Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

Or maybe not.

The airport was a flat runway viewed through the fence, with the low mist crawling all over it. The logging trail ran alongside and pulled in after the fence. The Land Cruiser rumbled along the gravel, tires crunching. Past the fence I hit the asphalt with a lurching bump and turned left. Then it got nice and smooth. After a minute the airport was behind me, and the road just one more shade of gray making a hole in the darker shades of enveloping forest.

Until the road ended.

Abruptly, without a warning. A horizontal line of asphalt advanced under me as the Toyota sped through the night. Suddenly I was off the asphalt and onto dirt again. I stopped the vehicle, put it in reverse, and backed up quick. There had been a sign on the side of the road when the asphalt had ended. I backtracked to look at it. With the Toyota Land Cruiser’s headlights I read two lines. On top it said, ‘Leaving America’. Below that was written, ‘Entering Tribal Lands.’

Another three miles of dirt road in the dark. Then the road widened to a parking lot, and I was there at the Rendezvous. The lot was big and flush with parked vehicles. I backed the Toyota into a spot with a good view of the place. Then I sat and watched for a while. The roadhouse was a one-story building. The roof was corrugated iron and the rest of the structure was clad in worn wood siding. There were colored lights and a porch. Music was coming out of it at a low, mellow volume. Roadhouse music.

I examined each vehicle. No silhouettes, no nothing. Just boxes on wheels with closed windows and the dead air inside of them. I waited two minutes. Nothing moved except the drizzle, the mist, and the leaves on the trees. A raccoon scuttled in from the right side of the lot. Three others came after it. The leader led the troop back to the side of the building and all four disappeared around it.

Then I smelled the barbecue.

The question was, go in armed, or not. I thought about it, for about a fifth of a second and decided to leave the firearms in the truck. I locked the vehicle, walked over and pulled open the screen door.

The room was large. A plain wood plank floor littered with cigarette butts and peanut shells, like something out of another time. Lighting design was courtesy of the Miller High Life sign taking up one side of the room, and the Coors Light sign on the other. In between were wood trestle tables, wood stand up tables, and a pool table with a worn green felt covered slate top. Left of the door, the bar took up the whole wall. The juke box was on the right side, pushed against the wall. A woman was leaning into it, trying to feed the machine a five dollar bill, which it kept on rejecting. Straight ahead, across the room, was a double wide door. In front of it a guy sat at a table. Other than him and the lady at the jukebox, there were three other people in the room, one of them worked the bar, the other one was me.

I looked back outside at the parking lot. At least two dozen vehicles, maybe more.

The bartender was as far as you could possibly get from the door. I started walking to the bar, and he slid himself over so that we met in the middle. I leaned my arms on it, he mirrored the gesture.

I said, “What do you have?”

He said, “We’ve got Alaskan. You can take your choice of Alaskan Amber or Alaskan IPA, either one works.”

“You choose.”

“Okay.”

I said, “I’m hungry.”

The guy jerked his thumb to the double wide door in the back. “Ten bucks gets you in and gets you barbecue. Just pay Jimmy over there and he’ll give you a stamp.”

Jimmy didn’t look up until I was standing right there in front of him. Jimmy opened his eyes and looked at me. I had a ten-dollar bill ready. He took the money with one hand, and the other stamped the back of my hand as soon as the bill was in his. It was a complex operation that looked simple.

I went through the double wide door.

Forty-One

The room was barely lit, so at first I couldn’t see a thing. Then the contours of the cinder block walls became clearer. Two short sides, two long sides, a rectangle. I stood smack in the middle of one of the short sides. In front of me was a wall of backs, specifically, the backs of men, and many of them bearded. Behind those backs were more backs, each one attached to a person. They were facing the far side of the room, the other short side. There was something going on up there. Some kind of a show.

A young guy leaned against the wall just inside the door.

He was clean shaven with short, cropped hair. Clean shaven was an anomaly here. It made him look out of place, and I figured it was the same for me. The guy was in the shadows, so I couldn’t see his eyes. But I could tell that they had fastened on to me. I saw the silhouette of a curly earpiece cord against the light grey wall. It wasn’t a phone cord, it was a coil tube earpiece for a two-way radio system. Which meant two things. A professional security detail, and someone to listen to through the earpiece. The guy wouldn’t be alone.

I moved up the long axis of the room, against the wall. People made way for me. Mostly grudgingly, sometimes unwillingly. I got some looks, I gave some looks. I got some shoulder blocks. I pushed through them, hard. Mostly, people were letting me through because they were occupied with the activity