by Layla Wolfe
Sure, she was infertile. Her cult had practiced forced sterilization on young women, so they could be “penetrated” at any moment by any man the guru ordered—often, the swami himself, of course. Knoxie had two teenagers from a prior marriage who tried to spend half their time at their new stepmother’s house, but it was rough going. They were going to resent any woman who tried to “take their mother’s place,” and eventually their nastiness wore down Bellamy’s patience. Luckily, by that time, the kids were on their own.
So they’d worked out a life without anyone to care for them in their elder years. Shit, they had the club, their brothers, old ladies, and all the attendant kids that came with it. Who needed kids of your own? That was one of the many reasons I enjoyed hanging around the club. It was a built-in family. Tanner said that belonging to something bigger than yourself helped with depression, with cutting. Well, I can tell you now, it really helped with a panic-stricken fear of the future. As long as I didn’t move out of state, I’d never die alone, neglected in some “care” facility, drenched in my own pee. The Bare Bones would be storming the fortress in a hot minute, scaring the bowels out of everyone.
Bellamy was describing her and Knoxie’s recent visit to Disneyland. She took a toke of the Leaves of Grass Eminence Front and passed the spliff to me. It was all right with me if Lyric smoked pot. Bellamy croaked out smoke with every word. “But Knoxie was so high, when he went to get into the little boat he fell right on his ass sprawled on the seat, halfway on some middle-aged lady’s lap.”
I spit out my laugh before I could even inhale the tasty smoke. “Oh my God.”
“That wasn’t the best part,” said Bellamy. “The guy who was helping people get onto the boat? He goes, ‘Those aren’t reclining seats, you know.’”
We laughed until we choked. It was one of those long, roller coaster laughs that starts to fade out, then becomes more intense when you remembered what you were laughing at. Finally, watery-eyed, we just sighed and looked out over the cliffs of red velvet.
I expected a lecture from Bellamy, but not from Lyric.
“You know, you really have to take Tanner at face value,” my half-sister said. “He probably just didn’t tell you about the rape conviction because of what happened to you.”
I was prepared with my defense. “And you!” I could feel my eyes flashing with anger, my nostrils flaring indignantly. “How would you feel if some guy you, you know, liked, suddenly popped up with a rape conviction?”
Lyric drew herself up in her chair. “A rape his brother did? I’d be like wow, that’s difficult. I’d ask if the brother was ever arrested later.”
“I assume so,” croaked Bellamy, “since they released Tanner and wiped the conviction.”
Lyric said, “They can do that even if there’s no new suspect, like if DNA evidence clears you.”
“Which I assume was the situation,” said the wrench. “I read that they had DNA evidence to begin with, but I guess our technology wasn’t so up to par yet to differentiate between brothers.”
“Or the people in his county didn’t care. An article I read said they were determined to convict either Tanner or one of his friends because they listened to Cannibal Corpse and Dying Fetus.”
I spit out angry smoke. “Dying Fetus? What the fuck?”
“Death metal bands,” Bellamy informed me, her eyes watery.
“Where’d you hear all this?” I just couldn’t picture Tanner wearing chain metal, his hair flowing down to his waist. I supposed that would stand out in a place like West Memphis, from what little I knew.
Lyric shrugged. “Google. I got real curious after he helped save my ass at our house that day. Tanner Principato. Not many of them.”
That’s for fucking sure. Not many of them. “Well,” I sniffed, “it’s not like it matters anyway. He’s going back to St. Louis the second we find Lavinia’s body.”
“Which you’re not going to do,” said Bellamy, “if you don’t make it up with Tanner. I’ll just bet he’s going to refuse to finish his job without you. That’s how honorable he is.”
“Honorable?” I scoffed. “There must’ve been some evidence linking him to the rape to get a conviction. He must’ve at least been watching.”
“Apparently not,” said Lyric. “It was a real railroad job. Haven’t you even googled your own boyfriend?”
Apparently not. “Well! Just maybe I’ll do that!” I said childishly and stomped into the house with my margarita glass.
I opened the front door for Bellamy’s sister, Ginny. I guessed she’d been invited over to cheer me up along with some other women, refugees from Bihari, all of them sterilized at the cult’s “bath house.” I felt a sisterhood with Gia, Sunyade, and Rhetta. I’d been inadvertently sterilized after a few too many abortion pills, but it was all the same. We’d been physically and psychically assaulted against our will time after time, relentlessly, when least expected. How was I supposed to keep associating with a man who’d served time for rape?
After showing the gals to the margaritas, I went into the home office. Luckily, I didn’t need a password to get onto the desktop computer.
The first thing that popped up was Hang Town Ranch, Tanner’s dog compound on the outskirts of St. Louis. It looked like an old, up-and-coming neighborhood, with some houses having broken windows and boarded-up doors, and some of the Queen Annes painted intricately in a pastel of colors. Tanner’s house was somewhere in between. He’d apparently bought two lots, maybe knocking down one of the slums, to make room for outdoor playing areas and covered training outbuildings. I wondered who his sponsor was, his benefactor. You don’t just get out of the Air Force and get enough money to build a compound like that. And his stepfather the garbage dump layabout obviously didn’t help.
It was sweet, though. He had a helper, Curly, an adorable little man with Down’s Syndrome who was probably so sweet to the dogs. And there was a young girl with stick-black hair and maybe half as many tattoos as me. Josie was a licensed pilot as well.
Browsing through the photos made me nostalgic, almost made me fall in love with Tanner all over again. For I was in love with him, no doubt about it. I was drawn in by his surly, gruff persona. He didn’t smile often in real life, but he sure did when around dogs. One photo depicted him shirtless cradling a little dog of some kind, and he sure was a carved fucking beast. I actually saved the photo into an email I sent myself.
One section of the website was devoted to his Puppies Behind Bars work. There I had to see him in his prison whites, melding in with his fellow inmates. I could see where he was one of them. Though Tanner had no ink or piercings, he was their equal in his ability to wreak havoc.
Becoming serious, I read a few news stories on how Tanner had been exonerated. Aaron “Slushy” McGill proclaimed, “Tanner Principato was set up by a prejudicial closely-knit community who saw anyone different from them as evil. These boys ran in crowds doing inexplicable things like playing death metal music, playing their own instruments, wearing all black, drawing pentagrams on their foreheads—not a sign of demonic intent, but of the music they loved.”
The beaten, raped girl had crawled to the side of the road and waved down a car. At the hospital, she said how it was one of “those death metal boys” who had done it—acting alone. Cops went immediately to the garbage dump and because Sonny hid when he saw them coming, Tanner allowed himself to be arrested.
That was pretty much it. Because Tanner was younger than Sonny, they imagined cops would go easier on him. It sounded like the opposite. He had a shitty court-appointed lawyer who basically sounded like he went along with everything the court told him. In fact, because Tanner sat there with arms crossed chewing gum and rolling his eyes, they had thrown a contempt charge at him as well. He was clearly the fall guy for a lot of back woods hatred for unconventional teens.
When I googled for “Sonny Principato” I saw that cops had arrested him at a traffic stop where it sure looked like he was heading into Canada. There
was already a BOLO on his ass because they’d matched DNA from the rape crime scene to him. So it was pretty cut-and-dried for them to arrest him and charge him for the rape and assault for which Tanner had already walked free.
I was looking at a photo of a smiling, happy Tanner with his arm around some slut when Knoxie came busting in the office door. The caption said the slut was Joy Shapiro, owner of Lucky Dog Pet Rescue. She was handing over to Tanner a maltipoo mix who’d been hit by a car and left for dead. Tanner was taking it to his vet in St. Louis, and there to his rehab. It was all very sappy and sentimental, and I felt like belting Joy one. I could just tell by their smug smiles that they’d banged one out, maybe just prior to the asinine photo shoot posing in front of his plane on a runway.
“Unity, Unity, thank God you’re here,” said Knoxie, out of breath as though he’d run up the hill.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, rising from his desk chair.
He quickly fell into the chair, then grabbed my hands. “Look, what I said was fucked and irresponsible. I guess I just, ah, just assumed you already knew what he was in the big house for. It was a shitdongles thing for me to say.”
“But it was true.”
“Well, yes, but it’s up to Tanner himself to give you that information, not me.”
I shook his hands free from mine. “But he served time for rape, Knoxie!”
“A rape he didn’t do!”
“You know what?” I jammed my forefinger into my chest. “It doesn’t make that shit-all much difference to me, deep down. He was in prison, with other real rapists who he associated with and considered his pals.”
Knoxie laughed at the wall. “Unity. I hardly think he was making campfires and S’mores with those assholes. Why would the air force let him in if they didn’t believe he was a hundred percent innocent?”
It was true. Articles had talked about Tanner’s “exoneration,” “sad mistaken identity,” and “freedom from all false claims.” It just didn’t sit right with me on an emotional level, that was it. You could hand me any number of facts and figures and I’d still be creeped out by a guy who had shared a cell, maybe, with some boy-raping pedo. “I’m sorry, Knoxie. I can’t. I just can’t. Tanner and Wolf will have to continue to look for Lavinia without me. Then he’ll go back to St. Louis with his shitty reputation and this slut—“
“Oh, Unity, thank god you’re here.” Wolf Glaser entered the office, also out of breath, as though he’d followed Knoxie jogging up Mescal Mountain. Was I stuck on some kind of tape loop? Who would bust through the door next? I took a seat, but it was just so I could sink my fingers into Beetle’s adorable ruff and kiss his fluffy forehead. “Man, I just ran from . . . from . . . parking lot . . .Unity, Tanner’s going to lose his religion if you don’t talk to him again. He feels like a complete and utter—“
“Shitdongle?” I suggested.
Wolf frowned, still trying to catch his breath, one hand on the desk. “Yes, something like that. Look, Unity. I’ve been around plenty of Prospects who come here out of the blue, looking for something else, and wind up finding love instead.”
“Prospects?” bawled Knoxie.
“Love?” I bawled.
Wolf held up his free hand. “I’ve seen it a hundred times, people. Maybe there is something to this vortex business around here, why the herbal essences come here and stay.”
“Tanner’s no herbal essence,” laughed Knoxie.
“I mean, who knows? Look at Fox and Pippa. Fox came here for a job and decided to spend his entire life.”
“Do you know something we don’t?” Knoxie asked darkly.
Wolf held up both hands. “I’m not saying anything, bro! I just don’t think Unity should write off Tanner so easily when there are greater, more mystical things at work than can be beheld in our heaven or earth.”
Knoxie snorted. “If you’re trying to impress the woman, I don’t think it’s working.”
Indeed, I had already stood and grabbed my purse. Wolf made as if to hold my wrist, but I yanked myself away from him.
I shrieked, “Thinking like this only leads to disappointment! Giant, crushing letdowns! I thought your way once, and it ruined my life. Falling in love is only for saps and morons.”
As I tore out the door, I heard Knoxie say,
“See? You broke her, Glaser.”
Even if what Wolf and Knoxie said was true, I didn’t deserve love. I’d always known in my inner core that I wasn’t worth anyone wasting their love. Someone so despicable that her own mother wouldn’t prevent her husband from raping, well, I was so low I could read dice from the bottom.
What had I been thinking, falling in love with that photographer Evan? Why didn’t I already know all photographers were sleazebags? Yet I’d actually been shocked, and ruined, and depressed for entire weeks after seeing an Instagram of him sucking on some model’s tit. When I confronted the model, she laughed at me. Laughed! “Oh, Unity. He’s like that with everyone.” Like that with everyone?
What was Tanner like, really? An air force hero, and a hero in a way for taking the fall for his worthless brother—a guy who rehabbed and hand-delivered adorable dogs to their forever home, well, whose heart wouldn’t melt for that? He was just with me because he was wrapped up in the Lavinia mystery. A handsome devil like Tanner Principato had women crawling out of their cellars to be with him. How could I compete with that?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Tanner
Unity was really carving it up Highway 17.
She had half an hour start on us, and Wolf and I were still speeding through Munds Park while she was in Kachina Village.
I knew all this because Wolf had finally called me while I paced anxiously in the pool room of the Bum Steer.
“She took off, Tanner. She split in sort of a huff.”
“A huff? What kind of a huff? Like, angry? Sad? Crying? Yelling?”
“Ah, sort of all four at once.”
But before I got a chance to angrily yell at Wolf, he added, “Never fear. I stuck a GPS tracker on her Sporty.”
Once again, I had to admit that the brainless moron was a genius. Wolf Glaser sort of teetered back and forth like that.
So, because none of her friends, or Knoxie or Wolf, could have convinced her I was a harmless, lovable old fool, Wolf came to the Bum Steer and I jumped in Beetle’s sidecar, the young gentleman himself hanging out at Knoxie’s.
There was no extra dome of obedience for me, but I wore Beetle’s goggles as we rode north. How did I go from a dashing pilot landing on the edges of vermilion cliffs to a lidless dude in a dog’s sidecar? It was in keeping with the drastic ups and downs of my life. Tracking down a pissed-off, tattooed cannabis model was pretty much par for the course, really.
I’d last felt this sense of brotherhood in the armed forces. The way the Bare Bones operated was along similar lines, and I felt right at home, especially with so many other former military—Knoxie, Ford, Fox, Sax. There was a tangible brotherhood to their monthly fish fries where brothers from other chapters came from all over Arizona to park in a sea of bikes out on the Citadel’s runway. Fables of these storied parties flew so frequently between brothers I almost wanted to stay on to attend the next one. Of course, I’d have to purchase a Harley . . .
I rode a rice rocket for a few years after getting out of the service before it became too impractical for transporting good dogs. I’d have to relocate Hang Town Ranch to somewhere in the vicinity of Pure and Easy’s red rocks, but that should be no problem. Maybe an old horse ranch. Then, when I realized I was thinking along these terms, I tried hard to become shocked at myself. What am I thinking? Join an MC at the age of forty-two? What about med school? Well, the U of Arizona wasn’t so far away. Oh law, what the fuck are you thinking, you fucking anusbrain? When would I ever sleep? I’d figure it out. A great deal of the need for being productive is the terror of things falling apart.
It seemed the faster we flogged it north, the farther Unity’s little icon on Wolf
’s tracking app became from us. We skirted the ponderosa pines of Fort Tuthill Park where archers walked with bows just as Unity started to leave Flagstaff. Heading north on 180 toward the Arizona Snow Bowl. What the fuck was up there—
It struck me, maybe at the same time it struck Wolf. The tailpipes were too loud for us to yell at each other, but his mouth opened wide enough to admit flies when he glanced at the screen I held. I dropped my jaw, too, to tell him via sign language that was Unity was doing was highly sketchy and even death-defying. I was glad I had my piece, and glad Wolf’s Glock was securely stuck in his waistband.
She was heading to Tutti Morgan’s compound.
“Fuckola!” bellowed Wolf. Now that I could hear.
I mentally urged Wolf faster as we zipped past Lowell Observatory, heading north through treeless mountains. By the time we turned off on Tutti’s street, Unity’s icon had already been there for fifteen minutes. What the fuck can she possibly want there? What point is there in accosting Tutti? We were about to go find Lavinia’s body. Find the body first, deal with Tutti later.
Unity’s digital fingerprint led us right up to the gate, predictably closed. Wolf cut his engine the moment we saw that, as I would’ve done.
“Now what,” he said, flatly.
“Do you have wire cutters?”
“Course.” As if it were an everyday tool, Wolf dismounted from his saddle and whipped out a pair of wire cutters from his saddlebags. I removed my goggles and looked inside his stash. Taser, billy club, hammer, hunting knife, radio, anal plug, handcuffs . . . I wasn’t sure if his goal was to kill someone or take a cruise down the Hershey highway. Just to be on the safe side, I grabbed the knife and hammer.
“Walk your bike into those bushes,” I instructed Wolf. He didn’t question my plan.
