No Time To Bleed Read online

  Contents

  The Old Dale

  Wonder Valley

  Black & White

  Roy's Motel

  The Cable Guy

  Patched Up

  The Mother Road

  Babyface

  Hell Breaks Loose

  Guardian Angel

  Three Down

  Goatee

  Tillman

  Kelbaker Road

  A Few Notes

  Want More Austin Conrad?

  About The Author

  The Old Dale

  “The fuck you lookin’ at, Gramps?”

  Austin Conrad stifled a grin when he heard the voice from behind him, barely audible over the lazy twang of a slide steel guitar blaring from the jukebox. At 47 it might be fair to say he was getting up there a bit, but Gramps? Then again, with babies having babies these days, grandparents in their 40’s were becoming more commonplace. But still…he’d only stopped into the Old Dale Saloon for a quick thirst quencher before getting back on the road to Vegas. Who knew his cold beer would come with a side order of age-shaming?

  It was a plain, square building on an otherwise empty lot in Twentynine Palms, in California’s Mojave Desert. Austin had an affinity for dive bars, and the Old Dale didn’t disappoint. It offered the perfect combination of cheap beer, outlaw country on the juke, and a long, beer-stained bar. And it was a convenient way-station whenever he took the back way up to Vegas from Riverside, especially in the summer. Even at night out here it might only “cool down” to the low 90’s, as it was tonight. He’d figured a cold beer would break up that long, hot ride nicely. Along with a peek at the local talent, if any was around.

  But tonight he wouldn’t quite get the peaceful respite he’d stopped in here for. Austin winced as he swallowed the dregs of his Tecate—damn, this Mexican rotgut sure turns sour as it warms up—and turned away from the bar to see whose cage he had rattled this time.

  The whining little bitch was standing a few feet away, glaring at Austin. He was kind of short but all puffed up like the Michelin Man, and looked barely old enough to vote. He was dressed in civvies but his look was unmistakable, especially here in Twentynine Palms: a United States Marine, newly minted by the looks of him. His skin was bronze and pulled tightly over bulging muscles; the stubble on his head bleached by the sun. His fists hung at his sides, clenching like they were busy with a pair of grip exercisers. His face looked like he had a mouthful of marbles. There were two more jarheads standing behind him, in sort of a V. Like they were in formation. How cute.

  “Look son I’m just minding my own business. Having a beer then getting back on the road.” Well, that and checking out the view. Not that there was much to see in the Old Dale tonight. The only girl in the place was a scrawny thing that looked to be about 45, which works out to around 30 in meth-addict years. She had stringy yellow hair and a crater face, and no ass to speak of. But she had a world class rack straining against her stained white halter top. No doubt a gift from some long-departed sugar daddy, probably a major or light colonel. Austin had raised a silent toast to whoever had paid for them. It was hard not to look, but Marblemouth had caught him.

  And apparently, looking at her was a no-no. She was now standing behind Marblemouth and his wingmen, sucking on her finger like it was made of candy.

  “I ain’t your son, Gramps. And Candi didn’t get dolled up tonight just to get eye-fucked by some old creeper.” Candi? How perfect. You couldn’t make this shit up. She wasn’t wearing a name tag but Austin would have bet a c-note that it was Candi with an “i”. It had to be.

  “Look, all I did was say hello as she walked by. Thought I was being neighborly. Is chivalry dead in Twentynine Palms?” Austin stood up from the barstool. As he straightened to his full 6’5” height, the three heads swiveled upward in unison. Austin towered over them, but they held their ground. Brave little fuckers.

  Austin had spent a lifetime tangling with their kind. It wasn’t always easy growing up an Army brat in Southern California, which was teeming with Marines from Pendleton to Twentynine. And most seemed to have a chip on their shoulder, magnified by the delusions of grandeur that was part of their Marine Corps indoctrination. But these guys looked like the real deal, despite their tender age. A few months out here in the heat had hardened them like beaten metal. Austin could hold his own in a scrap, but three against one might be a bit tricky.

  “I’ll tell you what. How about I just get on my bike and scoot. Nobody gets hurt. I’ll buy you guys a round and be on my way.” Austin peeled off a twenty, laid it on the bar, and turned toward the exit.

  Marblemouth took a step forward. “Not so fast Gramps. We’re not done with you. And if anyone gets hurt it ain’t gonna be us.” His wingmen stayed in formation as Marblemouth moved toward him. This was a fairly common group dynamic, Austin thought as he looked them over. According to one of Austin’s theories, groups of three tended to settle into the same pattern. There was always the leader and two followers, who could usually be further divided into a smart one and a dumb one. Like in the group round on American Idol. And the other two were parroting the aggressive stance of their leader—balled-up fists and nervous fidgets.

  “Yeah well I’m done with you,” Austin said as he turned away and headed toward the door. He didn’t know how this was going to end yet, but he had a pretty good idea what was coming next. These guys were looking for trouble, and he made a good target. Austin was tall and broad, but he had grown a bit pudgy over the years, his beer gut straining against an old Bocephus T-shirt. His arms were thick slabs covered with tattoos and scars. His leather vest was new; removing all the patches that morning had left his old one in shreds. A scarred up pair of size 13 Danner work boots, greasy jeans and a long wallet chain completed the ensemble. His wind-blown black beard was streaked with gray, and matched the shoulder-length hair that grew thin toward the top of his head. His eyes were the color of faded denim, wide-set between sun-beaten crow’s feet. Despite his formidable size, he looked washed up. Which he was counting on.

  As he stepped out the back door into the gravel lot behind the bar, his eyes swept left (his bike, parked next to a 10-year old Ninja) and right (a couple of old rice burners and a jacked up Chevy step-side). He took two more steps as he heard the lead jarhead hustling out the door right behind him, his wingmen in tow. Slowing his pace slightly, Austin listened for the sound of their shoes crunching gravel as they stepped off the small concrete stoop behind him. They were right on his heels. Perfect.

  Austin stopped abruptly, planted his left foot and spun his body around and back to the right. His elbow came up as he turned, his forearm following in its arc, a balled fist coming last, lending its inertia. Marblemouth's eyes flung wide open in the split second before Austin’s elbow made contact. But his legs hadn’t yet received the message, and they carried his face right into that freight train of bone and muscle. There was an audible, almost wet, crunching sound as Austin’s elbow plowed through the flesh of his nose and cheek.

  Marblemouth's legs shot out ahead of him like a cartoon coyote hitting a clothesline. His body crumpled, backside-first, to the gravel. Austin half expected to see a bag of marbles exploding from the guy's face on impact. But there was only blood and the mangled flesh of his nose and lips. And small, white shards of teeth.

  Yeah, Austin had known what was coming next. These guys weren’t going to quit until they’d had their fun, fucked with the old man from out of town, and shown Miss Candi what badasses they were. Perhaps earning free handjobs in the process. He’d given them a chance, but there was no sense trying to talk it out further; they were young, dumb and drunk, looking for violence. So Austin obliged them. He’d just brought it on a little quicker than they had expected. He fel
t he had the right, being outnumbered as he was. Who could blame him?

  As the dust settled around Marblemouth's head where it had bounced on the gravel, his two bootlickers looked up at Austin. One seemed a little scared, eyes wide, his mouth quivering slightly. He must have been the smart one. The other one looked angry. Bingo—he was the dumb one. Austin winked at him.

  “Oh you fucking cheater!” the dumb one whined. “That was a cheap shot!”

  Austin shrugged. “It was three against one. Now the odds are even, since there are only two of you left.”

  The dumb one moved first, but as he stepped forward, the heel of Austin’s Danner connected with his knee, bending his leg unnaturally backward. The crunch of the dumb one’s kneecap was almost drowned out by his scream as he fell to the ground next to Marblemouth.

  Which left only the smart one standing. He looked even more scared now. “There’s a twenty in there on the bar,” Austin told him. “Go call a medic for your buddies, then have a drink on me while you wait. Unless you want to wade in next.”

  The smart one looked down at his friends. Marblemouth was beginning to stir, blood still pouring from the ruin of his face. The dumb one was writhing on the ground beside him, holding his knee with both hands like he was fixing to punt a football, moaning in agony. Proving Austin’s theory on group dynamics, the smart one turned and hurried back toward the door.

  “And thank you for your service!” Austin yelled as he disappeared back into the Old Dale Saloon.

  Wonder Valley

  The rumble of the Harley-Davidson’s big V-twin engine settled Austin's mind as he sped away from Twentynine Palms on Amboy Road. He was headed for Vegas, where he had some business to attend to while things cooled down back in Riverside. He always took this route if he had the time, avoiding the Interstate for the solitude of the open desert.

  He hadn't meant to hurt those boys so badly. Austin carried weapons on his person—a Loveless fixed-blade chute knife strapped to his boot, a folding tactical knife with a tanto blade clipped into the front pocket of his jeans, an untraceable sub-compact 9mm tucked into his belt behind his back. Not to mention the credit card sized chunk of sharpened high-carbon steel concealed in his wallet, attached to the end of his wallet chain. But he hadn’t pulled out any of his hardware—he had no intention of killing those guys, even if they did wind up a bit more maimed than he’d intended. They would spend a couple of days in the infirmary, oblivious to how close they had come to a worse fate.

  He might have been going gray and getting fat, but he hadn’t quite gone to seed yet. Austin Conrad could still inflict some damage. He was ex-Army Special Forces, and after that he had spent a few years knocking heads for one of Southern California's most notorious biker gangs. Until this morning, when he’d turned in his patches and walked away. But the Rattlers MC didn’t have an exit policy, so he had made one up on his own.

  The 1972 FLH Electra Glide he was riding had belonged to his dad. Wayne Conrad bought it used in 1975, only a few years old but having been laid down on the asphalt and in need of some work. That was shortly after he returned from 'Nam. He had bought the scooter in part as an act of rebellion. But mostly he had bought it so he could hit the road, to escape the bullshit returning vets had to deal with back in those days. And perhaps try to outrun the demons that had followed him home.

  The old man had passed away while Austin was off fighting in his own war, of sorts. Only two years out of high school, he was in Panama chasing Noriega. Operation Just Cause had been the first combat jump of the 82nd Airborne since World War II, but that's not what had seared the date into Austin's memory so clearly.

  On Christmas Eve 1989, they had been mopping up after an assault on the Panama City airport. Austin was sitting on a baggage cart picking at an MRE when a messenger found him and delivered the news. But it would be weeks before he could get back home and sort out the details of his dad's death. The old man hadn't left him much, other than a 2-bedroom house near downtown Riverside, a few knives and guns, and the Electra Glide.

  His dad’s death left Austin shaken, and determined. He applied to the Special Operations Force upon returning to his unit after bereavement leave, and was accepted after an arduous selection process. Austin participated in covert operations around the world during the years leading up to 9/11. Then, like everyone else in the U.S. military, he spent most of his time in the sandbox dispatching Uncle Sam’s enemies before he started to realize it was mostly bullshit and came home.

  The moon was nearly full as Austin sped across Wonder Valley, heading east away from Twentynine. With no one on the road for miles in either direction—and you really could see for miles out here—Austin decided to go dark, and switched off the headlight. After a few seconds his eyes adjusted to the moonlight and he could see the road unrolling like a ribbon before him, the desert landscape stretching away to either side. In the distance he could see the abandoned homestead shacks of Wonder Valley, dotting the desert like tombstones. They reminded him of his dad.

  Wayne Conrad had been a tough man, made even tougher by the horrors of war. He joined the motorcycle club after he returned from Vietnam, and brought young Austin up on the fringes of that violent world. But he had a sentimental side too, which few in the club ever saw. Inside that hard shell was a man who cared about things. And one of the things he cared about was history. He believed you couldn't really know yourself unless you knew your heritage, and that of the people and places around you.

  His dad had instilled that interest in history into both Austin and his cousin Henry as they were growing up. For Henry, who now preferred to go by Hank, it had grown into a passion; he still traveled the world chasing down the answers to history's riddles. Austin would follow a different path through life, but he too hung on to a reverence for history—especially when it reminded him of his dad. Like these forgotten relics of the homesteaders.

  Dad had hauled Austin and Henry out here one weekend when they were both still in middle school. To him and his cousin it seemed like a prison sentence. What had they done to deserve being cooped up in pop’s ratty old Dolphin camper out in the desert for a whole weekend? But they spent those two days traipsing around Wonder Valley, checking out all of the old abandoned shacks that had been built, and then forgotten, by homestead petitioners back in the 30’s and 40's. They moved from shack to shack, sifting through the discarded remnants of the lives that had been lived in each one. Trying to decipher why in the hell the homesteaders had moved out here past the edge of civilization. And why they had given up on it.

  At one of the shacks they discovered, a bit too late, that it was still occupied even though it looked as run-down as any of them. It turned out that the resident had been busy taking a shit in the rickety outhouse while they were rifling through some rusty mining equipment behind his shack. The bearded old desert rat burst from the outhouse yanking up his drawers, hollering "GIT OFF MY LAND!" Henry, Austin and his dad ran off into the creosote bushes with the old fart yelling and shaking his roll of toilet paper at them.

  They laughed until their sides split as they made their way back to the camper. After they'd calmed down, Henry wondered out loud why the old homesteader had stuck it out for so long. Dad had replied "Maybe he's just a squatter," and they erupted into uncontrollable laughter all over again. It turned out to be one of the best weekends Austin could remember, growing up.

  The wind must have been slipping past the edges of Austin's goggles, making his eyes water. He slowed the bike, brought it to the shoulder, and shut off the engine. He grabbed a snot-rag from his vest pocket and lifted the goggles to dab at the wetness around his eyes. The silence was now deafening in the absence of the Harley's rumble. He looked around him, taking in the sparse shrubs, the shacks, the rocky hills in the distance. After a moment he fired up his dad's old Harley and continued on his way.

  Black & White

  Austin was running with the lights on as he drew near to Amboy. The crusty white moonscape of the sal
t evaporation ponds spread out onto Bristol Dry Lake to his right. To his left, a vast flow of jagged black lava rock stretched toward the moonlit outline of Amboy Crater, the small, extinct volcano rising in the distance. It was an interesting dichotomy, bisected by the gray asphalt of Amboy Road. Black and white, like the hats worn in an old cowboy movie. Good and bad. Right and wrong. Austin had lived his life in the gray area in between.

  He’d left the army when he finally figured out he was being used more as a tool to sustain war, rather than end it. He’d been in the Army since he left home as a teenager, and it wasn’t exactly a smooth transition back to civilian life. He’d come home to the house he had inherited from his dad. Joining the MC almost seemed like it was pre-ordained, as his dad had legacy with the Rattlers.

  It wasn’t a conscious decision to follow in the old man’s footsteps, but the club seemed to fit him like an old pair of boots. It offered the camaraderie and brotherhood he cherished from his former military life, but without the bureaucratic oversight and pretension. And he already had a skill set that was well suited for duty in the MC. He’d even looked up to Tillman, the club president who he was now at odds with, back in those days. Tillman had sponsored Austin into the club, and mentored him as a prospect.

  But times change. His recent contempt for the club echoed his growing disillusionment with the military 15 years prior. And like with the Army, he still felt brotherhood and kinship with his brothers in the club’s rank and file. But corruption of the leadership was the common thread in his experience with both.

  Ka is a wheel, Austin thought to himself, a recurring theme from some books he’d read when he was younger. In a nutshell, it meant destiny was circular, always turning, coming back around to the same place. If it had kicked your ass before, it would kick your ass again unless you made a course correction. Austin wasn’t sure if he believed in destiny, but he was a big believer in not making the same mistakes twice. This time, he wouldn’t just walk away. But after his abrupt departure from the club that morning, he needed to step back and assess the situation before making any moves. A few days dotting i’s and crossing t’s up in Vegas would provide that opportunity.