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  *

  Mosley thought it was kind of exciting to be lost. “Maybe we could call in for an airlift out of here.”

  Not even a sarcastic comeback from Cooper. Things had become fairly grim in the Jeep Grand Cherokee after several hours of wandering aimlessly down one miserable dirt road after another with the GPS insisting nothing they did was right. At one point it had informed them the Volkswagen had returned to Moscow, and this had inspired a brief burst of optimism, but then the thing couldn’t tell them how to get back there either from wherever they were. They’d apparently entered a twilight zone unknown to its GPS brain.

  But now Mosley spotted lights ahead on their current dirt road. Darkness had fallen while they’d been getting lost, and the lights were kind of pretty. They were Christmas lights twinkling red, green, and blue through the trees.

  “Look!” he said. “These people will be able to tell us how to get back to Moscow.”

  “Unless they got airlifted in.” This was a rare display of humor from Cooper, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t still grumpy. “These people will take one look at us and think it’s amusing to run us off a cliff.”

  “But it’s the first sign of civilization we’ve seen.” Besides, this road was too narrow for Mosley to turn around.

  He reached a clearing and found the Christmas lights were strung between several travel trailers. He parked among the jackstrawed trucks that must have come with the trailers, and as soon as he got out of the car, he was charged by at least six dogs. Some were barking. Some came nosing straight for his crotch. Some were growling and wagging their tails at the same time.

  A man came through the wall of trailers and yelled at the dogs until the barking and growling stopped.

  “Hi!” called Mosley. “We seem to be lost.”

  “Then come on in, have a beer,” called the man.

  Cooper was still grousing about the quality of directions they were likely to get while he and Mosley picked their way by the dim glow of the Christmas lights through cow pies and the now overly friendly dogs to a huge campfire, flames leaping ten feet or more into the sky.

  Men, women, and kids of all ages surrounded it. Music was blaring. Bicycles lay on the ground here and there. Motorcycles and ATV’s sat off to the side. One ATV had more logs for the fire and a couple of chainsaws strapped to it. There were two couches that looked as if they’d been left out in the rain, and now the dogs were leaping onto them, turning around the way dogs do, then sprawling possessively across them. There were also a couple dozen camp chairs, a long table, and a cluster of barbecues, all of them smoking, all of them smelling great.

  And Mosley usually ate by this time of night. “While we’re getting directions,” he said, “maybe we could grab some food?”

  The man who had come to meet them brought them beers. “You two really are lost,” he said. “We don’t get many black folks up here.” The guy was weirdly out of proportion, short legs, huge arms and torso, kind of like a troll, and with such a blurry look to his face it was hard to tell what he meant by this.

  Mosley glanced over to see how Cooper was going to take it, but Cooper was so disgruntled already it didn’t seem to have much effect.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” said a shorter man who had joined them. “There’s a reason people call him Bull.” This one looked more like a garden gnome with squinty eyes, a ski jump nose, and bushy sideburns sticking out from under his baseball cap.

  About then a kid smeared with dirt, maybe eight years old, came by with a bag of something. He shoved the bag at Mosley. “Want some?”

  Mosley held up the Ziploc to see what was in it. “Elk jerky,” said the kid.

  It was good elk jerky.

  “Want me to roast you a marshmallow?” said the kid. “I make the best marshmallows.”

  “No marshmallows till you eat your supper,” said Bull, and he passed the jerky on to Cooper. He probably didn’t take any himself because of the huge wad of snoose in his lip. “Don’t think I care what color you are,” he said around that mammoth chaw. “Just we don’t get much variety up here. But me, I like all kinds of folks. Especially women. I like titties. Don’t you?”

  The kid was still standing there waiting to carry the bag of jerky on.

  “Never saw a titty I didn’t like. Big ones, little ones, pink ones, brown ones, young ones, saggy ones—”

  No reaction from the kid, but the garden gnome interrupted. “When you get sick of Bull’s bull, we’ll tell you how to get to the main road. But we got lots of food, booze, chew. I’m Wheeler.” He stuck out his hand.

  “Why, just this afternoon,” the troll continued as if he’d forgotten he’d been listing tits, “this Carlos guy wanders in. One of those dirt bike backpackers, and we didn’t even hold that against him. Or the fact that he’s a beaner, no offense. Am I being offensive, Carlos?”

  A Latino-looking guy on the other side of the fire raised his beer.

  *

  Hector saluted with his beer and watched Bull and Wheeler introduce themselves to the newcomers, so these men were strangers to the group too. One of them was African-American, probably late forties but so huge he would still be a force. He was carefully dressed though in non-threatening khakis and a nylon jacket over a polo shirt. His clothes seemed to say all he ever did was sit at a desk, and he wouldn’t know how to do anything more physical than run the copy machine. Still, this wasn’t camping attire. It wasn’t the Moscow look either. The other one was young and must have been trying to look a little less stiff. He wore jeans with his nylon jacket and polo shirt.

  Hector couldn’t believe the rednecks here didn’t immediately spot these men as some kind of cops. Not DEA or they would have been dressed more like himself—and every other man here—in a faded T-shirt and baseball cap. They wouldn’t be local cops either. He had to guess they were some other kind of federals, probably FBI. But Bull and Wheeler were offering them food as well as beer and inviting them to stay, exactly the way they’d welcomed him. Bull and Wheeler just seemed to be welcoming guys.

  Which meant the rednecks probably weren’t involved in an illegal business. They just liked Annie’s songs.

  But who were these agents? What were they doing here?

  Samantha interrupted these thoughts by sidling over to Hector, swinging one long leg over his lap and practically sitting on his beer. He set the beer where he hoped it would be safe under his chair while she ground her way onto him. So he let his questions wait for a while. This was clearly another of those situations where a guy ought to try to blend in.

  Chapter 24

  Mercedes and Gary’s place wasn’t far from Buzzard’s, but it was in a very different neighborhood. They rented the basement of a deaf anthropology professor’s large and lovely home. Annie doubted the neighbors were too pleased about the funky school bus parked at the curb. The fact that the professor couldn’t hear Gary’s guitar, or even Mercedes’s drums—although he must have felt the bass drum thumping through his floors—may have partly explained his open-mindedness, but he may have also believed he was spawning some new cultural phenomenon, because his sense of style, which showed in the curved stone walkway she followed to the basement door, seemed to be from Greene and Greene, while Mercedes and Gary’s was definitely cartoon slasher.

  As soon as Mercedes welcomed her into the basement, Annie found they’d painted more of the concrete walls, adding more skulls, bodies spouting blood, and various kinds of ghouls. And dismemberment just didn’t seem funny to her anymore.

  “Don’t you get sick of all this red and black?” she said.

  “We find it soothing,” Mercedes said. She was dressed in orange tights and a skimpy halter top, which may have been another reason the professor let them live here. “All our anxieties, hostilities, and aggressions, we push them out into the otherworld.”

  Annie told herself Michael must still have all of his body parts since the kidnapper was expecting her to give him gold, but she tried not to
look at the walls as Mercedes led her past mutilated women, dolls brandishing machetes, and the washer and dryer.

  *

  Even with the time Wes had lost dealing with the Fish and Wildlife clown, he’d easily caught up with Annie. Because she hadn’t made any evasive moves, because she didn’t know he was following her. She’d gone straight from Buzzard’s to Mercedes and Gary’s place.

  Wes parked at the end of the street, still mystified by why she would be visiting her band members. Was she asking for their help?

  Would she forgive him if he found her uncle for her?

  He waited there watching the little Beetle and the basement door where she’d disappeared, his brain cycling on how he might find her uncle when the FBI probably knew exactly where Michael was and weren’t about to tell, Annie wouldn’t talk to him, he couldn’t reach Hector. And why didn’t he just accept the fact that she wanted him out of her life? Why did this woman mean so much to him that he’d blown his cover to her, trashed his career like that, and was still chasing her? And he’d thought it was a good career, interesting, good benefits, useful to society . . .

  A Moscow city squad car pulled up behind him and turned on its flashing lights.

  *

  Mercedes took Annie to a corner of the basement where four couches faced each other across a table cluttered with pipes, ash trays, incense burners, and an assortment of dirty plates and coffee cups. People were still being mutilated in this “living area,” which was only flimsily separated from the rest of the cavernous space by some blankets strung on a rope, but the lighting was softer here except where a blinding halogen work light lit one section of the wall.

  There Gary, in a paint-smeared T-shirt and black boxers with skulls on them, was meticulously drawing a Necromorph. He turned off the work light, put down his brush, and turned to Annie to say, “Hey! Did you come here to tell us more about the Drive-By Truckers tour?”

  He probably thought this because she didn’t come here often. Even though she considered them friends—not just members of her band—it was so hard for her to relax and enjoy being with anyone when her life was so full of secrets.

  She sank onto one of the couches and said, “Sorry, that was a lie.”

  “Oh.” Mercedes was clearly heart-broken, but she put a comforting hand on Annie’s arm and settled beside her on the couch. “You’re so thoughtful to come here to tell us. A text would’ve been so harsh.”

  “That isn’t why I’m here.”

  “I knew he was lying,” Gary said.

  Annie didn’t believe this for a minute, but it wasn’t the time to contradict him about dreams that even she’d halfway fallen for. Mercedes started packing a bong, her usual way of greeting guests, or dealing with disappointments.

  Annie waved a no-thank-you to the bong and said, “I can’t stay. I’ve just got to ask you one thing. You know how I’ve told you my uncle has a lot of gold? Who have you told about that?”

  Mercedes kept on packing the pipe. “No one! Why would we?”

  “Just because you were smoking weed and telling stories, and it’s a good story. I’m not mad at you about it or anything. It’s just that somebody else knows about the gold, and I’ve got to figure out who.”

  “Naw,” said Gary. “We never told anyone that goofy story. We figured it wasn’t true.”

  “You . . .” People who liked to decorate with Necromorphs hadn’t believed what Annie had thought was a fairly plausible explanation for her otherwise inexplicable wealth?

  “We just always assumed you were making money in a way you didn’t want to tell us about. Like maybe you were delivering dope.” Gary shrugged. “That sort of fit with how you’d disappear for an hour or more in almost every town, and you wouldn’t ride on the bus with us. But we respect that.”

  “We’ve met your uncle, you know,” Mercedes said.

  Annie felt her shoulders fall. So much for that secret. And so much for learning anything useful here.

  But they were both looking at her like they could tell something was wrong, and they were friends—in fact better friends than she’d known. Maybe they could help her figure this out. “Someone’s kidnapped my uncle,” she said, and the sick pain of this hit her again.

  “Oh, Annie.” Mercedes gave her an awkward, boob-smashing hug.

  Once Annie was freed from the hug, she laid the ransom note on the table. “They left this. They’re asking for gold.”

  She’d folded the pizza lid into fourths to make it easier to carry. While she was unfolding it and shoving incense and coffee cups out of the way, Gary took a long hit on the bong, then sat back looking contemplative—or just dazed from the bong.

  “You know, Buzzard might’ve believed that crazy story,” he said. “He tries not to confuse himself by thinking too much.”

  By then Annie had the pizza lid kind of flat. He and Mercedes leaned over it, then turned it this way and that to follow the writing. “This looks lame enough to have been written by Buzzard,” Gary said.

  “Oh, I hope these ideas didn’t come from our paintings,” Mercedes said. “They’re not supposed to be manifested in the material plane.”

  “Marlo’s Mighty Pizza is right around the corner from his house,” Gary said.

  Annie hadn’t thought of that. “But Buzzard wouldn’t kidnap my uncle.”

  “Yeah, Buzzard doesn’t do much of anything,” Gary said. “Although he’s not bad on bass.”

  “Marlo’s Mighty Pizza is terrific. They even do vegan,” Mercedes said.

  “So lots of people must buy their pizzas,” Annie said.

  “I don’t think Buzzard’s a vegan,” Mercedes said.

  “But they make the usual kind too,” Gary said. “There’s cheese all over this box.”

  Even though Annie had refused the bong, she was now feeling light-headed and muddled, and actually sympathetic to anyone who didn’t like to think. Especially about some things—like her uncle being held by a kidnapper. Or the fact that the man she’d fallen for—after deciding she wouldn’t fall for anyone again—was a DEA agent.

  Or that Buzzard’s light had gone out when she’d knocked on his door.

  “I better go see Buzzard,” she said.

  “Yeah, and hey, sounds like you might need help. Just let us know,” Gary said. “Although Mercedes and me, we’re kind of the gentle sort.”

  “Because we etherealize our violent tendencies,” Mercedes said. “But here, I made some great brownies. You’ll find them soothing too.”

  *

  “I told you, I’m DEA. That means you let me go whether you think the truck is stolen or not.” Wes had been explaining this to the Dudley Do-Right cop for way too long.

  “I have a call in,” said the cop. “I’m trying to get this cleared up as quickly as I can. But the truck was reported stolen and you admit it isn’t your truck.”

  “It’s Fish and Wildlife!”

  Now Annie was coming out of the basement. At least the cop had turned off his flashing lights. Maybe she wouldn’t notice Wes standing here on the sidewalk talking to this bonehead. “FWS, DEA, what’s the difference?” he tried one more time.

  But he was ready to disable the guy as soon as he thought he could without getting Annie’s attention.

  “There is a difference, Agent Reese. I know you think I’m stupid. I can tell. I’m not so stupid I can’t tell you think I’m stupid. But I wouldn’t just appropriate some state trooper’s car.”

  Annie started the VW. She pulled away from the curb, and she was almost far enough down the next block that Wes thought he could take out this doofus when two more squad cars squealed into the street. One pulled right across the front fender of the Fish and Wildlife truck. The other jammed it from the side.

  Now it was going to take a crane to get him out of here.

  *

  Annie drove to Buzzard’s place as fast as the little Beetle would go. His house was still quiet and dark. Even more distressing, his car was no longer there. The t
hing did run.

  She pounded on the door even though the silence in the house now felt deathly real. Because Buzzard had kidnapped her uncle? He was broke, he was always broke, and he’d come up with this plan?

  True, the note showed uncertain, wandering thought processes that sounded kind of like Buzzard, and the fact that he’d been here, hadn’t answered his door, and now was gone made it look like he must be involved—hard as that was to believe. But the kidnapping itself, that just wasn’t him. Plus the note said, “We’ll cut off his toes.” Someone else had to be in on it.

  Someone smarter, meaner, and scarier.

  She stumbled back to the car knowing Gary was right. Her dad had trained her in self-defense. She could handle most things by herself. But now she did need help.

  Gary, however, was also right that he and Mercedes weren’t the ones to ask. Even though Mercedes could look pretty muscular when she was beating on her drums, Gary looked barely able to hold up his guitar.

  Many people would go to the police. Maybe most people would.

  But she wasn’t one of them.

  She needed someone like the police who wasn’t the police.

  She needed someone like Wes who wasn’t Wes!

  Just thinking this made her even angrier at him.

  Was there anyone in her lonely life who could help her rescue her uncle?

  Then it came to her that she did have some fans who were brawny, aggressive, potentially violent guys and claimed they would do anything for her. And since it was a summer weekend, in fact the Fourth of July weekend, she knew exactly where to find Wheeler and Bull.

  Chapter 25

  “You know, if you’re really going to do this in my car, without first replacing the clutch cable,” Buzzard said, “maybe you should quit wandering around Moscow and get out onto the highway where you can stay in fourth gear.”

  “I’m getting to the highway,” snarled Fleep.

  The old Valiant jerked and stalled for maybe the two hundredth time. Fleep ground the starter again. The car bucked like a rodeo steer, then abruptly sped into the next block, but already the light at the end of that block was turning red.