Gathering Prey (11 page)

Skye got underwear and shirts and cargo pants and six pairs of pumpkin-orange socks, and at Letty’s urging, a new pair of boots, a decent pack, a top-end three-season sleeping bag, heavy long johns, and a variety of cooking and eating gear: a compact stove, fuel bottle, camping silverware, a lightweight parka, and gloves—“I’ll be down south before I need them, but it can get pretty frosty even way down south, in Mississippi and Texas.”

And, “I need a knife.”

“Well, let’s find a good one,” Letty said.

They settled on a Gerber survival knife, with a five-inch blade, for sixty bucks.

When they left the store, Skye said, “I owe you. This isn’t just a donation. I owe you.”

“I’m okay with that,” Letty said. “You can owe us. Someday you’ll do good, and you can pay us back. I’ll get you some cash—you’re going to need to eat until everything is done with.”

•   •   •

LETTY GOT TWO ROOMS
with a connecting door, at the Holiday Inn, and they wound up staying two nights. Skye was an interesting talker and an interested listener, and got Letty talking about her younger days as a trapper and a shooter of crooked cops and cartel killers.

“I’d never ever shoot anyone if it wasn’t self-defense, but that’s what it was,” Letty said. “I sometimes think I might have a touch of the sociopath, or more than a touch, because none of it ever made me feel the least bit bad.”

“But if you were a sociopath . . . wouldn’t that mean when those cartel killers came after the family, you would have taken care of yourself first? Instead, you got between them—the Mexicans and your family.”

Letty smiled: “I never thought of it that way. Thank you. I guess I’m not a sociopath, and I’d kinda started to worry about it.”

“I don’t know how killing somebody would make me feel, but I guess I might feel bad after a while,” Skye said. “I can see how if it was kill or be killed, I’d rather be the one who stays alive. But I believe I’d lose a lot of sleep over it.”

“Then you’re a nicer person than I am,” Letty said. “I never missed a minute’s sleep.”

•   •   •

THE NEXT MORNING,
Letty drove Skye to Lucas’s office. Lucas had just gotten copies of a video taken at Regions Hospital. He’d looked at it once, and had been about to call the support services to cut some frames out of it, when Letty and Skye walked in.

“Is this the woman you call Kristen?” Lucas asked Skye, putting the video back up on his computer.

Skye crouched over the screen, watching, then said, “Yes! That’s her. For sure.”

“The video’s not so good.”

“I don’t care. That’s her. You can’t see it, but she’s got these pointy teeth. She filed them down herself.”

“All right. I’ll have the best stills printed out, and you can talk to our artist, help him make some pictures of the other people.” To Letty, he said, “This will take a while.”

“I don’t care. I want to watch.”

•   •   •

SKYE DID FOUR IDENTIKITS,
of Pilate, Bell, Raleigh, and a woman named Ellen.

While she did that, Lucas had gone to check on his other cases. Jenkins and Shrake were at Ben Merion’s cabin at Cross Lake, and told him that there’d been no problem finding places in the woods that looked dug up, but, “There are about a million of them. We saw a squirrel actually making one of them, burying acorns, and there are squirrels all over the place. The idea was good, but the execution is impossible.”

“So, you’re coming back?”

“Yeah, we’ll see you tomorrow, I guess. Go back to looking for computer chips.”

Del had not yet found the guy with the safe full of diamonds.

He called Stern, who said, “We got something weird on that Roscow’s phone . . . that Bony guy.”

“Weird’s usually not good,” Lucas said.

“Not good in this case,” Stern said. “We pinged them all, and the only returns we’ve gotten so far are from California. On the most recent calls, we got nothing at all. Our guy here says they may be pulling the batteries on their phones.”

“That doesn’t help,” Lucas said. “They’ll use them sooner or later, though. Keep pinging them.”

When he came back to Letty and Skye, he checked out the identikits and said, “Not bad. We could get something from these. I’ll send them over to Stern, he said he’d plaster northern Wisconsin with them, get them in all the papers up there.”

“Are you sure they’re up there?” Skye asked.

“We’re not sure of anything, but that’s where they were headed. By now, they could be in New Orleans.”

After a fast lunch, Lucas, Letty, and Skye went over to Swede Hollow Park to look for other travelers. They found three, sitting together, passing a joint, and Skye told them about Henry—one of the three knew him—and asked about Pilate. None of them knew him, or had heard about him.

Skye caught up on gossip, then Lucas went back to work and Letty and Skye drifted off, caught a movie at the Mall of America, bought a burner phone for Skye with twenty-five hours of talk time, bought a hat for Letty, ate again, and went back to the Holiday Inn. Letty broke out her laptop to check her Facebook for news from her friends, and punched in “Pilate,” and got nothing but the wrong one.

Skye always carried one big fat paperback novel with her, and she’d spent some of the money Letty gave her on a Diana Gabaldon Outlander
novel. In between spates of talk, she’d read the book, and she was reading it when Letty took a bathroom break.

During the day, nobody had wanted to talk to Skye about Henry, and she’d begun to feel that something was being hidden from her. When Letty went into the bathroom, she put the book down, stepped over to Letty’s laptop, which was showing the Google page, and typed “Henry Mark Fuller” into the search field.

The front page of the
Rapid City Journal
’s blog page popped up, with the headline “Murdered Man Was Crucified,” and beneath that, a bad picture of Henry, taken from his high school yearbook.

With increasing horror, she read through the news story, based on the autopsy done by a South Dakota medical examiner. Henry had been crucified, castrated, and slashed nearly to pieces.

She barely heard the toilet flush, and the bathroom door open, and then Letty, behind her, blurt, “Oh, shit.”

Skye turned around, tears streaming down her face: “You didn’t tell me.”

“You were already screwed up. You didn’t need to know the details,” Letty said.

“I needed to know . . .” Skye said. “Could you . . . uh, I want to read everything I can find, but I don’t want you here to watch me. I’m gonna cry a lot. Could you go out and get some Cokes or something? I won’t be real long.”

“Sure. Half an hour?”

“That should be enough. I want to see what all the papers say.”

When Letty was gone, Skye went to Craigslist and dropped an ad: “Going to Juggalo Gathering near Hayward? I need ride, will pay $50.”

She listed the number for the burner phone, then dropped back to Google and typed in Henry’s name again. All the daily papers in South Dakota had the story, and a couple across the border in Wyoming and down in Nebraska. They were all the same, reprints of an AP story based on the
Rapid City Journal
’s initial report. She read them all anyway.

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.

P
ilate 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?”

•   •   •

PILATE, RALEIGH, AND RICHIE
piled into Chet’s car, and they went back to the gas station, where the story never did show up again. They waited so long that the guy behind the counter finally asked them what they were watching for, and Pilate told him that they thought they might have known the girl rescued by the cops, who was a Juggalo. The counter man pulled an iPad out from behind the cigarette rack, called up the TV station’s website, and let them look at the cached news story.

The reporter had heard from a sheriff’s deputy that the kidnapping victim had managed to conceal and turn on a cell phone, which the authorities had then tracked to the ambush point. The victim had told them that her kidnappers had been responsible for murdering a Chippewa Falls man who’d been found dead in a burning RV.

“You know what this fuckin’ means?” Pilate asked, back in the car again. “That bitch is gonna tell them what we look like. They’re gonna make those drawings of us, and plaster them all over the fuckin’ state.”

“We gotta get out of here,” said Richie. “Like way gone.”

“We gotta do something,” Pilate said, toying with one of his beard braids. “But they don’t know we’re at the Gathering. We put on some clown makeup, nobody’ll recognize us and we’ll be good for a while. Move the rest of that cocaine and we’ll have the bucks to get on up to the Michigan Gathering, that’s a long way from here. Put on the clown faces again, and by the time that’s over, nobody’ll remember us.”

“I don’t know—I think they’ll remember, at least around here,” Chet said.

“If I could get my hands on that bitch Skye, I’d skin her alive,” Pilate said. And, “Who’s got the Cheetos? Pass them up here.”

“What are we going to do about Bony?” Raleigh asked.

“Nothin’. He’s dead,” Pilate said. “He’s outa here. No point in doing anything.”

“It seems like—”

“Nothin’,” Pilate said. “Dead gotta take care of themselves.”

“I was thinking some kind of . . . words,” Raleigh said.

“Leave the thinking to me, dickwad,” Pilate said. Then he nodded. “But yeah. That’s a good idea. Words is good. I’ll talk tonight.”

That night they did almost half of the remaining cocaine, getting high with Bony, and Pilate said his Words.

“Bony was our friend. He was an outlaw. Y’all remember the time he got that .22 and went up Malibu Road shooting cats out the window of his car, and about fifty cops came and how he didn’t give a shit, he just turned right around and did it again? Remember how he rolled that guy’s antique Porsche down that boat ramp into the ocean? We were sitting up there laughing our asses off and the guy was down there crying tears about his fuckin’ Porsche?”

And so on.

They were up late that night and got up late the next morning, and the first thing Pilate saw when he climbed out of the new RV was an enormous fat man riding past in the back of a John Deere Gator.

He was shirtless, with black rings painted around his tiny pink nipples, and was wearing a black, white, and red clown face, and was throwing bottles of Faygo to bystanders. Another clown was driving the cart.

The Juggalos were coming in.

•   •   •

THE JUGGALO GATHERING
was on a run-down farm east of Hayward, off Highway 77. Roughly the size of a football field, the site had until recently been used to grow alfalfa. At one end, Juggalos were unloading cardboard boxes full of firewood from a flatbed trailer, to be used to construct a huge bonfire. At the other end, more Juggalos were setting up a stage, for music groups. Between them, but closer to the fire, a carny crew was setting up a low-rent Ferris wheel beside the Tilt-A-Whirl.

Designated parking areas were set up on both sides of the field, marked with red plastic tape stretched between poles; and rows of blue fiberglass porta-potties were set up on the far sides of both parking lots.

Pilate and his disciples had set themselves apart, in a circle at the far end of one of the parking areas—the end zone of the field, to the left and slightly behind the stage.

Skye got to the campground at ten o’clock. She’d ridden up with her friend Carl and two guys, named Siggy and Ivan, both Russians. The Russians had been cool guys, and had face paint that they were happy to pass around. Carl helped make up Skye’s face as a sad clown and she did his as a happy face, but when they got out of the car and collected their packs, Carl said, “We don’t look like Juggalos. We look like travelers with clown faces.”

Skye nodded. “Let’s see if we can find some guys and ditch the bags.”

“Get something to eat,” Carl said. “You got money?”

“Yeah. We’re good.”

There were already a couple of hundred people at the Gathering, with more coming in. A white TV truck rolled past them, toward the stage, and a fat guy in a John Deere Gator went by and tossed them bottles of Faygo.

Skye had never heard of it and gave hers to Carl as they made a quick loop around the field. As they walked, they passed through invisible clouds of marijuana smoke, like old autumn leaves being burned. Halfway around, they found a cluster of travelers, sitting under a tree. Skye knew two of the women, and trusted one of them, who was named Lucy, and who agreed to watch her pack while Skye scouted the field.

“Gotta need for weed,” Lucy said.

“Got ya covered,” Skye said. “We’ll spark up when I get back.”

“Then hurry back,” Lucy said.

•   •   •

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.”

•   •   •

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.”