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  Now Smith pulled a gun!

  Smith had dropped the controller. So no one was driving the float anymore. Michael tried to get it, but there were too many feet in the way. One of those feet hit the controller.

  It slid off onto the ground.

  Michael looked out and saw the float plow right into the crowd. He hesitated only because he hadn’t done anything like this in many years and his knees were old. But just like this morning when he’d driven his car, now he did what he had to do. He jumped off the flatbed and was pleasantly surprised to get only a twinge in his knees. He snatched up the controller and applied the brakes. At least that would stop the float from doing any more harm. But he couldn’t see it from here on the ground. Too many rigs were parked on this hill.

  The screen on the controller that gave the view from the front of the float showed people pulling things out of the way, their chairs, their kids, but he couldn’t tell if anyone was hurt.

  He ran for the float.

  He could still hear music, tubas and bagpipes. Nothing had happened so horrific that the parade wasn’t still going on. Then someone grabbed him. The man wore an Orphan Annie mask, so he was a fan of Annie’s, but, “Not now,” Michael said.

  The fan was insistent. He held onto Michael.

  “I don’t know where Annie is,” Michael said. “I’m sure she’d love to talk to you, but I’m busy.”

  The fan seemed to have a serious allergy. He kept scratching furiously and tilting his head in such odd ways Michael felt sorry for him. And he didn’t think of himself as an unsympathetic or violent man, but he was on a mission. He shoved at the person in the mask, and maybe because of the man’s allergy, the man fell flat on his face.

  *

  Annie saw one of the thugs on the flatbed lunge at Wes. He grabbed hold of Wes’s arm, the arm that held the gun. She stopped, her heart screaming in her chest. Michael jumped to the ground. That was good. The other man pulled a gun!

  She was still a hundred feet from the flatbed, and she didn’t have a gun. She ran for the flatbed anyway. Those goons were going to kill Wes!

  Then a gun went off!

  Instinctively, she ducked behind a car. She didn’t think she was in danger here as long as she stayed down. And Michael seemed to be safely away from those brutes.

  But Wes!

  She crouched there, the screaming in her chest twisting into gray dread.

  Then Wes’s partner ran by with his gun out. He took aim, and there was another shot.

  Chapter 34

  Annie didn’t hear any more shots, but she waited, staying low—so heavy with dread all she could do was stay crouched like that. Then she heard voices, and one of them sounded like Wes. She forced herself to peek around the back of the car she was hiding behind.

  Yes, Wes was standing up on the flatbed. The men who had been with Michael were sitting down. They appeared to be handcuffed, and Wes was holding his gun on them while his partner was bandaging the arm of one of them.

  She tried to ignore the way her body went limp with relief. She stood up and walked the last hundred feet to where her uncle must have been crouched under the bed of the truck.

  Except he wasn’t there.

  No more relief. She searched around the cars nearby. She came back to the flatbed and looked under and around it again. “What happened to my uncle!” she asked Wes.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Guess I lost him again. But he should be safe now.”

  Yes, he should be safe now that Wes had these goons under control. Still, “Why does he keep disappearing like this?”

  She climbed up onto the bed of the truck so she could see more. She could see a lot from up there. She could see over all the rigs parked on this hill and down the whole length of the parade all the way to the high school. She still couldn’t see her uncle. She spotted his float though.

  It had reached this end of the town, but it was sideways in the road. It was blocking the parade. Michael must have lost control of it when Wes and these men had been fighting. Maybe he’d seen it go sideways. So that was probably where he’d gone, to do something with the float.

  There still didn’t seem to be a panic. Maybe the float hadn’t hit anyone, and everyone must have thought the gunshots were just more fireworks. But since she didn’t trust the FBI, couldn’t the float still blow up?

  *

  Michael felt bad about the man who had fallen down, especially since he was a fan of Annie’s and seemed to be ill. Also he heard gunshots, which made him worry about Wes. Maybe he shouldn’t have abandoned Wes. But no, his responsibility was the float.

  He ran on until he reached the crowd that surrounded it. He shoved his way through. He was pleased to find it still broadcasting his recording, and no one seemed to be hurt. But it was perched on a tangle of lawn chairs, and not only had it destroyed a number of people’s chairs, the way it was angled across the road it was blocking the rest of the parade. The ukulele players were marching in place. The draft horses were looking bored. Several people were trying to get into the float.

  “The driver must’ve had a heart attack!”

  “The doors are locked. Why would anyone lock themselves in?”

  “I can’t see anything through all this crepe paper.”

  “Call 911!”

  “I can tow it out of here with my truck so the parade can at least go on.”

  Michael didn’t try to explain. He yanked enough of the flowers off the windshield that he would be able to see through it. As soon as he started doing that, he had lots of help.

  But then a farmer in a John Deere hat said, “No one’s in there at all!”

  “The driver must’ve fallen under the dash!” a startled woman said.

  Michael still didn’t know what to say. He wasn’t sure if there was much time for talking anyway. He just pulled the broken lawn chairs out from under the float. At least he’d asked Hank and Smith for keys to both the storage facility and the float. He went to the rear doors which had been left only partially covered with crepe paper since he and Hank and Smith had had to go in and out through them several times when they’d been setting up the gear inside.

  He opened the back and climbed in. The fan in the Orphan Annie mask climbed in right behind him. That poor guy was sure persistent and still uncoordinated. He tripped over a wire and bumped into one of the fifty-five gallon drums.

  *

  Now Annie could see her uncle in the crowd around the float. He was getting into the rear of it. So he wasn’t going to try to control it with the remote anymore? He was going to drive it himself?

  But what did he want to do with it? Could he really want it to blow up?

  Then someone else got into the float, and the curly red wig was unmistakable. The man wore an Orphan Annie mask.

  *

  “What is this shit?” said the man in the mask. “Is this thing a bomb?”

  Michael slid into the driver’s seat and started backing the float out of the spectator area, back onto the road. He wished this fan hadn’t chased him here. “I’m afraid I have these friends,” he explained. “At least they say they’re my friends. Anyway, they may be disappointed right now. And angry. You should probably get out.”

  “I’m not leaving you again,” said the man. He ripped off the mask. It was Fleep! “And you’re doing exactly what I tell you this time.”

  Michael was concentrating on his driving. He didn’t want to make the U-turn with the rest of the parade. He’d originally planned to do that, of course, but now everything had changed. As soon as he’d lost the controller, he’d realized that plan might not work. So he wanted to pull out of the parade and take the road out of town. It was completely blocked though with people and their coolers and chairs. He could go only a few inches at a time. Then someone would see what he was trying to do. They would move aside, taking their kids and gear with them, and he would be able to inch forward a bit more.

  Still, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Fleep had a
knife.

  “Yeah, I’ve got a knife this time. I brought it in case one of those hippies jumped me, but it’ll work for you too. I would’ve pulled it on you before except the sun was in my eyes.”

  “I still think we should get out of town,” Michael said.

  “Right. We need to get back to Moscow because that’s where you’ve got your gold.”

  This was very upsetting, almost as upsetting as Hank and Smith and their ideas, but Michael had rediscovered something this morning that he’d forgotten. He kind of liked to drive. He had to keep it slow until he was past the last of the spectators, but then he accelerated up the hill and onto the open road.

  *

  “Wes,” said Annie. “I need to use your car.”

  Michael’s float was now backing up. Then it straightened and slowly pulled forward. But it wasn’t following the rest of the parade. It wasn’t making the U-turn.

  “Why do you need the car?” asked Wes. He looked out over her shoulder. “Your uncle’s leaving town in the float? I’ll come with you.”

  “I can take care of this,” his partner said, and Wes jumped off the truck.

  Annie did too. She ran with him to the BMW, which wasn’t parked far away. But now her idea that it would be easy to leave from this graveled hill didn’t look so smart. The people who had arrived after them had blocked them on all sides.

  “What is Michael doing now? Where is he going?” she wondered as Wes edged between two cars with barely an inch to spare.

  “He’s running away. But that won’t work.”

  Except why would Michael run away? He’d brought the float here. He’d been proud of it. Why would he decide to run away now?

  And where were the FBI if they were so on top of this? Michael was driving a bomb!

  It seemed nothing about her uncle would hold still. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope. About the time she thought she saw what was going on with him, everything shifted again.

  Maybe he was trying to run away from Fleep. “Fleep is with him,” she said.

  “The guy who taped him up and put him in the trunk?”

  She explained about the gold that didn’t exist while Wes kept trying to wrestle the car through the tangle of vehicles. She was flung forward and back, then right and left, which was exactly how she felt inside too. Couldn’t these people have at least parked in rows?

  Wes said, “Let’s see if this thing really is four-wheel-drive,” and he slipped through another insanely tight gap and charged off into the surrounding field. Next they were bouncing through furrows of wheat. Disconcerting scraping sounds came from underneath the car. She held onto the grab bar. They kept bouncing until they plunged through a ditch, which caused even more alarming noises from under the car. But then they bumped up onto the pavement.

  “Hold on,” said Wes, as if she wasn’t already, and she was pressed back into the seat as he poured on the gas.

  Chapter 35

  “Please don’t try to do that yourself,” Michael said. “I told you, it’s complicated.”

  “And I told you to turn off the fucking loudspeaker.” Fleep was poking at an array of wires, apparently thinking about pulling one of them.

  “Honest,” Michael said, “what you’re doing could be disastrous. I don’t even know for sure how to shut it off.”

  But maybe it wasn’t smart to upset Fleep. “Would you like me to stop so I can try to trace the connections? This is as far as I thought I’d go anyway. Just out of town. Then I was going to call Annie.” He let off the gas and began to pull to the side of the road.

  “No, you don’t.” Fleep held up the knife.

  It was one of those big Jim Bowie knives like you might buy as a souvenir at some historic mountain man site. Michael didn’t think anyone ever actually used knives like that. In fact, the only one he’d ever seen before was at Disneyland and had been made of rubber.

  He didn’t pull over. He kept on driving, but he tried to see if this one was real. He found that hard to do. Fleep was in the passenger seat, but he wasn’t exactly sitting in it because there was also a car battery in the seat as well as some switches and the array of wires. So he was perched on the edge of the seat with one hand on the dash to steady himself, and sometimes on the curves he had to brace himself with the other hand too, the one with the knife. So the knife never held still. Besides, as out of practice with his driving as Michael was, he didn’t think he should look away from the road for long.

  But even if it was a real knife, there wasn’t much he could do for Fleep. “I already told you I don’t have any gold,” he said.

  “Annie said you do. You think Annie lies?”

  Actually, Michael suspected Annie didn’t tell the whole truth at times. He knew his disability checks were barely enough to pay the utilities and the property taxes on his house, and he didn’t think her band earned enough to explain the way she covered all their other expenses. Then she’d bought that cool motorcycle a couple of years ago.

  But what he said was, “I know this guy, Dr. Kortge, who might be able to help you.”

  *

  Here in the Palouse Hills, the road was never straight or flat enough for Annie to be able to see Michael’s float up ahead. Sometimes in her side mirror, she got glimpses of a school bus behind them though. Gary and Mercedes must have seen the float leave town too. And soon Wes caught up with Bull’s pickup. Buzzard must have told Bull about Fleep, and Bull must have been able to get free of the crowd quicker than she and Wes.

  Then she did see Michael’s float in front of Bull’s pickup, and Wes slowed down. He probably didn’t want to scare Michael. She realized it might be difficult to make Michael stop safely, since Fleep was with him. And the float was a bomb.

  But Bull didn’t know about the bomb. He came up behind Michael fast.

  *

  Suddenly a pickup was right on Michael’s tail. It had come up so fast it startled him. He really had to concentrate on his driving all the way through a curve. When the road straightened back out, the pickup pulled into the other lane, but that made him even more anxious because he couldn’t see it there. He’d torn most of the crepe paper flowers off the windshield and the windows of the rear doors, but the side window was still blocked. He’d seen the truck pull to the left. Then it had disappeared.

  He eased off the gas and held as steady as he could in his lane to help it go on by.

  But it didn’t. It never reappeared.

  He slowed some more. It still didn’t pull in front of him.

  “You think you’re stopping again?” said Fleep. “Remember old sharpie here,” and he swung the knife around.

  “There’s someone in the other lane,” Michael said. “He won’t go ahead and pass.”

  “Then speed up,” said Fleep.

  But this was much too stressful for Michael to want to speed up. He slowed even more. The truck still didn’t reappear. At least the road here was staying fairly straight, and so far no one had come from the other way. Then he heard yelling. He pushed the button to roll down the side window. There was still a web of chicken wire and crepe paper there, but now he could hear what the person was yelling.

  “Michael! Pull over!”

  Whoever was in the pickup knew his name.

  The pickup pulled ahead enough that its front came into view. It still didn’t go on past. It just hovered there, but now Michael could see a man leaning out the window of the truck. It was one of Annie’s friends.

  “Michael! Pull over!” the man shouted again, and the nose of the pickup veered toward Michael. He had to swerve partly onto the gravel shoulder to keep from being hit.

  “Don’t you dare stop!” yelled Fleep. He flashed his knife, but Michael was much too busy to worry about the knife now.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have let you drive. I should’ve tied you up again. There just wasn’t time!” said Fleep.

  The pickup veered toward Michael again, and now here was a curve. Michael braked hard and dove onto the
shoulder, and maybe he hadn’t been going as slowly as he’d thought. The float skidded in the gravel. Sure enough, a car came around the curve in the other lane. The pickup swung into the right lane to miss it. Michel went fishtailing through the gravel. He fought the float to a stop.

  At least he hadn’t hit Annie’s friend’s truck. It was now parked in front of him, a nice new-looking truck. And the float hadn’t blown up. He hadn’t thought a sudden stop, or even a crash, would detonate it, but with so many wires and switches and such, he hadn’t been absolutely sure. Plus, as soon as he turned off the engine, the loudspeaker went off, so he didn’t have to try to remember how he’d wired that in. Also, Fleep now looked incapacitated. He was wedged against the windshield with the battery in his lap. His knife was definitely real. His arm was bleeding. But the bleeding didn’t look so bad that Michael felt the need to help, and get in close to that knife.

  He unfastened his seat belt and left Fleep dripping blood and struggling to get the battery out of his lap. He was working his way to the back doors when they flew open.

  Annie was there, and he was pleased to see she was with Wes again.

  *

  Annie couldn’t believe Bull had taken the risk of running Michael off the road. But after a lot of scary swerving, the float came to a stop. Wes sped up and parked right behind it. He had the back of the float open before Bull and Wheeler were even out of their cab. And there was Michael. Finally truly safe? Making his way to the rear doors.

  Wes stepped back, and Michael got out. “I was going to call you,” he said to Annie. “Fleep wouldn’t let me.”

  “You were going to call me? And tell me what?” The float was filled with wires and fifty-five gallon drums.

  Michael didn’t answer. He just dropped his head, his ostrich-like hiding technique.

  Leaving Annie with her insides still feeling as if she was being thrown all around. While her mind seemed to go numb. Because even now she just couldn’t believe her uncle would want to set off a bomb.