Unleashing Lazarus, I bellowed at Dingo, now standing behind the bar with his laptop lighting up his face. “What the fuck did that jackoff want?”
Dingo held up a hand, asking for patience. Deloy, Gideon, and Dust Bunny all stood in a half-circle around him like ballet spectators in the footlights. I was there to take over the bar while they held chapel. Part of that job was protecting the clubhouse from douchemonkeys like Pratt, and I felt I’d fallen down on the job.
“It’s okay,” Dingo called, not taking his eyes from the screen. “He just stopped in here to harass us about adding the grill extension without proper permits.”
“Oh, is that all,” I said sarcastically, stepping behind the bar to see what was so fascinating.
“Dingo found something,” said Gideon, moving back to let me crowd in. “He’s positively identified this specific shadow of the darknet as belonging to an alias of Ladell Pratt. Whoever uploaded these videos was also the one who took them.”
“Live and in person,” said Dust Bunny.
I saw that Deloy’s eyes were shining with tears. Oh, motherfuck, did that striptease video finally go viral? What I saw were just more of the usual darknet images Dingo had been perusing. Videos and stills of young men masturbating or penetrating themselves with implements—nothing we hadn’t seen or done a thousand times before.
But Deloy was upset, so I asked softly, “What’s wrong?”
His finger shook when he pointed at the screen. “That’s Kenyon Stout, Levon.”
The name rang some vague bells, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. “Yeah?”
Deloy’s lower lip was trembling and his eyes brimmed with tears. I put an arm around him. It was Dingo who answered me.
“Kenyon Stout was our age in Cornucopia. He was…closest to Deloy. Kenyon and one other kid are the only Lost Boys we haven’t identified as being alive somewhere, on the street in Bountiful, in the underground network, in prison or rehab. They’re the only two we can’t find.”
I felt like I’d been stabbed in the stomach. Those two unidentified bodies out at Gideon’s mine. “Are you thinking…” I couldn’t even give voice to it.
Dust Bunny nodded. “One and the same. The unidentified mine bodies have been there about five years.”
Deloy stuttered, “And Kenyon looks as he did five years ago on this page.” He finally sobbed, his mouth an upside-down U, misery washing over his innocent face. He used something he’d been wringing in his hands to cover his face.
Dust Bunny cried out and snatched the thing away from Deloy. “Don’t! You’re getting snot all over it!”
I yelled, “What the fuck, Dust Bunny? Can’t you see he’s fucking upset about his friend?” I tried to snatch the thing back, but Dust Bunny was sprinting out the other side of the bar, waving the thing.
He called, “This is DNA evidence! I’m getting a Ziploc bag.”
I drew Deloy down to the end of the bar, away from the laptop. I held him by the shoulders and bent down, like he was a kid I was comforting. Which he was. “What was that thing Dust Bunny took?”
“It was…it was…” I had to take a bandanna out of my pocket and hand it to Deloy, he was blubbering so badly. He swiped at his eyes and sobbed, “Kenyon Stout’s beanie! I’ve been keeping it all these years as a reminder of him. My only reminder!”
Now I remembered where I’d heard the name Kenyon Stout. He was the boy Deloy had been caught making out with. I thought he’d vanished from Cornucopia shortly after Deloy was booted, too. As usual, everyone just assumed he’d been sucked into the vast underground network of Lost Boys, maybe leaving the state and going beyond our radar.
“Oh, Jesus, Deloy. That’s fucking rough.” I tousled his hair like a father would do. “Now, we don’t know Kenyon is the guy in the mine. How long will it take to get DNA proof back on the hat?”
“My lab takes five working days,” Dust Bunny called out. He zipped the plastic bag efficiently and placed it into a small cooler. “Should be back this Friday.”
I petted Deloy’s shoulder. “There, you heard him? Five days.” As though that was any more soothing. It just meant Deloy had five more days to suffer not knowing if his childhood crush had been murdered and tossed into a mine.
Deloy struck my hands away. “I can’t take this anymore, Levon! We suffer in silence! We try to better ourselves, to improve our lives, and we just get kicked in the head for it. We undergo the trials of a child of God and every time we turn around there’s some self-righteous, hypocritical asshole trying to smite us down!”