We stopped for breakfast around 9 a.m. at a small country store that catered to hikers entering the park. The cook was cheerful, the waitress cute as she took our orders for the lumberjack special. Three eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, buttermilk pancakes and a small breakfast steak with unlimited coffee was just the ticket and all for $5.99. We put our faces down and did some serious damage to the pile of food. I heaped ketchup on everything but the toast and pancakes while both of them made fun of my condiments. When the three plates had been wiped spotless with the last sliver of toast, I sat back and politely smothered a burp. Mairy kicked me under the table.
“What?” I protested. “I swallowed it.”
“Hog. Where to next?”
“Into town. There's a BMW dealership that has just released three bikes kept on hold,” I answered checking the quipp. I hadn’t expected to need them but I was glad I’d set them aside months ago just in case. Paperwork and license tags were all in order, all we had to do was drop in and pick them up.
“Back into Red Lodge?” Robin gaped. “Are you nuts?”
“Sure, it's the last place I’d be right now. I’d have to be an idiot to come back here,” I said. “Even you think it’s stupid. “
We hitched a ride with a contract lumber cutter, the same job as Travis Walton who was the guy that said he was abducted by aliens.
“I remember reading about that,” Robin commented. “What do you think really happened?”
“He was taken by stealth helicopters and examined for signs of radiation,” I said briefly. “Same as all those cattle found dead and mutilated. The government is checking how much strontium is in the reproductive organs and the eyes, tongue and nose because that’s where most of the radiation accumulate.”
“You sure? Everyone says it’s those grays,” Robin protested.
“Nope. I saw the files when I hacked the NSA data banks. It’s all done by our government.”
We were silent as we bounced in the bed of the pickup on the washboard road, sitting among the bags of feed, a chainsaw case, wedges, and a crosscut saw. The range chief stopped at the four-way and stuck his head out the window. “Far as I go into town,” he called. “Keep straight, ain’t more than a mile before you hit the Walmart and Shopping Center.”
We hopped out and I offered him a twenty but he declined it. “You might need it. Stay safe.”
“How come you're not out chasing after the miracle man?” I asked curiously.
He snorted. “I reckon if God made this boy so perfect, it ain’t up to me to hunt him. Crazy fools. How many will kill themselves in these woods hunting for a unicorn?”
With that, he drove off. We kept walking on the road. Surprisingly, there wasn’t much traffic nor were there many vehicles in the Walmart parking lot or Shopping Center.
We found the BMW dealership next to a Rite-aid, entered the stuffy showroom to find only one employee kicking back at his desk.
“Where is everyone?” I asked as he sat up when he saw us.
“Out hunting snipe,” he snickered as his lips twisted. “Damn fools. Can I help you?”
“We’re here to pick up order 799-05CE. Three BMW K1200s in the name of Tom Horn.”
“Any relation to the bounty hunter?”
“No, not that I know of. I’m from California,” I said.
“Well, everything is in order with your paperwork and we have your three helmets and saddlebags that you ordered. Here are the keys, the bikes are out back, I had the service department fill the tanks and put your plates on. The modifications you asked for are in place, also.” He handed me the leather pouch with our licenses, tags, and maps. “Follow me.”
We walked behind him and out of the service department door, from there outside to a yard encircled by chain-link fences and razor wire. Three beautiful shiny black and blue bikes waited for us, tricked out with leather saddlebags, windscreens, and plush leather seats. Three helmets with flames, a phoenix, and a wolf design. The bikes were 16 valves with 4 cylinders, a DOHC horizontal in-line liquid cooled engine with a 6-speed manual transmission. Normally, the bike could go 174 mph but with the modifications I had asked for, it could hit 260 mph without blinking an eye. The only thing faster was a Honda Blackbird or the Dodge Tomahawk but those were a very limited model that would attract attention and be hard to forget, not to mention that the average joe couldn’t afford a Tomahawk unless he was a millionaire.
Robin and Mairy looked at me, the bikes and needed no urging. Robin claimed the bike with the flames, Mairy took the wolf and left the phoenix for me. Both climbed on and kick-started the engines with a throaty roar and I heard the two of them purr in response.
The modifications I had asked for and paid a hefty bonus were not strictly legal but the salesman had quietly agreed and pocketed the extra 10K. The capability of the bikes was now a killer 260 miles per hour and could out-corner a jackrabbit on speed. Yet, they were also good on dirt.
He shook my hand and pointed down the alley that stretched through the back side of businesses and town. “That way heads out to the state land and dirt bike trails. Cuts off about ten miles of road and brings you out on Hwy 27, past the road blocks. Follow that to the interchange, you can pick up three Interstates, one to Mexico, one to California and another to Canada.”
“Thanks.”
“Your insurance is good in Mexico because I got you a policy through the consulate. There’s an ID card in your papers from Juarez,” he added. “They don’t honor American companies down there and it can cause problems.”
“Got it.” I threw my leg over the saddle and started the bike. She growled at me like a jaguar and I could feel his eyes on me until we turned a shallow corner out of his view. I wondered how long it was before he would put it together and sell us out.
Five million dollars was a lot of money.
The helmets had built in radios so we could converse and I let them get a mile down the alley before I turned the bike onto a cross street called Palmetier, stopped and told them to remove their helmets. Both of them followed my instructions, kicked the stand down and waited as I ran the quipp over each bike and helmet. No bugs. That done, I opened up the electronics in the helmets and reset the frequencies so that we could speak without the fear of being monitored by any agency or satellite. I programmed another so that we could eavesdrop on the police bands.
Done with that, I handed them back and we started once more down the road out of town. But not by the route that the salesman had shown us. We left town by way of Main St., past the hospital where the crowds of news vans and lazier hunters had given up or hadn’t started after us. No one paid any attention to three more bikers breezing through town.
When we hit the concrete of the Interstate, I cranked the bike up to 75 mph and spoke to them. “You guys okay?”
Mairy said shakily, “I’m nervous as hell, Lake. I thought we were sitting ducks in town.”
“You were right, Laky. No one ever dreamed you’d be stupid enough to come back here. Where are all the agents we saw when you were first brought in?”
“Looking for me in the woods or at some other clinic,” I shrugged. “I hope. Remember, they think I’m still wounded and flat on my back.
“We missed our rendezvous with George Little Bear, he has all the gear we need for the rest of this trip. We can’t get it here; it’d draw too much attention.”
“Passports?” Robin questioned. “Won’t we need passports to get into Canada?”
“EDLs are in the pouch. We’ll get passports in Canada from the reservation in Victoria.”
There was a lot of traffic heading into town but not much going out our way. We’d done five miles when we ran into a road block but not surprisingly, the police didn’t stop us---they weren’t expecting me to be on a bike after the kind of injuries I’d had nor were they looking for three bikers. They would assume I was being transported by car or ambulance nor would they think I would have headed east away from my intended destination of Canada.
We drove for four hours leaving Montana behind and into North Dakota. Into the Black Hills. I was uneasy with all that openness around me, I much preferred the dense thickets of ponderosa pine, mountain ravines, and cliffs than these barren, open hills of sere grass.
I was grateful for the perplex windscreen. At our altitude, speed and the cold, the wind was a solid knife that ate through our leathers and clawed at muscles making it nearly unbearable. I was afraid to raise my core temperature and heat up my face, hands and feet. The other two must be near to frostbite. I decided to stop at midnight, to continue on was risking a collision with deer or pronghorn, black ice, frostbite or worse.
We had traveled far enough that Bismarck was nearly in our sights and George Little Bear would meet us there if we needed him.
“Real hotel tonight?” I asked. “Shower, bed and real food?”
“Is it safe?” both asked.
“Safe as any place. I’d rather be out camping but that’s what Chase and Cameron expect me to do. Besides, I’m sore sitting on this bike, nice as it is.”
We parked at a truck pull-off lane underneath a sodium vapor light and while both of them dismounted to stretch their legs, I sat on my bike running through the trivago site. There were quite a few empty rooms in the Clarion and Best Western, hardly any at the Hilton. There, we would be just another group of anonymous faces in the crowd of bikers who’d come up early for the Sturgis Rally. More than a million people were predicted this year. Of course, it wasn’t until July 30th but people were already scoping the place out and getting the town ready for the 76th anniversary of the Biker Rally.
“We can go on to Bismarck or stop in Sturgis,” I offered. “Even though it’s not Rally time, no one would look twice at us. Bismarck, we’d be more out of place unless we checked in at a Best Western or Motel 6.
Mairy sighed. “I vote for sooner. My butt is killing me.”
“It’s killing me too,” I leered. Robin gagged.
“Sooner, Romeo. I need a shower and a beer not necessarily in that order.”
“Motel 6 it is,” I said and found us two adjoining rooms on the 1st floor near the back. A confirmation code scrolled across the vid screen as I set the kickstand down, walked off the stiffness and stretched.
“How are you feeling?” she asked me, picking up my hand. I rubbed her palm and the blue lights flared, illuminating an area the size of a tractor trailer.
“Whoa. That good?” she grinned and gave me a long slow kiss that raised my temp making the field as brilliant as halogen truck lights.
“Hey, bro. Sis. I’m still here!” Robin shouted. “It needs to wait until you can get a room!”
I pointed my finger at him and a streak of blue danced towards him, wrapped itself around his legs and I gave it a jerk. Pulled him off his feet and onto his ass. He went down with his arms flailing, and his mouth open in surprise. Mairy burst out laughing as he climbed to his feet and charged me. I ran grinning, down the side of the shoulder with him threatening dire harm should he catch me. Good luck with that.