Throttle (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF

coherent order. If his memory was right again—he knew it was asking a lot of it; he hadn’t been this way in a couple of years—then the spur road ran through Cumba before veering back to rejoin Highway 6 about nine miles ahead. If Race could stay in front—
    Except.
    Except, unless things had changed, the road went to hard-pan dirt beyond Cumba, and was apt to drift across sandy at this time of year. The truck would do okay, but a motorcycle . . .

    The chances of Race surviving the last four miles of that nine-mile run weren’t good. The chances of him dumping the Deuce and being run over were, on the other hand, excellent.
    Images of Race tried to crowd his mind. Race on his Big Wheels: the kindergarten road warrior. Race staring at him from the backseat of the GTO, the Popsicle melting, his eyes bright with hate, the lower lip quivering. Race at eighteen, wearing a uniform and a fuck-you smile, both present and accounted for and all squared away.
    Last of all came the image of Race dead on the hardpan, a smashed doll with only his leathers holding him together.
    Vince swept the pictures away. They were no help. The cops wouldn’t be, either. There were no cops, not in Cumba. If someone saw the semi chasing the bike, he might call the state police, but the closest one was apt to be in Show Low, drinking java and eating pie and flirting with the waitress while Travis Tritt played on the Rock-Ola.
    There was only them. But that was nothing new.
    He thrust his hand to the right, then made a fist and patted the air with it. The other three swung over to the side behind him, engines clobbering, the air over their straight pipes shimmering.
    Lemmy pulled up beside him, his face haggard and cheesy-yellow. “ He didn’t see the taillight signal! ” he shouted.
    “ Didn’t see or didn’t understand! ” Vince yelled back. He was trembling. Maybe it was just the bike throbbing under him. “ Comes to the same! Time for Little Boy! ”

    For a moment Lemmy didn’t understand. Then he twisted around and yanked the straps on his right-hand saddlebag. No fancy plastic hardcase for Lemmy. Lemmy was old school all the way.
    While he was rooting, there was a sudden, gunning roar. That was Roy. Roy had had enough. He wheeled around and shot back east, his shadow now running before him, a scrawny black gantry-man. On the back of his leather vest was a hideous joke: NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER .
    “ Come back, Klowes, you dickwad! ” Peaches bellowed. His hand slipped from his clutch. The Beezer, still in gear, lurched forward almost over Vince’s foot, passed high-octane gas, and stalled. Peaches was almost hurled off but didn’t seem to notice. He was still looking back. He shook his fist; his scant gray hair whirled around his long, narrow skull. “ Come back, you chicken-shit DICKWAAAAD! ”
    Roy didn’t come back. Roy didn’t even look back.
    Peaches turned to Vince. Tears streamed down cheeks sunflayed by a million rides and ten million beers. In that moment he looked older than the desert he stood on.
    “ You’re stronger’n me, Vince, but I got me a bigger asshole. You rip his head off; I’ll be in charge of shittin’ down his neck. ”
    “ Hurry up! ” Vince shouted at Lemmy. “ Hurry up, goddamn you! ”
    Just when he thought Lemmy was going to come up empty, his old running buddy straightened with Little Boy in his gloved hand.
    The Tribe did not ride with guns. Outlaw motorheads like them never did. They all had records, and any cop in Nevada would be delighted to put one of them away for thirty years on a gun charge. One, or all of them. They carried knives, but knives were no good in this situation; witness what had happened to Roy’s machete, which had turned out as useless as the man himself. Except when it came to killing stoned little girls in high school sweaters, that was.
    Little Boy, however, while not strictly legal, was not a gun. And the one cop who’d looked at it (“while searching for