Gathering Prey (4 page)

Letty heard some talk in the background, and then said, “Yes, it’s a hundred dollars.”

“Then do it. I’ll give you the money back, no problem,” Letty said. “Call and tell me when you’ll get here.”

“It’s the Jefferson Lines, I can get a ticket now. Wait a minute, let me ask this guy.” She was gone for a minute, and Letty could hear some talk in the background. Skye came back to the phone and said, “The bus leaves here at midnight and arrives in Minneapolis at noon tomorrow.”

“All right. All right, I’ll meet you at the bus station. Stay away from Pilot and stay away from that blonde.”

“I will. Oh, Jesus, what about Henry?”

“We’ll work that out. I’ll get my dad, and we’ll work that out.”

•   •   •

HER DAD WAS
Lucas Davenport.

Lucas was a tall man, dark-haired except for a streak of white threading across his temples and over his ears, dark-complected, heavy at the shoulders. He had blue eyes, a nose that had been broken a couple of times, and a scar that reached from his hairline down over one eye, not from some back-alley fight, but from a simple fishing accident. He had another scar high on his throat, where a young girl had once shot him with a piece-of-crap street gun. So his body was well lived in, and he’d just turned fifty, and didn’t like it. Some days, too many days lately, he felt old—too much bullshit, not enough progress in saving the world.

For his birthday, his wife, Weather, a surgeon, had bought him an elliptical machine: “You’ve been pounding the pavement for too long. Give your knees a break.”

He used it from time to time, but he really liked running on the street, especially after a rain. He liked running through the odors of the night, through the air off the Mississippi, through the neon flickering off the leftover puddles of rainwater. He needed to run when he was dealing with people like Ben Merion.

By the time he reached the last corner toward home, he’d worked through his grouchiness. He turned the corner and picked up the pace, not quite to a full-out sprint, but close enough for a fifty-year-old.

And through the sweat in his eyes, saw Letty standing under the porch light, hands in her jeans pockets: looking for him.

Letty had gotten herself laid: he and Weather agreed on that, although Weather called it “becoming sexually active.” Lucas was ninety percent sure that she hadn’t been sexually active in high school, aside from some squeezing and rubbing, though she’d been a popular girl. Once at Stanford, she’d apparently decided to let go.

Lucas deeply hoped that the sex had been decent and that the guy had been good for her, and kind. When he was college-aged, he hadn’t always been good for the women in his life, or kind, and he regretted it. He also knew that there was not much he could do about Letty’s sex life, for either good or bad. Keep his mouth shut and pray, that was about it. Trust her good instincts.

He turned up the driveway and called out, “Whatcha doing?”

“Waiting for you. Something’s come up,” Letty said.

He stopped short of the porch, bent over, his hands on his knees, gulping air. When he’d caught his breath, he stood up: “Tell me.”

•   •   •

WHEN SHE’D TOLD HIM,
he said, “Have you thought about the possibility that she’s nuts? Or that she’s working you?”

“Of course. I don’t think she’s crazy—I mean, I don’t think she’s delusional,” Letty said. “I have to admit that she talks about a guy being the devil, which doesn’t sound good, but when she does it . . . you almost have to hear it. She’s not talking literally: not a guy with horns and a tail. She’s talking about, what? A Charlie Manson type. A Manson family guy. He calls himself Pilot.”

“Pilot.”

“Yeah. Pilot. She flat out says he’s a killer,” Letty said. “She didn’t come up with that today, she said it weeks ago, when we first met in San Francisco, when there was no money in it. As far as working me goes, she tried to work me a little in San Francisco, because they weren’t making any money with their singing. Then she realized she didn’t have to work me, because I was going to buy them a McDonald’s anyway. She’s not dumb.”

Lucas sat on the porch next to her and said, “Okay. First of all, you know, she
is
crazy. Somehow, someway, because all street people are. Not necessarily schizophrenic, or clinically paranoid, but almost certainly sociopathic to some extent, because they can’t survive otherwise. If they’re too sane, their whole worldview breaks down, and they wind up in treatment or in a hospital or dead: dope or booze.”

“She’s not exactly street,” Letty said. “She’s a traveler. They’re kind of street, but they’re different. A lot of street people are . . . bums. Beggars. Travelers are different. For one thing, they travel. They’re usually pretty put together—they buy good outdoor gear, they stay neat, they try to stay clean. Lots of them have dogs that they take care of. They have objectives. They make plans. They know each other, they meet up.”

“More like hobos,” Lucas suggested.

“I don’t exactly know what a hobo is. Aren’t they on trains?”

“Yeah, but these travelers sound like hobos,” Lucas said. “They have a certain status.”

“Exactly,” Letty said. “Will you come with me, when I meet her? She’ll be in around noon.”

“Yeah, sure. I might have to push a meeting around, nothing important,” Lucas said.

“She said they had Henry’s heart in a Mason jar,” Letty said.

“Ah, the old heart-in-the-jar story,” Lucas said.

“That Pilot made a guy eat Henry’s penis . . . roast it and eat it.”

“Ah, the old roasted penis story . . .”

“What if it’s true?”

“It’s not,” Lucas said.

Lucas stood up and dusted off the seat of his running shorts. “There are certain kinds of stories that pop up around crazy people, especially street people. Apocryphal stories, urban legends. Slander: cannibals are the big crowd favorite. I’ve run into all kinds of stories like that—the most extreme ones you can think of, people eating babies or feeding babies to dogs, and so on. Exactly none of them have been true.”

“But . . .”

Lucas held up a finger: “There are cannibals out there, but there aren’t any true stories about them. Cannibals are quiet about what they do. When you hear cannibal stories, it’s
always
about somebody trying to get somebody else in trouble. And usually about roasting and eating somebody’s dick. Or somebody’s breasts. Sexual fantasies, made up to get somebody else in trouble.”

“All right. But—come with me tomorrow.”

•   •   •

LUCAS MOVED HIS MEETINGS
around and at noon the next day, he and Letty were in Minneapolis. The Jefferson Lines shared a terminal with Greyhound off Tenth Street, a relatively cheerful place compared to most bus stations, built under a parking garage.

They could see the green-glass top of the IDS tower peeking over the surrounding buildings as Lucas parked his Mercedes SUV on the street. He and Letty walked over to the station, where they were told that the bus was running forty-five minutes late. “Hasn’t even gotten to Burnsville yet. There was a big accident out on I-90. The driver’s trying to make up time, though, so they won’t be in Burnsville for more’n a couple minutes,” said the guy behind the Jefferson Lines desk.

They decided to kill the time by walking over to the downtown shopping strip, so Letty could check out new arrivals at the Barnes & Noble and Lucas could look at suits at Harry White’s.

The Harry White salesman was happy to see him, as always: “You’re running late in the season this year, but I snuck a suit off the rack, put it in the back, until I could show it to you. Italian, of course. It’s not quite as dark as charcoal, you couldn’t call it charcoal, but it’s a touch deeper than a medium gray, with a very fine almost yellow pinstripe, more beige, I’d say.”

Lucas was a clotheshorse, and always had been. He spent a half hour looking at suits, had a couple of them put back for further examination on the following Saturday, spent five minutes looking at ties, another five with shoes, checked out a black leather jacket—$2,450 and soft as pudding. He spent nothing, and walked across the street to Barnes & Noble, where he found Letty checking out with a Yoga tome and a book on compact concealed-carry firearms.

“You’re
not
going to start carrying a gun,” Lucas said.

“Of course not, but I want to stay informed,” Letty said. “We oughta go out to the range this weekend, if it doesn’t rain.”

“Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “It’s been a while.”

•   •   •

SKYE WAS THE LAST PERSON
off the bus. She was wearing the same outfit as in San Francisco, but smelled like soap. She and Letty shared a perfunctory hug, Letty introduced Lucas, and they waited until Skye’s bag was unloaded. Lucas said, “We got you a hotel room in St. Paul. We’ll drop your stuff there and grab something to eat, and figure out what we’re doing.”

“That’s great, but I really don’t think I can afford—”

“We got it,” Lucas said. “For two or three days, anyway.”

“Appreciate it,” Skye said. She’d learned not to decline kindnesses; they might not be offered a second time.

A half an hour later, they’d checked her into a Holiday Inn on the edge of St. Paul’s downtown area, and from there went to a quiet Bruegger’s Bagels bakery on Grand Avenue to talk. They all got baskets of bagels and Lucas and Letty got Diet Cokes and Skye a regular Coke—the calories thing again—and as they settled down at a corner table, Lucas said, “You’re worried about your friend.”

“One of Pilot’s disciples—one of the women he sleeps with—told me they cut out Henry’s heart and put it in a Mason jar and they take it out at night and worship it.”

Lucas stared at her for a moment, then asked, “Do you believe that?”

She held up her hands, palms toward Lucas, like a stop sign. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s all road bullshit. But I’m telling you, Mr. Davenport, this is not like that. We go back a way with Pilot, all the way back to Los Angeles, and there are stories about him. That he kills people, that they all join in, killing people. Not like some black Masses or something, that weird shit. They do it because they like it, and because it makes them feel important. I call him the devil because that’s what he wants people to think about him. He loves that. He loves that whole idea of being evil to people, and have people talking about him.”

Lucas leaned back and smiled, and offered, “He does sound pretty unlikable. You know his real name?”

“No. Everybody calls him Pilot. He has this tie-dyed sleeveless T-shirt that he wears all the time, it’s yellow with a big red
P
on it. The
P
is made to look like blood, and he tells people it
is
blood.”

“You think it is?” Letty asked.

“Looks like regular tie-dye to me, kind of faded out.” She turned back to Lucas: “Mr. Davenport, Pilot
is
full of shit. He’s a liar and he’s lazy and he’s crazy and he sells dope, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t do some of the stuff he says he does. I know for sure that they have all these food-stamp cards, and they sell them for money at these crooked stores in L.A. They’ve been running that scam for a couple of years. He talks about how the Fall is coming, and how the only way to survive will be to join up with the outlaws . . . and you gotta be willing to kill in cold blood. They’ve got guns, and everything.”

“The Fall?”

“Yeah, you know, when everything blows up and all the survivors wear camo and drive around in Jeeps.”

•   •   •

LUCAS AND LETTY
threw questions at her for fifteen minutes, and when they were done, they had character sketches of Pilot and four of his disciples, named Kristen, Linda, Bell, and Raleigh, no last names. “Raleigh plays a guitar and Pilot calls him Sledge, like a combination of Slash and Edge, and Kristen used a steel file to sharpen her teeth into points, and she’s like inked from head to toe,” Skye said, but she had few hard facts.

She knew that Pilot’s group traveled in a caravan of old cars, including at least one RV, and she thought they’d been hassled by the South Dakota highway patrol at some point, because Henry, before he disappeared, but after he spotted Pilot at the rally, said they never stopped talking about it. “They had all kind of drugs in their cars, and they almost got busted by a South Dakota highway patrolman, but they didn’t because the cop was on his way home for dinner.”

“That sounds real enough,” Letty said, glancing at Lucas.

In the end, Lucas said, “All right. You’ve got me interested. Let me take a look at the guy. I need to know Henry’s full name, and it would be good if we could get the license plate numbers on Pilot’s vehicles.”

“It’s Henry Mark Fuller and he’s from Johnson City, Texas. He went to Lyndon B. Johnson High School, but I think he dropped out in eleventh grade. I don’t know any license plate numbers.”

Lucas wrote Henry’s name in his notebook, and then said, “If you ever see any of Pilot’s people, take down the license plate numbers, if you have a chance. That can get us a lot of information. If you run into friends you trust, ask them to keep an eye out.”

“I will.”

“If Pilot was ever in serious trouble, where would I most likely find a police report?” Lucas asked.

Skye considered that for a moment, then said, “I heard that he was originally from Louisiana, somewhere, but he claimed that he was an actor in Los Angeles for a long time. I think Los Angeles. I don’t know where in Louisiana.”

Letty asked, “Will you see any more travelers here?”

“I think so. The St. Paul cops are mellower than the Minneapolis cops, so people come here and hang out in Swede Hollow. I’ve been there a couple times.”

“You can walk there from the hotel,” Lucas said. He said, “Check around, but don’t be too obvious about it. Don’t ask about Pilot, ask about Henry. Mostly just listen.”

“I can do that,” Skye said. “I’ve been asking about Henry everywhere.”

•   •   •

LETTY DIDN’T WANT
to end the interview there, so they all drove back to the house, where Letty borrowed the SUV to take Skye to a laundromat.