FIFTY OR SIXTY CARS dotted the two parking areas, along with a few campers and RVs, but a cluster of vehicles that seemed to be parked together caught her eye, and she went that way. Not much was moving around the cluster; freshly burned log remnants were still sputtering in a fire ring. She moved closer, trying to shelter behind groups of Juggalos and the random cars in the parking lot.
She was thirty or forty yards away, standing behind an aging Volkswagen van, when a woman staggered out of the RV. She was wearing cut-off jean shorts and nothing else, though she was carrying what looked like a T-shirt, and one of the nearby Juggalos yelled, “Yay, tits,” and the woman laughed and gave him the finger, and a minute later, wiggled the shirt over her head.
Skye didn’t know her, but she looked like a disciple. Skye edged closer as the woman went to one of the cars in the cluster, opened the door and emerged with a pair of sunglasses, a pack of Marlboros, and a Zippo lighter.
Skye called over, “Hey: tell Pilate that Carly said hi!”
The woman finished lighting a cigarette, blew smoke, and called back, “I think he’s still asleep.”
“I’ll talk to him later,” Skye called. She waved and walked away. Back with the travelers, she recovered her pack, took out the Gerber survival knife, and slipped it into the leg pocket on her cargo pants. Across the field, another carnival ride was pulling in. She’d lie around with her friends, Skye thought, until dark.
Then she’d spot Pilate and she’d stick him.
She had no qualms about it: thought about Letty, and her feelings about killing. Ridding the world of Pilate was a public service, Skye thought, and would probably save a lot of lives. Still: the cops would call it murder, and if she went to prison, there’d be no more traveling. She could feel the tension growing in her gut, and let it build, not trying to deny it. She was talking to Lucy, passing a joint back and forth, watching more and more Juggalos pulling in, when she spotted Letty: “Gotta go,” she said, getting to her feet. “Gotta run.”
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LUCAS’S CABIN WAS less than twenty miles from the Juggalo campground and Letty knew the route well. She’d started north an hour or so behind Skye and closed the gap on the way up, arriving forty-five minutes after Skye had.
When she pulled the Benz into the campground, she gave a guy standing next to a barrel five dollars to park, got a date-stamped ticket, put it on the dashboard, and said, “Thanks,” when the guy said, “Nice ride.”
When she’d parked and got out, a tough-looking, bare-faced guy in work clothes, who was probably a cop, walked by and muttered, “Not a place for college girls.”
Letty winced: the ticket seller and the cop, if he was a cop, had picked her out in seconds. She made a quick circuit of the field, looking for Skye, then drove back to Hayward, found a yoga place, bought a pair of black yoga tights and a bright red crop top and black jacket, went over to the Walmart for a pair of high-top hunting boots and cotton socks.
She changed out of her Neiman Marcus jeans, blouse, and wedge sandals in the car, into the new stuff, drove back to the campground, reparked, got out, and decided she more or less fit, except for her hairdo and bare face. When she walked onto the field, where the crowd was still a little sparse, a short, thin, balding man with a box said, “You need a face. I’ll paint your face for free if you show your tits.”
Letty grabbed the front of his shirt and said, “You’ll paint my face for free or I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
“Violence. That’s so hot,” the guy said. “Gives me a little woody.”
“‘Little’ being the key word,” Letty said. “Now, you gonna paint or get beat up?”
“Can we do both?” he asked.
? ? ?
DESPITE THE PAINT—a dog face with a droopy red tongue—Skye picked Letty out instantly.
Had nothing to do with the way Letty dressed, or the face paint: had something to do with the way she walked, like she owned the place. She said to Lucy, “Watch my bag again, okay? You see that girl over there? The one with the red nose in the black tights? I gotta stay away from her. She’s gonna come here and she’ll see my pack. Tell her that I went to Hayward with a friend.”
“Whatever,” Lucy said, in a voice that sounded like a gravel road. “Gimme a last good hit.”
“Finish it,” Skye said, passing the joint. “Tell her I won’t be back until after dark.”
? ? ?
LETTY SPOTTED THE TRAVELERS, but nobody shaped like Skye. She went that way, and asked for her, and Lucy said, “She’s gone off to that . . . that town, I can’t remember it. She went off with Carl, they’re not coming back until night.”
“Hayward? She went to Hayward?”
“Who?” Lucy was confused. “Man, that shit just crawled right over me.”
“Skye. Skye went to Hayward?”
“Who?”
Letty knew that Skye would be back, because she’d left her pack, and all her gear, with her friend. It was a matter of waiting, but the waiting nearly drove her to distraction: nothing to do. Even the Juggalos seemed uninteresting, after she’d seen a few dozen of them. A really bad rap band got going on the stage and a guy ran past wearing nothing but a jockstrap. She began to feel stupid in the face paint. The hours crawled by, until dinnertime; she got two hot dogs with lots of onions.
Then Weather called: “I don’t want to pry, but are you in Hayward?”
“Not exactly,” Letty said.
She heard her mother turn and tell Lucas, “She says, ‘Not exactly.’”
Lucas said, “Goddamnit, she is. That Juggalo thing is east of town, that’s why it’s ‘not exactly.’”
Weather asked, “At this Juggalo thing, right? Looking for Skye?”
“Maybe,” Letty said.
Weather said, “Your father is seriously annoyed.”
“I believe it,” Letty said. “Not for the first time, though. He’ll get over it.”
“Yeah, well . . . he just went steaming out of here. I think he’ll be telling you how annoyed he is, personally, in about two hours.”
“He doesn’t have to—”
“He thinks he does,” Weather said.