It Came From Del Rio: Part One of the Bunnyhead Chronicles (27 page)

“It’s not his fault,” I said.

“Of course it’s not,” the agent said back, then smiled a little more. “It’s nobody’s fault. Oh, too, you do know that, by following a man-rabbit out here, you confirmed certain things for us, right?”

“You, too,” I told him.

“Clarify.”

“If I wasn’t on the right track, you wouldn’t be here.”

He laughed, riffled the photos back into their sleeve.

“Every track is the right track down here, Laurie Romo. It’s all connected.”

“Then what are you here for, instead of out there catching him?”

“You tell me.”

Like reciting, I said, “Either you want to warn me off, or you’re about to break regulation and tell me all the particulars of this bomb you’re chasing.” I thumbed out one of the pictures, held it up for him. “Let me read this, maybe.” It was the spiral that had been under Larkin.

The agent shrugged that he was impressed.

“We assumed you’d already read it.”

“You’re trying to get me to say I was there.”

He hissed a laugh through his teeth. “Say you had to make a prediction now,” he said. “Am I going to break regulation, pull an amateur with personal motivations into an international investigation with truly global implications, or am I going to tell you just to concern yourself with certain funeral arrangements, let the government do its job?”

“Can I turn around now?” I asked, my eyes in the rearview, my lips pursed so I wouldn’t say anything too smart.

The agent shrugged a sure. I wheeled the truck slow and wide from ditch to ditch, started heading back to the LTDs.

“Let me ... um, clarify if I can here,” I led off.

“Please do.”

“If I don’t back off, you turn these pictures over to the state authorities, and it’s bye-bye Laurie Dodd you crime-scene tamperer, justice obstructer, trespasser, all that?”

The LTDs were waiting for us about a quarter mile up.

“Well, twenty years ago, yeah, maybe,” the agent said. “Things these days, though, they’re a lot more ... oblique, you could say.”

To show what he meant, he nodded ahead of us. The rear passenger door of the front LTD was swinging open. The side I hadn’t been able to see. From it, falling into the empty road, Dave. They’d put the bunny ear headband on him.

“If, facing charges, you give a deposition about federal coercement,” the agent beside me said, shrugging as if this was just the way the world was, “some fringe newspaper might actually pick it up. If he goes on the record about conspiracies though, well
...”

I looked over at him, my foot on the brake now.

“That’s not playing very nice,” I said.

“Yeah, well, what we’re dealing with’s not very nice, Officer Romo,” the agent said, like that’s the name he wanted to stick, then stepped down while we were still rolling, jogged himself down to a fast walk, never looked back.

On the dash he’d left a shiny new pair of electrician’s pliers and a sealed blister pack of crimps. To fix my radio. The two LTDs backed out in tandem, turned around, disappeared. Federal choreography. I was officially impressed.

In their wake Dave stood up, peeled the ears from his head, and, when I eased the truck up for him, he shied away, started running for the pasture like bees were after him. He didn’t make it over the fence, though. And it wasn’t any better on the other side anyway.

I idled my truck and walked over, trying not to see the way he was shaking, then finally just told him the only thing I could that would bring him back: that I knew where another chupacabra was. That I’d seen it. Slowly, Dave looked up to me, to see if I was lying. I nodded that I wasn’t, then touched his shoulder, left my hand there.

An hour later we were heading east again, the FBI’s pliers in my glove compartment, my radio still dead.

“Misanthropes,” I said out loud, a few miles closer to Austin.

“Pirates,” Dave said back, unable not to grin.

And no, we didn’t have the rifle yet. That was still days away.

Three nights later, Hell Bunny debuted on the Bastrop six o’clock news. It was the beginning of the end.

I was sitting at a counter alone, waiting on a cheeseburger with jalapeños that were going to cost fifteen cents each. Dave was supposed to be in the bathroom taking a sink bath, but I knew he was back at the dumpster checking messages on his cell phone, maybe dictating some story into his voice mail. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me, I don’t think, but — since the FBI, he hadn’t been the same. Sitting behind the tinted windows of that federal LTD, it had broken something in him that I’d guess had been broken once already, years ago, and he’d only just been holding together.

He was seeing them everywhere now is what I’m saying. Suits, ties, sunglasses. Satellites. If you asked him, he’d tell you he hadn’t slept any since Ozona, but he had, his face pressed up against the side glass of my truck. What we were doing was coasting the back roads for chupacabra. Because the pigs had drawn it in once, Dave had a wooden call of some sort that he blew through my bullhorn.

If I hadn’t had a lightbar on top of my cab, we would have been hauled in, I know, and I wouldn’t be here now. But we’re not here to talk about what if.

For me, trolling 71 for chupacabra was just a holding pattern, until my dad surfaced again. My dad with the rabbit ears. Who was dead and gone, and now carrying a nuclear device. I’d tried to explain it to Dave but he’d just stared at my mouth, as if suddenly unsure, like he was checking to see if the way my lips were moving really matched the words he was hearing. He wasn’t used to people speaking his language, I don’t think, and didn’t trust it coming from someone else.

Maybe that’s what he was muttering into his voice mail back at the dumpster — a long suicide note to his mom, about how he was hitched up with this crazy girl who thought she had a zombie for a dad. That he never meant to get involved. That all he wanted was one more clear shot of a chupacabra, to make up for the chemotherapied dog he’d wasted a roll on outside Del Rio. He’d showed them to me along with the second set from Sealy.

“How —?” I’d asked, looking at the same set of pictures the FBI had.

Dave had smiled, shrugged. He’d been prepared for the FBI for a long time, he said. He always ordered double-prints on a separate ticket, then had them mailed to a post office box at the radio station, one not in his name.

Looking at the shadow of the rabbit on that cinderblock wall was when I’d tried to tell him about my real dad. It probably didn’t sound any better there than it will in court. Because things like that don’t happen.

If there was any other way to explain it, though, then please believe me, I would. And no, in spite of what my attorney says we could do, I’m not going to ride some insanity plea here. What I’m trying to do, really, is make it all not insane.

Which brings us back to Hell Bunny, I guess.

The clip was exactly nine seconds long.

In it, in slow motion, Hell Bunny lunges through the doors of a convenience store in Bastrop, grabs a spiral off the school supply endcap, then backs out, trying to hide his face from the clerk. His ears were taller than the sleeve of his jacket, though. And then it was over.

Beside me, Dave was just standing there, his face not wet from the sink. And yeah, if we had this footage for court, it would be more than a little bit helpful, I know.

As far as my attorney can find, though, it only ever ran once, fed into a live broadcast that’s itself already been recorded over. Apparently the next time the station tried to run it, they finally found it under some derelict coffee cup. It was a novelty one, designed never to spill in the car. Its magnetic base was perfect for some dashboards.

Dropped into the coffee, too, were about fifty dollars of hearing aid batteries, and a handful of lithium camera ones, too. Just to be sure. Evidently the coffee conducted their cumulative electricity, gave the magnet under them a bit more charge, enough to erase the tape from front to back.

Granted, for the electricity to reach the base there would have to have been a hole drilled somewhere, maybe even a wire in the plastic, but I’m sure whoever accidentally set that cup there was proficient enough with the principles of electromagnetism to know that. The only real question is whether that coffee drinker was wearing a headband that day or not. That he was smiling goes without saying.

They shouldn’t have even let it run at all, though. Because of it, I knew, next time, to take the spiral with me.

We weren’t the first ones to converge on that convenience store in Bastrop that night. The parking lot was full. We were the only ones to start walking the marshy pastures around it, though, our flashlight beams swimming with bugs.

The clerk who had been working the night of the big spiral theft didn’t know anything. He’d been in the bathroom. It was why they didn’t even find the footage until eight days after it happened. They were looking for a beer run or something, and chanced on a giant rabbit — just the kind of comedy segment the news always wants, as, in comparison, it makes them look more human, I suppose.

As for the trees around the convenience store, they were hopeless. We had no system, were just going on stupid luck, like always.

We gave up after an hour and-a-half. Dave was sure he’d seen a chupacabra — evidently he can tell their eyeshine from a raccoon’s — but he saw them every time I got more than about thirty feet from him, too, and it was going to take more than that for me to pull my truck out into the mud.

“Well?” I said to him, finally.

We were standing in a pool of our own light. Dave shrugged. There were more of the faithful out in the trees now, the convenience store’s battery rack empty.

“When’s the funeral?” Dave asked.

I watched a woman fall in the darkness, struggle up.

“When’s the next show?” I asked back.

Dave didn’t answer, just chewed his cheek.

“You know they’re just pretending?” he told me, about all the people who’d followed us out into the darkness.

I pretended I did know that, yeah. Because the FBI has that kind of manpower. But who knows.

I touched Dave’s shoulder to tell him it was time to go and we turned, started weaving our way back to the neon sign of the convenience store. Beside us and off about thirty yards, the woman I’d watched fall stumbled again, then came up screaming. All the lights gathered on her.

What she had was a dead something. It was bloody and stiff and smelled, but she wouldn’t let it go. Dave looked at it and then away, fast.