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  So his would be special, more traditional, like the floats he’d seen as a kid on TV in the big parades, in Pasadena and New York.

  “I still say we take a can of spray paint, Bigfoot for President.” Smith mimed scrawling these words across the side of the dented orange cargo van they were using for the float.

  And again Michael wondered if Smith might be a little slow. “I told you, Bigfoot’s already been done. I mean, true, it was a great idea. As Mark Twain said, ‘If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.’” He was trying not to be too harsh with Smith since he believed you should be patient with people who are slow.

  “It’s a perfect idea. Simple, easy, we’re done with this crap,” said Smith. “We move on to the fun part.”

  But for Michael, even though he was struggling to shape the teeth of the gear, this was the fun part. He stepped back to get a better look at his work.

  The problem was that the crepe paper flowers kind of smoothed out the teeth making the gear look more like a wreath, except with spokes. So maybe it looked like a Ferris Wheel. He just had to hope once he’d made all the gears and linked them together with chains, which would be made of crepe paper flowers too, people would see how they worked. People would see the whole machine. “This is going to be so much better,” he said.

  “This is going to be a big waste of time,” grumped Smith, and since Hank had given him the job of folding the crepe paper flowers, Michael had to admit that Smith was at least helping.

  While Hank was just sitting in a folding chair, watching and giving assignments to Smith. And he didn’t seem to get it either. “Where do you plan to put that wreath, or whatever it is?” he said.

  “Right on the front,” Michael said. “It’ll be the biggest one because it’ll be the government.” Then, thinking they might understand his vision better if they were more involved in the design, he said, “You guys can decide where the other gears go if you’d like. The banks and unions, the health care cartel, all that sort of thing. Farmers. But maybe we shouldn’t do farmers. There are a lot of farmers out here who might take offense.”

  “How many of these fucking flowers do I have to make?” said Smith.

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Michael said. “There’s a gear for just about every one of us.”

  Smith scowled and went back to folding pink and yellow crepe paper, actually kind of wadding it up. His flowers looked more like warts.

  “Did you know I get Social Security Disability?” Michael said. “Medicare too. I hope you guys don’t think less of me for that.”

  “You’re forgiven,” said Hank.

  “I feel kind of bad about it, but my parents set it up, and these checks just keep coming into my bank account . . .” Michael let this rather embarrassing confession trail off and went back to work.

  At least Hank and Smith had provided this old van, and it was good that it was so beat-up because the first step had been to wrap it in chicken wire, and the wire was scratching the paint. They’d also provided the crepe paper, and they’d rented this garage in this row of rental garages that was close enough to Michael’s house for him to walk here. It had been a long time since he’d had any friends, but he did remember. He knew it could be challenging.

  For instance, Ritchie had liked to run his little cars off the end of the upper bunk of his sisters’ bunk beds even though Michael’s sisters hadn’t wanted him or his friends in their room, and the cars sometimes broke when they crashed onto the wood floor. But for Ritchie, that had been his favorite game.

  And Jeremy, he cheated at Monopoly. He sometimes stole money or switched houses to hotels when he thought Michael wasn’t looking. He wouldn’t play at all unless he got to be the top hat. One time he made Michael be the iron.

  But with Jeremy Michael could ride his bike much farther from home than with anyone else. Jeremy knew the way. And Ritchie could make up marvelous stories, turn a jungle gym into a spaceship, turn a vacant lot into another planet.

  Sometimes they’d been good friends.

  Dr. Kortge, Annie, and even his mom had told Michael he had a serious disease, but he’d never been fully convinced of that. He’d had a few tough years back in his twenties, but after that it seemed to him he’d just become shy. And lazy. That was why he hadn’t held a job since those first rough years, and why he’d mostly just stayed in the house where he’d grown up. He may have become unforgiving too, expecting too much of other people, unwilling to accept their sometimes prickly differences. Maybe that was the reason he hadn’t had any friends in all these years.

  Then he was struck by a great idea that immediately lifted his mood. “You know what would make this even better?” he said. “What if instead of pink and yellow crepe paper we used green!”

  Smith reared back. “Instead?”

  “We could draw pictures of presidents on the paper, and then the flowers would look like they were made out of dollar bills!”

  “Now I’m drawing fucking presidents?”

  Michael couldn’t really blame Smith for resisting this change, since he was sitting in the middle of a mound of pink and yellow flowers he’d just made, so maybe it would be best if they still used some of those colors too. But finally Michael saw it, exactly the way he often saw it in his mind, the gears made out of money turning around and around, feeding the money around and around. “And maybe we can make little people, out of pipe cleaners, and they’d be trapped between the gears, screaming like in those old paintings of hell.”

  Smith stood up, carelessly stomping on his pile of crepe paper flowers, or warts. “Pipe cleaner people! This nut is crazier than we thought!”

  “That would make it so perfect. Except . . .” Michael had to step back again, to see the full length of the van, to imagine the float complete. “How are we going to open the door? For the driver to get in. Once the gears are all over the van and connected to each other . . .” Already chicken wire covered the front doors. Only the ones at the rear could still be opened. “And the windshield! I wasn’t thinking. We put chicken wire all over the windshield too! How will the driver see? We should’ve used a lawn mower like I suggested at first. Then the driver could crawl up on top of everything—”

  “You can’t fit anything in a lawn mower!” shouted Smith.

  Hank kind of waved that outburst aside and said in his second grade teacher voice, “Have you ever played with a radio-controlled car, Old Red? You know, those cars with the antennas? You drive them with a handheld controller?”

  “No, but they look really cool. I’ve seen them on TV.” In fact, Michael loved the ads for toys that were so much more ingenious than when he was a kid. He kept hoping Annie would someday have kids because then he could buy toys like that and play with them with his grand-niece and grand-nephew. “But I don’t see . . . what do those cool toys have to do with our float?”

  “Just don’t worry about a driver,” said Hank. “And we need to talk about the rest of the plan. We’ll need your help with a few other things too, to make sure this float really wakes people up.”

  *

  There was a big rectangular clean spot on the wall of Buzzard and Fleep’s living room. The TV had been repossessed. This had made for a very slow evening for Buzzard. He’d already nodded off on the couch a couple of times, and now that he was more or less conscious again, he thought he might as well go to bed.

  But just then Fleep came into the house out of breath. “I walked like ten fucking miles!” he said.

  “They took your car too,” Buzzard deduced from the half-reclining-half-upright position he’d managed to achieve.

  “But I’m going to get it back.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll just have to drive yours for a while.”

  “The keys are right over there.” Buzzard hoisted himself the rest of the way off the couch and shambled off toward his bedroom while kind of waving at the top of the refrigerator, where he’d last seen his car keys maybe two months ago.
Of course, that was a major accumulation spot for empty beer bottles and other assorted trash, the keys could have easily been knocked off during the past two months, and the car didn’t run. No reason to point any of these things out to Fleep.

  “What’s the thing need?” said Fleep. “Just a clutch cable, right?” So he knew the car didn’t run.

  “An engine would be good too.”

  “I’ll fix the clutch.”

  “Sure.” Buzzard’s primary focus was still going to bed.

  “But I can dry-shift it for a while.”

  By then Buzzard had made it to his bedroom door and wasn’t about to interrupt his peaceful, relaxed flow to respond to this.

  “Because we’re going to have to kidnap that rich uncle now.”

  “We’re what!”

  “Those guys in the van, they didn’t find the gold. I swung by there today, before the slimy repo bastards stole my car. And the van is still there. They’re still watching.”

  “But they’re cops! You said they’re cops!” Buzzard, in spite of all his intentions, found himself wide awake now.

  “Just IRS, I bet, treasury cops, like I said, because the old guy’s been scamming them on his taxes the way rich, eccentric geezers do. And they saved us from having to break in and search his house because now we know the gold isn’t there.”

  “But you said they’re still watching the house! And the uncle, the guy you want to kidnap, he’s in the house!” How was anyone supposed to get any sleep with an insane roomie like Fleep?

  “We’re just going to have to work around that. I want my car back.”

  “That car was a piece of shit. No room for your knees—”

  “Those hippies are going to put me in prison!”

  “For fraud. That’s maybe a year in a nice federal resort where everybody used to wear a suit before they kind of screwed up. Not kidnapping. That’s like maximum security locked up with sadistic Neanderthals.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to hurt Annie’s uncle,” Fleep said with bizarre reasonableness. “We’ll just ask him for the gold. Then after he gives it to us, we’ll bring him back home safe and sound. Annie won’t press charges because she needs you to play bass.”

  Buzzard braced himself against the doorframe of his room, barely five feet from his bed, which was still his goal. He stood there until his initial shock began to wane into more manageable disbelief. This had to be the result of Fleep’s having walked so far, probably farther than the guy had ever before walked in his life. His blood sugar was precariously low. There wasn’t enough oxygen in his brain.

  “Have some potato chips,” Buzzard suggested. “Or a beer. Beer is bound to help.”

  Then, with grim determination, he went on to bed.

  Chapter 16

  “Uncle Michael, what’s that?”

  Michael found Annie was right behind him looking over his shoulder. He quickly flipped away from the website he was on. He hadn’t heard her come up behind him maybe because he’d been thinking too hard—about the complexity of having friends, the fact that some people became irrationally unnerved at just the mention of lawn mowers, and the energy needed to initiate an explosion.

  “Was that a pattern for a guitar?” she asked.

  “No.” He reached for Lisa who had been sleeping in her usual spot by the CPU and pulled her into his lap.

  “It was some kind of schematic. Why did you take it off the screen?”

  He’d switched to his homepage, which he’d recently reset to a weather site because lately he’d found himself not enjoying his favorite blogs as much as he had. “It’s going to be sunny and warm,” he said.

  “I bet it’s going to be sunny and warm for the next three months.”

  He kept petting Lisa, but maybe he petted her too hard, or she was annoyed that he’d grabbed her like that, abruptly interrupting some cat dream. He had to keep blocking her with his arm or she was going to jump away.

  “Okay,” Annie said. “I didn’t mean to bother you. Wes and I were just going out. Do you need anything? Are you going to be all right?”

  Michael nodded his head up and down but then shook it side to side too. He wasn’t sure which was the right answer. Too many questions. It wasn’t possible to know all the answers when there were so many questions. Everything seemed to have become more complex.

  Then Lisa leaped out of his arms, so he had to get up and follow her to his bedroom.

  *

  When Wes made the turn onto the gravel road, he looked over at Annie in the passenger seat to see if she gave any response. Maybe she frowned?

  “I just found this place on a map,” he said. “The road follows a river. I bet there’ll be a good spot along here.”

  “For a picnic? I thought we’d go farther north, maybe out the St. Joe,” she said.

  Because she had something to hide on this road? Because it made her nervous to be on it?

  “Isn’t this a good place?” he said. “Have you been up here before?” He knew she had, of course, only three weeks ago on her bike. He’d just about wrecked the Porsche Cayenne chasing her on this road.

  Now he drove slowly as if he didn’t want to throw gravel up onto his current even more pretentious car—which he wouldn’t be driving if he hadn’t blown his cover so badly with the Cayenne—and he kept watching her.

  “Sure, I’ve been here before,” she said. “I’ve lived around here all my life, you know.”

  “So won’t we find a picnic spot along the river here?”

  “This isn’t much of a river compared to the St. Joe, and most of the land by the water is leased for private campsites.”

  “Isn’t this National Forest?”

  “No, it’s timber company land. Didn’t your map tell you that?”

  She seemed irritable, but he wasn’t sure it had anything to do with being on this road. She’d been edgy all the way here, often just staring out the window and pretty much ignoring him.

  Was it something he’d said or done?

  Yesterday she’d seemed to think it was a great idea to take a picnic out into the woods, and this morning when they first woke up everything had been fine. In fact, better than fine. He loved the way she often woke cuddly and sensually alive.

  Which was why this plan had to work.

  “You’ve fallen for her, haven’t you,” Hector had said the last time they spoke. “I knew it. I saw it in your baby blue eyes way back in the diner. We need to pull you out.”

  “I’m going to get the lab,” Wes had insisted. “No one else is going to get this close to her.”

  “Bet you’re right about that.” But then Hector had pointed out the obvious snag. “So what happens to her then?”

  When Wes had explained that Annie would no longer be in the picture—they had no hard evidence on her, and her friends would never turn on her—Hector’s only comment had been, “You got it bad, pardner.”

  Wes was afraid he did. Clearly, he was getting feelings for her like he’d never had before. Even if what he was doing with her hadn’t been so problematic, he would be having to think hard about her and himself and their future. So he needed to get the job done. Once he was no longer “investigating” her, everything was bound to be simpler. Then maybe he could figure out if she was just one of the many terrific women he’d had the pleasure of knowing or much more than that.

  But so far he’d gotten exactly nowhere with this investigation. No matter how smoothly he tried to slide his questions in, she insisted her parents had run a totally legitimate airplane business and none of their old hippie buddies were anywhere around. So he’d come up with the idea of bringing her here, thinking this place might unnerve her, get something to slip.

  Plus they might find a secluded spot where they could make love—out in the woods, out in the sun, maybe beside the quiet burbling of a stream.

  He did have it bad.

  “Isn’t the St. Joe a big tourist area?” he said. “I thought a more private spot would be nic
e.”

  “A private spot would be nice,” she said.

  So in spite of whatever was bothering her, she wasn’t mad at him?

  He drove on past all the narrow drives that branched off. They probably did lead to private campsites. But also, he didn’t want to stop until he reached the place where she’d left the road—holding a black-gloved middle finger high.

  He was driving so slowly through that stretch maybe it was believable that he saw the trail she’d taken. There he pulled over and stopped, looked at her for a reaction, and still not seeing any, said, “We could walk up that path. Where do you think it goes?”

  “Well, it doesn’t go to the river,” she said. “Wrong side of the road.”

  “But maybe there’s a nice spot up there.”

  “Except for some openings along the river, the woods here are pretty thick.”

  “I still think it’s worth a try. Like you said, people have camps all along the river.” He got out of the car.

  She got out and followed him to where the path led off. You could still see her tire tracks where she’d leaped up the bank—spewing gravel at him. “This must be a dirt bike trail,” he said.

  “A lot of people ride dirt bikes around here. And four-wheelers,” she said.

  “This isn’t a four-wheeler trail.” It was much too narrow for that, or he might have tried to follow her in the Cayenne.

  “No,” she said. “It isn’t much of a hiking trail either.”

  This turned out to be true. It was deeply rutted and went straight up a steep hill. She was in flip-flops. “I hadn’t planned on mountain climbing today,” she said. “And really, you’re not going to find a great picnic spot up there.”

  “How do you know? Have you ridden this trail on your bike?”