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  “And how about men?” asked Char. “Meet any good ones out there?”

  Annie laughed. “I told you, I’m not interested in that sort of thing anymore.”

  “I’m still interested in that sort of thing,” said Char.

  “Me too,” said Russ.

  “You don’t get it,” Annie said. Or maybe they did, more than most people did. They seemed to have the kind of love that glowed around them even when they were flipping each other off. But she’d never gotten close to that kind of thing with the guys she’d fallen for, the ones who had “loved her music” and then become jealous of every minute she spent with it. And then there were all the other complications of her life. Didn’t Russ and Char know the job she did for them required secrecy? And meant she never dared completely let down her guard?

  Plus there was the usual downside to playing in sleazy bars. Just thinking about the way some of those drunks pressed themselves against her—claimed the moves she made on stage proved she was hot for them—until with the help of her dad’s training, she convinced them to back off—

  She needed to get this conversation back to the Porsche Cayenne and the DEA.

  But now she remembered there was something else she should tell Russ and Char. “Okay, I did meet a guy. Right here in Moscow. He claims to be a booker. Of course, that’s a standard bullshit line.”

  “Of course,” said Russ. “How exactly does it go? Come on up to my place and I’ll show you my . . . books? Or is it my bookings?”

  “It means he wants to book my shows.”

  “Mmmmm,” said Char, so she did understand what this would mean.

  “He said he might get us the opening slot for a Drive-By Truckers tour.”

  Char apparently didn’t get this. “Is that a good thing?”

  “Truckers who just drive on by. Doesn’t sound good,” said Russ.

  “Sure, it would be great,” Annie said. “If it was true. That’s the way a lot of musicians have gotten their breaks, been seen by a much larger audience. Joe Ely opened for The Clash, Ghostwriter opened for Nick Cave . . .” She glanced at their glazed eyes and stopped listing musicians they’d probably never heard of. “But it would mean I wouldn’t be scheduling my own shows.” She took another piece of bread to let that sink in and realized even if that “booker” was talking crap, which more than likely he was—guys had been giving her cards and claiming they could take her to the big time ever since she put together her own band—still—

  “I think I should go for it,” she said. “That would force you two to retire, wouldn’t it? Since I wouldn’t be able to fit my tours to your deliveries.”

  “Oh, Annie, how long have you been delivering for us?” asked Russ.

  “I don’t know. The first time was maybe—”

  “Four years ago,” said Char. “Then you waited a year before you did it again. So really it’s been only three.”

  “And how long do you think Char and I have been doing our . . . experiments in consciousness?” said Russ.

  “So I can’t convince you it’s time to quit. You think you’re invincible?”

  “Actually,” said Russ, “we think we’re old.”

  “Old as dirt,” said Char.

  “You can’t seriously believe that’s a legal defense.”

  “Eh?” said Russ. “We may be going a bit deaf too.”

  “I feel a sudden case of senility coming on,” said Char. “I have no idea how that equipment got into that shed over there, or what it could possibly be used for.”

  Like Russ, she’d taken off her boots and also had holes in her socks. Maybe they were getting senile. But even when Annie was a kid and they were supposed to be taking care of her, she’d often been the one who remembered when it was time for her to go to bed, or to school.

  Then Russ got halfway serious-looking and said, “Okay, here’s the deal. You are retiring. You have someone following you, and you’ve got a chance to take your music to another level. Don’t worry about us.”

  “He’s already cooking,” said Char.

  “Shit,” Annie said. But this explained a lot of his behavior today. She looked over at him, and he gave her another peace sign along with one of his goofiest grins.

  “I’ve been telling him he needs a better respirator,” said Char.

  “Fine. I tried.” Annie looked at her watch. She needed to get back home. She didn’t dare leave her cell on when she was here in case someone was tracing it, so Uncle Michael couldn’t reach her.

  That led her to another thought. “I can’t go with that booker. He’s talking longer tours. He’s even talking Europe. I couldn’t leave Uncle Michael that long.”

  “We could take care of Michael,” said Char.

  “How? No, he’s my responsibility.”

  “Why? Your Aunt Karen is his guardian,” said Char.

  “She lives in Phoenix,” Annie said.

  “So she believes he’s okay on his own.”

  “Yeah, he seems okay, most of the time. But my mother was always closer to him than Aunt Karen has ever been. I think he needs me.”

  “Or you need him,” said Char. “Makes it a lot easier to say you’re not interested in men. At least you’re not alone.”

  “What?” Rather than follow that further, Annie stood up. “Your money is out in my jacket. I’ll go get it.”

  “Keep double your usual cut this time, since you’re retiring,” said Russ.

  “And be sure to wrap up some of the bread for Michael,” said Char.

  Chapter 7

  Annie should have known this was how Russ and Char would take the Cayenne. They’d reacted much the same when she’d told them about guys who had approached her on the road, flashing way too much money, trying to make huge buys. That had happened twice this past year, obvious attempts on the part of some law enforcement agency to get her to let down her guard. But since those incidents had been far away from here, it had almost made sense when Russ and Char had told her to make her own decision, but they would keep on manufacturing the cleanest LSD they could because they didn’t believe it should be illegal, and that was that.

  But in spite of these thoughts running through her head, what she noticed on the ride back to town, taking the roads much more slowly than before, was the late spring green, the thickening of the forest, the fresh growth on the rolling fields. Okay, so maybe she was relieved to be through delivering LSD. She was tough. She’d grown up tough, since her parents had so often been gone. She’d handled the risks, much the way she handled playing in bars. But she’d learned it was best not to let band members use drugs on the road. She wouldn’t let clubs pay the band with free drinks. She’d always thought her parents had acted awfully silly when they were stoned and suspected they’d crashed their plane due to their fondness for psychedelics.

  And now there would be no more prickly fear every time she had to leave her car because some loser might steal it, funky and old as it was, and thousands of hits of acid—or tens of thousands of dollars—would be lost. No more sleepless nights because those hits of acids were right under her sleeping pad, or more than a hundred thousand dollars was hidden behind the molding of her bedroom floor. She might even quit tensing up whenever she saw someone who seemed out of place.

  No more prison nightmares.

  But the Cayenne guy was still out there. She would have to stay away from Russ and Char to make sure he couldn’t follow her to their place. She would miss them. She would worry about them.

  And there would be no more extra money coming in . . .

  *

  She found Uncle Michael looking pretty much exactly the way he had when she left, peering at his computer reading more wacky blogs. But as soon as he got to the end of that particular wacky post—from over his shoulder she’d seen something about Building 7 and FDR—he turned to her and said in a very worried voice, “Annie, we’ve got a problem.”

  “We do?” Another problem? Besides someone trying to bust Russ and Char?
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  “I don’t know why I never noticed it before. But I’m inside most of the time, and Lisa, she’s getting so old she doesn’t ask to go out much anymore.” He stood up and led Annie to the back door. He stepped out into the breezeway that linked the house to the garage and urgently said, “Look.”

  She looked all around but couldn’t tell what was upsetting him. Surely not the peeling paint. He got anxious if she even talked about repainting the house. Probably not the unmown lawn either. He didn’t mind her mowing it, but he also never seemed to have any qualms about letting it grow until it was seeding dandelions for miles.

  “Look,” he said again, now walking out into the backyard.

  Then she saw it, once she’d gone far enough to see beyond the corner of the house. Five or six mounds of dirt were scattered around the backyard.

  “You think it’s a pocket gopher?” he said. “Lisa, she used to eat those things. She’d sit there, one paw raised over a mound like that, and then pow! It was beautiful to watch. But, like I said, she’s getting old.”

  “Pocket gophers can move in and do a lot of damage,” Annie said. But their mounds were usually more conical, like little volcanoes.

  “Or maybe it’s a digger. One of those ground squirrels. They’re bigger. These mounds are pretty big.”

  “We don’t have diggers much in town. They’re mostly out in the fields.”

  “Would a dog do this?” He clasped his arms across himself looking really worried now.

  Annie bent down to poke at one of the mounds, and she didn’t find an animal’s tunnel under the turned-up dirt. The hole was about a foot deep and a couple of feet in diameter, and chunks of sod were mixed in with the dirt. This wasn’t what a gopher did at all. Could it have been done by a dog?

  Michael was still holding his arms across himself almost shuddering. “If there’s a dog loose, I won’t be able to let Lisa out at all anymore.”

  Annie pulled out the chunks of sod, kicked the dirt back into the hole, stomped it down and laid the sod on top. Maybe the lawn would heal.

  “We’ll watch for a dog,” she said. “But if that’s what it was, it was probably just a one-time thing. The dog got out, but its people have caught it by now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She went around smoothing out the mounds until Michael quit holding himself so tightly and eventually let his arms drop to his sides. Another disaster dealt with. If only they were all as easy as kicking dirt back into holes.

  Still, the holes were puzzling. They actually looked as though they’d been made with a shovel and then the dirt carelessly shoved back in. Kids playing some kind of prank? Better to let the subject drop. “Did you go to the store?” she asked. Any kind of change in his surroundings, like these mounds of dirt, could have derailed him from the store errand.

  But he said, “Sure. I told you I would. And you were right about the asparagus. It was even on sale.” This change of subject seemed to have worked just right. He headed back into the house.

  “And I made some new friends,” he said.

  “More blogging buddies?” She followed him inside.

  “Well, I guess they are. They said they are. But I don’t remember them.”

  She wasn’t sure what to make of that.

  He opened the refrigerator and proudly displayed the asparagus and chicken breasts there. “Those look good, don’t they? Nice and thin and green?”

  “Yeah, they look perfect.” She took the food out of the refrigerator and turned the oven on.

  “That’s where I met them, my new friends,” he said. “At the supermarket mall.”

  Annie had started running hot water into the sink. While the oven was heating up, she could try to make a dent in this pile of dirty dishes. She was also thinking how to prepare the chicken and asparagus. Maybe she would just roast them both. So it took her a moment to process what her uncle had said.

  “At the store?” She looked up from the suds bubbling in the sink. “You met some new friends at the store? Not blogger friends on the Internet. You met real people?”

  “At the bookstore. Yeah, they were real people.” He looked at her quizzically, and she realized it was an odd question.

  “Of course, they were real people,” she said, even though she still wasn’t sure.

  “But they were blogger friends too. At least that’s what they said. It seems to me you could be both.”

  “Sure. That’s great.” It was hard to believe that after all these years of isolating himself in this house he’d met some real friends, not just cyber-friends, but this was probably the kind of improvement Dr. Kortge had told her to expect. And having any contact with anyone was bound to be a good thing.

  *

  A girl on a liter dirt bike! Wes couldn’t get that image out of his head. A tall skinny girl sheathed in black leather straddling that big dirt bike, and flipping him off.

  Now he was in a booth at the back of a trendy diner. He’d picked this spot to put as much distance as possible between himself and the clusters of college kids who seemed to like to sit up front so their friends could see them from the street munching their burgers and slurping their shakes. This meant he got to watch Hector limp the whole length of the black and white checkerboarded floor, and by the time his partner had slid into the red vinyl seat across from him, he had to admit he was amused by Hector’s pain.

  “You did this on purpose, didn’t you,” Hector groused. “Picked the farthest booth from the door.”

  “Touchy, aren’t you?” said Wes. “Just ‘cause you got beat up by a girl.”

  “Some girl. I saw you wuss out. You were supposed to jump in and be the hero. Do the moves we practiced. No real contact, like John Wayne. But you weren’t about to get caught in the crossfire.”

  “Gotta get me a pair of those high-heeled boots.”

  The waiter swooped by with coffee and plastic, retro-looking menus. They waved off the menus, but when Hector sipped at his coffee, he did a grudging yet appreciative humph. “Weird. They send us to the American equivalent of Siberia and the coffee’s better than you can get in Detroit.”

  “It is a weird town,” Wes agreed.

  But now Hector was apparently revived by the coffee. He leaned back with a grin. “Hey, she bested you too, didn’t she? Took you out into the boonies and dumped you in the woods.”

  The image flashed in Wes’s mind again, Annie clad in black leather, spitting gravel as she leaped off the road. “Were they able to track her from there?” he said, ready to get down to business now and quit talking about the skills of that girl.

  “Nope. Couldn’t see her from the air. Trees too thick.”

  “How about dust from the bike?”

  “Lost on that too. Ground’s still too wet. And you wouldn’t believe how many little cabins are scattered up in those hills. The lab could be anywhere.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “You’re doing the booker thing. Your idea, right? Since you’re such a music buff.”

  “That’s not looking so good. She’s had bookers before. Thinks they’re about as useful as tits on a steer.”

  “Then you turn on your legendary charm.” Hector winked. “The sensitive blue eyes, the George Clooney beard. Doesn’t that thing itch?”

  “What?”

  “The beard. If I don’t shave every day, mine itches.”

  “That’s because you’re a beaner. Probably started shaving when you were ten. I have this nice soft petable beard.” Wes ran a hand over his chin while digesting the other part of what Hector had said. “You’re telling me I’m supposed to come on to Annie? Not just as a booker.”

  Hector laughed. “This is a problem? I thought she looked hot.”

  Definitely. “But . . .”

  “Nothing against regulations, pardner.” Another big grin plus a heavy dose of his Texas accent. “I’d do it myself, but she didn’t seem to like me much. And that music of hers, makes my teeth rattle.”

  “The mus
ic’s strong, fresh, raw, tight.”

  “See, you’re the man for the job. And the women do seem to go for you.” This was said with an even heavier accent and a go-figure shrug.

  Wes decided it was time to work on his coffee. Sure, women had been calling him cute ever since he was three, and generally that still worked for him. He and Hector had competed sometimes to see whose style played best, Hector’s sultry Latino act or his cooler comic approach. To Hector’s ongoing disbelief, Wes had often won.

  But that had been an off-duty game.

  True, this job often involved playing a role. You were a wealthy but reckless businessman who believed you could get even wealthier by investing in drugs. You were a lowlife junkie who desperately needed to put together a score. But the bad guys you were trying to snare were sleazeballs, hard eyes, often tracks on their arms. Most significantly, they were usually men. He’d never been asked to play a romantic role before.

  And that wild redhead taking that gravel road at that speed. A girl on a liter dirt bike!

  “I just don’t get it,” he said. “She doesn’t look like a mule.”

  “What exactly does she look like to you?” Hector’s grin was beginning to get annoying. “I said you’re supposed to charm her. Not the other way around.”

  But that wasn’t the problem. At least Wes didn’t think it was—in spite of the way he kept seeing her in his mind, stomping out the beat on the stage, stomping down on Hector’s instep, and swinging that bike around as if she was in the Paris-Dakar.