“Girl please,” he said, “you think your bike is fast? Pfft. You ain’t got nothing on me!”

“Is that right?” I answered. “What’re you riding, Ricky Schroeder? A Rebel?”

“Nah, baby, Daihatsabusa.”

Daihatsabusa. The very name caused a my stomach to tie itself in knots. A supercharged two-wheeled assisted suicide machine. Just shy of a full litre of hell caged up in a couple hundred pounds of aluminum and carbon fiber. More expensive than a visit to Dr. Kevorkian, but a heck of a lot more fun, too.

Of course, the knots could have been the whiskey planning it’s inevitable rebellion against the Rumpleminz that we had started drinking when the first bottle ran dry, but damn – that’s the bike that killed Johnny Ringo. I’d blown right past a few too many an hour ago, but there’s a protocol to these situations and the guantlet had been thrown down. Now I had to ride.

“Oh yeah?” I said.

The kid just smiled. He knew he had me now. “Yeah. Right outside. Wanna go for a spin?”