Gathering Prey (12 page)

“He doesn’t have to—”

“He thinks he does,” Weather said.

When Letty got off the phone, something in her spine relaxed. Lucas was on the way up: that was a good thing. A Juggalo went by, looking for volunteers: “We’re putting up the fire and we need somebody to help. Could you help?”

She was doing nothing else, so she went to help. The Juggalos were building a fire stack out of cardboard boxes stuffed with stove-length pine logs. From the fire site, Letty could keep an eye on the travelers, and Skye’s backpack.

•   •   •

LUCAS WAS BOTH
furious and frightened. Letty thought she was tougher than she actually was, and she didn’t know enough about crazy. He changed clothes, got his gun, climbed into the Porsche and took off. He drove the route so many times during the year that he could almost do it with his eyes closed. He stopped once to pee and stuff the footwell cooler with Diet Cokes, and flew on into the evening.

•   •   •

SKYE GOT BACK
to the campground just after dark, looked for Letty, didn’t see her in the milling mass of bodies. When she’d left that morning, there might have been dozens of people. Now there were hundreds, and at the far end of the field, a moderately good rap group was performing, the music pounding over the heads of the crowd. The organizers had strung long lines of Christmas lights down the length of the field, on both sides. A dozen campfires were going on the edges of the field, and the smell of roasting meat mixed with the odor of marijuana.

Lucy was lying on her sleeping bag, staring at the stars. Skye crouched next to her and asked, “That chick show up? Letty?”

“Who? Oh . . . yeah. Just for a minute.”

At that moment, Letty walked up: “Skye.”

And Skye looked up and said, “Ah, shit.”

Letty: “What are you doing? Are you looking for Pilate? And if you find him, then what?”

“I’ll figure that out when I find him,” Skye said. She didn’t look toward Pilate’s encampment. She squared off with Letty, and added, “Letty, I owe you, I appreciate the help, but you’re not my mom.”

“I know I’m not your mom, but if you try to go up against Pilate and those guys who had you . . . I mean, Skye, that’s crazy,” Letty said. “You can’t do that. You’ll get hurt. My dad’s coming up here. If you can spot Pilate, he’ll bring in the cops—”

“Yeah, yeah, and then what’ll happen? There’ll be some kind of bullshit legal stuff and Pilate will blame everybody else and he’ll walk. You watch, you’ll see. He’s the devil.”

“He’s just an asshole,” Letty began. “My dad’s handled a lot worse than him.”

“There
is
no worse than him,” Skye said. “That’s what nobody gets.”

She turned and looked out at the growing crowd and then asked, “You bring your car? Could you lock up my pack?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m just down the field.”

Skye picked up her pack, said, “Thanks,” to Lucy, and to Letty, “Let’s go. This stuff is too good to get ripped off.”

They dropped the pack at the car and Letty asked, “So you’ll wait for Dad?”

Skye shrugged. “Might as well. What are they doing over there? Building a teepee?”

“Fire stack. They’re going to torch it off at midnight,” Letty said.

“Jeez, you’ll be able to see that from outer space,” Skye said.

“Not done yet. Once they get it built up to the point, they start another ring of boxes and build that up. They got a lot of boxes left. I was over helping to build it.”

“Then let’s go help . . . at least until your dad gets here.”

•   •   •

THEY WORKED STACKING
fire boxes for ten minutes, then Letty turned away, caught up in the construction, and when she turned back, Skye was gone. She looked around, like a mother for a lost child, then stepped outside the ring of workers, still didn’t see her. Stepped farther outside and looked down the field, and caught a flash of Skye’s face, forty yards away, looking back at her. Their eyes touched, then Skye juked and disappeared into the crowd.

“Goddamnit.” Letty jogged after her. When she got to where Skye had been, she couldn’t see her. She wandered through the crowd, turning, but the lights, the painted faces, were like something out of a nightmare. The Juggalos were dancing to the rap music now, long chains of them . . .

•   •   •

THE DISCIPLES HAD BUILT
a fire in the middle of their camp circle. They were all sitting around or lying around, talking, smoking, but nobody was singing “Kumbaya.” Most of them were wearing clown faces, including Pilate: Laine had painted a half dozen faces on him, wiping them away and redoing the work, until he was satisfied. The white paint was fluorescent, and she’d outlined his face with it, and put a dab on the tip of his nose. He was wearing a Catholic priest’s black clerical suit, including the white collar, which, he thought, made a proper Juggalo statement.

Raleigh, Bell, and Chet were also in costume, and were moving the last of the cocaine. They’d already figured out that there wasn’t much around, and they stepped on it again with dry baby formula, and still got premium prices. They wouldn’t get rich, but they’d have enough cash to get back to L.A.

•   •   •

SKYE SAW A PRIEST
with a clown face, but didn’t recognize him as Pilate because of the costume and face paint. She stood in a clump of trees behind the circle of cars, in the dark, waiting for him, handling the knife, calm, quiet as a hunting cat. Thinking about Henry. About Henry’s baby face, and how he’d always go off somewhere to pee, so Skye couldn’t see him, even though they’d been together for months.

At eight, a decent rap band broke out on the stage, and the crowd got tighter; several people in Pilate’s campground moved out toward the stage, and the new band set off a series of powerful strobes that flashed red, white, and blue at the crowd.

From her stand in the clump of trees, Skye saw the clown-face priest amble off toward the bonfire structure. She fumbled a joint out of her breast pocket, lit it, and with most of the disciples gone, she went looking for Pilate, moving into the circle where three remaining disciples were sprawled on blankets.

She said, “Dudes.”

One of them said, “Whatcha got there?”

“This shit from Oregon.” She lifted her chin and blew a smoke ring.

“Pass it?” asked one of the disciples, a woman in a phosphorescent green Hulk mask. Skye passed it and the woman took a hit and handed it down to one of the guys on the ground. They were standing behind the fire ring, and Skye asked, “Anybody seen Pilate?”

“Think he’s out at the show,” said one of the men.

“Naw, he went down to the fire thing,” said the other man.

The woman pointed down to the end of the field and said, “That’s Pilate, you can just see him, the guy in the dark suit, he’s dressed like a priest.”

Skye turned to look, and the woman stooped and picked up one of the logs next to the fire ring and hit Skye in the back of the head. Skye dropped as though she’d been hit by an ax and the woman said, “C’mon, we got to hide her.” She stooped and got Skye by the wrists and started dragging her between a car and the RV.

“What the fuck are you doing?” a man asked. He was on his hands and knees, looking out at the Gathering grounds. “There are people all over the place.” He looked at Skye and said, “Shit, she looks like she’s dead.”

“Not yet,” the woman said. “This is that Skye chick. She didn’t recognize me, but I recognized her and her voice. She was looking for Pilate. I bet she’s got a gun.”

Skye was on her side, her breathing rough, bubbly. The woman patted her down, found the REI knife in her leg pocket. “Gonna cut him,” she said. “Gonna kill him. Richie: go get Pilate.”

Richie got unsteadily to his feet, but started down toward the bonfire, found some momentum, and went off at a trot. The woman said to the other man, “Let’s get her over in those trees across the road. Pick her up, put your arms under her armpits, like she’s drunk and you’re trying to help her out.”

“Jesus, she’s hurt bad,” the guy said. Skye’s head swung around, loose.

“Not as bad as she’s gonna be, if I know Pilate,” the woman said. She looked out at the field: “Nobody’s watching. Let’s go.”

•   •   •

LETTY WAS AT THE BACK
of the music crowd, twenty-five yards from the stage, turning, looking for Skye. A priest in a clown face went by, and a moment later, somebody called, “Pilate! Pilate!”

Pilate turned, stepped around Letty, and called back, “What?”

“Gotta come back, man.” He poked his thumb back over his shoulder, back toward the ring of cars.

“What?”

“Just . . . you gotta come, man, like right now.”

Pilate could see he didn’t want to say why, but could feel the urgency in his voice. He nodded and started after him.

So did Letty.

•   •   •

SHE LET THEM
get twenty yards ahead, then took out her cell phone, called Lucas, and asked, “Where are you?”

“I’m half an hour out. Where are you?”

“I’m at the Gathering. I found Pilate.”

“What? Get the fuck away from there. Letty—”

“He doesn’t know I found him,” Letty said. “I heard somebody call him that. I mean, how many can there be?”

“
Stay away from him.
I’m coming. I called Stern, he’s talking to the sheriff up there, about getting some people together. We’re hooking up in Hayward, we’re coming out in a convoy. You see any cops there now?”

“I saw a guy who I thought was a cop, but there aren’t any uniforms or squad cars around . . . I could look for that guy.” She was on her tiptoes, trying to follow Pilate as he pushed through the swirling crowd.

“If you can find a cop, it’ll probably be a sheriff’s deputy. Tell him we’re coming. He’ll have a radio, have him get in touch with the sheriff. And stay the hell away from those people.”

•   •   •

LETTY RANG OFF.
Pilate and the man who’d come for him were now thirty or forty yards away and headed behind the stage, and she jogged in that direction. Somebody yelled, “Show your tits,” but not at her, though it was about the two hundredth time she’d heard it that day, and from the round of applause, she suspected that whoever yelled had gotten his wish.

She lost track of Pilate and the second man in the scrum around the stage, where the rap was getting better and hotter; the enormous fat man in the John Deere went by again, wearing a shirt now, still passing out bottles of Faygo. Somebody ran past and shouted, “Fart-lighting contest . . . Follow me!”

Letty stayed on track; the urgency of the man’s call to Pilate suggested that they’d go wherever they were going in a straight line. From one of the parking lots, looking over the hoods of parked cars, she saw them again, at the far end of the parking area. The priest and five or six other people were walking past a circle of cars into a stand of trees. There was some light from the stage, and various other sources, including headlights of cars coming and going, but the strobes broke everything up, and she couldn’t get close enough to see what Pilate and the disciples were actually doing, until they seemed to break into an odd dance.

She muttered to herself, “What the heck?” and edged closer, but worried about breaking out of the parking lot. The dancing stopped and they drifted out of the trees, back toward their cars, where they stood around talking.

Letty watched for another five minutes.

Then, afraid they could spot her if she stood in one spot too long, she faded back into the cars and looked around for a cop, or a cop car. She didn’t see one immediately. Where was Skye? Had she found Pilate? Did they have her?

Her phone rang, and she looked at the screen: Lucas.

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Where are you?”

“Uh, in a parking area . . . When you come into the field, I’m in the parking area that’s to the left of the entrance.”

“Are you leaving? Are you getting out?”

“Not yet. I think Skye . . . I don’t know, I think Skye was looking for Pilate. I don’t know if she found him, but I can’t find her.”

“Don’t look! Don’t look! Get out of there!”

“Okay, I’m backing off. When you come in, Pilate’s in a circle of cars at the far end of the field, off to the left of the stage and a little behind it. I can’t see him now, I’m too far away.”

“Get out of there!”

•   •   •

HAD SKYE GONE BACK
to the other travelers? It was possible, Letty thought—and they were directly across the field from where she was. She looked back toward the circle of cars. Pilate’s people were talking, Pilate was gesturing, and a fire was burning hot in the middle of the circle. Looked like they’d be there for a while. Even if they broke up, and moved into the crowd, she’d seen only one person with a priest costume, so finding him again shouldn’t be too hard.

She looked toward the spot where the Juggalos had been, and decided she had time to run across the field. She did that, jogging past a group of people with a circular blanket; they were using it to throw a half-naked woman up in the air, the woman laughing, kicking and screaming as she went up. There were only two travelers where Skye’s friends had been. No sign of Skye.

Lucy was there: “Where’s Skye? Did she come back?” Letty asked.

The girl shook her head. “Didn’t see her after you guys left.”

Letty turned and looked back toward the circle of cars. She couldn’t see it from where she was, thought about it for a moment, jogged back that way, detoured around the growing crowd at the stage, pushed past a couple of drunks, one of whom grabbed her ass. She slapped him away and kept going, out to the side of the crowd, and then back toward the circle of cars.

The priest was there, pointing his finger at his various disciples, snapping out orders. The disciples were scrambling around, dragging stuff into cars and the RV. Getting ready to move. Fire still going hard.

Letty pushed past the last of the dancing Juggalos—not so much dancing, she thought, as bouncing up and down in place—and walked up to Pilate, who saw her coming, tipped his painted face toward her.

“Where’s Skye?” Letty asked.

“What?”