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  “From now on I’m running those suckers,” said Fleep.

  Some cowboy in a fully-loaded pickup, tires as tall as the little Valiant’s roof, disagreed. Buzzard braced his knees against the dash, but Fleep apparently decided against playing chicken with the truck. He slammed to a stop just before the monster’s bumper would have turned Buzzard’s car into scrap metal.

  Buzzard wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed. At least that would have put the poor car out of its misery. It would have put an end to this absurd and kind of disturbing caper too.

  The engine died again.

  “What’s wrong with your car?” Michael asked from the backseat.

  “I’m just getting the feel of the clutch,” Fleep growled between clenched teeth.

  “I can walk home from here,” Michael said.

  “No!” shouted Fleep.

  “Quit overreacting. He was just offering.” Buzzard turned to look at Michael to see how the guy was taking this so far. After Annie had come to the house, maybe because she’d realized Marlo’s Mighty Pizza was just around the corner from there—but they hadn’t had anything else to write on in the house—Fleep had decided they needed to take Michael somewhere else.

  Annie hadn’t busted down the door, and she must have seen the lights go out. She must have heard the video game too before Fleep turned it off. Buzzard had been surprised she’d just left. He’d expected more of her. But he had to agree she might come back.

  And Michael had been pretty disoriented by Fleep’s whole emergency black-out routine, so he’d been more than willing to get back into the car because he thought they were taking him home. “You don’t have to walk. We’ll get you there,” Buzzard told him.

  “I don’t mind. I like to walk,” Michael said.

  Now Fleep had the car moving again, and the next light was green. He accelerated. The engine whined.

  “You blow up the engine,” Buzzard observed, “you blow up your plan too.” But again he wondered if that might not be for the best.

  “You want to drive?” snapped Fleep.

  “Naw. I gave up on this car two months ago. You know that.”

  There was a lot of grinding noise, but Fleep managed to move the gear shift. The engine wasn’t whining quite so bad. Only two more lights to go.

  “You missed my turn,” Michael said. “I live right down there.”

  “If you think I’m slowing down and making some tight-assed turn onto some fucking stop street—” Fleep didn’t finish, probably because he was concentrating on grinding his way into third.

  “Then how are you going to take me home?”

  Buzzard took a deep breath and didn’t look at Michael this time. He’d been kind of dreading this, but somehow he’d never been able to imagine things actually getting this far, due to the dicey condition of his car. What would happen once Michael realized they weren’t taking him home?

  “So I lied. Sue me,” said Fleep. “Everybody else is.”

  *

  Samantha had moved on from Hector too soon to call it a real lap dance, but this assignment had stayed interesting. He’d had two plates of barbecued ribs, beans, and roasted corn, and Lettie had brought him one of those soggy paper plates, her boobs swinging right at eye level when she’d handed it to him. The younger federal agent had been chowing down on ribs too. The older one kept walking off into the woods as if he had a prostate issue, or he was consulting some electronic device.

  Hector knew for a fact no cell phones worked here, but satellite gear might.

  Whenever the women or the feds weren’t entertaining to watch, he tried to listen for references to Annie, LSD, or mad scientists living in these woods. He also amused himself by trying to count the kids as they spun by, and tracing family resemblances. Like Wheeler’s upturned nose. It appeared on a number of small faces, most appealingly on the scrappy little girl’s. Bull’s apelike body type wasn’t as attractive on the girl who was morphing into preteen with that unfortunate genetic card. By putting snippets of conversation together with his other observations, he soon found the family trees here were more like bushes. Ex’s were now with new spouses who were often the brothers or sisters of their ex’s. Which meant a lot of these kids were both cousins and half-siblings?

  Then he got into a conversation with the man sitting next to him about the advantages and disadvantages of various ammo. The man handloaded his own since, according to him, the commercial stuff was all made in China now and unreliable. Hector had become interested in handloading due to the increased accuracy, so he was getting pretty involved in this when two more people joined the group.

  A man and a woman rode in on ATV’s.

  These weren’t lost strangers. They were greeted with hugs, and many of the kids leaped into their arms. They must have been camped nearby since their ATV’s were legal only off-road. They were older, both of them wiry and gray with the look of hippies who hadn’t totally quit flying the colors. No tie-dyed clothes, just jeans and T-shirts, but the woman’s gray hair hung in a long ponytail down her back. The man had a scruffy beard, and his hair, though not as long as hers, was shaggier than any other man’s here.

  They were not only warmly welcomed but shown remarkable respect. Immediately the current David Allan Coe about eating pussy was turned off, and Hank Williams Jr. came on.

  The ammo reloader next to Hector stood up. “Here, you can have my chair,” he said to the older woman. “I gotta put my kids to bed.”

  “Can Jesse stay up a little longer?” the woman asked. She was holding a little boy who wrapped his arms tighter around her neck and nestled into her, making it look as if it would be cruel to pull him away.

  “Sure. As long as he sits with you and slows down. It’ll take us a few minutes to make up the beds.”

  The man headed for one of the trailers. The woman settled into the chair with the boy in her lap. The boy immediately raised his head and started talking not at all slowly about how he could now ride his bike without training wheels and he could almost touch on his sister’s bike, but not quite, and he’d skinned his knee, but his other knee was practically healed. When he stopped talking briefly because he was pulling up his pant leg to show her one of his wounds, the woman leaned across to Hector and said, “Hi, I’m Char. I don’t believe I’ve met you.”

  *

  This party was taking Mosley back to some of his best frat days. The food was great. The women were amazing. The guys were friendly and told wild stories. Everyone laughed a lot.

  Cooper hadn’t yet interrupted this by asking for directions and dragging Mosley out of here because, according to the GPS, the Volkswagen was moving again, in fact heading back up into the woods. Cooper was so consumed by this, every few minutes he left the fire to check its coordinates, which had allowed Mosley to sneak several pulls from a bottle of bourbon as it went by.

  But now Cooper was coming up to him after another walk in the woods. Mosley reluctantly prepared himself for the inevitable order to go somewhere else and do something boring again.

  Instead, Cooper said, “He seems to be coming here.”

  “To this camp?”

  “Or somewhere very close by. We’ll know soon.”

  “Hey, that’s good. Isn’t it?” Mosley thought it was good, especially since it meant he didn’t have to leave the party yet.

  “Just don’t get too shit-faced,” Cooper said.

  So maybe Mosley hadn’t been as sneaky as he’d thought with the booze. But pretty soon Cooper left again, and Mosley went back to the circle of men with the bourbon. He listened to more tales about their injuries, near-deaths, and other exciting experiences braved while they were felling trees, riding motorcycles, and taking other manly risks. He stood there and laughed with them until he felt like sitting down, possibly due to their generosity with the bourbon.

  He took a camp chair and was soon enjoying the party from there too, especially his view of the leggy brunette who was dancing with just about everyone. Then t
he man in the chair next to him said, “How do you like your job?”

  “What!” Since Mosley’s job was a secret here, this startled him at first. But the question had been asked by the old guy who had ridden into the camp on an ATV. So this was just philosophical old man talk. Maybe the guy was thinking about retirement. There was no way he knew anything about Mosley’s job.

  “My job’s okay. How about yours?” Mosley said.

  “Hated all of mine.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah. Jobs. Give you a false sense of meaning. Confuse the quest. Offer answers before you’ve even come up with the questions.”

  “Okay.” Older people sometimes got kind of odd.

  “My wife, she makes elderberry wine. It’s not bad. Want some?” The guy held out a wine bottle with no label on it.

  “Okay,” Mosley said. Now that he was sitting down, it seemed another sip of wine couldn’t hurt, and he would hate to offend this old man or his wife. He took the bottle but found it almost empty. “There’s hardly any left,” he said. “You should probably keep it for yourself.”

  “Naw, I’ve had enough. This is for you.”

  “If you’re sure.” Mosley tipped up the bottle, and he couldn’t say it made him a big fan of elderberry wine, but since there was only a swallow or two, he downed it anyway.

  Chapter 26

  Buzzard was impressed that Fleep had ground and lurched and sworn the old Valiant out into the farmland and fourth gear. Now the car was actually running fairly smoothly. Still, this plan had gone from bad to worse.

  “Lisa is missing me. I need to get home to Lisa. Lisa likes her water fresh. I need to change her water. It’s time for her tuna fish.”

  This sort of thing had become like a chant from Michael in the backseat.

  And Fleep, hunched over the wheel, kept shouting, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut the fuck up!”

  It reminded Buzzard of when he’d had to drive his niece and nephew somewhere—they’d been maybe three and five years old back then—so they’d been strapped in the backseat, and his niece kept saying, “Choo, choo, choo,” probably just to annoy her brother, who kept saying, “Shut up, shut up,” until Buzzard totally lost it, squealed over to the side of the road, ripped the little monsters out of their car seats, and shook both of them good. After that he’d been much more understanding whenever his sister went off on the kids, and he’d refused to drive both the little maggots anywhere ever again.

  He felt he was holding himself together much better this time. But Fleep was getting louder and more abusive with his language.

  Then Fleep braked and rode the bucking car all the way to a stop.

  “Now you’re going to have to start it again, you know,” Buzzard said.

  Fleep wasn’t listening. He was out and opening the trunk. Michael was still chanting about Lisa and going home while Fleep was rattling through the trunk. Buzzard tried to remember if anything he might have left in there could be used to do violence. Fleep came out with a roll of duct tape and yanked open the car’s back door.

  Buzzard leaped out of the car, but he was too late. Fleep was on top of Michael in the backseat, and by the time Buzzard could pull him off, Michael’s mouth was taped shut.

  “You promised you wouldn’t hurt him,” Buzzard said.

  “He isn’t hurt. It might sting a little when we pull the tape off, but what about me! He was hurting me!”

  Michael was already pulling the tape off and climbing out the opposite door.

  “What the fuck!” screamed Fleep. “Your car doesn’t have child locks?”

  He ran after Michael. Michael went off down the ditch by the road. Fleep chased him through the ditch and up the other side. There they both became tangled in a barbed wire fence. Buzzard stood by the car and wondered again how he’d gotten himself into this.

  “Help me, you asshole,” called Fleep.

  Buzzard knew he’d never been brilliant at school, or anywhere else for that matter. He was a damn fine bass player though. Annie wasn’t the only one who had told him this.

  So he was thinking about that, his one skill, while Michael made it through the fence and took off across the garbanzo bean field. You had to keep the rhythm to play bass. That was the most important thing.

  Now Fleep abandoned a shoe in the fence and headed after Michael. “Don’t just stand there!” he yelled. “Our gold is running away!”

  But Buzzard did just keep standing there.

  Because you had to stay steady to play bass even when everyone else in the band was sliding in behind or in front of the beat. Even Mercedes could flutter and skip around it with her snares and tom-toms. The bass had to ignore all those fancy acrobatics. Buzzard had always liked that about the bass.

  Fleep was definitely a lead guitar—if he’d had any talent for music, which he didn’t. He had those kinds of flighty ideas, and he was throwing the rhythm all out of whack the way he was running around in that field with only one shoe.

  Michael, even though he was an old guy, was keeping the rhythm better. Fleep wasn’t gaining on him much. A farmhouse wasn’t more than a quarter mile away. Michael might make it there. And even if Fleep did catch him, he still had to get Michael back to the car somehow. Then the chances of the car starting again were iffy at best.

  When Buzzard considered all of these things, it didn’t seem he had to take a side.

  He wasn’t about to help capture Michael and truss him up in duct tape. He was sorry he’d had that duct tape in his trunk, left over from when he’d been able to carry his own equipment to local gigs. On the other hand, Fleep had been his friend for a long time. And he’d promised not to hurt Michael. Since Buzzard had already helped his roomie get this far with this caper, he had to believe Fleep would keep that promise.

  It was true that duct tape didn’t exactly hurt.

  So Buzzard decided to stay steady since that was what he did best. He turned and started walking back to town. Some farmer was bound to come along soon since it was a Friday night. Someone always gave him a ride.

  *

  Mosley still sat by the fire. The old guy wasn’t by him anymore, although Mosley hadn’t noticed when he left. Mosley didn’t feel like talking to anyone anymore anyway because the fire had become sensational. He’d never realized how many colors twisted and danced in a fire’s core. He felt he could sit here all night just looking deep into the pulsing coals, the leaping tongues of flame, the whispering exhales of smoke, and then the way the sparks spiraled in ribbons into the night.

  But gradually he became aware of a noise nearby, a sharp gruff noise, not like the almost musical breathing of the fire. The noise repeated itself louder. Then whop! Something hit his arm.

  “Wake up. The VW’s here.”

  It was his partner’s voice. Mosley turned toward the voice, but probably because he’d been staring into the brightness of the fire, it took a while for Cooper to take shape, and even then he kind of swelled and shrank and swelled and shrank kind of like the fire.

  Mosley must have drunk way more than he’d thought.

  He tried to hold Cooper still, and he said, “The VW?” his voice sort of swelling and shrinking too.

  “Yeah, the old Beetle. The one we’ve been following. It just showed up here. But the subject didn’t come with it. His niece drove it here.”

  Mosley’s eyes were adjusting better to the darkness now, and he could see a tall redhead not far away. People seemed to be lining up to hug her. “The VW?” he said again.

  “We need to report this.”

  “Report?”

  She was some hot-looking girl, just as leggy as the brunette who had actually sat on his lap for a while, but that girl had been stupid drunk. This one was almost effervescent. Yes, the more he looked at her, the more of a sparkly glow he saw shimmering from not only her bright red hair but her long bare arms and her long bare legs. Summer was such a delightful time of year.

  The girl was hugging the older woman, the on
e who must have made the elderberry wine. Then she was turning to the Latino man who was sitting next to the woman and saying, “Do I know you?”

  If she’d said that to Mosley, he would have agreed. He would have agreed to anything that girl said. Sure, they’d met somewhere before, wherever she imagined. But this guy, he said, “I don’t think so.”

  “We need to call this in,” Cooper said. “Or we need to head back.”

  “Back?” Mosley was surprised to find Cooper still standing by him.

  “It would be best to call in,” Cooper said. “But we don’t have phone service here.”

  *

  “No, I’m pretty sure we’ve never met,” Hector told Annie. Then he got up and moved away before she could remember where they’d met. At least he wasn’t limping anymore from the stomping she’d given him. He decided to check out the other—more obvious, he hoped—feds.

  “You planning on a few rounds of golf up here?” he asked the black one, although, if it weren’t for the guy’s prissy clothes, football looked more his game.

  “You know where we can get cell signal?” asked the fed.

  “Yeah, just up the top of this ridge. You need to make a call, I can take you there on my bike.” Hector figured he might as well help out another agency, and he’d like to call Wes and tell him about Annie coming here.

  “Okay, let’s go,” the football player said.

  “No offence,” Hector said, “but I’d rather take your buddy if that would work. You’d overweight the bike.”

  “Okay. You know what to tell them?” that one asked his buddy, who had been staring into the fire and, from what Hector could tell, not paying any attention to this.

  Sure enough, the fire watcher said stupidly, “Tell them?”

  Hector decided he should leave these two alone so the competent one, who was beginning to get justifiably steamed, could give his preoccupied but lighter weight partner more detailed instructions. “I’ll be right over there,” he said.

  Eventually, the smaller one showed up and got on the back of the bike, acting at least halfway aware of what he was doing. “I’ve never ridden a dirt bike before,” he said.