“Good call. Then we can walk.”
The school was in a small valley surrounded by very low, undulating sandstone hills. We parked the truck in a small ravine and shoed it the rest of the way. The midcentury glass of the abandoned school soon came into view. We couldn’t see the scoots.
Mahalia said, “They must be around on the basketball court side. They probably don’t want Pratt to see their bikes.”
We were silent another couple minutes. Then I said, “Remember that basketball player you dated in high school?”
“Before I met Field?” Field was her first—I should say only, since her second was a polygamist fundy—husband who had died in a construction accident. There were some who thought this “accident” was brought on by Allred Chiles and his henchmen.
“That guy. Did you ever think you’d wind up in love with a biker?”
“Oh, shut the front door! Oh my sin, no! Not in a hundred thousand lifetimes.”
“But now that you are, it feels natural and right.”
“Of course. Are you—are you in love with Levon?”
“Yes. And I stupidly told him that right before he left for the school. Guess what, Mahalia. He didn’t say it back!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
What else could Mahalia say? She was obviously filled with pity for me. She even put her arm around me as the three of us trudged toward what was beginning to feel more and more like our doom.
“There they are!” I cried in a stage whisper, although we were much too far away for them to hear us.
“Look.” Mahalia pointed. “If we head up that gorge toward the hot springs, we can peek around the corner and they can’t see us.”
The men dropped from our line of sight as we clambered up the parallel gorge. We had to hop from boulder to boulder, and I didn’t want to let Lazarus off the leash for fear he’d go running to find his “dad.” I didn’t need him to be murdered twice in one month.
Another outlet of the gorge would give us a view of the basketball court where the bikes were parked. I hoped to hell Lazarus wouldn’t bark.
The leather-clad men were also peeking around a corner of the school. Dingo alone kneeled on the cement tinkering with something.
“We should’ve brought binoculars,” I said.
“They must be trying to figure out which room he’s in,” said Mahalia. “I wonder if they’re going to storm it.”
“Throw one of those smoke bombs, maybe? Tear gas?” I wish we had brought those items, too.
“You know, isn’t it ironic? Levon and Dingo and Deloy are all Lost Boys. Now a club named The Assassins of Youth turns out to be their salvation.”
That irony hadn’t been lost on me. “Let’s pray, Mahalia.”
I felt her hand slip into mine. Since her Cornucopia ordeal, I knew she didn’t actively practice any religion, but we were praying hard. It was all we could do.
LEVON
“What’s that sound?” barked Pratt. He looked at us as though we should know. Maybe he thought we’d planned something. We hadn’t. We weren’t that organized.
I had the shuriken between my fingers behind my back. The angle was awkward, but I could definitely angle it so the edge acted like a knife, and I sawed away at the zip-tie while Pratt was distracted at the door.
He went to the filthy window but probably couldn’t see a thing. He didn’t want to wipe it with his pristine sleeve, so he searched around for something to use as a rag. He was forgetting about us as his central focus. He knew we were safely bound, and he was the one with the gun.
I caught Deloy’s eye, and he gave a slight nod to acknowledge I was doing something. My whole life I’d loathed feeling powerless. That was why I’d taken control of my out-of-control life in my early twenties. I’d become my own boss so I’d never be at anyone’s mercy again. I didn’t have to accept clients if they didn’t meet my standards. I noticed that quite a large percentage of them even paid more than we were asking due to feelings of guilt. We were all utterly masters of our own universe up at Liberty Temple.
The whirring sound came closer to our door. When Pratt found a T-shirt to wipe off the window, the whirlybird went right up to the clean spot in the glass. Pratt gasped.
“What the…” He headed straight for the door.
Deloy was perplexed, but not for long. “It sounds like one of those—”
I whispered. “Drones that Dingo uses.”
The one I’d seen Dingo use was a blue quadcopter. It took bird’s eye view videos that actually had very high res. I had to smile inside as I sawed away at my ties. If nothing else—even if Pratt got carried away and shot us right now—the club would have proof of his doings.