Now They Call Me Gunner

  * * *

  On Monday afternoon, Randal walked into Elsa’s kitchen, grabbed me, and hugged me.

  I was shocked. I thought that he was still in jail.

  “You saved my life, man,” he said. “I was three days away from breaking out when my lawyer came and told me that they’d found new evidence. The Road Snakes have all been arrested. That was you, wasn’t it? It had to be you. Nobody else knew about the Snakes and Billy.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked around the kitchen. It was the afternoon lull. “You think Gil can handle the grill for a while?”

  “No problem.” Gil was turning out to be a fair cook now that he wasn’t distracted by Katie all the time. Not as good as me and way less good than Randal, but good enough to handle the grill by himself, even when there was a bit of a rush.

  “Come on, then. Grab a drink and we’ll go out back and talk about it. I gotta say, ‘Hi,’ to Gwen.”

  He was more subdued with Gwen because she was on duty and there were customers in the front. He didn’t grab her and hug her but he couldn’t stop grinning. I guess he was happy to be back at Elsa’s.

  A few minutes later, he and I were sitting at the picnic table around back – me with a chocolate shake and him with a coffee.

  I told him what had happened after he got arrested. I left out a couple of details but not as many as I omitted when I was talking to the cops. I couldn’t leave out that Katie had nearly been raped because that was how she figured out that Billy had raped The Doll and that was central to everything.

  “Bummer,” he said. “I’m sorry that you and her had to go through all that. Is she going to be all right?”

  “Yeah. We talked about it and everything’s square between us.”

  “Good. You keep a watch on her, though. If it was bad enough, she might get flashbacks.”

  “I don’t think it was that bad. It could have been, but it didn’t go far enough.”

  “I hope not.”

  I didn’t tell him that I was having nightmares. I’d been having them since before Katie almost got raped but they’d been worse since. Almost every night for the past few nights, in my dreams, I was back in the Road Snakes clubhouse, me getting beat up and Katie getting her clothes torn off. It wasn’t full-blown flashbacks like Randal got, but it was bad enough that I was getting a good idea about what kind of hell his life was like.

  I also didn’t tell him about how close Katie and I had become, but Randal was spooky sharp about that.

  “So you’re not a virgin any more.” He grinned.

  “I didn’t say that,” I countered.

  “No. But you didn’t have to. It’s something that you can’t hide from your friends.”

  That idea was disconcerting.

  He asked a few more questions about what had happened after he was arrested but I mostly repeated what I’d already said. I wasn’t tempted to reveal more than I wanted.

  When I had answered as many questions as he could think to ask, he shook his head. “You got them to confess and show you the evidence. That’s amazing. You’re like the Amazing Kreskin. Getting into their heads like that.”

  “It started when you figured out that they thought we were checking them out for the Hells Angels.”

  “Yeah, but I never would have thought about taking it as far as you did. That wasn’t just cool. That took pure guts.”

  When a guy who’s escaped from a Viet Cong prison camp says that you’ve got guts, you can’t really contradict him. All you can do is blush.

  I blushed.