Scot on the Rocks

by Catriona McPherson

  ‘And you forgot the worst thing they did,’ Todd said. ‘Kidnapped a real live woman and ripped off one of her fake nails to send back to her husband.’

  ‘Did they though?’ I asked him. ‘I still think it’s more likely that Bran did that to get the cops’ attention. Or Brandeee herself did it to kick dust over the fact that she left of her own accord. I don’t think the disappearance of the woman and the disappearance of the statues are related, necessarily.’

  ‘Except you forgot one crucial fact,’ said Todd. ‘The belly button got sent to Blaike, her son.’

  ‘My God, so I did,’ I said. ‘So it did. And the toe, in contrast, just got put back at the scene with the floral tributes.’

  ‘Where it might not have been found till they’d all withered and the city was clearing it up for composting,’ Todd said. He waited for a response. ‘Lexy? Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. I’m trying to think … what that … compost … But it won’t come. What happened to the chainsawed nose? Did that get placed at the scene of the statue heist or did it get sent to someone, like with Blaike?’

  Todd was already dialling. As he waited for Noleen to answer, he took the chance to give me some advance instruction in how to keep following a car on an empty road. ‘You know what you could do? You could peel off at the next exit, and go up the ramp and over, then back on again. In case they think we’re following them. They’ll see you leave and then they’ll see another car come on. They won’t think it’s the same one. Especially if you put full beams on when you rejoin. You’re dipped now, right?’

  ‘That’s actually a great idea,’ I said. ‘But what if we go off and then on again, and they do see us at it? They’ll get suspicious.’

  ‘No they won’t. They’ll think you’re buzzed or lost or something.’

  ‘And what if we come back on and they’ve disappeared?’

  ‘The exits are a day’s ride apart up here,’ said Todd. ‘They’re like Spanish missions. OK? Deal? Next exit, we go off, disguise our lights and come back.’

  ‘What if they’re driving to Alaska?’ I said. ‘We’ll run out of petrol.’

  ‘Honey, nobody drives to Alaska. I don’t think there’s even a road.’

  ‘Of course there’s a road!’ I said. ‘And, as for what nobody does, we’re talking about people who cut off bits of statues and mail them—’

  Todd held up a finger as Noleen finally answered her phone.

  ‘An outie,’ she said, on speaker. ‘He found it in his boathouse locker – can you believe they have these kids row on a river, in Idaho, in February? – and handed it right over to the cops, right there in downtown Hicksville. Said he knew there was no point handing it to the school because they’d smother the second coming if they thought there’d be blowback. So he hitched into town, made a statement, gave the cops the piece of plastic and kept walking.’

  ‘And what about the wooden nose on the … who was it?’

  ‘She’s called Liberty and she’s a kind of a centrepiece at a Girl Scouts camp up there. Let me just … I bookmarked all the new stories … Did they say …? Here it is. Her nose was sent to the PO box of the Girl Scouts of Oregon and Southwest Washington. That is sickness beyond sick. That’s really nasty.’

  ‘It’s a big step up from what they did with Mama Cuento’s toe,’ I said.

  ‘And the intermediate step is a real head-scratcher,’ said Todd. ‘Sending a belly button to a boy in a boarding school? That doesn’t go with the overall … He’s always been a boy, right, Lexy?’

  I shrugged. ‘I think so,’ I said.

  On the other end of the phone, Noleen covered the mouthpiece and shouted, ‘Hey, kid? Blaike? You’re cis, right? Not trans.’

  ‘Yeah,’ came Blaike’s voice in the background. ‘Why?’

  ‘Nothin’,’ said Noleen. She came back on the line. ‘You hear that?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘No help there, then.’ But still it gave me a warm glow. Some things in this mad world were getting better. ‘The target statues are not random. Black, Native, Asian, Mexican. Hence Kathi dropping that brick in the Lode. But the targets for ransom notes are hard to put together. Left behind at crime scene, sent back to crime scene, Girl Scouts, grieving husband, oblivious son. Unless we can tie Brandeee to these Scouts in some way? Maybe the Akela is her sister.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Troop leader. Noleen, can you phone Bran and ask if Brandeee has connections in the area?’

  ‘On it,’ she said, and rang off.

  ‘The area of Oregon and Southwest Washington,’ Todd said. ‘You know it’s bigger than Scotland, right?’

  ‘Yeah but there’s no one there. It would be significant if she had family or close friends … Hang on. Are there elks in Washington?’

  ‘Elk,’ said Todd. ‘Do I look like I would know a thing like that? Why?’

  ‘Because Brandeee’s fake husband, Lenny Kowalski, was supposed to have died in an elk-hunting accident. That’s the story she always told Blaike until she finally admitted the guy didn’t exist.’

  ‘And he believed her?’ said Todd. ‘He believed a guy called Lenny Kowalski hunted elk?’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘You really need to keep on with your assimilation to the advanced level,’ Todd said. ‘Would you follow Montague Cavendish’s recipe for Hoppin’ John? How about going square dancing with Sofia Hernandez?’

  ‘I don’t know any of these people,’ I said. ‘Make your point, Todd.’

  But he had spotted a junction and he shifted all his attention to persuading me to turn off, adjust the light setting and come back on again, like a proper private eye on an official tail.

  And, to be honest, it got to me. Doing something so sketchy and so deliberate seemed to cement the fact that we were now right up in the buttes, surrounded by farmland on all sides and still barrelling north to God knows where, on a bona fide adventure.

  ‘Yippy-kay-ay,’ said Todd, when we were back on the road again and the lights of our mark were still there, winking at us far ahead. ‘Let’s do this thing!’

  TWENTY

  We crossed the state line.

  ‘Does that make this … what does that mean?’ I asked Todd.

  ‘It means don’t buy any cauliflowers and try to take them home,’ he said. ‘What’s the gas doing?’

  ‘It’s being consumed steadily by the engine,’ I said. ‘Will we run out before they do? What kind of pickup was that anyway?’

  ‘Dodge Ram 3500 HD,’ said Todd. ‘It’s a guzzler but it’s got a huge tank so it’s a crapshoot.’

  ‘If we pass a petrol station we should stop,’ I said. ‘And then you can take over driving and floor it to catch up so even if we get stopped it won’t be me who gets into trouble.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘You think if someone’s going to speed and get pulled over it should be the brown guy?’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, which really annoyed him.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he echoed in a mocking voice. ‘Systemic racism. It went clean out of my pretty blonde head for a minute there. No, Lexy. If we’re going to stop for gas and floor it to catch up, you’re driving. If we get pulled over, talk about Outlander for a woman sheriff, and golfing at St Andrews for a man sheriff, and you’ll get off with a warning.’

  ‘Deal,’ I said and, leaning over to shake his hand, I missed the very moment that our prey, the car we’d been following all the way from Cuento until my eyes were gritty from watching its brake lights, suddenly disappeared.

  ‘Where’d it go?’ said Todd. ‘Where’d it go?’

  We both stared out into the blackness of the road ahead. There was no exit sign in sight and no pickup sitting on the shoulder with its lights off, waiting for us to catch up.

  ‘Slow down,’ said Todd. ‘Slow down and let me look to see if there’s any kind of a … Only how could there be? I mean, I know we’re in the boonies, but it’s still a highway. There can’t
be little lanes and private driveways opening off of this. Where the hell did it go?’

  ‘There!’ I said. I had slowed all the way down to twenty. ‘Look. Off to the side.’ I was sure of it. Beyond the hard shoulder of the road, the land was unfenced and, while most of it was black with blacker smudges that had to be trees and paler smudges that were probably distant hills, one bit of it seemed to be a smeary pinkish colour. Like the colour of brake lights still showing through the dust as a pickup truck travelled overland.

  ‘We can’t follow them off the road,’ Todd said. ‘There’s no YouTube video ever made that could make that unsuspicious.’

  ‘Throw something out the window,’ I said. ‘Right when we pass where the lights are and we’ll keep driving, then come back once they’ve had a chance to get ahead.’

  ‘Throw what?’ said Todd. ‘You mean like litter?’

  ‘Anything,’ I said. ‘Something that won’t blow away. But quickly.’ We were getting close to being level with the pink blur and it was very small now as the pickup kept moving into the scrubland, away from the road.

  ‘Antibacterial wipes, owner’s manual, throat lozenges.’ Todd was pawing through the glove box. ‘I can’t see anything suitable. Do you have anything?’

  I didn’t answer. I used the button on my side to open his window then I snatched up his personal go-cup with the integral mixer, for fad-hoppers who were currently dissolving all sorts of crap in their drinks, and lobbed it out to land on the shoulder with a sickening crack as we passed.

  ‘Roger bought me that cup,’ said Todd. ‘Why didn’t you throw yours?’

  ‘Because my mum sent it for Christmas,’ I told him. ‘It’s from Greggs.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it’s made of very cheap plastic and it would roll away.’

  ‘Replace mine,’ Todd said, ‘and I’ll forgive you.’ He was up on his seat, looking out the back window. ‘I’ve lost sight of them. That was a brainwave, Lexy. Turn around now. This is getting exciting.’

  I gave it another half a minute, just in case the pickup driver could still see the road even though we couldn’t see them, then, as Todd instructed, I wheeled round on the empty tarmac and headed back to where his bashed-in go-cup was still leaking cold coffee on to the ground. I parked on the hard shoulder and pulled the handbrake on.

  ‘Now we swap,’ I said. ‘Surely. You’re the owner. If anyone’s going to be driving off-road, shouldn’t it be you?’

  ‘The brown guy,’ Todd said again.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ I said. ‘Your name is Dr Todd Kroger and you’re not as brown as I’d be if I had all summer to sunbathe. Todd, I’m not spitting on your proud Latinx heritage, but seriously, would a cop from away out here in the back of beyond conceivably pick up the subtle vibes of … I don’t even know what … that say your dad was Mexican? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Lexy,’ he said. ‘We don’t have time to go into this right now, but I am deeply, deeply … Yeah, OK.’ He got out and went round, swiping up the ruined cup on his way, while I wriggled over to the passenger side.

  ‘Apart from anything else, I’ve never driven overland,’ I said.

  ‘Me either,’ said Todd, like every other jeep owner in California, I daresay.

  It wasn’t too bad. We couldn’t go quickly, because we were following the tracks of the pickup truck as it wound between little scrubby bushes and past the odd boulder, like in a cowboy film. Occasionally there was a burst of sharp stink as we drove over something Todd told me was called vinegar weed, but mostly we were just bumping along, trying not to think what would happen if we ran out of petrol all the way out here.

  ‘Call home, I suppose,’ I said, when Todd first aired the question. Then I glanced at my phone. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘Dead battery?’ Todd said. ‘There should be a cable in the console there. Thank God no one threw it out the window.’

  ‘My battery’s fine,’ I said. ‘There’s no signal. Let’s see yours.’ I was clutching at straws because we were on the same network and my phone was a bit newer, and right enough when he tossed his into my lap, it was wearing a grey frown emoji on its home screen and was stone dead.

  ‘That’s unsettling,’ Todd said. ‘I’ll turn back the minute the fuel gauge bongs. That gives us forty miles.’

  ‘Deal,’ I said. ‘Wait. I’ve got two bars back. We must be picking up on someone’s Wi-Fi.’

  Todd slammed the brakes on and put his hand out in a classic soccer-mom save to stop me getting whiplash.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I snapped anyway.

  ‘Duh,’ he said. ‘If you’re picking up someone’s Wi-Fi, we’re probably getting close to where they were headed, don’t you think?’

  ‘We could be,’ I agreed. ‘So … what do we do now?’

  ‘I think there’s a little hill ahead,’ Todd said. ‘We could go up on foot and look over. If we can’t see anything, then we keep on driving, following their tracks.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it. Is there enough moonlight to walk by? Or can we put our phone lights on?’

  ‘On low and trained at the ground,’ Todd said. ‘We don’t want to advertise our arrival, if they are nearby. Hey, what’s the Wi-Fi called, by the way?’

  ‘“Direct 36-HPM-281”,’ I said, reading it off my settings menu. ‘Shame. “Kidnappers R Us” would have been much more snappy.’

  We climbed down and Todd locked the jeep; the beep sounded alarmingly loud in the cold, quiet air. After it stopped reverberating, we stood still and listened to perfect silence. It was a chilly night up here and not a breath of wind. Besides Todd’s breathing, there was nothing. And it felt somehow as if that nothing went on forever. I looked back over my shoulder. There was a road there. But there was no one on it and it might as well have been scrub desert for a hundred miles all round. I swallowed.

  ‘Are there any …?’ I said. ‘What’s the wildlife situation like round these parts?’ The cold air swallowed my voice. Maybe there was a fog starting.

  ‘It’s too cold for moths,’ said Todd. ‘Or I would not be standing here. Mosquitoes too.’

  ‘Anything else?’ I said.

  ‘Rattlesnakes,’ said Todd. ‘Coyotes, bears. Why?’

  ‘But no moths,’ I said. ‘Phew.’ I looked up into the glittering navy-blue sky and told myself this was an adventure at best and a waste of time at worst, then I pressed my light setting down as low as it would go, trained the puny beam on the ground in front of my feet and started walking.

  There was indeed a hill ahead, as Todd had thought, but it was so gradual that we walked and walked for what felt like half an hour and nothing about the ridge in front of us ever seemed to change.

  ‘This dust gets in your throat,’ Todd said, eventually, with a slight cough. ‘And your eyes.’

  ‘And your shoes,’ I said. ‘I’ve got grit in my insteps.’

  We walked another while. Sometimes there was another patch of vinegar weed and once a scuffle as a tiny creature took off out of our way.

  ‘Was that a snake?’ I said.

  ‘That scampering sound?’ said Todd. ‘Only if it had its tap shoes on. What’s wrong with you? It was probably a gopher.’

  ‘Cool,’ I said. I didn’t actually know how vicious gophers were and I didn’t want to.

  ‘Put your torch out and see if you can see anything up ahead,’ Todd said.

  We waited for our eyes to adjust, then looked all round.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘And I’m not sure I like it.’ I was dead sure I hated it actually: out here a hike from the jeep, with only someone else’s password-protected Wi-Fi and no clue what we were walking into. If this ended as badly as it might, I was going to make a very sheepish corpse.

  ‘You never want someone to read your obituary and say, “Well, what did she expect?”’ I said. ‘Ideally, if you die suddenly, you want people to say, “No way! Who could ever have foreseen that?”’

  ‘No one’s going to die,’ said
Todd. And I chose to believe that the break in his voice was from the dust.

  We trudged on. The way was getting steeper, I was sure. It was certainly getting stonier; the bits in my shoes were too big to call grit now. And I was almost sure that there was a faint lightness coming from behind the ridge we were finally approaching.

  ‘Put your light off again,’ Todd breathed. ‘Stand still and listen.’

  Without the torchlight, it was unmistakable – a glow of sodium. And without our footsteps the sound was unmistakable too – the flatulent hum of a petrol generator put-put-putting away somewhere not too far off.

  ‘What will we do?’ I breathed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Todd. ‘We’ll go and see what’s what.’

  ‘What do you think might be what?’ I said.

  ‘Why? What do you think might be what?’

  ‘I don’t know. And I don’t think I want to.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Todd. Then before I had a chance to answer he said, ‘Oh for God’s sake!’ And he started walking towards the light and sound.

  I had the choice of following him towards the lair of a statue nabber and peach potato aphid bomber, or of being left all alone in the pitch black surrounded by snakes, coyotes and bears. And at least one gopher. And – this was the crunch – letting Todd walk into a potential nest of aphids on his own.

  ‘Wait for me,’ I hissed and scuttled after him.

  Now, of course, the ridge came rushing up to us. Before another minute had passed, we found ourselves lying on our bellies, peering over it at what lay beyond.

  There was a fenced compound dead ahead. It looked about the size of a small mall or large farm: a collection of buildings and a few exterior security lights. There were also a few humped shapes of various heights that might have been statues wrapped in tarpaulin, but might have been a hundred other things too.

  What there wasn’t was any obvious entrance. It was beyond frustrating to be this close and yet still so short of answers. We couldn’t hear anything but the generator. And we couldn’t see much detail through the close slats of the high fence. Todd shuffled to his left and I followed him. We still couldn’t see much inside the fence, but we were on the other side of a big dead-looking sage bush now and at least we could see what it had been hiding from our view. Quite alarmingly close to where we lay, outside the fence, sat a row of pickup trucks, including – I was sure – the one we’d been following. Its engine was still ticking as it cooled down.