Scot on the Rocks

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘What’s wro—?’ I started to say but, when I turned to face where they were both staring, my voice died in my throat. I think they were supposed to be irises, freesia and some kind of daisy, but what they actually were was a roiling mass of little fat yellow bugs, like popped blackhead middles, all squirming around, fighting for a place to latch on to the flower heads and chomp them to nothing, or taking off and flying around, then re-landing to try again. They’d already finished the roses in the bucket next door.

  ‘Get Todd out of here!’ Kathi said. ‘Go!’

  I wheeled round and charged back to the table. ‘Vamanos, papi,’ I said, clamping him by the elbow and dragging him to his feet.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said, standing on tiptoe to see over the heads of the gathering crowd.

  ‘Don’t look, baby boy,’ I said. ‘Just come with me. Vite, vite, vite, vite.’

  But my words didn’t work. Instead of running, he stopped dead. ‘Is it bugs?’ he said.

  ‘It’s bugs,’ I said, because I knew how important it was that I never ever lie to Todd about this.

  ‘Can they fly?’ he said.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I said, because I’m not a monster.

  Then we both fled for the door, the car park and the jeep, where Todd sat crying and swearing, slapping at himself to kill the imaginary insects he knew were crawling on him and stamping his feet to get the ones that he knew were swarming all over the floor. I thought about EMDR techniques – tapping and blinking and thinking about a beach – but the swearing seemed to be helping on its own. He sniffed hard and stopped sobbing. His attention seemed to have been caught by someone crossing the car park in front of us.

  ‘Lex,’ he said. ‘Call me crazy, but look at that guy and tell me he’s not familiar.’

  I followed where he was pointing and saw what, to me, looked like a pretty random bloke, dressed in an outfit that must have made it very easy for him to sort out loads of washing: to wit a black sweatshirt, black trackie bums and a black beanie.

  ‘He’s not carrying any groceries,’ Todd said.

  ‘Maybe he only needed a toothbrush,’ I countered.

  ‘And I think he’s headed to that truck,’ said Todd. ‘Look.’

  I followed the trajectory of the guy’s progress across the car park. He did indeed appear to be making for a large pickup with double back wheels, parked away in the far corner.

  ‘Tell me that truck’s not familiar too,’ Todd said, sitting bolt upright and grabbing me.

  ‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘But I only know Mini Coopers and VW bugs.’

  ‘I think that’s the guy,’ said Todd. ‘I think that’s the truck.’

  ‘I think it’s a bloke in a hoodie and a pickup,’ I said. ‘One of a thousand bloke–hoodie–pickup trios in a five-mile radius.’ But even as I said it, I saw something that convinced me. When the man in black got to the pickup in the corner, instead of opening the passenger door and climbing in, he hoisted himself up like a gymnast and shot, feet first, through the window.

  ‘Start the engine, Lexy,’ said Todd, his voice quivering with excitement; bugs – both real and imaginary – quite forgotten. ‘And follow that cab.’

  NINETEEN

  ‘For the seventeenth time,’ Todd said, ‘I know it’s not a cab. But have you no sense of drama or even rhythm? “Follow that doolie” is horrible dialogue, Lexy. “Follow that doolie” is like “Make him an offer he should think about quite seriously.” Or, “Put your lips together and yodel.” Change lanes! They’re changing lanes! Change lanes!’

  ‘I’m changing lanes!’ I said. ‘Jesus.’ We were on the main circular route round the north side of Cuento, the one that splits the grid streets off from the suburban lanes and circles, and the pickup with the lithe passenger was three cars ahead of us, doing a normal, sort-of legal, five over the speed limit. ‘Phone Kathi and tell her where we are,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll phone Noleen,’ said Todd, frowning and daring me to argue. I wasn’t planning to argue. I didn’t understand why it was scary to speak to someone a mile and a half behind us, who was near some insects, but then I didn’t have to understand. I just had to accept.

  ‘Because if she’s still in there someone in the background might describe them really loud,’ Todd said.

  ‘That would be bad dialogue,’ I pointed out, and got a grudging laugh out of him.

  ‘Nolly?’ he said, clicking her to speaker as the call went through.

  ‘Oh my God! Where are you? Are you OK? She phoned me! What the hell? Did they …? Are you OK, Todd?’ Every so often Noleen proves that the offhand reserve is a carapace and underneath she’s all love and smooshy hugs.

  ‘Did they what? Did they what?’ said Todd, right back to maximum panic again. ‘Did they get on me? Did any of them get in the jeep with us? Lexy, did they? Did they?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They were metres and metres away from us and we skedaddled. Nothing is in this car, Todd, except you and me. So, Kathi called you?’ I said into the phone. ‘Tell her we’re sorry we abandoned her, but she’ll understand when she finds out why.’

  ‘Yeah? Cos she’s not too happy right now. How did you manage to get her barred from the Lode for being a Nazi sympathizer? That’s not nothing.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Well, we’ll straighten that out. And you don’t shop at the Lode anyway. You said when you wanted potatoes you bought potatoes and you didn’t want a potato experience for an extra five bucks.’

  ‘It’s a long way from “Keep your lifestyle spuds, pal” to “By all means call me a Nazi”.’ She had a point. ‘So. Why?’

  ‘Because we’re following the pickup that stole Mama Cuento,’ said Todd. ‘Tah-dah!’

  ‘Following it where?’ Noleen said.

  ‘North out of town,’ I said, as it peeled off the circular on to the highway. I glanced at the petrol gauge and saw a comforting three quarters of a tank. ‘We’re getting on the highway, now. Hey, is Blaike there, or is he still at the Skweek?’

  ‘He finished his killer forty-minute shift at the folding table,’ Noleen said. ‘Making it a buck a minute, by the way. He’s napping.’

  ‘Again?’ I said. ‘Is he OK? Has he got narcolepsy or carbon-monoxide poisoning or something?’

  ‘He ate a box of Cinnabons,’ said Noleen. ‘And licked the frosting right off the cardboard. He’s probably just sleeping like a lion sleeps after eating a gazelle. But I can wake him up for you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But when and if he wakes up of his own accord, can you ask him why Mike might have thought Brandeee is a bit of an arsonist? And … what was the other thing, Todd?’

  ‘Was the fibreglass belly button a nipped-off outie or a gouged-out innie,’ said Todd. ‘And ask him what happened to it. Did he leave it behi—? Oh God, Lexy, we left the case file on the table at the Lode.’

  ‘Kathi has it,’ Noleen said. She went on, over Todd trying to interrupt her. ‘She’s going to check it over and give it a good ol’ dusting with insecticide then leave it overnight in a zipped baggie.’

  ‘Don’t tell me anymore!’ said Todd, and I killed the call.

  ‘Breathe,’ I said. ‘Tap your legs. Imagine your beach.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you it’s not a beach?’ said Todd. ‘It’s a café in Paris and I’ve just fallen into a chair to order a Perrier because I cannot carry these shopping bags any farther up the Champs-Élysées. I may have to call my driver.’

  ‘Did you even try a beach?’ I said. ‘Or a woodland glade?’

  ‘I can’t hear you over the Paris traffic.’

  I waited.

  ‘OK,’ he went on eventually. ‘Tell me what colour they were. Unless they were yellow.’

  This was the progress we had made. After an incident, once Todd had calmed down in his happy place, he asked one question he felt he could stand hearing the answer to. We thought it was foolproof.

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I said.

  It wasn
’t.

  ‘Oh God, they were yellow?’ Todd shrieked. ‘Really? They were yellow? Why didn’t you say they were grey?’

  ‘You want them to be grey?’ I asked him.

  ‘Of course not. That would be disgusting. Grey? I can’t imagine anything more gross.’

  If I had been a complete sociopath, I would have suggested grey and yellow stripes, but I’m not, so I didn’t.

  ‘Does it help that they were tiny?’ I said.

  ‘No! That means the car could be full of them. Stop torturing me. I need to google how to follow a car in case we pass Madding and the traffic thins out.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, slightly offended, because I was still three cars back in a different lane, and feeling pretty proud of myself. ‘You do that and I’ll do my thing. I need to think something through. You know that thing …?’

  ‘General, much?’ said Todd. It was a phrase I had long been meaning to add to our blacklist, but I didn’t know what to call it.

  ‘That thing when you know something and you don’t know you know it. Or you think you know two things but it’s one thing from two angles only you don’t know that? Or you think maybe you need to move something you know to a different bit of your brain where it’s going to fit better like unwrapping the loo roll so they can go in a drawer one deep.’

  ‘Or,’ said Todd, ‘you keep following that car and I’ll google how to not get lost, caught or shot.’

  Shot. I still forget sometimes that that’s an option.

  ‘Deal,’ I said. ‘Not shot is my absolute favourite. Like I said about Earl with the ears, I don’t think things should ever be able to hit you and go straight through.’

  They do say there’s a YouTube video for everything. In less than a minute, Todd was reading off his screen. ‘“Learn habits ahead of time.” Well, that’s not helpful. “Equip yourself with long-distance lenses, featuring night-vision capacity.” This is bullshit. Wait, wait: “Don’t follow too close behind.”’ He looked up. ‘Good. What else? “Overtake and follow from the front, using your mirrors. Great! Overtake, Lexy.’

  ‘We’re on a highway, Todd,’ I reminded him. ‘If I’m in front and they go off at a junction, I’m not going to be able to do a U-ey and catch back up.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’ Todd said. ‘The median’s grass and we’re in a jeep.’

  ‘I’m not driving over the central reservation!’ I said.

  ‘It’s my jeep!’

  ‘It’s my green card that’ll get ripped up and stamped under the long leather boot of the Highway Patrol guy, in his tight britches,’ I said, possibly getting slightly off the point as I imagined the scene.

  ‘But they’re not in their short-sleeved shirts in February, which is a real shame,’ said Todd, always willing to get sidetracked with me. ‘Otherwise, take me in, officer. Punish me.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said. ‘You always go too far. Anyway, even if I bumped over the grass and went back, and they didn’t see me do it, I’d have to break the speed limit to catch them and we’d get clocked.’

  ‘Speeding isn’t a crime of moral turpitude,’ said Todd. ‘You wouldn’t lose residency for that.’

  ‘Clocked!’ I said. ‘Seen, spotted – by the people we’re following. Learn English!’

  ‘Learn how to follow someone without being caught!’ Todd shot back. ‘Because I don’t think they’re going to Madding, do you?’

  We had passed four of the five exits that led into the Beteo county seat and the pickup ahead showed no signs of slowing and heading for the inside lane. I knew that once we were on the road north there would be no cover. There was literally nothing up there but Canada. Well, there was Oregon and Washington State and even inside California there were towns big enough to have a tractor dealership and a choice of burgers, but there was nothing that caused any Friday-night traffic. San Francisco was one way, Tahoe another, Napa a third. We were headed in the fourth direction, just the pickup full of statue nabbers, Todd and me.

  I fell right back until the truck lights were a pair of distant twinkles. There was nowhere for them to go anyway. No exits for mile after mile after rice-paddied, tumble-weeded mile.

  ‘So, will they have to shut the Lode down, do you reckon?’ said Todd, coming back to it like a diva to a diss, helpless not to. ‘It wasn’t the food that was infested with killer … don’t tell me! Do you think they’ll be shut down by the health inspectors when it was only flowers?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Although, flowers …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Big business,’ I said. ‘Especially this time of year, between Valentine’s, Easter and Mother’s Day. And then the weddings start up. If …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m going to make a call now,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want you to listen to it. OK? Put your earbuds in and crank up the sounds.’

  ‘Why?’ said Todd.

  ‘Because I want to talk plainly and I don’t want you to get upset,’ I said. ‘It’s about what Mike said, remember? A break-in at the botany department? And now a stramash at a flower stand and there was dead Barbra and someone else said something flower-related or at least flower-adjacent … if only I could remember.’

  ‘No, Mike won’t mind you calling her up and saying that at all,’ said Todd. ‘That’s not so vague it’s infuriating. Not a bit.’ He was scrolling through his playlist, jamming his buds in deep. ‘Ahhhhhh. Paulo Londra!’ he said, and sat back with his eyes closed and his head bobbing.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ I said softly. Then to double-check: ‘Todd, you’re nearer forty than thirty. Why are you pretending to like rap music?’ There was no response. So I placed the call.

  It took some persuasion to get the despatcher to put me through to Mike and I had to dangle the possibility of information on Mama Cuento before she sighed fit to blow down a brick house and hit the buttons.

  ‘Hiya,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, great. It’s the karate kid,’ said Mike. ‘“Hi-yah”, Lexy.’

  I ignored her. ‘Look, you know this break-in in the botany department?’

  ‘Don’t ever tell me I’m not a kind-hearted person,’ Mike said.

  ‘When Officer …’ I realized I had no idea of Mills of God’s real name. ‘When the officer said that a lot of valuable peonies had been stolen, he seemed not too sure of his information. So, I was wondering, was it maybe freesias, irises and daisies instead? Because we were just in the Lode—’

  ‘Oh, were you?’ said Mike. ‘You saw what went down?’

  ‘And I was thinking a university botany department studies diseased and infected things, right? Not pretty posies. And those flowers certainly looked like they were in trouble.’

  ‘It wasn’t peonies,’ Mike said. ‘So you saw it all, did you?’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t the botany department at all,’ Mike said. ‘It was the entomology department. Only I didn’t want to say that in front of Dr Kroger.’

  ‘That was nice of you,’ I said.

  ‘Because if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a screaming queen who’s literally screaming,’ Mike said.

  ‘Well, OK, that’s not quite such an explosion in the human-kindness dairy, but still, it saved Todd a lot of anguish. And so the peonies were … what? Growing in the lab for beasties to eat?’

  ‘It wasn’t peonies that were stolen,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you listening? It was peach potato aphids. Thousands and thousands of the little boogers, in tanks.’

  ‘Peach potato aphids,’ I said. ‘So nothing to do with flowers at all then? Just peaches and potatoes?’

  ‘Let me enlighten you to the contrary,’ Mike said. ‘The dude in charge of the greenhouse that got looted would not stop talking. The peach potato aphid, Lexy, is one of the insect kingdom’s great generalists. Like a tiny raccoon.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And when you say “boogers”, is that a descriptive term?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re creepy li
ttle dudes. Kinda yellow and gross-looking.’

  ‘I think they ended up in the Lode,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, we know some of them ended up in the Lode,’ said Mike. ‘And some in Safeway, some in Costco, some in Winco … Any market in the city limits that sells flowers is selling flowers with added protein tonight. One of my officers is out picking up the CCTV now, and that’s my Friday, unless we get a murder – watching the feed for the weirdest bioterrorists ever.’

  ‘Did they leave notes?’

  ‘In this instance, they did not.’

  ‘Do you think they’re dangerous?’ I asked.

  ‘If you’re a carnation,’ said Mike.

  ‘So it’s not a do-not-approach-or-attempt-to-subdue type situation?’ I said. I was totally ready to tell her what we were up to and hand it over to the long arm of the law, depending on what she said next.

  ‘Uh, no,’ was what she said, and in a mighty sarcastic tone too. ‘We won’t be calling in the SWAT teams over the great peach potato aphid resettlement plan.’

  Which I took as permission to carry on following the truck and not troubling the busy detective with the fact that I was doing so.

  I hung up, tapped Todd on his shoulder, and then winced and swerved as he unplugged his buds from his phone instead of his ears and filled the car with a sudden deafening blast of Argentinian street music.

  ‘Jesus, Lexy,’ he said. ‘Could you try to be a bit more conspicuous to our mark, maybe? You didn’t manage to swerve across all the lanes and on to the shoulder there.’

  I said nothing, which was a triumph of self-restraint.

  ‘What did you want to talk to Mike about?’

  ‘Not important,’ I said. ‘Where do you think we’re going?’

  ‘How could I possibly hazard a guess when I don’t have the information about what just happened at the Lode?’

  ‘The information would cause you distress,’ I said. ‘But let’s say it was the work of the same gang that stole the statue. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise.’