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certain the KK had a landline, if it hadn’t just been knocked down by the storm.
    Fagan looked up. The clouds seemed darker and angrier like a mob working itself up to a confrontation. He scanned the road east/west once more but there wasn’t a sign of traffic. They must have warnings out on all broadcast media.
    On hands and knees Fagan turned toward the roadhouse. A series of faces regarded him through the steam-misted window, in and around the neon beer signs. He staggered to his feet. Five rat choppers out front, three with apes. One had a Stihl chainsaw bungeed to a cargo rack. The bikes dripped with skulls, grim reapers, Grateful Dead symbols, tiny bells, packets and ephemera. Bikers were more superstitious than gypsy wives. Three of the bikes appeared to be Harley-based. The other two were of unknown provenance.
    He looked up. Smoke curled from the old brick chimney as from the College of Cardinals. As he watched the lights went out. Shouts and curses from inside.
    The Kongo Klub was made of brown logs, possibly telephone poles, held together with white mortar. A railed porch ran the length of the club, about forty feet. There were a half dozen white plastic chairs and two round white plastic tables, the kind you buy at Wal-Mart. Fagan went up two steps to the stout brown door with a scratched square window smack in the center. Seconds later the sound of a generator starting up reached him and seconds after that the lights flickered back on.
    Fagan heard scuffling and scraping furniture as he approached the door. He pulled it open and stepped inside. Pain radiated like a high red whine from his arms and legs. Five hairy bikers—three at a circular table decorated with empty bottles and two more at a square table in the back flipping cards. The card players were old. They would be Doc and Curtis. What was that like, to be an old biker with no health insurance, three teeth in your jaw and a stinking trailer somewhere?
    The room smelled of beer, tobacco, marijuana and testosterone.
    Two behind the bar—a grizzled homunculus and a fresh-faced blond who looked as out of place as a chrysanthemum in a coal bin. Eyelashes like crow’s wings. Had to be fake. She wore a man’s white shirt tied around her taut midriff and hip-hugger jeans. There was a tat of Gaiman’s Death on her bicep. They all looked up. It would have been unnatural if they hadn’t. But there was nothing natural about the forced bonhomie of the bikers doing their best to appear nonchalant.
    That lasted three seconds.
    The biggest biker, a slab of beef with a full beard, gold earrings and a gold tooth slammed a Bowie knife the size of a PT Cruiser into the scarred wood table causing the bottles to dance.
    “MACY! WHERE THE FUCK’S MY BURGER!”
    With a frightened expression the blond angel disappeared behind the bar.
    All for Fagan’s benefit.
    The youngest, a wiry hillbilly with a Dennis the Menace cowlick and a wide grin, said in an adolescent twang, “Well look what the cat dragged in.”
    ***

CHAPTER 7
The Road Dogs
    Fagan let his cop’s gaze stop at each. The two in back were salt and pepper, looked like they were in their sixties although they could be anywhere from forty to eighty. The biker lifestyle put the miles on your face. They never looked up from their card game.
    The three around the circular table glowed with malice. The man mountain with the knife was obviously the prez followed by a human fist with a shaved skull and inked neck and biceps in his late thirties. Cowlick was a gangly nineteen, pale face a constellation of zits.
    Fagan dismissed them and walked to the bar, setting his bifurcated helmet down with a thump. He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror behind the bar. He looked like a child’s toy that had been dragged through broken glass and a coal mine.
    “Bullard County Deputy Sheriff,” he croaked. “Do you have a land line?”
    The middle-aged bartender was short with bright, inquisitive woodchuck eyes and