“Bet you had to trap a lot of coons to get into Stanford,” Skye said.
Letty smiled again, and said, “Well, my mom got murdered and the cop who was investigating, he and his wife adopted me. They’re my real mom and dad. It was like winning the lottery.”
Skye: “For real?”
“For real,” Letty said.
Skye said, “Huh. How about your real pop?”
“Never really knew him,” Letty said. “He’s a shadow way back there.”
“He never . . . messed with you, or anything?”
“No, nothing like that,” Letty said.
“Sorry about your mom,” Skye said.
“Yeah, thanks. She . . . couldn’t deal with it. With anything.”
Skye nodded. “My mom is like that. She didn’t get murdered or anything—as far as I know, she’s still living in her old trailer.”
“What about your dad?”
“He’s probably still around, too. Probably messing with my little sister, if she hasn’t taken off already.”
Letty didn’t ask the obvious question; the little sister comment made it unnecessary.
• • •
SKYE FELT THAT and bent the conversation in another direction. “What’s that little teeny watch you’re wearing?” she asked, poking a finger at the red band around Letty’s wrist.
“Ah, it’s one of those athlete things. Not a watch. Tells you how many steps you’ve taken in a day, and how high your heart rate got, and all of that.”
Skye held up a wrist. A piece of dark brown, elaborately braided leather was wrapped around it, and she said, “My bracelet doesn’t tell me anything.”
“Yours has more magic,” Letty said.
“Wanna trade?”
Letty’s eyebrows went up. “Are you serious? It isn’t important to you?”
“Nah. I buy the leather in craft shops, we go in and ask if they’ve got any scraps, and I make these up, then we sell them, when we can.”
“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.