“Caught her fuckin’ around on me,” Pilate improvised. He turned away—no place to get in a real fight, not with Juggalos, they’d swarm you—and he said to Kristen, “Keep moving, we gotta get out of here. Too many people here. The cops could be coming.”
They started moving and Bell slipped off into the stand of trees where they’d left Skye, half buried in brush. He gathered up as many downed tree limbs as he could easily find, threw them on top of her, broke a few more off the evergreens and added those. When he was done, he thought Skye’s grave looked like an ordinary pile of brush. Somebody might find her eventually, but not until they were long gone. He hurried back to the circle, where they were throwing stuff in his car.
Pilate pulled Raleigh aside; Raleigh was in full Juggalo dress. “You got Colorado license plates, so nobody will be looking at you. I want you to hang out here, see what happens. Stay all the way to the end. Anything too weird happens, call me.”
“Got it.”
Pilate said, “You can have Linda to ride with you.”
Raleigh gave him a thumbs-up: “Most excellent. I will pound her like a fuckin’ big bass drum.”
Pilate patted him on the cheek, then pulled the others together for one last-minute pep talk: “This isn’t working out as well as we thought. That fuckin’ Skye might have fucked us up—we don’t know what she told the cops after Bony got killed. Let’s meet up next week at the Gathering in Sault Ste. Marie. Kristen’s dividing up the money, giving some to everybody. Save as much as you can. We can’t go in a convoy, because Skye probably told them that’s how we travel, and that we’re from California, and we’ve all got California plates. So when we head out, split up. Everybody go their own way. Go to town and get maps, and, you know . . . stay out of sight. See you at the Gathering next week. Remember, we rule.”
Everybody muttered, “We rule,” and a minute later Pilate rolled out in his Pontiac, followed by the RV, and then the others.
? ? ?
THE FAT MAN and his driver took Letty to where Pilate had been, but when they got back behind the stage, the circle of cars was gone.
She unconsciously grabbed the hair above her ears and squeezed her fingers tight: “Oh my God, I let them go . . .”
She stood up in the back of the cart, turned and looked down the length of the parking area, hoping to catch sight of the convoy before it got out to the highway. If she could get a tag number, any tag number . . . She saw taillights of cars turning onto the highway, but they were too far away to read any tag numbers and even if she had been able to see them, she couldn’t be sure they were the right cars.
She got on the phone and Lucas answered instantly: “Dad, I found them, Pilate—and then I lost them. I think they’re on the road.”
“Are they in one tight convoy?”
“I don’t know. There are all kinds of cars coming and going,” she said.
“You okay?”
“Not exactly,” she said, pressing the gauze pad to her nose.
? ? ?
LUCAS GOT THERE fifteen minutes later, along with three sheriff’s cars and six deputies, all in plain clothes. Letty was waiting at the entrance to the parking lot, and when he got out of his car, Lucas said, “Aw, Jesus Christ, Letty . . .”
He reached for her, to hug her, but she flinched away and said, “Don’t do that—I might have a cracked rib or something. Pilate kicked me. It hurts.”
“Need to get you to the hospital, need to get you going.”
Lucas looked frightened, something she really hadn’t seen before. Frantic, yes; frightened, no.
Letty said, “I’m not gonna die, I just don’t want to be squeezed.”
“Let me see your face.”
After they did all the father-daughter stuff, Letty told Lucas and the ring of cops, “They were parked right here.”
She told her story, about the disappearance of Skye and the attack by Pilate, and how the man in the John Deere saved her, and how just before they left, Pilate and his disciples had been in the trees across the entry road. She pointed past the parking area, to the straggly stand of pine and aspen. “. . . and they did a little dance, jumping up and down.”
By the end of the story, she was shouting at them. The music had stepped up another notch, now as loud as a jet plane at takeoff, loud enough to feel it scratching at your face. The group onstage had set off whirling green laser lights that flashed up into the trees around the field, and made the branches seem to sparkle with thousands of emeralds.
Lucas took a moment to walk away to the fat man in the John Deere and say something to him, and then slap him on the back, and say something else, and then he walked back to Letty and the deputies and said, “I’ll talk to that guy again. Now, where were they parked exactly? And you say there was another RV?”
Before she could answer, he said to one of the deputies, “And I need one of you guys to run Letty into the clinic.”
“Not yet, not yet,” Letty protested. “In a minute.”
“Yet!” Lucas said. There was a copper taste in the back of his mouth, like blood. Letty was still bleeding from her nose and would have a major black eye: he could see it already.
“In a minute,” she said again.
Another cop car had come in and a seventh deputy joined them, this one in a uniform. They all had flashlights and they walked across the circular parking area inch by inch, and dumped out a plastic trash bin that sat at the edge of the parking lot, thirty or forty yards away, checking the contents under the flashlights.
As the deputies were doing that, Lucas scuffed around the fire, his own flashlight probing the dirt, looking for something, anything—a charge slip would be good, something with a credit card number—that might tell them something about Pilate’s group, and at the same time lecturing Letty. “Goddamnit, Letty, I know you’re grown up and all of that . . .”
Letty pointed to the clump of trees. “I’m going over there, where they were dancing.”
“You’re going back to town.”