“Think he’s gonna come in here with his bad self,” Fat Joey answered. He moved his hand back on his belt and found the smooth grip of his revolver. “Think we’re gonna have to bust a cap in his faggot ass to move him on.”

Ratchet grunted, chewed his pick, and watched the Dark Man walk around the row of gleaming machines belonging to the big four and the highest-ranking brothers. “My daddy used to tell me stories about the man in the long black coat. It’s another name he had for Death.”

Fat Joey took his eyes off the window to look uneasily at Ratchet. “Why’d you tell me that, man?”

“No reason.” Ratchet continued to gaze at the Dark Man, and after a while, Fat Joey did the same.

Outside, the Dark Man turned his head and said something. The driver’s side of the car opened, and the muttering and derisive laughter of the low dogs rose to howls…but there was silence from the brothers and silence from the Big Four.

The driver was a bitch, and the bitch was a freak.

She had dark purple hair, a little longer than her shoulders, with two white stripes at her face, but that didn’t make her a freak. She had no shirt on and her bare tits were hanging out, two good handfuls, firm and perky the way he could vaguely remember Cammy’s being in the beginning. That almost made her a freak, but what pushed her over was the metal.

Her eyebrows were dark lines beneath steel tracings. Her ears were completely rimmed with loops. Her tits were pierced, not just her nipples, but her whole tits, sparkling like diamonds in the sunlight. Her waist was belted with chains hanging in web-thin strands from hoops in her skin. There were gems in a half-diamond around her navel and a gold hoop in the bellybutton itself. Seeing all this, Fat Joey was reasonably sure her pussy was pierced, too.

“What the fuck is that?”

That was Top Dawg, come at last to see what the big deal was, and Fat Joey and Ratchet moved aside to let him come between them. The Dawg’s eye went to the bitch first, and Fat Joey could all but see the gears grinding in the Dawg’s head as he thought about putting it to that cyber-snatch, but then he got a good look at the man with her and the Dawg started frowning.

Outside in the baking sunlight, the two strangers were still browsing the bikes. The Dark Man gestured curtly and the freak-girl came over beside him and that was the point at which Fat Joey realized the bike they were looking at so closely was his.

“What the fuck?” Top Dawg said again, and the man in the long black coat touched Fat Joey’s bike.

Not a pansy touch, or a timid poke like you sometimes got from fuckers at gas stations, the ones who want to call you brother and trade road stories because they had a Honda in the garage at home under a tarp. Those touches were bad enough, but no, this crazy motherfucker had his whole hands on the bike and the girl was talking and pointing like she was selling him the fucking thing.

Fat Joey glanced at Top Dawg, but the Dawg didn’t move, so Joey didn’t move. He stood, fuming, watching the faggot bad-ass grip his goddamn bike. He still wasn’t quiet in his mind about the way the Dark Man looked or moved, but he felt better being pissed off than uneasy, and he thought that shooting the Dark Man for touching his bike would solve both problems nicely.

“Go,” said the Dawg at last.

Fat Joey went, shoving the door open into the heat of high noon and stepping out onto the sagging porch. “Hey, you candy-ass motherfucker!” he roared.

The girl jumped and the Dark Man gave her one up to the side of her purple head without even turning around to see where the shout came from. He thumped his hand down on the bike’s dash and the girl dazedly answered, her eyes darting from Fat Joey to the Dark Man and back again.

There was something weird about the Dark Man’s hands. He kept them in fists most of the time, in or close to the pockets of his coat, but when he tapped at the dash, Fat Joey could see, just for an instant, something…sharp…

That was the last bit of fuck-upedness Fat Joey could handle. He was ready to skin, and if it hadn’t been for the Dawg watching him through the window, he would have shot the Dark Man right there in the parking lot, right through the middle of his broad, turned back. He thought about doing it anyway—his place in the Big Four was rapidly dimming in importance compared to the urge to blast this bad motherfucker out of existence—but he knew that Top Dawg was getting creeped out, too, and when the Dawg got creeped, the Dawg wanted to be in on the bloodletting. If Fat Joey just plugged this fucker right now, the Dawg might just be pissed enough to open a few holes in Joey.

It took nearly every drop of guts that Fat Joey had left to raise his voice to the Dark Man again.

“Get away from my goddamn bike or I’ll blow your fucking head off!”

Now the Dark Man turned, and for a split second, Fat Joey was frozen. His legs shivered once, violently, as if his lower half had made one desperate jump back toward the bar and been outvoted by the rest of him. ‘Fuck it,’ Fat Joey thought suddenly. ‘He can have the fucking thing.’

The Dark Man started walking, not fast or slow, but steady and in a straight line for Fat Joey. He caught his girl by the arm as he passed her and dragged her along at that same even speed until she picked up her feet, and then he let her go and kept on coming. He mounted the wooden steps to Charlie’s, thumped heavily across the creaking boards—

—and went right past Joey and into the bar without glancing at him again.

The girl came after, as Fat Joey was pulling in his first breath after realizing he’d been holding it. Close up, she was nothing but pale, creamy flesh, gleaming metal, and the diamond flash of cut gems. Fat Joey had only a dim impression of purple hair and wide, terrified eyes as she darted past him in the Dark Man’s wake.

And that bothered him even more than the Dark Man’s disinterest, because the girl didn’t looked scared of Joey, she looked scared for him.

Fat Joey hesitated, his hand on the butt of his revolver, but he hesitated too long, and when he turned, the Dark Man was inside. He was standing before the bar, bold as walking talking God, and frowning at the wall behind the register. He acted like he was alone in the place, acted like the muttering crowd of the Pack was nothing but static on the radio. All his attention was fixed on the worn and faded map of American Route 66, peppered with black and white photos of brothers Charlie had known, back in the day. More creeped out that ever, Fat Joey came in off the deck and closed the door.

The Dark Man stood motionless as his girl huddled at his side, but stirred himself when Charlie approached. He said, “Do you have something like that for this place?”

The man’s voice was deep and gravelly, but utterly uninflected.

Charlie glanced back at the map, then at the Dark Man, and wiped the bar down with a rag. “Got Rand McNally.”

The Dark Man waited, as patiently as if still expecting an answer.

“Hey asshole,” one of the low dogs called, and the Dark Man by-God turned around. It was Hagen, of course. Only Hagen was stupid and ambitious enough to think of impressing Top Dawg by poking sticks at this dangerous stranger. Hagen grinned when he saw the Dark Man’s shadowed face and said, “The word you’re looking for is ‘road map’, ya stupid ass-banging motherfucker.”

The Dark Man continued to stare for a beat or two before he turned back to Charlie. “Do you have a road map?”

“Got Rand McNally, I said.” Charlie left the bar rag where it was on the counter and rested his hand a little lower down, nearer to the shotgun he kept below the bar.

Now there was an expression on the Dark Man’s face—a faint frown, ready to be anger.

“That is a road map, leatherqueer,” Hagen supplied, and the other low dogs nearest him ran a course of laughter across the room.