I had ceased to trust El Cid after the knife incident in New Mexico. I had stress fractures forming in my brittle psyche. I could feel the paranoia drifting in through every pore that wasn’t already blocked with bug guts, salt, or 60-weight bike oil. Every access point-the nostrils, the ears, the parched tear ducts, the busted and seat-polished asshole-it seeped in everywhere, slow, gray, like gutter bile. Paranoia defies the laws of permeability and non-permeability. As with nickel cigar smoke or a dirty New Orleans B chord, the gamy bitch beds where she damned well pleases, and the best defense is arrogant allegiance. Ride it, ride the sick mother like an adopted twerp, whipping and screaming, beating the juices out of it with a crop of tightly woven doom, into the rubber wall of relativity in hopes of being hurled all the way back to contemporary reality, social acceptance, and perceived salvation.
My partner, El Cid, and I were in Bandit’s hideout located at the peak of the Malibu hills, overlooking the Pacific. This was where the wanted rogue and his legion of hoodlums generated the motorcycle world’s most twisted yellow rag. A far reaching table of brushed aluminum, surrounded by barstool-style motorcycle seats, bearing a billet fruit bowl filled with chromed human skulls ran along one wall. Bandit lounged heavily in a broad, high-backed leather chair made from old motorcycle jackets, with zippers running in all directions like an interchange of county highways. He leaned far over the vintage Panhead springer frame and engine, which acted as the legs to the eight-foot slab of crystal that formed his desk.
“When you ride up to Sturgis, you really feel your bike. That’s the true Old West up there. You may never come back…” Bandit said calmly, smoothing the pages of his white tiger-skinned atlas with his Harley-bedecked hands. He gazed for a moment at a black shield that hung above his door. Upon the simple, almost crude fixture were burn-engraved the words, “To my good friend,Bandit. Only those elements time cannot wear were made before me, and beyond time I stand. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
“I’ve plotted a route I want you to take. I think it’s the mostbeautiful and interesting way to get to Sturgis … back roads, out-of-the-way places. You’ll meet characters there you can’t meet anywhere else,” the outlaw told me, smiling warmly.
Bandit handed me a piece of his 5-Ball-embossed stationary (five wives), and for an instant I had a pointed burning sensation in my hand, similar to the feeling one gets when a bootleg Cubano smoke rolls off a poker table in Miami. Without thinking you involuntarily grab the coal end, snatching it from its ruinous descent. On it was written, in Old English, a detailed route originating in L.A. and ending in Sturgis, South Dakota. He hadn’t bothered to draft a return route.
I’d written for Bandit before and figured his route would be as good as any. Our assignment: Cover the greatest motorcycle rally in the history of man-Sturgis. Fifteen countries in five languages awaited our account on the biggest thug orgy in the world, based on a cherry route hand-picked by one of the most overpaid outlaws to ever bend a footpeg. And despite his numerous social handicaps, dammit, I liked the guy. He was on our side.
El Cid and I saddled up and put the spurs to our twins at the witch’s hour. We were to ride deep into the desert, travel at night (safer that way-less chance of burning up a scoot in the 120-degree heat), snort a few June bugs, and knock the cobwebs out of the tail pipes before setting in for the big pull north. El Cid, in typical Spaniard bravado, tossed his tattooed prick onto my beaten road map and proclaimed that with an inch equaling 100 miles, a man can judge his riding ability by the distance he spans in a day. By his measurements he predicted we would ride somewhere deep into the broiling litter box known as Death Valley.
At around 4 a.m. we shut down in a nameless, paintless hotel on the hot side of Hades on Cinder Street for two hours sleep. Six a.m. came quicker than usual, but there were no complaints. There’d been a chill in the air when El Cid had marked our coordinates thenight before, so we had only ridden 500 miles. Big Lucy, my’93 Wide Glide, had a dead battery-the first sign. We push started her and headed east. Fifteen minutes later, she blew her tail pipes off and I became a pedestrian in an area on the map near the Nevada border called “The Devil’s Playground.” I sent El Cid on to find help. He roared off east toward Vegas, his red cape cracking in the wind, burning like fire under the dry-scald sun of the desert, which God made just to prove he was God.
I’d been down in these conditions before, so I moved quickly. Unpacking my saddlebags, I pulled out anything white-bandannas,T-shirts, underwear-and covered all exposed skin to prevent horrendous burns and retain fluids. The blacktop was partially liquidized with heat and I shifted from one boot to the next to prevent scorching the soles of my feet. I scanned the map. The nearest water was in Furnace Creek, 30 kilometers over a 3,000-foot rock range. Then I noticed in parenthesis the word “Dry.”
The thing a person notices in the desert, is the silence. Heat waves make no sound and in this area they are the only thing that moves. I could hear my own breathing, each dry puff, every gravely movement on the radiating pavement, the grind of the sand beneath my ass as I sat, staring out into the shimmering oblivion. Mysounds traveled to infinity, finding no competition. I could hear thejoints on the hard outer shells of the scorpions creaking as theyslowly, laboriously inhaled and exhaled the brittle, spiny air. Billions of expired plants protected themselves with thousands ofhomegrown swords against marauding beasts who would never come. The entire desert is a vast exercise in misery and irony where humor falls on its face and dies in the sand to lie uneaten by sweating ants.
Two more hours passed. I watched as a big rattler tried to race across the interstate, only to flop and writhe on the ribbon of impassable ebony death until it became a knotted rope of scrambled eggs where it sat, softly smoking.
At last the Red Dog appeared on the rippling horizon, coming on hard. El Cid had brought not only a gallon of water, but also Las Vegas Harley-Davidson’s search and rescue unit, the 121st Flying Angels.
Ten minutes after our arrival in Vegas the 121st had Big Lucy on a freshly evacuated trike hospital rack and had tracked the problem.
“Got a smoked stator,” Hiro told me. “Gonna have to tear it out, put in a new one.”
“How long?” I asked, pulling a pair of cotton underwear off my head.
“Three hours, door to door,” Hiro hollered over his air impact wrench. He knew the importance of our mission and worked accordingly.
El Cid and I walked across the street to the Poker Face and ordered lunch.
“We’re gut shot,” El Cid said bluntly, slugging back a tequila andorange juice.
“How do you figure?” I asked, chipping the salt off my bottom lip with a flathead screwdriver.
The waitress, a busted soul with do-it-yourself fingernails, skidded two plates loaded with cheeseburgers and rust-proofed french fries onto the blackjack table where we were seated.
“We got to be back in L.A. in three days. We’re already a day behind.”
“We could blow it straight through,” I said.
“To Sturgis?”
“Yep.”
“That’s 40 hours north … fucking crazy gringo bastard,” El Cid trailed off, chopping angrily at his fries with a long K-bar knife.
“Right.”
El Cid looked up at me from under thick, ebony eyebrows.
We blew out of Vegas at 6 p.m., dark spirits moving quickly over the landscape, riding the left lane hard, faces rippling in the hurricane of wind, and stifling heat.
At Mesquite, Nevada, we stopped for breakfast at the Casablanca Hotel with the sun burning up over the rise.
A wizened strumpet wearing a deco blue, DOT-approved hairdo hurled sterile eggs and cold potatoes geared up with hotrod Cajun ketchup that burned a man’s mouth. She returned a few minutes later with a plate bearing a leather tortilla covered with red 30-weight synthetic engine oil.
“Here’s your pancakes,” she snapped, releasing the plate four inches above the table.
At the next table was piled a bulbous, white-meat college boy trying to talk a chunk out of a 45-year-old divorced Olympian who had moved out west in order to legally change her name to Cheyenne. She was glad to tease him long enough to get a free breakfast and enough money to pull on the slots. But it was clear he was never going to be allowed to stand up in her guts.
I’d dabbed some urine-colored medicine in a small bottle, which the hotel clerk had given me, on my mouth to deaden a split in the side of my lip where a tooth had punched into it during a misunderstanding in the alley behind a bar a few days back. At once my lip went dead. Then the left side of my face. Then my left arm.
“Sweet mother, I’m done for,” I croaked as I felt the feeling draining out of my left leg.
El Cid snatched up the bottle and read the label, “For relief oftemporary oral discomfort caused by oral irritation. Caution, in caseof accidental ingestion, seek professional assistance or contact thePoison Control Center immediately. Well shit, you’re not even supposed to put the stuff directly into your mouth,” he mumbled and took a slug.
I slumped against the side of the booth. A waitress wandered up as El Cid turned off my recorder.
“Uh oh,” she muttered, seeing the recorder. She rotated on one of her white spiked heels and clattered off to the kitchen.
“That’s where they butcher the children,” I whispered hoarsely, drool dangling from my slack face. I saw myself in the mirrors, a stroke victim, piled up against the greasy wood.
“Who gave you this shit?” El Cid asked, referring to the bottle of vile buzzard poison? It’s not bad.”
“The bellhop,” I whispered, throwing my left arm onto the table with my right hand.
“The bastard dosed you,” El Cid said. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“This is all Bandit’s doing. I’ll eat that honkey’s liver.”
“What are you talking about?”
“They’re playing White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane in the middle of the desert where they butcher children after a stator just happens to fall out! What does that tell you, idiot?” El Cid hissed. He was beginning to slump in the vinyl booth.
“I can’t feel my legs. How can I ride with no legs?”
El Cid was clearly awaiting a response.
“El Cid, I was kidding about the butchering children bit. This isAmerica. We only butcher the children of other countries. It’sillegal to do it here. I’m sure the events taking place behind thoseinexplicable one-way glass walls are perfectly legitimate. The one-way glass is probably just used to cut down the glare from the sun.”
“No you weren’t,” El Cid replied.
“No I weren’t what?” I slurred.
“No you weren’t kidding.”
“I wasn’t?”
“No. You were quite serious,” El Cid assured me.
“Oh. Well, in that case, we should ride,” I said, feeling horriblyparanoid.
The place represented where America’s trek in search of bliss and prosperity had taken us. We were sitting on a giant cyst formed by the idealistic breakdown of America-a boil that could never burst, swelling up to a shiny dome in the blazing daytime heat and then shrinking back down to a heavy, wrinkled pod of cold, viscous jelly at night.
A silken flit adorned with gnashing colors sallied past us and uttered something with chilling detachment.
“What’d he say?” El Cid asked me, looking through the steam off his tequila-spiked coffee.
“I think he said, ‘Reno’,” I replied, puzzled, trying to flick thedrool from my lip by tossing my head.
“We aren’t scheduled to go through Reno,” El Cid said, pointing with a ketchup-stained hunting knife at the red line Bandit had drawn.
The flit floated by again, this time making eye contact.
“Keno?” the flit asked, then dashed off.
“Keno?” I asked.
“Who the fuck is Keno?” El Cid asked, now wholly on guard.
We looked about, but the flit had vanished in a cloud of knockoff perfumes and double crosses.
“Do you know anyone named Keno?” I asked. El Cid pondered this for a moment.
“No, do you?” he asked me with venomous suspicion.
I kept a close eye on the bastard’s knife. We were tired, we were a long way from friendly territory, and things were starting to get weird.
“I don’t know any Kenos,” I assured the jumpy alien.
“Didn’t you say you had a cousin named, Keno?” El Cid asked, running his oil-stained finger along the edge of the blade.
“I never said I had a cousin at all, you goosey commie. This is no time to get spooked. He must be a connection. Something’s wrong. Bandit is trying to get a message to us,” I said.
“I think we should track Cheyenne, see where she goes,” El Cid said. “Just look at how that pretty-boy prick talks to her. I could take you to the moon, my sweet Cheyenne.”
El Cid looked around, then slid some eggs into his vest pocket. “That no good mother Bandit is behind this shit, I know it,” El Cid snarled, suddenly leaning in close. “I will drive him from Sturgis the same way my great, great, great, great grandfather drove the Moors from Spain!” El Cid slammed his knife into the tabletop, causing several patrons to immediately evacuate their tables.
It was time to go. Get El Cid on the road. Blow a little air through his radiator fins, cool him down before he went nuts with the blade and started carving the college boy up. The constant ring of the gambling machines, the tones, the bells, the whistles, the shrieks, the screams of the dead, it was all too much for a couple of burned-out freaks with a sluice of drowned gnats in the bottom of each eye and years of run-ins with the straights. I had enough feeling in my right leg to make it to the door.
In the parking lot I spotted El Cid eating a handful of something.
“What the hell was that?” I demanded.
“Melatonin,” he snapped, “helps me relax. You know, when I getnervous.”
He stood there, his molars slowly grinding a dozen or more of the pills, crumbs and chunks falling from between his parched, cracked lips, small whiffs of pill dust floating out of his nose like Indian smoke signals telling of bad times to come.
“Let me see those,” I said, grabbing the bottle of small, gray pills with my good arm. “You evil wretch! This is not melatonin!”
“How do you know?” El Cid asked defiantly.
“Because that’s a prescription drug and these have a picture of a clown’s face on them!”
“That’s to help get kids to eat them without a fuss,” El Cid snorted in disgust.
“They don’t give melatonin to kids, you sorry geek. What the hell are you taking?”
Suddenly El Cid began to leap about, clawing frantically at the air.
“Get them off! Can’t you see them? They’re all over me! Get ’em off me!”
I gimped for Big Lucy at top speed. If this bastard wanted to tour the inbred justice machine in the middle of an area self-proclaimed as “Death Valley,” fine. But I wanted nothing to do with it.
“You can stay here all day if you want, I’m going to Sturgis,” Iyelled, hoping to motivate the Spaniard to follow.
“That’s just what Bandit wants us to do, charge into the trap! Fuck you! You’re probably working for him!”
“OK,” I said, pulling up alongside him. “But you won’t have me here to help when they come.”
“Who?” El Cid asked with alarm.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” I said, roaring off. In minutes I could see El Cid in my mirrors, coming on strong, his red cape standing straight out behind him. It was time to get some miles between us and the hotel and find Keno to see what the hell was going on. For all I knew, Bandit had been captured. Perhaps Bandit was Keno. We roared past a bride sitting on the side of the road, weeping. El Cid tried to spit on her, but the wind blew the spit back into his face, causing him to curse violently.
Some time later, in southern Utah, I realized I’d lost El Cid. I stopped on the side of the road. The last I remembered having seen him was as we were fighting our way through buffeting canyon winds that had tossed us easily from lane to lane. A leaden wind swept across the mountains. Lightening cracked and exploded in a large ring around me, which seemed to be closing in. Purple curtains of rain, coming in at 45-degree angles encircled me. I’d been on the road now nonstop since Vegas.
Most of the feeling had returned to my left leg and I was able to see out of my left eye again. I searched for the map to find out where I was. It was gone. I knew it. El Cid, that turncoat swine had stolen the map and abandoned me in the middle of Mormon country. I was sure to be lynched by men without zippers or ball bearings. I was on a high hill, with enough ammunition for the H&K .45 in my saddlebags to hold out for a few days, that was all. Where the hell was Keno? 
Perhaps I should burn Big Lucy … slide her into the ditch, light the tanks. Make it look like I was all but consumed in the fire. Take out a molar with a filling in it with the pliers and toss it into theflames to cook, make it look legit. Then I saw a headlight ragingthrough Bryce Canyon.
“What happened?” I asked El Cid, when he slid up.
“No time to talk!” he yelled. “They’re right behind me!”
“Who?” I asked in horror.
“Hercules and Zeus! Who the hell do you think?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you see all that lightening?” El Cid screamed over the groaning wind.
“Yeah!” I yelled.
“They’re right behind me!”
“Who is behind you?” I bellowed over the wolf winds.
“Hercules and Zeus! They’re working for Bandit! They’re trying to-”
A crack of lightening split a fence post in the ditch next to us,drowning out El Cid’s words and illuminating his face in a brilliantwhite light.
“Ride! Ride! Ride!” El Cid shrieked as he roared off into the flying dust and leaping tumbleweeds.
I swung aboard Big Lucy and rocketed up out of the ditch. El Cid was very religious and would often stop and pray in the ditch, building makeshift shrines out of beer cans, road kill, weeds, and superstition.
But this was different. Billion volt spears of electricity stood inthe ground all around us, bouncing the pavement under Big Lucy’s tires, blinding us, melting the asphalt, electrifying the barbed wire.
We rode back down through Arizona on 9, then on 89 to 160 where we fled back north into Utah. Our plan was to lose the gods by heading south, when they thought we would continue north, toward Sturgis. Then we’d run back north up 191 to the I70 where we’d make a fast run across the Rockies at Vail Pass.
After a few hours it looked like our plan had worked. We rodesmoothly, and the weather cleared. We stopped in Arizona.
“What the hell did you do?” I yelled.
“It wasn’t me, Bandit sent them. All I did was try to strike a deal with them. Didn’t work. He must be paying them a fortune.”
I decided to run with the lunacy, let it play out, and try to discover what we could do to rid ourselves of the bad luck that was plaguing us.
“But by definition, if they are truly gods, shouldn’t they be able to find us anywhere?” I asked, electrical taping a bottle of 60-weight oil to each hand grip.
“Apparently not,” El Cid quipped cheerfully. “It only proves that Bandit sent them. That’s why they’re looking for us further up the trail. Bandit’s trail,” El Cid added with great and sudden savagery.
I ran a rubber line from each bottle into a second line which ran directly into the oil reservoir. Lucy had developed a quart per fill-up oil habit which I didn’t have the time or tools to address. The IV would give us the kind of range we needed at the molecule-shearing speeds we were traveling at to make Sturgis on time to meet with the man.
“Where’s the route take us next?” I asked as we fired up.
“Monument Valley,” El Cid growled. “But we’re asking for trouble if we stay on it.”
He had lobbied to turn off Bandit’s route and continue on an alternate route in order to surprise the outlaw and kill him, but I had refused. I was damned if I was going to fall victim to his paranoid Catholic superstitions.
I was riding in a daze through Monument Valley when the first boulder hit. Billion-year-old dust and rock split and splintered, daggers of fragmented fossil shit ripping the air to tatters. Hercules flung the second meteor from atop one of the monuments. It came on at a dazzling speed, whistling sweetly as it passed over Big Lucy’s front fender. I dumped the throttle and gave her the gas. On the opposing side Zeus leapt upon another pillar of stone and began slinging lightening javelins. The sky was at once purple, then orange as the air traded electricity for stone and dust explosions.
The bastards had me in a crossfire. I had ridden right into their trap, half asleep, delirious, off guard. But how could this be, I thought as a boulder and a lightening bolt collided only a few meters over my head. Hercules and Zeus were myth, legend, figments of a band of idle philosophical perverts. There was no reality whatsoever to theirexistence. A boulder nicked my helmet. It was too late to turn back,so I made a run for it. Winding Lucy up into the triple digits, I laiddown on the tank and gave her hell. When I shot out of the other side I realized El Cid was nowhere to be seen. Egad, I thought, had the grim swine slain him? Or worse, had he been captured? He would talk for sure. I was doomed. I torqued up atop a large overlook andscouted the road. No sign of the red cape, but Hercules and Zeus wereflinging round after round at a dust cloud which was streaking acrossno man’s land at well over a hundred miles an hour. Bolt after bolt,stone after stone, they threw, but the dust cloud kept coming. El Cidwas making a run for it.
“Ride you cockeyed, ill-bred, result of an Aztec rape!” I hollered, knowing if they caught the adulterate, his first notion would be to sell me out to save his own DNA-stained hide.
A lightening bolt shot straight into the cloud of dust and there was a fierce explosion. Hercules pissed on us from the mountain, turning the road to slick mud.
“Shit!” I bawled. “He had the maps! You unlearned monkey!” I yelled.
A rocket of red cape, fire, and fury blew out of the cloud of dust.
“Viva, El Cid!” I cheered. “Ride you illegitimate bastard, ride!”
El Cid shot out of the corridor and headed off across the plains,obviously desperate to catch up with me, beating violently at theflames which snapped and popped from his rear fender.
“Curses!” I barked, as I leapt aboard Big Lucy. “Stop you fool!”
Three hours later, I caught up with El Cid at the foot of the Rockies. He told me that Zeus had managed to hit one of his spare fuel canisters and when it had blown it cost him his left saddlebag, which contained his “medicine.”
“You look healthy to me.”
“That’s because I’ve been taking my medicine! I expect massivecellular and psychological deterioration to begin any time,” El Cidsnapped savagely, the right side of his face already beginning totwitch.
“What do you mean by psychological deterioration?” I asked with blooming suspicion.
“Well, nothing really, I mean, nothing more than theusual … withdrawal.”
“Oh you worthless mutant!” I roared. “I knew that was some homegrown bathtub aspirin you were eating! You get the hell away from me! I don’t want to be anywhere near you when you start thinking I’m a desert tarantula!”
“Now really, you should calm down,” El Cid said with a twisted gleam in his eye. “This is a very tough time, we need to stick together, amigo…”
I ran for Big Lucy as El Cid went for his knife. El Cid got a bath of gravel, which did nothing more than send him running for his bike, his south of the border problem solver clenched between his gleaming teeth.
The murderous Spaniard chased me for over four hours into the night as we climbed higher and higher into the Rockies heading for Vail Pass, first through rain, then sleet and finally, as we passed 11,000 feet, snow. Twice the loco inbred Indian got close enough to actually take a swipe at me with the hunting knife. At last I saw him in my rearview mirrors look around at the towering rock cliffs in a puzzled manner, sheath the knife, and wave to me in a most friendly and bewildered way.
“What’s the rush?” El Cid asked as I walked stiffly back to him, the 20-degree temperature having frozen the life out of my lower body.
“You were trying to kill me with your knife,” I said, my teethclattering.
“I was? How embarrassing,” El Cid replied apologetically.
“That’s all right,” I said. “Let’s see the map.”
We were somewhere near the peak. The snow had stopped, but it was becoming even more windy and the pitch black night made the dangling cliffs even more dangerous.
“Better get the hell out of here,” I said, trying to swing a frozen leg over the iced saddle. “Get caught all the way up here in a big blow and we’ll be bear shit.”
We coasted the last five miles to a fuel station, having reached the summit just prior to running both bikes out of fuel. The woodsman pumping the gas said we had 12 hours to get to Cheyenne. The good news was, he told us Sturgis was only two hours beyond Cheyenne.
“We’ll eat breakfast in Cheyenne,” I told El Cid. “It’ll be light bythe time we hit Denver.”
By Denver the temperature had reached a balmy 50 and the wind chill had risen to a tropical zero degrees.
Northern Colorado was a seamless blur of pain that started from the second joint in each finger and continued in a building symphony of skeletal torment where it crescendoed somewhere at the tip of my coccyx.
Then we rode into a river of chrome. Rolling rubber, sound, cracking leather, raging hair, taillights, headlights, boots, beer, blood,tattoo ink, and body sweat stretched into oblivion-hell’s salmon run. Every on-ramp spewed more iron into the main artery, crowding, gunning, gassing, braking, jockeying, fighting for position to be allowed into the flow. Red blood cells from the bad side of town rammed and brawled for passage through the narrow capillaries on their way to the aorta.
We rolled in a stream of fresh bikers, filled up with coffee,sleep, and gusto. But we were just trying to get through, to make itwithout falling off and becoming pink stripes with helmets at the end. Sleep was smothering me. It was the only thing I thought about when I was able to think at all. I could crash now, I thought, it wouldn’t be so bad. I probably wouldn’t even notice it. Just drift off and let her slide. Sleep right through it. Maybe I’d be lucky and get a nice, warm hospital bed. Or better yet, a quiet, padded, silky coffin that I could have all to myself. I could close the lid and drift off tosleep…
In Cheyenne we parked in front of a small cafe. El Cid and I sat on our bikes, staring across the street at an abandoned post office. My ears are ringing, I thought. It’s so quiet now and my ears areringing so loudly. I wonder how they could make so much racket on their own? Aren’t ears supposed to be hearing instruments? So what are they doing making so much noise? It’s not so cold now. That post office sure looks lonesome. I wonder what the best love letter that ever went through there read like?
I don’t know how long El Cid and I sat there. I vaguely remember other bikers walking out and watching us closely as they wandered past, their conversations drifting off into silence as they observed the blank, penniless, straight ahead gazes we bore, sitting atop our bikes, exhaustion drunk.
It was the clicking of Lucy’s chrome which broke me from the trance. Thank God for shrinking chrome. I had tried several times to leave the trance on my own, but like a dream one can’t wake up from, I did not posses the power to break the spell.
“Sturgis?” the waitress asked as she sat down the food El Cid and I ordered. “That’s six hours north of here.”
“Six hours?” I said in horror. “You must be mistaken. We were told back at Vail Pass it was only two from here.”
“Well, two, plus four. That’s probably what they meant, honey,” the woman said with a look of concern.
“Six hours…” El Cid echoed in a tone of clean defeat.
“Best bet is to take 85 north. That’s the way most of the boys ride. If you leave now you’ll be there by nightfall,” the waitress added.
El Cid applied a fixed look of despair to my face.
“We can’t make it,” he croaked hoarsely. “We have to be back in L.A. in 48 hours.”
