“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?”

“I saw her coming over here—”

He was so fast. She never saw the fist coming and it hit her like a meteor, below her right eye, to the right of her nose. She went down, dazed, and Pilate kicked her in the ribs and she felt a knifelike pain and he tried to kick her again but she managed to push away and caught the blow on her arm and rolled and tried to get up but he kicked at her again and she couldn’t see very well and then somebody screamed, “Hey-Hey-Hey quit that shit, quit that shit . . .”

Pilate shouted, “She tried to stick me with a knife . . .”

And the other person shouted, “Quit that shit, quit that shit . . .”

Pilate shouted back, “Fuck it, get the fuck out of here.”

He picked up one of the fire logs and waved it in the face of the fat Juggalo in the John Deere, who threw a bottle of Faygo at Pilate’s face and at the same time screamed, “Help a Juggalo!”

A group of Juggalos turned and broke off from the dance crowd and started toward them and Pilate went away.

Letty was on her hands and knees, the pain rippling up her side, and she thought that maybe Pilate had hit her harder than she thought, but she got to her knees. The rap music was so loud she could barely hear anything, but she did hear the fat man shout, “Get in here,” and he pulled her into the back of the John Deere and shouted, “Roll it,” to the driver and they rolled away down the field and Letty shouted, “Wait, wait.”

The fat man shouted to the driver, “Keep going,” and took her to the middle of the field, where the crowd was thinnest, and told the driver to stop, and said, “Babe, you got a bloody nose, your nose is really . . .” Then he turned to the driver and said, “Dave, we got to get her to the med tent.”

They started driving again and after a dozen bumps that sent pain screaming up Letty’s rib cage, they got to a med tent where a Juggalo in full makeup, but with a fingerwide Red Cross on his forehead, said, “That’s gotta hurt. Let me get you a gauze pad.”

He pressed the pad to Letty’s nose, and he said, “Might help to tilt your head back,” and she did that, and said, “I gotta go back there.”

“That’s not the brightest idea I’ve heard tonight,” the fat man said.

“They might’ve hurt a friend of mine,” Letty said.

The fat man wouldn’t move until she’d thrown away the first gauze pad, now soaked with blood, and the medic had given her another. “Should stop now,” the medic said. “Where else did you get hit?”

“Kicked me in the side . . .”

The medic asked her to lift her arms above her head, but when she did, the pain shot through her, and she jerked her arms back down and leaned forward to groan.

“You got some busted ribs,” the medic said. “You need to get into town, go to the hospital.”

“Gotta go find my friend,” Letty said. The second nose pad was now soaked with blood, and the medic gave her a whole pack of them. “Keep pressing them against the side of your nose.”

“Gotta find my friend . . .”

“Dave and me’ll give you a ride down there,” the fat man said. And, “My name is Randy. I’m your friendly fat guy.”

•   •   •

WHEN LETTY WAS taken out of Pilate’s circle, a number of Juggalos stood around looking at them, and one of them, maybe drunk, asked, “What’d you hit the chick for, asshole?”

“Caught her fuckin’ around on me,” Pilate improvised. He turned away—no place to get in a real fight, not with Juggalos, they’d swarm you—and he said to Kristen, “Keep moving, we gotta get out of here. Too many people here. The cops could be coming.”

They started moving and Bell slipped off into the stand of trees where they’d left Skye, half buried in brush. He gathered up as many downed tree limbs as he could easily find, threw them on top of her, broke a few more off the evergreens and added those. When he was done, he thought Skye’s grave looked like an ordinary pile of brush. Somebody might find her eventually, but not until they were long gone. He hurried back to the circle, where they were throwing stuff in his car.

Pilate pulled Raleigh aside; Raleigh was in full Juggalo dress. “You got Colorado license plates, so nobody will be looking at you. I want you to hang out here, see what happens. Stay all the way to the end. Anything too weird happens, call me.”

“Got it.”

Pilate said, “You can have Linda to ride with you.”

Raleigh gave him a thumbs-up: “Most excellent. I will pound her like a fuckin’ big bass drum.”

Pilate patted him on the cheek, then pulled the others together for one last-minute pep talk: “This isn’t working out as well as we thought. That fuckin’ Skye might have fucked us up—we don’t know what she told the cops after Bony got killed. Let’s meet up next week at the Gathering in Sault Ste. Marie. Kristen’s dividing up the money, giving some to everybody. Save as much as you can. We can’t go in a convoy, because Skye probably told them that’s how we travel, and that we’re from California, and we’ve all got California plates. So when we head out, split up. Everybody go their own way. Go to town and get maps, and, you know . . . stay out of sight. See you at the Gathering next week. Remember, we rule.”

Everybody muttered, “We rule,” and a minute later Pilate rolled out in his Pontiac, followed by the RV, and then the others.

•   •   •

THE FAT MAN and his driver took Letty to where Pilate had been, but when they got back behind the stage, the circle of cars was gone.

She unconsciously grabbed the hair above her ears and squeezed her fingers tight: “Oh my God, I let them go . . .”

She stood up in the back of the cart, turned and looked down the length of the parking area, hoping to catch sight of the convoy before it got out to the highway. If she could get a tag number, any tag number . . . She saw taillights of cars turning onto the highway, but they were too far away to read any tag numbers and even if she had been able to see them, she couldn’t be sure they were the right cars.