Gathering Prey (2 page)

“Even up,” Letty said. She peeled the band off her wrist, and Skye did it with hers, and they traded.

•   •   •

“IF THIS PILOT GUY
is such an asshole, why does Henry like him so much?” Letty asked.

Henry: “He’s a movie guy.”

Skye turned on him: “You know, I don’t usually think you’re stupid, but you’re stupid about Pilot. He tells you he was on TV and you believe him. If he’s on TV, why’s he driving around in a piece-of-shit Pontiac? That thing is fifteen years older than you are, Henry.”

“It’s a cool car, man.”

“It’s a piece of shit.” Skye turned back to Letty. “We made the mistake of hanging round with some of the disciples for a while. If you’re on the street, down in L.A., if you’re around the beaches, you’ll run into them.”

“If you hate him so much, why’d you hang with them?” Letty asked.

“They share,” Henry said.

Skye nodded. “They do. That’s one thing about them. They’ll feed you if you’re willing to listen to Pilot talk about the Fall. You get hungry enough, you’ll listen.”

“I would have been curious to meet him,” Letty said.

Skye said, “Not unless you’re crazier than you look. I’m not kiddin’ you: he is an evil motherfucker.”

•   •   •

THEY TALKED FOR
a few minutes more, then Letty checked the time on her cell phone. “I’ve got to go.”

“Where’s your home?” Skye asked.

“Still Minnesota.”

“Really? Maybe I’ll see you there. Henry and I are gonna hit the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, the bikers are usually good for something. Problem is, Pilot’s going there, too. To Sturgis, to sell dope. That’s what he told a friend of ours, anyway.”

Letty took a miniature legal pad out of her shoulder bag and scribbled a phone number on the page, with her first name only. “If you make it to Minneapolis, give me a call, I’ll buy you another cheeseburger,” she said. She took a fifty out of her purse, folded it to the same dimensions as the note, and pushed it across the table. “Emergency money.”

“Thanks. I mean really, thanks.” Skye took it and asked, “Do you really think you could kill somebody?”

Letty nodded: “I have.”

Skye cocked her head: “Really?”

“Really. Believe me, Skye, when it’s you or them, you tend to choose
them
. And not feel bad about it.”

Skye said, “If you say so. If we get there, I’ll call. In fact, I might come there just to get the sandwiches.”

“I’ll look for you,” Letty said, and she slid out of the booth and added, “Take it easy, Henry. And if you get in the shower with the devil, don’t pick up the soap.”

Skye laughed and Henry nodded, his mouth too full to reply. When Letty was gone, he swallowed and said, “Man, this turned out good. That killing stuff, though, I mean, what a bunch of bullshit.”

“I don’t think it was,” Skye said. After a moment, “You weren’t looking in her eyes.”

•   •   •

SKYE AND HENRY
spent June in San Francisco, then Eugene, and the Fourth of July in Seattle. Later that month they caught a ride to Spokane and made a little money before the cops started hassling them. They got lucky at a truck stop and a trucker hauled them all the way to Billings, Montana.

•   •   •

IN BILLINGS THEY TOOK
a big risk—or Henry did, but if there’d been trouble, they both would have gone to jail.

The trucker dropped them off on the edge of I-90, a few blocks before he’d have to turn off to his terminal. “They wouldn’t want to see me giving people a ride,” he told them, and they thanked him, and he went on his way. It was nearly ten o’clock at night, and they found themselves in an industrial area on the edge of town, with some farm fields and brushy areas mixed in.

Three hundred yards away, a dark building stood under a dozen orange security lights, which illuminated a bunch of farm equipment—tractors, trailers, combines, as well as a few bulldozers and graders. They went that way, walking along the frontage road, because it seemed to be more toward the center of town.

As they were walking along, a man pulled into the parking lot of the farm-equipment dealership, got out, locked his car—the car was small and swoopy and expensive-looking. The man went to a glass door on the side of the building, unlocked it, went inside.

They continued to walk along the frontage road, moving slowly in the dark, and were fifty yards away when the man came back out of the building. He’d left a light on inside and they could see he was now wearing shorts and a T-shirt. He took off running, or jogging, away from them, along the frontage road, moving fast.

Henry said, “Take my pack.”

“What?”

“Get off the road and take my pack. Get back in the weeds,” he said. “Wait for me.”

“What?”

He didn’t say anything else, but wrenched the walking stick off her pack and ran toward the building. Skye watched him cross the parking lot, crouch by the door, and a minute later, heard the distant sound of breaking glass. Henry disappeared inside, and a minute later, crawled back out and ran toward her.

As he came up, he said breathlessly, “C’mon—we got to go. We got to go.”

“What’d you get?”

“Got his billfold.”

“Oh, Jesus, Henry.”

They jogged until Henry got a stitch in his side, and then they walked for a while, swerving off the frontage road whenever a car came along, going down in the ditch, crouching, catching their breath, then running some more. They were a mile south when they heard sirens and saw the flashing lights of the cop cars back the way they’d come.

They kept going, another mile, and another, and then a cop car went by on the frontage road, as they lay in some weeds in the ditch. When the cop was gone, they ran some more, the best they could, nearly panicked, until after midnight, when Skye couldn’t go any farther. She told Henry, and they swerved off into a farm field, dark as pitch, and eventually stumbled into a copse of trees.

They spread out their bags, broke out a flashlight, and looked in the wallet.

Eight hundred forty dollars. They couldn’t believe it: more money than they’d ever had at one time.

“They’ll be coming for us,” Henry said. “They’ll be all over us. I never thought it’d be this big.”

“So we hide out,” Skye said. “Maybe right here. Tomorrow night, we start walking again.”

“Which way?”

She pointed back the way they’d come with the trucker. “There were some diners back there, some gas stations. We find some broken-ass guy with out-of-state plates, going through. Give him fifty dollars for gas.”

“And we’re gone,” Henry said.

•   •   •

THAT’S WHAT THEY DID.
They buried the stolen wallet in the field, and on the next night, found a ride that took them back through the city, and then south and east. On the fourth of August, a hot day, a trucker with an eagle feather in his hair dropped them off in Sturgis, South Dakota.

Right in the middle of the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally; thousands of bikers, mostly old guys with beards and full-sleeve tattoos and hefty old ladies who looked like they’d be more comfortable making Jell-O salads with little pink marshmallows.

And there were a few people like themselves.

Travelers.

They’d been there two days when Skye saw the devil, loafing through town in his black Pontiac with the gold firebird decal on the hood, the blonde still riding shotgun.

Henry saw him, too.

•   •   •

HENRY WAS WANDERING
through the Sturgis marketplace in the gathering dusk, looking at tattoos, thinking about getting one, something small and stylish; looking at chaps, the leather jackets, the Harley accessories. Henry was a traveler, but wouldn’t always be one. When his traveling days ended, he thought, maybe he’d get a Harley. Really, though, he liked the looks of another bike, might be Italian . . .

He was checking out a tall, muscular man dressed all in black leather and silver, with wraparound black shades and a harsh black goatee—Henry liked the look, but realistically, he wouldn’t get a goatee like that in this lifetime; he barely had blond fuzz—when a woman slipped in behind Henry and licked his ear.

He tensed and turned and there was Kristen, she of the filed teeth. She was wearing a leather bikini bottom and a strip of black duct tape across her breasts, little bumps where her nipples pushed against the tape, and black high-heeled boots. She had a silver ring through one wing of her nose, and a bead through her tongue. Her body was a riot of tattooed Wonder Woman comic art.

She said, “Well, well, well. Our Henry. Pilate’s been looking for you. He talked to the producer and he thinks they have a slot for you in the miniseries. Think you could do a cowboy?”

Henry didn’t know how to answer and didn’t know where to look. He backed a step away, blushing, but said, “Well, shoot, I grew up in Johnson City, Texas. I guess I could do a cowboy.”

“We’re out scouting locations, right now. You know what that is?”

“Yup, I do.” He’d once talked to a location scout in Pasadena, California.

“Well, fine. Me and Ellen are meeting up at the Conoco at eight o’clock. Be there. You got one chance. Okay?”

“Okay. I don’t know where Skye is . . .”

“We don’t want Skye. Skye is a pain in the ass. She’s so negative, you know what I mean? You bring Skye, Pilate will say forget it.”

Henry swallowed, scratched his nose, glanced over at the black leather guy, who winked at him. He turned back to Kristen and said, “I’ll be there.”

She stepped right up to him, pushing her breasts into his chest. He tried to step back again but she grabbed his package and squeezed, a little, and said, “Me’n Ellen are looking forward to it.” Then she turned and ambled off, her hips swinging off the pinpoints of the boot heels.

•   •   •

ELLEN LOOKED LIKE
either a mean schoolteacher or a mean prison guard, Henry thought, when he met them at the Conoco an hour later. He thought it was her hair: short, tightly curled, her ears sticking out like semaphore signals. He was having second thoughts about going off with them, but the idea of being in a movie: a
movie
. He’d be
somebody
.

Ellen was gassing up a Subaru station wagon when Henry wandered up, and Kristen came out of the Conoco carrying two grocery bags, heavy enough that the muscles stood out in her forearms. She’d changed into jeans in the cool of the evening, but still had the black duct tape across her breasts.

They got in the Subaru, Henry in the back, with his pack and the grocery sacks, the women in the front. Ellen started the car, and then Kristen, in the passenger seat, threw her arm around Ellen’s shoulder, and the two women kissed, a long, sloppy French kiss, with Kristen’s eyes cutting to Henry in the back, who looked away.

After ten seconds or so, Ellen turned away, put the car in gear, and they headed out through town, past the roaming bikers, country people in trucks, out of the built-up area, and into the hills.

“Where’re we going?” Henry asked, ten minutes out. There were no lights along the road they were on. Ellen said, “Got a camp out here. The movie’s set out in the wilderness. The thing is, you can’t have shit like road signs and telephone wires when you’re shooting a cowboy movie. You gotta get way out in the countryside.”

They drove along for another few minutes, then Henry asked Kristen a question that had been bothering him a bit: “Aren’t you a little . . . cold?”

“Mmm, yeah, you know. There’s a shirt right behind you, in the back, toss that to me, will you?”

Henry turned in his seat, looked over the back, saw the shirt, got it, and handed it to her. She ripped the tape between her breasts and peeled it off, then turned to Ellen and said, “What do you think?”

“We get back to camp, and I’ll suck them right off your body.”

“You wanna help?” Kristen asked Henry.

“Uh, I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know? What the fuck does that mean?”

“I think he’s queer,” Ellen said.

Kristen nodded. “Yeah, he looks queer.”

“Not queer,” Henry said, turning to look out at the night. He really wished he’d stayed with Skye.

“He’s queer,” Kristen said. She pulled on the shirt and buttoned it. “Maybe he could blow Raleigh.”

Henry shrank away into a corner of the seat. “Why don’t you guys let me out. I can walk back from here.”

“Oh, fuck that. Pilate wants to talk to you about the movie. We told him you were coming, and if we don’t bring you up here, he’ll kick our asses.”

The road had started out bad and had gotten worse, gone from gravel to rutted dirt. Ellen slowed, slowed some more, and Kristen said, “There’s the rock.”

An orange rock, looking like a pumpkin, sat on the edge of the road. Ellen took a right and started climbing a hill. The headlights no longer showed any road at all, although here and there, Henry could see tire tracks. They topped the hill and off to the left, and higher, he saw a sparkle of lights coming down through a stand of trees, and as they got closer, an oversized campfire.

“Here we be,” Kristen said. Ellen pushed the Subaru past a circle of cars, and the group’s RV, and stopped.

The two women got out, collected the grocery bags, and Henry, toting his pack, followed behind them, through some trees and between a couple of older cars, toward a campfire whose flames were reaching to head height.

He looked up and saw the entire Milky Way, right there, on top of him. He staggered a little, looking straight up as he walked. The stars looked like the lights of L.A., from up on top of the Santa Monica Mountains.

“Got him,” Ellen called, as they walked into the firelight.

Henry could see fifteen or twenty people sitting on camp chairs and stools around the fire, and then Pilate stood up and called, “Everybody say, ‘Yay,’ for Henry the traveler.”

The people around the campfire all shouted, “Yay,” and Pilate came over and wrapped his arm around Henry’s shoulders and said, “Glad you could come. Hey, Raleigh, come over here and say, ‘Hi.’ Bell, come over here . . .”

Three or four men came over, and wrapped up Henry, tighter, really tight, and he tried to laugh or smile and at the same time push them off, and then Pilate said, “Take him down, gentle,” and the whole mass of them collapsed on the ground, and somebody said, “Give me the tape,” and Henry tried to fight them then, but his arms were pinned, and he tried to bite, but there was a hand on his forehead, pushing him back, and then somebody rolled a strip of tape over his eyes and they turned him and rolled him and in the end, he was helpless, his hands taped behind him, his feet taped at the ankles, his legs at the knees, another strip around his mouth so he couldn’t scream.