When Letty got back, Skye gestured at the laptop and said, “Nobody cares. They wrote one story and everybody copied it, and that’s the last we’ll hear about Henry Mark Fuller, because nobody gives a shit about people like him. Like us.”
“That’s not true,” Letty said. “A lot of people give a shit, which is how you got pulled out of the back of that car.”
Skye dropped onto one of the beds and cried, “Ah, jeez . . .”
? ? ?
THEY TALKED OFF AND ON until midnight and then Skye went off to her room and flopped on the bed and failed to sleep. Letty managed to sleep, after two o’clock. Skye got a phone call at seven, a male voice: “This is Juggalo Central, two of us going today. We’ve got two seats.”
She arranged to get picked up at nine, at Mears Park, said she’d buy both seats, got them for thirty-five dollars each, but she wanted to take a pack. “We got that much room.” Skye slipped out and ran to Swede Hollow, where she found some friends, including a reliable guy named Carl. When she asked if he wanted to go to the Juggalo Gathering, he said, “I was thinking I might.”
“I’ve got two seats,” Skye said. “I got a motel room, you can take a shower so you don’t smell too much.”
Carl said sure, and they hurried back to the motel. Carl showered with the motel’s perfumed soap, put on his cleanest clothes, and at eight-fifteen, they were gone. Skye left a note for Letty that said: “Thanks for everything, I will pay you back someday. You’re a good friend, but I just can’t handle this. I got to travel on.”
Letty found the note when she walked through the connecting door at nine o’clock, as Skye and Carl loaded into the ride.
Carl said, “This is gonna be great, huh? Jug-A-Lo, know what I’m saying?”
? ? ?
LETTY RAN DOWN to the Benz and headed to Swede Hollow. She spotted a guy they’d talked to the day before, sitting on a sleeping bag playing a recorder, and hurried over. “I’m looking for Skye. Has she been by?”
“She’s gone,” the guy said. “She came down and got Carl, said she had a ride waiting. Don’t know where they were going, but they were in a hurry.”
“Goddamnit.” Letty walked back to her car, sat and called Lucas, and told him that Skye had taken off.
Lucas said, “How’d she arrange a ride?”
“Well . . . I don’t know. Maybe she knew somebody.”
“I thought you were with her.”
“I was, until midnight. She found an online newspaper article about the autopsy on Henry and kinda freaked out. Anyway, she’s gone.”
“Damnit, we need her here,” Lucas said. “If you’re down there anyway, ask around. Maybe somebody else knows where she went.”
“All right.”
“Be careful.”
Letty got fifty feet back into the park, when a thought struck her, and she turned, went back to the car, turned on her laptop and called up the browsing history. The link was right at the top: Craigslist. She drove five minutes to a Caribou Coffee, got online, went to Craigslist and to Rideshare, and found Skye’s advertisement from the night before.
She called Lucas back: “I know where she went.”
She told him how she found out, and he said, “Good. Stern will be up there, or at least have some guys up there and they know what she looks like. I’ll get them to track her down.”
“They won’t recognize her if she goes as a Juggalo,” Letty said. “I’ve been doing some research on them. They wear costumes and clown faces. It’s hard to recognize anybody.”
“Well, we gotta look,” Lucas said. “We really need her back.”
“That’s your last word? ‘We really need her back’?”
“Well, what the heck am I supposed to say?” Lucas asked. “We do need her back. And we’ll find her.”
Letty was fuming when she got off the phone. Lucas had gone bureaucratic on her and Skye was headed for serious trouble. She didn’t want to do it. She knew Lucas would go ballistic—but she pulled out and headed for I-35.
The Juggalo Gathering was two and a half hours away.
Pilate and his crew freaked when they learned what had happened to Bony and that the cops had gotten Skye back.
Chet found out at a convenience store, where a television was tuned to a Duluth station. The shooting and rescue were big news. He drove back to the new campground at eighty miles an hour, about all he could get out of the aging Corolla, to tell the others.
Pilate was gone when he got there—the rest of the crew said that he and Kristen had gone to cruise used-RV lots, planning to trade a half kilo of lightly cut cocaine for an RV, if they could find the right guy.
The crew stood around remembering Bony and some of the stunts he’d pulled. Like the time he screwed this lady teacher and then told her that he was a student at her school—he looked young enough—and blackmailed her into what he called Stupid Teacher Tricks. And he did mean tricks.
The new campground was fifteen miles east of Hayward, Wisconsin, and was mostly empty, except for a carnival crew setting up a Tilt-A-Whirl in one corner of the open field, getting ready for the Juggalo Gathering that would start the next day. They were still standing in a semicircle, talking about Bony, when Pilate and Kristen pulled in, Pilate driving what turned out to be another Winnebago Minnie, this one a 1999 model with eighty-six thousand miles on it, but otherwise, cherry.
He got out, grinning, picked up on the vibe and the grin drained away: “What?”
“The cops shot Bony. He’s dead,” Laine said. “Chet saw it on the TV.”
“What!”
“Dude, they shot him. It’s on TV,” Chet said. “The cops got that chick back, and she’s gonna tell them everything.”
“He was my main man,” Pilate wailed, spittle flying around the semicircle of disciples. “They gunned him down?”