AS LUCAS AND LETTY sat talking on the dock, Pilate was on a back highway crossing into Michigan. The rest of the crew had scattered. Skye had been with the cops for a full day before the disciples killed her, and they had no idea what she might have told them. But she knew some names, for sure.
After kicking her to death, they’d gotten scared: Pilate pretended he wasn’t, but he was. All the other murders had been in quiet spots, with nobody around but the disciples. This time, they’d killed a woman next to a large crowd.
Then the dark-haired Juggalo chick had shown up and started yelling at him about Skye. Pilate had punched her: couldn’t help himself, chicks did not get up in his face like that, and walk away.
He was lucky, in a way, that the fat guy had shown up, because he was so buzzed on kicking the first girl to death that he might’ve killed the second one, right there in front of the crowd.
But the fat guy did show up and the Juggalo chick was taken away and they’d hauled ass.
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WITH EVERYBODY ELSE going every which way, Pilate headed east in his Firebird, followed by only one other vehicle, the new RV, driven by Terry and Laine. They stuck to back roads but hurried to get across a state line. In Pilate’s experience, which mostly came down to watching Cops on television, the police did not talk well across state lines.
Once in Michigan, at midnight, they found . . . almost nothing. Trees.
“Jesus, it’s dark. Aren’t even any cars,” Kristen said, peering into the darkness through the Firebird’s windshield. “It’s like somebody’s pulled a black sack over your head.”
Dark as the L.A. people had ever seen the world; even the cars’ headlights didn’t seem to punch much of a hole in it. A few miles into Michigan, they saw a narrow dirt track in their headlights, heading off to the left, with a sign and an arrow that said something that they were going too fast to read. They took the turn, and found that it led to a boat landing. They couldn’t see anything of the lake, but there were no lights anywhere. They got flashlights, found a spot where people had camped out, and rolled the two vehicles back into the trees.
“Now what?” Laine asked, when Pilate and Kristen joined Terry and her in the RV.
“Just gonna sit and wait,” Pilate said.
Laine peered out a window. “Bears out there, I bet. Maybe wolves.”
“Wolves don’t eat trucks,” Pilate said. “It is really fuckin’ dark, ain’t it? Lots of stars, though.”
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LETTY WAS HURTING when she got up in the morning, at nine o’clock. “Everything hurts. The nose hurts worst. Not the bruise, the place where the doctor cauterized it.”
“Take some pills,” Lucas said.
“I’ve already taken four of them,” Letty said. “The max is two.”
“Uh-oh,” Lucas said. “You’re gonna have to stop at the drugstore.”
“I always thought stool softener was for old people,” she said. “Maybe you could get it for me.”
“Screw that,” Lucas said. “I’m not doing it.”
A few minutes later, she said, “The nose . . . it really hurts. It feels like somebody stuck a blowtorch up there.”
Neither one of them felt like eating more Cheerios, left over from Lucas’s first night at the cabin, so they drove back to the Juggalo Gathering site, which had sprung a hundred tents, and more people sleeping in cars, and, on one side, a big no-go zone defined by yellow crime scene tape and a bunch of sheriff’s patrol cars and a Wisconsin crime scene truck. A group of Juggalos was disassembling the stage, and when Lucas asked, a deputy said they were going to move the stage to the other end of the field, where the bonfire had been.
The crime scene crew had exposed Skye’s body; her head was misshapen, like a partly deflated soccer ball. The leader of the crime scene crew said he’d heard that Lucas thought she’d been kicked to death, and he said, “I think you’re probably right. Doesn’t look like clubs, no bark or anything in her face or her arms. Skull was crushed, with impact marks everywhere. Dollars to donuts, they kicked her to death.”
“DNA?”
“We’re sampling everything that looks possible.”
The deputies said that there’d been no convoys spotted overnight, but they did have tag numbers for a half dozen vehicles from California, which had been run when the cars were stopped. None of the people stopped were wearing Juggalo makeup. Nothing had come back that would allow the Wisconsin cops to hold the cars.
The deputy said: “What are we gonna do? We got nothing to go on, but that one tag from Minnesota, and we never did spot him.”
Lucas said, “Gimme what you got. All the California tags you stopped.”
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BOTH LUCAS AND LETTY had to go into Hayward to make formal statements for the sheriff’s department, so they continued into town.
The guy who would take their statements wasn’t in yet, and wasn’t expected for half an hour, so they walked over to Main Street, looking for breakfast. The Angler’s Bar and Grill, where Lucas usually ate, wasn’t open, so they settled for coffee and scones from a coffee shop around the block. Then they weren’t far from the Walgreens, so they walked across the highway, and Lucas lingered by the book rack as Letty was checking out with the stool softener.
Outside, Lucas asked, “You got it?”
“Yeah. I told the checkout lady that it was for you, but you were embarrassed to ask for it.”
Made him laugh.
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AS THEY WALKED BACK toward the sheriff’s office, they talked about the murder. Letty told Lucas, “Skye was going to stop at three Juggalo Gatherings. One here, one in the UP, and one down by Detroit somewhere. She thought Pilate might be going to them, too. All the people I saw with Pilate were wearing Juggalo gear, like they were really into it.”
“Where is it at? And when? The next meeting?”
“Let me look at my phone . . .”