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INSIDE, THE TWO TRAVELERS loaded up on calories: Henry ordered a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, large fries, a chocolate shake. Letty said, “Get a couple burgers, if you want.”
“You serious?” Henry asked.
“Go ahead.”
They did—two sandwiches, two fries, and a shake for each of them. Letty got a fish sandwich and a Diet Coke. When they’d spread out at a table, Letty asked Skye, “So . . . you feel safe when you’re on the road?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty safe,” Skye said. She took a big bite of the first burger and said, “I’m usually with somebody. Which helps. When I’m alone, getting ready to move, I’ll find a festival, or something like that, where there are a lot of people. You can ask around, find somebody going in your direction. Check up on him. Or her. Sometimes, when I got the money, I’ll ride the dog. One time, I met this guy in San Antonio, he was a dope dealer but, you know, he was okay. He bought me a ticket on the train to Los Angeles. More than three hundred dollars. And he didn’t want anything for it.”
“They usually want something for it?” Letty asked.
“Oh, sometimes they think they might get something . . . but they don’t,” Skye said. “If they’re the kind of guy who’s going to push it, I can usually figure that out ahead of time and I don’t go.”
“Ever make a mistake?” Letty asked.
Skye grinned at her, showing her yellow teeth, and said, “You’re kinda snoopy, aren’t you?”
Letty smiled back and said, “I used to work at a TV news station.”
Skye bobbed her head and took another bite of the sandwich. Eventually she said, “I made a couple of mistakes.”
“What’d you do about it?” Letty asked.
“Nothing. What could I do?”
“I would have killed them,” Letty said.
Henry was examining the side of his sandwich, and his eyes cut over to her and he said, “Easy to say, not so easy to do.”
“Not that hard,” Letty said.
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SKYE AND LETTY LOCKED EYES for a few seconds, then Skye said, “Jesus.” She swallowed and said, “You’re with Pilot, aren’t you?”
“What?”
Henry brightened up: “Hey, really? You’re with Pilot?”
“I don’t know who Pilot is,” Letty said. “I’m a student. At Stanford. I’m meeting friends in fifteen minutes, back at the square. We’re on a last shopping trip before summer vacation.”
Skye looked at her for another moment and then said, “Yeah. I can see that. You don’t know Pilot? He likes college girls. Or at least, college-girl types.”
“No. Who is he?”
“He’s an asshole,” Skye said. “Maybe the biggest asshole in California. Travels around with his disciples, he calls them. Fucks them all, men and women alike.”
“Does not,” Henry said. “Nothing queer about Pilot.”
“You hang with him, you’ll find out, little pink cheeks,” Skye said. She reached out and pinched his cheek. “And I’m not talking about these cheeks, either.”
“Fuck you, Skye.” He didn’t sound like he meant it, though.
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“‘BIGGEST ASSHOLE IN CALIFORNIA’ would put him in the running for the national title,” Letty said. “What’d he do?”
Skye looked at her steadily for a moment, then said, “Might be a little more than a college girl would want to know.”
Letty said, “I’m not the standard-issue college girl. What’s he do? Besides being hot for Henry?”
“Shut up,” Henry said.
“Hot for Henry—we ought to write a song,” Skye said to Henry.
Henry knew the two women were teasing, and said again, “Shut up,” and, “You want all them fries?”
“Yes, I do,” Skye said. “So: Pilot. Pilot has these people he calls disciples, and they steal for him, the men do, and the women give him their paychecks and sometimes he sells them, the women. He peddles dope to TV people and sometimes these TV guys need to hustle a deal or hustle up some money, and Pilot’s women will go over and do whatever the money-men want.”
“Nasty,” Letty said.
“That’s not even the bad stuff,” Skye said. “There are probably twenty guys in Hollywood doing that. Pilot’s like one of those cult guys. He says the end of the world’s coming—he calls it the Fall—and the only thing that’ll be left are the outlaws. Like him and the disciples, and the dope gangs and bikers and Juggalos and the skinheads and like that. He believes that the groups need to bind themselves together with blood. By killing people. We both heard that he’s killed people. That the whole gang has.”
“All bullshit,” Henry said.
The women ignored him and Letty asked, “Why don’t you call the cops?”
“Nothing to call them about,” Skye said. “We say, ‘We heard he’s killed someone.’ They go, ‘Who?’ ‘We don’t know.’ ‘When?’ ‘We don’t know that, either.’ ‘Who told you?’ ‘We don’t know. Some street guy.’ The cops say, ‘Uh-huh, we’ll get right on it,’ and hang up.”
Letty said, “Huh.”
Skye: “He’d snatch you off the street in a minute.”
Letty showed some teeth in what wasn’t exactly a smile. “He’d get his throat cut.”
Henry swallowed a smile and said, “Yeah, right. Pilot eat you right up . . .”
Letty stared at him until he turned his eyes away. Skye squinted at her: “Where’d you get that mean streak?”
“I grew up dirt poor out on the prairie in northern Minnesota,” Letty said. “My old man dumped us and my mom was a drunk. I kept us going by trapping muskrats and coons, wandering around in the snow with a bunch of leg-hold traps and a .22. Must’ve killed a thousand rats with that gun. Pilot’s just another rat to me.”
“Bet you had to trap a lot of coons to get into Stanford,” Skye said.
Letty smiled again, and said, “Well, my mom got murdered and the cop who was investigating, he and his wife adopted me. They’re my real mom and dad. It was like winning the lottery.”
Skye: “For real?”