The Hunt

by Chuck Wendig

  “I love you, baby.”

  Atlanta rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I love you, too.” She quick points ahead: “Here, here, take a right here.”

  She feels Arlene give her a look.

  But the car makes the turn.

  Boom.

  Atlanta slaps the certificate down on Holger’s desk. Holger looks at it, then to Atlanta, then back to it. She plucks a pair of reading glasses from her front pocket, brings the two halves of the spectacles together (click) as she puts them on.

  “This is legit,” Holger says, sounding surprised.

  “It’s legit as hell,” Atlanta says. “Now, if you please? My shotgun.”

  Holger pops the glasses off, leans forward. “First I want to say: I’m sorry about your house.”

  “Thank you.”

  “They’re doing what they call an origin and cause investigation. Seeing why the fire started and all that.” Holger lowers her voice, says: “Do you think someone did this, Atlanta? On purpose?”

  “No,” she says without hesitation. It’s a lie, of course. She doesn’t want to put anything out there for Holger to grab on to. Especially with what Atlanta’s planning. No need to give herself any kind of out-loud motive. “It was an old house with wiring that I think George Washington himself installed by hand. I guess stuff like that just burns down sometimes.”

  Holger pauses, then nods. “Fair enough. Let’s get you that gun.”

  Holger brings the gun out to the car. She’s carrying it in a long fabric case and tells Atlanta, “This case has been sitting back there for a good while. I suspected you could use it. Besides, I don’t think I should just hand you a gun.”

  Atlanta takes the case. She wants to unzip it, bring out her little squirrel gun with all the eagerness some people might possess when they pick a puppy up from a long stay at the kennel. But she holds off because, well, weird.

  Holger leans into the driver’s-side window. “Ms. Burns,” she says.

  “Arlene,” Mama says, looking uncomfortable.

  “Of course. I’m turning this weapon over to your daughter, Arlene. She’s underage, but if I remand it to the both of you, and given that she now has the hunter safety certificate, it’s all aboveboard. You understand?”

  Mama offers a small, confused laugh. “Sure, okay.”

  Now Holger stands up, looks at Atlanta. “Do you understand, Atlanta?”

  “I do.”

  “This means I trust you.”

  “Okay.”

  “That means don’t prove me wrong.”

  “I said okay.”

  “What I said is true: something happens, your mother will share the responsibility. The criminal responsib—”

  “I get it,” Atlanta snaps. Then tries to cover it up with a smile. “Detective, it’s fine. You have nothing to worry about.” She almost adds pinky-swear, but figures that might be a little too sassy. And she’s already broken too many of those anyway.

  The motel they’re staying at is called the Pole Barn Inn. Atlanta hoped that the name was as far as it went, but nope—turns out, the whole place has kind of a barny-farmy aesthetic going on. Outside is red like a barn. Amish hexes inside the motel office. Paintings of barns and farmhouses and silos everywhere.

  Mama’s out getting them dinner—cheap Chinese food from Hunan Palace down off of 80, where the General Tso’s tastes like spicy candy and the lo mein is the greasiest, greatest lo mein ever made.

  Atlanta’s about to make a call—

  —when her cell rings.

  UNKNOWN number.

  Huh. Okay.

  She bites her lip, answers the phone.

  A recorded message plays, which at first she thinks must be some kind of telemarketer hoo-haw: “This is a call from the State Correctional Institution Frackville. Please press ‘1’ to accept the charges, or press ‘2’ or hang up to reject them.”

  Atlanta hesitates. Phone hovers over her ear.

  Then she holds it tight and presses:

  1.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Sunday. A day later.

  It’s three of them in the car this time, Shane driving, Josie in the front (she said with some irony: “I know it’s your thing, Atlanta, but I’m calling shotgun”). Plus, Atlanta owes Josie now, since she and Mama are done with the motel and she’ll be crashing at Josie’s at least for the next week to ten days until . . . someone figures something out.

  Ahead, the prison. Past one gate where Atlanta has to give her name. Then another gate. Two sets of chain-link fences, each coiled with barbed wire. Four small towers with guards standing up there—each armed with what looks like a high-powered black rifle. The prison itself isn’t much to look at: a flat, blocky box with fenced-in areas dividing it up all around. In the distance she sees what must be some kind of exercise yard; prisoners in lemon-yellow jumpsuits and jackets are jogging, lifting weights, or otherwise standing around in little clusters.

  Mostly black guys by the look of it. A few bald white dudes, too. One of them has a swastika across his entire bald head, big enough that she can see it even from here. A bold, if terrifying, fashion choice.

  Being here freaks her out.

  Something about the place makes her think she could go inside and the metal doors will close behind her. They’ll lock. She’ll never come back out.

  Absurd, because it’s not like she’s the FBI’s most wanted. Nobody cares about her. (Which is, she figures, a firm advantage.) Still. Whole place makes her feel claustrophobic. Even looking at it makes her feel trapped, somehow.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Shane asks. “I don’t think he’s going to be very happy to see you.”

  “He invited me,” Atlanta says. “So, I’ll pop my head up like a gopher at the hole, see what’s shaking.”

  Josie gives her a scared smile. “Be safe.”

  “It’s jail,” Atlanta says. “What’s the worst that can happen? They gonna riot while I’m in there?”

  Dang, what if they riot?

  She’s sitting alone in a little room with five tables, each of those with a bunch of green stools. The door out is wooden with wire-mesh safety glass in it. Once in a while a shape passes by: someone’s head. The guard, she thinks—a pornstached dude with mean, beady little eyes.

  Eventually, the door unlocks—Atlanta didn’t even realize it was locked, which is probably good because just the thought of it is giving her a panic attack right now—and the beady-eyed guard comes in.

  Followed by Ellis Wayman, the Mountain Man.

  The man who is a mountain.

  She’d forgotten how big he is. His hair is shorter now, close cropped. But that big bushy beard hangs there like the root system of a briar thicket growing down deep into the dirt. He’s gray as the steel wool she sometimes uses to clean her gun. He takes a seat at the table, hands shackled in front of him.

  “We good?” the guard asks.

  “Yeah,” Wayman says. “Thanks, Lardner.”

  “You got it, Mountain Man.”

  Then the guard heads to the door and starts to leave the room.

  Leaving Atlanta alone with Ellis Wayman.

  She calls after: “No, wait, where are you—”

  But it’s too late. Door closes.

  And locks with a click.

  It hits her: this really is a trap. All along she’s been thinking she needed to pay attention to Ty Carrizo, maybe even to Orly Erickson, but she thought Ellis Wayman was a checker piece that she’d knocked clean off the board. Now here he is. Sharing a locked room with her.

  “I swear, you do anything I’ll scream,” she says, standing up, fists by her side. “You get near me, I’ll kick, I’ll punch, I’ll bite. I’ll make you eat that beard.”

  “Relax,” he grumps. “Siddown. I’m not gonna hurt you. I got sway, but no matter how much I got, no way they’re gonna let me murder a teenage girl in the prison. I harm one strand of hair on your fire-red head, they’d expel every last guard on duty. And worse, they’d b
oot my ass in a hole so deep and so dark I’d wish they just sent me to Guantanamo.”

  She doesn’t sit, though. She stands, staring. “Why invite me here?”

  “Better question is, why accept the invite?”

  “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “You do know. You owe me. Maybe you don’t realize it consciously, but you know it in your heart.”

  She barks a laugh. “I don’t owe you poop squat, Mister Wayman. Respectfully, what happened to you was the grave you dug.”

  “Maybe so, but you pushed me into it. Things were good. I had everything I wanted. The Farm wasn’t really a well-oiled machine, but like an old, classic Massey Ferguson tractor, it kept chugging along and never failed me. Then you showed up. Took my dog. Shut everything down. Got me and—shoot, how many others?—sent here or across the state.” He blows air out from his lips and his mustache lifts up like Marilyn Monroe’s skirt in that old movie. “You did a number on me and my operation. And now you’re doing it all over again.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “You got a habit of stepping in shit, is what I’m saying to you. And then you . . .” He waggles his fingers like he’s playing an invisible piano. “Track that shit all over the damn place, don’t you? I’m talking about Ty Carrizo.”

  “I . . . I don’t know—”

  “You gonna sit, or what?”

  She sits. At a different table. One over. Out of reach.

  Ellis watches her do it, then chuckles to himself.

  “I don’t know how you know anything about that,” she says.

  “I didn’t, up until very recently. Funny thing. A fella came in here, a fella I know but don’t much care for, name of Owen Mahoney. Mahoney told a pretty wild story. Said some teenage piece of ass with firebrand hair doped him up and then called the police on him. Said he remembered little bits here and there. Her asking him about a specific set of operations run by a man named Ty Carrizo.”

  “I don’t know any Owen Mahoney.”

  Wayman gives her a look that says, Really, we’re gonna play it that way? Dubious as all get-out. “Uh-huh. Sure. Fine. Let me tell my story, then, and see if any of it pings your radar. So, Mahoney thinks maybe Ty Carrizo set him up. Carrizo, after all, like that bastard Erickson, he plays at being legit. Which is sneaky, snaky business. Because me? I always was what I was, no fooling around, no fancy foot moves to make people think differently. Mahoney starts asking around, and that’s how word gets to me. And I do a little shaking of the bushes myself and, turns out, some shit has been going down, hasn’t it? A little prostitution ring. A dead girl. A pregnant girl.”

  “And a house fire.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “I do say. My house burned down the other night.”

  “That’s the thing, isn’t it? You seem to be at the heart of all this.”

  “What’s your point?”

  He leans forward, resting his bearded chin in the cradle of his chains. “That is the question, isn’t it? Here’s something: you hamstrung my operation and the people in it. But I’m not done yet. I still got some juice. Carrizo, I don’t like him. He’s trying to steal what juice I have left. That’s a no-no.”

  “You ran girls, too?”

  “Little bit, though no teenagers. We kept it all aboveboard. But it’s not just that. It’s everything. I won’t get into all the gory details, but I want him gone.”

  She hesitates, thinks, Maybe we’re being recorded. A strange thought, but there it is. “I won’t be a part of that.”

  “No,” he says with a big smile. “You’ve got clean hands. A moral heart. You’d never put yourself in the eye of the hurricane. Hell, girl, you are the eye of the hurricane. But let’s just make believe for a half a second that I knew about Ty Carrizo. About how, say, he was running a banquet this Friday night, a banquet that plays host to all manner of bigwigs. Couple state senators. Some lobbyists. Plus, all the higher-ups at his company, a lot of whose hands are nowhere near as clean, whose hearts are nowhere near as saintly as yours. And what if I were to tell you that after this banquet ends, Ty Carrizo will do what he always does after such events, which is bring out the young girls, the drugs, the cards for a high-stakes poker game.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  His smile drops. His lip sneers. “Because even though I’m in here, I have reach, but not enough. Because I want my competition’s legs cut out from under him. Carrizo doesn’t belong here. He’s somebody else from somewhere else. I’m Pennsylvania born and bred. I care about this place.” He snorts up a snot into his throat. Chews it a little. “Besides, his business is a dirty one even without the crime. Fracking is naughty shit. Buddy of mine over in Tioga County was able to set his damn tap water on fire. That should tell you how safe it is.”

  “But why me? You got . . . juice, whatever that means. Go have your guys on the outside—am I using that slang right? The outside? Have them do it.”

  “They can’t. They won’t. And I don’t wanna risk them getting scooped up by the competition. A tough little girl like you, though. They’ll never see you coming. I didn’t.” He drops all expression now. His face, cold as an autopsy table. “I like you. And you owe me. And you need this.”

  “Let’s say I do. How do I do it?”

  “You’ll figure something out. But the way I see it is, go with the classic. Use the same play as last time. Same one that brought me down.”

  On the car ride home—“home” for Atlanta now meaning Josie’s place—Shane asks, “Everything go okay in there?”

  Atlanta nods, staring out the window, watching trees pass.

  “Yeah.” No. I’m scared. Scared of what’s coming. “Yeah,” she repeats.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A few days later, Atlanta’s got her hand deep in a toilet tank. Popping in the new—well, she doesn’t know what they call it. The flappy bit that opens when you flush, snaps shut when it’s done. The whatchahoozit. The thingamabibble.

  She finishes popping that on, makes sure it forms a tight seal.

  Door to the trailer ratchets open. She hears Guy come in with a few bags from Walmart. She leans her head out of the bathroom, blowing a jet of air to divert a strand of hair from her eyes. “You get what I need?”

  “You fix my shitter?”

  “Your toilet’s fixed, yeah.”

  “Then I got what you need, ’Lanta.”

  She walks home with a new brick of .410 ammo under her arm and Guy’s warning in her ear: Whatever you’re thinking of doing, girly, you might wanna think of doing something else. Go be a kid. Forget this stuff. The world’s full of bad people doing bad things and you can’t stop it. You feel me?

  She “feels” him.

  She gets it.

  She doesn’t even disagree.

  It’s good, sound advice.

  And she’s still not going to take it.

  Way she sees it is this:

  Some heinous business is going down. They’re doing things to girls. It’s not just about running some sex trade—Atlanta figures any girl who sells her body is probably getting scammed, but that’s her body and not Atlanta’s business. This, though? It isn’t that. It’s girls forced into it. Young girls.

  And she was almost forced into it, too.

  Now her . . . ex-friend, current friend, whatever friend, Bee, has a baby in her belly. And Samantha Gwynn-Rudin is dead.

  It didn’t end with Samantha, either. It started there but keeps going.

  She remembers having to clear out a bunch of briar that had ringed their last house down South—out there with a machete, cutting it apart till a neighbor told her that wouldn’t fix it. What you see on the surface isn’t all of it, she said. Stuff grows up, forms a big-ass root system underneath. Then it spreads. Both underneath the ground, with shoots and runners, and aboveground, too—any time one of those long, thorny briar fingers got too long, it drooped over like a sad man, worked its tip into the dirt, and started a whole new ro
ot system. All part of one plant.

  So, you wanna kill it, the neighbor said, you either hafta hose it all down with weed killer, or you gotta dig up all the roots. Rip ’em out.

  This problem is like that. It isn’t just one thing. It isn’t just the girls, though that’s a big part of it. It’s that Ty Carrizo is out there. The man’s a blight. He’s got a whole root system working underneath his feet while people think he’s a shiny, productive, brand-new member of the community.

  Time to rip out those roots.

  Josie’s house is nice. Not richie-rich nice, but suburb nice. Sits at the end of a cul-de-sac. Got a snazzy pair of red maples out front. It’s all pretty standard, pretty boring, a pair of sensible shoes instead of a pair of Doc Marten boots, a line drive instead of a home run, a golden retriever instead of a pet Komodo dragon.

  Her parents, too, are nice, if so distracted that Atlanta’s not a hundred percent sure they’re not secretly ferrets piloting people costumes. They zip around here, there, back to here. Josie’s mother is an executive assistant at some small pharma company about an hour south. Her father is a sales rep for audiovisual systems—screens and speakers and the like. He’s on the road a lot.

  Right now, the core group—Atlanta, Shane, Josie (duh), and Steven—sit in Josie’s room, which is about as far from pretty standard as you can get—a mishmash of punk and ska band posters and hand-painted, hand-embroidered roller skates (“I wanna do derby someday,” Josie says with an almost scary fire in her eyes). A buncha weird antiques, too: some art deco stuff, a lamp that looks like a cowboy boot, a purple dresser whose entire top is a topography of melted candle wax in motley colors.

  Shane says: “I don’t think this is a good idea, Atlanta.”

  “I know it ain’t,” she says. “But they ran Bee off the road. Tried to burn my house down. Killed Samantha. I don’t know that they won’t stop coming.”