Page 90 of Shadow Ticket

“Nice one to be in out of,” Hicks remarks.

She looks up from the catalogue page, leaving her finger where it was. And what do you know, it really is Terike, with a carburetor situation. Rainlight wavering across her face. Happy to see Hicks? He wouldn’t bet the rent.

Despite frequent warnings in the Gumshoe’s Manual not to consider hairdos as more than secondary factors, let alone deal-clinchers, Hicks now finds himself unprofessionally gazing…

“Your hair’s longer.”

“It needs a shampoo.” Her stylish aviator helmet having not altogether kept the wind from getting in and leaving behind deposits of farm dirt and atomized road oil.

“Happy to give you a hand with that.”

Which gets him a look. “Come to think of it, what are you doing here anyway? Have you been following me?”

“That would explain it all right, but—”

“Not that it’s any of your business, yes, Ace has been on the run, what from he’s not telling me, he never tells me anything, but he still needs looking after, if not by me then by who, I’d like to know. Anytime you want to chip in and help, feel free.”

—

After some mysteriousshortwave conversation with Heino Zäpfchen, Zdenek the golem has located Hop Wingdale en route to a Croatian guerrilla training camp near the Hungarian border. “Think I’ll go down there and see what’s what. Might get lucky. You better stick around, wait’ll you hear from me, don’t want to be too conspicuous. Fact, much as I like the two-tone paint job on the Bugatti here, maybe it needs to blend in more with the landscape.”

32

As the road-Pullman plows its way through the night, moving deeper into Vladboys terrain, underlit landscape furling silently aside, the band find themselves growing less enthusiastic about the Trans-Trianon 2000 Tour of Hungary Unredeemed. Loose cocaine isn’t always practical on these beat-up roadbeds that send happy dust flying all over the coach interior, in which you can’t depend moment to moment on where your nose is going to be in relation to line or spoonful, exactly, so to maintain a chirpy outlook everybody prefers a veterinary-size pill combining cocaine and morphine, known as a speedball.

“What’s with that sign out the window,Fal a Halál? Hungarians at Christmastime?”

“Means ‘Wall of Death.’ ”

“We’re supposed to be playing a gig at one of them?”

“Good ol’ Nigel, done it again.”

They pull in by a towering wooden cylinder set in a clearing, filled with the snarling of low-displacement bike engines, light of beacon intensity thrown skyward, Motalko exhaust and smoke from bike engines and spectator tobacco rising slowly up the bright column into outer darkness.

The management here want music not only for drinking and dancing but also to accompany Wall of Death activities, not that ascents, descents, and time on the Wall between aren’t dramatic enough already. Sheet music copied from Erno Rapée’sMotion Picture Moodsis available.

Ace Lomax, taking a break from the Harley-Davidson he rode in on, hasbeen working aboard a local brand of bike about the size and horsepower of an Indian Scout, zooming up, down, and around, collecting tips paper and metallic in a number of different currencies as he goes circling around the top.

“And welcome to amateur night! Your turn, hotshot.”

“Me?” Ace a little embarrassed, “Can’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

“Take a look at this crowd. Nobody’ll notice.”

“Anybody here know ‘O.K. Corral’?”

“Didn’t Smith Ballew cover that?”

“Whistle us a couple bars.”

[clip-clop cowboy rhythm]

Down by the O-K, Corral,

That’s where we usually met,

our little corner of Tombstone,