive quivering in his belly:away, away, away. Self-preservation.
He threw himself to the ground as another twig snapped…and just before the sound of a gunshot cracked the quiet of the clearing.
“Shit, get down,” Ghost said, as he rolled and grabbed for his gun. Roman, stupidly, was still on his feet, arms held out to either side like the next shot was going to be something large and visible that he could catch. “Get down!” Ghost told him again. He had his Colt in his hands and rolled again, behind his bike, gun held in both hands as he scanned the darkness for a target.
Another shot rang out, and Roman hit the dirt suddenly beside him with a curse and a grunt. Idiot.
Ghost squinted hard, searching, searching…and there it was, a glimmer of moonlight on metal, just under the tree canopy. He took aim and fired off four quick shots.
Silence, afterward.
Ghost eased slowly up, first to his knees behind the bike, and then to his feet; he kept the gun trained on the place where he’d fired. “You alright?” he asked Roman without looking.
There was another grunt. “Yeah.”
Ghost shot once more, just to be sure, took a deep breath, and walked over to see what he could.
What had seemed like a black wall from fifty paces away was actually a shifting gradient of dark-to-light shadows once he stood inside it. Dappled moonlight fell through the mostly-bare branches and illuminated the face of a dead man. He’d been hit with three of Ghost’s rounds and lay face-up, legs crumpled beneath him, eyes wide and sightless.
Ghost catalogued his face away in his memory, and walked back toward the bikes.
Roman sat in the dark, hand clapped over his opposite arm, right in the meaty part of his bicep.
“You got hit?” Ghost asked, and for a moment, just one dark second, entertained the idea of leaving his ass out here alone to bleed and feel sorry for himself.
“Yeah. Through-and-through I think.” Roman hissed as he pulled his hand away and revealed a dark stain against the pale gray of his sweatshirt. There was a lot of blood.
Ghost walked over to his bike and pulled a (mostly) clean bandana from his saddlebags. “Here.” He shoved Roman’s hand out of the way as he knelt beside him and knotted the black fabric over the wound. He’d like to say he was gentle, but he wasn’t, Roman hissing again as it tightened. “Can you ride like this?”
In an unsteady voice: “Yeah.”
“No, I meant it. Can you? ‘Cause I’m gonna be mad as hell if you pass out and smear yourself all over the road. Duane would never believe I didn’t make you crash on purpose.”
Roman huffed a pained laugh. “I can manage.”
~*~
The only person up and awake back at the clubhouse was the prospect whose name Ghost never could seem to remember. He sat at the bar, drinking a beer, turning slowly through a bike magazine. He looked tired, and very young, hollow-eyed.
He startled when they entered, and nearly overturned his beer.
Ghost felt bad for the kid. “Where’s Duane?”
