Everybody Smokes in Hell by John Ridley

Author:John Ridley [Ridley, John]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Barstow was on the way to Las Vegas from Los Angeles. Barstow was on the way from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Both cities—LA and LV—had something to offer. Not much and not much good, but something. Something more than the dirt and arid-weather vegetation that surrounded Barstow. But for some reason, over both just about equidistant places, people chose to live in Barstow.

Maybe they chose to.

More likely they were heading to one location or the other, broke down in Barstow, and decided to stay there. Like how a bug that gets stuck decides to stay in a roach motel.

Lot of gas stations in Barstow. Fast-food places did well too. The faster the better, as most people couldn’t wait to be at either end of 1-15.There were a few sit-down places, places where the person who took your food order wasn’t talking at you through the busted speaker of a clown head. Not many. A few.

And there was The Trading Post. The Trading Post got built back in the forties, when just about the only thing to Barstow was The Trading Post. It did very well. People stopped at The Trading Post because if they didn’t stop at The Trading Post and load up on gas, extra water, and food there was a good chance they would break down just south, toward LA, or north, toward Vegas, and once they broke down there was an equally good chance they would not be found and would end up baking to death in the desert sun. Anyway, that’s what the people who ran The Trading Post would tell you. A little piece of info that did wonders for business.

So the Post prospered over the years, with people buying overpriced gas and food and souvenirs and tchotchkes and knickknacks and postcards (Greetings from Barstow). The rest of the city, what little bit of city there was, grew around The Trading Post. By this day and age there were other places to buy gas and food, or get tchotchkes, knick-knacks, and purchase postcards (Greetings from Downtown Barstow), but there was only one place where you could do all those things.

The Trading Post.

Paris eased the Gremlin next to one of The Trading Post’s pumps. By that much he’d undazed enough along the drive to realize he needed to fill up. Once he started pumping he dazed up again.

Nearby, close to the bin where the complimentary squeegee sat in dirty water, a crazy guy sang “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” into a plastic cup. He either didn’t know or was too insane to remember the words, so he spiced up the lyrics with a few non sequiturs. Nutty as he was, he didn’t rate so much as a look from Paris. After you’ve cradled the dead, guys singing into cups amount to little.

Paris just kept up his from-here-to-eternity blank-eyed stare, and it was only the overspill of gas onto his feet that jerked him from visions of shot-up bodies and screaming telephones and a million dollars going from cash to ash, back to real time.

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