Helmet Head Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1: Probable Cause

  CHAPTER 2: White Noise

  CHAPTER 3: A Sound in the Forest

  CHAPTER 4: Homicide

  CHAPTER 5: Demon Eye

  CHAPTER 6: The Kongo Klub

  CHAPTER 7: The Road Dogs

  CHAPTER 8: Helmet Head

  CHAPTER 9: Here Come De Judge

  CHAPTER 10: Poor Service

  CHAPTER 11: The Freezer

  CHAPTER 12: The Book of Death

  CHAPTER 13: Tape

  CHAPTER 14: The Applicant

  CHAPTER 15: Traffic Stop

  CHAPTER 16: Hot Dog

  CHAPTER 17: Motor

  CHAPTER 18: Ed Steps Up

  CHAPTER 19: Terrell

  CHAPTER 20: Snake Bit

  CHAPTER 21: Nazis

  CHAPTER 22: The Boogerman

  CHAPTER 23: The House

  CHAPTER 24: Wotan

  CHAPTER 25: Valk

  CHAPTER 26: Grandpa

  CHAPTER 27: Chainsaw

  CHAPTER 28: Bad Decisions

  CHAPTER 29: Angela

  CHAPTER 30: Terry

  CHAPTER 31: Wild Bill Returns

  CHAPTER 32: The Limbo Rock

  CHAPTER 33: Just One Smoke

  CHAPTER 34: The Truck

  CHAPTER 35: Waking Up in a Strange Bed

  CHAPTER 36: Lone Survivor

  CHAPTER 37: Downstairs, Upstairs, In My Lady’s Chamber

  CHAPTER 38: The Basement

  CHAPTER 39: The Source

  CHAPTER 40: Chop Chop

  CHAPTER 41: Triumph of the Will

  CHAPTER 42: Escape

  CHAPTER 43: Helmet Head Speaks

  CHAPTER 44: True Love Triumphs

  CHAPTER 45: One For the Road

  CHAPTER 46: Corn Liquor

  CHAPTER 47: After the Storm

  About the Author

  A THRILLER

  Mike Baron

  HELMET HEAD

  Mike Baron

  He was just a rumor to the rough and dangerous “one-percenters”—a monstrous motorcyclist dressed all in black who rode the back roads of Little Egypt cutting off the heads of other bikers with a samurai sword. But on one terrible stormy night, Deputy Pete Fagan discovers that Helmet Head is all too real—and consumed with a fury that won't be satisfied until his demonic sword drinks its fill.

  ***

  Smashwords Edition – 2014

  WordFire Press

  www.wordfire.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-145-8

  Copyright © Mike Baron, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover by Joe Arnold

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta Publishers

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, Inc.

  PO Box 1840

  Monument, CO 80132

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  ***

  Dedication

  To my wife, Ann Baron

  ***

  CHAPTER 1

  Probable Cause

  Larry “Red Rocket” Rodell was four hours out of Elgin with two ounces of meth in his ditty bag and one-and-a-half grams in his blood when he topped a gentle rise in Southern Illinois, saw the lushly wooded hillsides undulating into the distance and thought, Fuck me, I’d better get off this bike, drain my lizard and do a bump if I’m going to make the roadhouse tonight.

  He felt the heat from his 113 inch S&S motor in his thighs. He felt every jolt in the old cracked asphalt from his hardtail frame. He was inured to the shriek of the bike and the roar of the wind, but Larry wasn’t getting any younger. At 39 he was a full-time outlaw. He could always get a job sober and would always lose it when he showed up drunk or stoned.

  Well fuck that shit. Larry was a Road Dog and the Dogs took care of their own. You could make a decent living as an outlaw. As Dylan said, you had to be honest to live outside the law. The ounces were for the club. Wild Bill promised Larry that there would be five keys coming in tonight or tomorrow, most of which Larry would take back to the Greater Chicagoland Area for distribution. Such was the economics of drugs that flowed up and down the Mississippi like the water itself. You could shoot it, you could snort it, you could stick it up your ass. And you could sell it. Larry thought meth should replace the dollar. The country would be better off on the Meth Standard. Meth was something Americans produced with pride.

  Meth was the lifeblood of American labor. Assembly line workers in Beloit and Elgin lived off that shit. It carried them through the week and then it carried them through the weekend. Coke was for faggots and pussies.

  Not paying attention, Larry took a gully-whumper that cracked a shock up his spine and rattled his skull. Whoa dude! Time to get off the hawg! He zipped through a hollow where the trees came right up to the side of the road. The air smelled of honeysuckle and just a tinge of pig shit, which put Larry in a nostalgic mood. He motored up a gentle hill to a plateau and there was a turnoff leading into a cornfield, two sturdy gate posts with the barbed wire pulled aside. It would have to do. He squeezed on Marilyn’s brakes and the big bike slowed, front disc shrieking like a bitch in heat. He rolled Marilyn carefully off the scabbed asphalt onto the hard-packed earth, reached behind for a coffee can lid which he tossed in the dirt. He wanged out the kickstand and let Marilyn lean.

  As always, he touched his fingers to his lips, then to Marilyn’s, painted on the tank.

  Larry semaphored his long right leg off the bike and stretched backwards, squinting into the afternoon sun. He was six four, weighed 170 with a narrow skull and the parchment skin of a heavy smoker and tweaker. His arms were so inked they were blue. His long brown ponytail fell back from his black skull bandanna. He wore Gargoyle shades. He wore a filthy gray T-shirt, now in its fourth day and over that a black leather vest bearing the Road Dogs’ colors, a snarling pit bull. Over the pit bull it read in Gothic script “Road Dogs.” Beneath it said, “It Ain’t the Size.”

  The front of the black leather vest was covered with patches including “1%,” “Floyd Davis/1952 - 1974/RIP Brother,” POW/MIA, “Don’t tread on me,” and the red thirteen patch honoring Larry for giving cunnilingus to a menstruating woman.

  Larry’s heart went boom boom boom. He looked around. It was a beautiful sunny day in Southern Illinois, not too hot, not a cloud in the sky, birds chirping, the fragrance of summer on the breeze. Larry didn’t see all that. Pollen made his eyes itch. He walked among the waist-high corn, unzipped his pants and pissed like a horse on a flat rock. His head felt like a cement mixer. He’d been taking a pounding all day. All his life. His back felt tight as a hurricane fence and his fingers were numb. He flexed them and swung his arms trying to bring some sensation back.

  Temples throbbing, Larry returned to his hawg and removed a much-creased state map from one of the leather side bags. The Dogs were waiting at the Kongo Klub a couple miles outside Ptolemy. He’d made the run but this was a new route. The ma
p looked like somebody threw a plate of spaghetti on the ground; there were so many winding, intertwining back roads. Where the fuck was he? Larry hadn’t looked at a road sign in an hour but he had to be close. He could feel it.

  He reached in his vest and removed a folded paper bindle filled with white powder. He looked around. Not much in the way of furnishings, so he shook it out right on his gas tank and used a stolen credit card to line up the bump. Not on Marilyn’s face, of course. He fished a crushed plastic drinking straw from another vest pocket, bent down and hoovered.

  Just like plugging in a cell phone. All his bars lit up! Yeah, baby! From Zero to Hero in five seconds flat. That bump would carry him all the way to the Kongo Klub where he couldn’t wait for his first glass of Jack.

  Larry straightened up feeling righteous. He glanced down the road—more loop the loops through the endless wooded hills. He looked up. The sky had changed color.

  Someone had leeched the blue and turned it a sickly milky white. A tiny black dart headed east far overhead. Larry scanned his surroundings. The hills surfed into the distance like a coarse green blanket. He didn’t notice the flies buzzing around his face. The tip of a red silo stuck up over the trees in a valley to the east. His eyes swept past four o’clock and doubled back.

  What the fuck?!

  Less than a quarter mile away to the northwest lay another gently rounded promontory peeking over the cornrows and this one was a county park, if you could call a patch of gravel, a trash barrel and a picnic table a park. A county mountie straddled his Milwaukee iron and stared at Larry through a pair of binoculars.

  They both froze, each instinctively recognizing his mortal enemy. Larry’s imagination clicked into overdrive. How much was he carrying? Enough to bust him for dealing? Did that fucking cop have probable cause? Fuck probable Cause! Larry knew cops. They didn’t need no stinkin’ probable cause. They’d been hassling him all his life. And that cop probably knew this county like the back of his hand, and was going to be on Larry’s blue ass like white on rice.

  ***

  CHAPTER 2

  White Noise

  Pete Fagan poked through the gray bones of the chicken shack with a stick he’d picked up in the yard. Place stank of cat urine and some acrid chemical that dug into the sinuses like glass splinters. Empty plastic liter bottles littered the ground and there were three inches of scorched copper tubing. The shack hadn’t been a meth lab in a long time but it wasn’t a wasted trip. Every bit of knowledge helped Fagan do his job.

  Kids had decorated the interior of the shack with cans of spray paint—the usual crude comments, wannabe gang symbols and a crude figure of a man drawn all in black with an oversized head waving a sword. There was a filthy mattress in one corner and scores of used condoms. Cigarette butts and empty bottles of peppermint schnapps. The place was open to the elements and various animal droppings lay on the wooden floor among the rubble.

  Fagan stepped out of the chicken shack into the overgrown yard. A hundred feet away sagged the falling-down farmhouse, another casualty in the decades-long war against the family farm. Times were tough in Little Egypt. Fagan understood why some might turn to meth but he had no sympathy for them.

  The grass and weeds were up to his knees. Kids had busted all the windows and painted graffiti on the side of the house. Upside-down crucifixes. Blue Öyster Cult. The Grim Reaper. A swastika. Weird symbols, random letters copied from photographs in Juxtapoz or Vibe or from boxcars that passed nearby. Teen tough guys high on paint thinner and glue. He went up the sagging steps and looked in through the missing front door. Absolute rubble. Mice and rats scurried inside the walls. The place was in receivership to a failing bank. It ought to be declared a hazard and surrounded with police warning tape, not that it would do any good.

  The recession hit farm country hard. The last couple of years had been particularly difficult for the nation’s solar plexus, which had absorbed blow after blow, both manmade and natural. Tornadoes swept the area in April killing four people in Bullard County and devastating a trailer park.

  Why did the tornadoes always strike trailer parks? Was there something there that attracted extreme weather? The house smelled rotten. Piss and shit. Fagan turned away. The porch and yard were filled with empty beer cans and bottles. Fagan sighed and scratched his head with gloved hands. The helmet made his scalp itch.

  It did give Fagan an idea, something to pursue someday when he was no longer a cop. A pig, an oinker, a jack-booted thug. He’d been called those things and worse but down here in the alfalfa fields far from the city, not so much. Rural folk respected the police unless they were running a still or a meth lab. Even then they’d smile and call you sir as they lied to your face.

  Fagan’s idea was simple. A motorcycle helmet lined with stiff bristles like a hairbrush so that when you moved it side to side the bristles stimulated the scalp.

  His radio squawked. Down here in the valley, the reception was for shit. He’d have to get on top of one of these hills to communicate with the sheriff’s office in Ptolemy. Fortunately, Fagan knew of a roadside park two miles down the road. He snapped a few photos of the graffiti with his cell phone to add to the department collection, not that they were tracking Los Zetas.

  Some pot farming, a couple meth labs and domestic violence were as bad as it got in Bullard County. Occasionally they had to scrape up the pieces when some kid put his car into a tree at ninety mph, but what rural community didn’t have that problem?

  Of course, Fagan wouldn’t have the job if his predecessor hadn’t lost control of his bike during a high-speed pursuit and planted himself in the side of a barn.

  They never found the perp.

  Fullerton thought it was a probably a drug runner.

  And the Road Dogs, a fifth rate pack of losers who dealt meth up and down the Mississippi and liked to hang at the Kongo Klub. Fagan hadn’t met them yet. He planned to introduce himself the next time they were in town.

  He crossed the yard, long grass swishing against his calf-high highway boots. His ride was a modified, fat-fendered, black and white Harley sporting a light bar and a whip antenna. He tried the handset but all he got was white noise. Fagan picked his helmet up off the seat. It was white with the blue and gold star of the Bullard County Sheriff’s Department. He strapped it on. His scalp itched.

  Fagan got on the bike, thumbed the starter and crunched down the gravel driveway to the county road. He turned right and accelerated up the hollow, the police bike as quiet as a bike can be.

  When he emerged into the open, the sky looked funny. Dark cumulus were bunching up in the west and he could feel the languid touch of change on his cheek, smell it in the wind. Rain coming, maybe severe weather. There’d been no warning in the morning. Five minutes later he pulled into the county wayside, a gravel lot, a trash barrel, a picnic table and a trail leading into the woods. He kicked out the stand and spoke into the handset pinned to his shoulder.

  “This is Fagan. What’s up?”

  Snap crackle pop. Irma Conklin, the department’s veteran dispatcher answered. “Pete, Ellis Johnson just dropped in and said looks like the Road Dogs are back at the Kongo Klub. You said you wanted to be notified.”

  “Thanks, Irma. Where’s the Sheriff?”

  “Sheriff Fullerton is transporting a prisoner to Paducah.”

  “What’s up with this weather?”

  “It does look a mite stormy but we haven’t heard any warnings or sirens. I’ll let you know if we do.”

  “Thanks Irma. I’m off to the Kongo Klub.”

  A faint rumble off to the west drew his attention. A bolt of lightning arced from cloud to earth in brilliant dazzle. It could have been ten miles away; it could have been a hundred. Fagan waited for the rumble. One, one thousand. Two, one thousand …

  The rumble came on ten. The storm was a long way off. A breeze picked up out of nowhere and rattled the alder and oak. Fagan keyed the starter, eyes automatically sweeping the horizon.

  And th
ere he was, biker at ten o’clock, peaking up over the rim of Gardner’s cornfield. Fagan pegged him instantly from the silhouette—the gaunt frame, doo-wop rag on his head and the sunglasses. He could just make out the top of the dude’s ape-hangers. Fagan reached into the tank bag for his fold-up binocs.

  As he was bringing them to his face the biker reacted in comically exaggerated fashion, his whole body doing a snake-whip as he went rigid, jumped up, jumped down, and started the motor.

  The thunderclap reached Fagan almost instantly.

  ***

  CHAPTER 3

  A Sound in the Forest

  “Fuck!” Larry spat spraying dirt all over the cornstalks and nearly sliding sideways as he torqued his hawg back to the road. He knew that oinker was coming. Larry had an outstanding warrant in Illinois. If they caught him with that much dope—it was only a couple ounces!—they’d put him away for a long time.

  The sheer unfairness of the situation made him furious. He’d love to set a trap, wait for that fucking mountie to ride by and pop him with the .44 he carried within easy reach in the saddlebag. All he had to do was lean back and pull it out. He’d taught himself to fire over his shoulder like Annie Oakley. He couldn’t hit anything but the effect was gratifying.

  Well fuck that noise. With any luck Larry’d never see that cop’s headlight in his rearview. Marilyn checked out at 106 ft.-lbs. of torque at 2500 rpm. Larry had hundreds of thousands of miles experience. No Deputy Dawg could keep up. Larry hit the road and opened the throttle, the twin cylinders, each the size of a soup can, emitting a primordial bellow as he dove back into the endless valleys enveloped by shade.

  Larry was pretty sure that if he stayed on Brogden Road it would take him to State Highway 123, which led right to the Kongo Klub at the crossroads with 38. He’d been this way before but not in a long time. What the hell—they weren’t building any new roads. Not in this neck of the woods. They could barely maintain the roads they had. Where the fuck were those highway dollars? Larry had seen better roads in Baja.