by Chuck Wendig
Miriam has to admit: she has. Gabby put together the budget. Bought the maps and plotted their routes. She’s gotten their rooms. Made the whole plan.
“Okay,” Miriam says. “Fine.” Four words in the English language pain her greatly to say because to say them feels like a kind of weakness, but right now, all four seem somehow appropriate: “Thank you. And . . . I’m sorry.”
Gabby kisses her temple. “Now the big question: How do we get to Tucson? Only about an hour away. We could take the bus.”
Miriam has no intention of taking the bus.
Fuck the bus. The bus is where humanity is at its grossest. People picking their toenails and eating soup and puking Canadian whiskey on themselves. Buses smell like piss and BO and Doritos. Every bus— even school buses, if Miriam remembers correctly— are full of the squawking, stinking damned. Buses are terrible and Miriam will not abide a bus ride in this heat. Or in the cold. Or anywhere at any time, not with a goat, not with a stoat, not near a boat. No boxes, foxes, bucks, or fucks. Never, ever, ever again.
Fuck. The. Bus.
Miriam says, “You really want to be on this adventure with me?”
“I do.”
“Like, really for real really?”
“Really for real. Really.”
“Then let’s go make some trouble.”
EIGHTEEN
RING OF KEYS
The motel office is plywood paneling. A plastic fern stands in the corner, strung up with wisps of cobweb. Berber carpet is stained with who-knows-what, and Miriam is thankful the buzzing lights above her head are fluorescent and not UV. Behind the industrial metal desk sits a grade-A goober, the motel clerk. He’s here all the time. Sleeps at the desk.
Like he’s doing now.
He doesn’t snore so much as he hisses. Like wind through tall grass.
Got an overbite so big, he might swallow his own jaw if he’s not careful.
Miriam says, “We need a new key.”
He keeps snoring. Gabby gives Miriam a look and a shrug.
Miriam kicks the desk.
The goober startles awake.
“I need a new key.”
His tongue smacks against the roof of his mouth. He itches his cheek, where a band of adult acne has bubbled up like lava from broken earth. “Huh?”
“New. Key. Room. Six.”
“Where’d yours go?”
She flips through a mental catalog of snarky, jerky answers. Something about proctology on a gorilla’s ass, but she just doesn’t have it in her. All she says is “I lost it, okay?”
“That’s a problem because we’re gonna have to change the locks.”
“Why?”
“Because that means anyone can break in now.”
“Anyone can always do that. Since you use actual keys instead of keycards, all anybody has to do is go out and make a copy, and then they have that key forever. Which means that person could, say, copy the old key or the new key or any key at all and then years later come back, waltz right in, and serial kill whoever is sleeping in that bed.”
The goober— who, by the name placard on the desk, she sees is named Kyle— just sighs. He’s done. She can see him deflate like a bouncy castle punctured by some kid’s braces. “Fine, fine, I’ll get you another one. Hold on.”
He gets up, stretches like a cat coming off a windowsill, then plods his gangly-dangle limbs into a room in the back. She hears rattling and banging. The jingle of metal. She gives Gabby the nod.
Gabby wanders into the back with him. And she really turns it on. Miriam hears her say: “Oh! Hey! Wow. Nice office back here. You must have a lot of authority. You’re basically, like, the owner, right?” And of course he leans into it, talking up how important he is and basically he’s the owner, basically.
Meanwhile, Miriam goes around to his desk.
Starts opening drawers, quiet as she can muster.
Nothing. Shit.
But then she pulls the middle drawer. Pens, paper clips, a rusty letter opener that looks like it hasn’t opened a letter since Nixon was in office, a scattering of thumbtacks, and then? Bingo. A ring of keys.
Car keys.
She hoped they’d be in here. Guy like him can’t keep a big set of keys like this in the pocket of his cargo shorts. She scoops them up, pops them in her own pocket, closes the drawers.
She heads half out the door then calls: “Gabs! I found the keys! Tell the nice man I found them and we’re good.”
Gabby comes out and Kyle trails behind like a lost puppy. Sorry, dingleberry, but the ride’s over, Miriam thinks. She throws up her hands and makes a funny face. “Sorry! Didn’t check my back pocket. I’m so silly.”
“You ladies wanna hang out later?” Kyle asks.
“Sure,” Gabby says, surprising Miriam. She bats her eyelashes and playfully rests her fingernail on her pouty lower lip. “We should certainly repay the kindness of such a handsome man. See you here at eight?”
“I’ll be here,” he says, licking his lips.
The two of them hurry out, laughing as they go.
NINETEEN
OF COURSE IT’S A WIZARD VAN
Of course it’s a wizard van.
The parking lot isn’t exactly crammed full of cars. The motel is mostly empty because it’s a motel outpost in the middle of Arizona’s dry and dust-swept vagina. So, when she pokes through the few vehicles out there— a pickup, another pickup, a Chevy Aveo, a chopper— and she comes upon the lavender van with the mural of a golden-bearded wizard shooting lightning out of his crystal-tipped staff (lightning that then electrocutes a series of rainbow dragons: red, blue, yellow, green, orange), well, she thinks she has a winner.
Gabby says, “Are we really doing this?”
“We are really doing this.”
“This is bad.”
“This is very bad. And that’s good.”
“I can’t. We shouldn’t. We could go back in, just give him money— he’d probably relish the idea of selling it. We have cash—”
Miriam unlocks the door. “Too late.” She throws her bag inside.
“We haven’t stolen it yet. We can just get a taxi.”
Miriam nods as if, yeah, sure, we can do that, but then she hops in the driver’s seat anyway and pops the passenger side. “Let’s take this ugly turdboat for a drive. Kyle won’t know.”
“Miriam—”
“The longer you stand there, the likelier it is he’ll come out and see us stealing his van.”
That does it. Gabby flings her bag onto the floor and jumps in.
The van smells like weed and spilled beer. The dashboard is cracked plastic. The steering wheel is swaddled in camo-pattern duct tape.
The engine rumble-grumbles to life. The CD player spins up and starts playing, of all the songs, Ace of Base’s “I Saw the Sign.”
Together, they drive to Tucson.
TWENTY
THE LAWS OF GODS AND MEN
Gabby, thankfully, has her shit together. Miriam’s plan is mostly just drive south and eventually we’ll run smack dab into Tucson, but turns out that plan is actually very bad. Gabby has maps on her phone. She plots a course, finds a motel, and off they go to a Motel 6 about ten minutes from the courthouse.
They get a room, 208. The two of them crash there for the night. In the morning, Miriam drives over to the Superior Court building. The ten-minute drive turns into a forty-five minute trip because of course she gets lost— she arrives by the grace of swallowing her pride and asking a couple rando tourists for directions.
The courthouse looms. It’s a massive square structure. Maybe ten stories tall. All white, punctuated by bands of black glass.
Now a new problem: she has no idea what to do.
It’s not like Mary Scissors is going to be here, just hanging out. (Just to be sure, Miriam gives a good look up and down the parking lot in the rare instance that the universe has chosen to be kind to her. It has chosen no such thing. Not that she’d recognize her ea
sily— the last photos she’s seen of the woman were at her brother’s house, and they were easily two decades old.) So, what then? All right, she thinks, the woman is on probation for something.
Which means there’s a probation officer inside. And maybe meeting the probation officer will tell her something. Anything. Any little clue that will lead her to Mary Scissors.
The day is warm. The air, dry. Sky so blue it looks like it was painted on.
Let’s do this.
Inside the courthouse: metal detectors up front. Panic suddenly shocks her heart like a pair of defib paddles— I have the gun. The gun is in the van.
But she does have a knife. A small lockback knife.
But by the time she’s realizing it, they’re already ushering her through. And of course the metal detector goes off. And an old white dude and an old Hispanic dude come up on each side of her, sleepily telling her to empty her pockets— white guy named Hugo, the Latino gent named Jorge— and she winces and does as they demand. The knife clatters into the plastic tray. Gulp.
The cuffs clap around her wrists fast, or so she expects. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, Hugo and Jorge just nod to each other, tell her to take her stuff back, go on in, have a nice day, miss.
She’s almost tempted to stab one, just as a reminder why you shouldn’t let people with knives into important government buildings, but that might just be the persistent nic-fit that’s haunting her body like a furniture-flinging poltergeist.
Instead, she asks them, “Probation?”
Jorge says, “This floor. Down at the end, through the hall.”
Hugo adds, “It says probate on it.”
Miriam nods. Heads that way. Passes by a crowd of normals—lawyer types in black suits and dour faces, like each of them is attending a funeral for American justice. A judge in his robes. A couple chatty ladies in pastels. A lost-looking boy by a water fountain, noisily slurping.
Feet echoing on white stone.
They stare at her as she passes. They’re probably used to every degenerate and deviant who walks through here, and they probably stare at them the same way they stare at her. Still. Her hair, an electroshock mess. Her white tee torn at the edges. Jeans so frayed that if she were to sneeze, they’ll probably explode into a pile of threads and leave her standing there in her panties. They watch her.
Whatever. Go on and stare, fuckballs.
Into the probation offices. Glass door. Inside, a whole different world. Like a regular office. Gray cubicles. Beige tile. Drop ceiling and buzzing lights.
A woman sits at a desk at the front. Big hair, so big it looks like it’s trying to eat her pink-cheeked, peach-lipped face. “Can I help you?”
“Ahhhhh.” Miriam hears the sound drawn out of her mouth as she’s lost for any meaningful lie. Suddenly, she feels off her game, a bird batted off its perch by the events of the last couple days. Lie, you lying liar. You’re good at this. Your two specialties are telling hard truths and spinning crafty lies. “Ahhh, well. I’m . . . looking for someone.”
So clever.
The woman gives an expectant stare.
“Who . . . were you looking for, hon?”
“A probation officer.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place.” A bored smile. Placating.
What’s the whole point of probation? Miriam thinks. Checking up on ex-cons, yeah? Making sure they aren’t on drugs, have a bed they sleep in every night, have a job they go to and— there, that’s it, that’s the key.
“I’m an employer,” Miriam says, settling into the groove. “One of your . . . probates? Probees? She’s a waitress at this roller derby juke joint place I just opened up on the south side of town. We show movies and serve beer and then also there’s gladiatorial combat with roller skates— it’s like Medieval Times, but not at all like Medieval Times. I need to have a confab with her parole officer?”
“Oh. That sounds interesting. What’s the last name, hon?”
“Scissors.” Wince. “Stitch.”
“That’d be Lela Quintero. Just head down the hall—” She points, and it’s not a hallway but rather a channel carved between cubicles. “Turn right at the end by the copy machine and her office is right there. Near the water cooler.” Miriam nods, thanks her, starts to walk away, but the woman says: “Hey, what’s your place called again? That sure sounds interesting— I have a cousin who is kind of, what’s the word, alternative, and he might like that place—”
“We don’t have a name.”
“You don’t— well, how can you not have a name?”
“We’re just a symbol. Like Prince had. It’s a roller skate inside fire and— you know, it’s very exclusive.” She waggles her fingers, then walks on.
Miriam can feel the woman’s eyes burning holes in her back.
Down the hall. A big jowly fucker with a knobby yam nose is standing there by the copier, and Miriam has to shimmy past him. “No, no, don’t move or anything,” she growls at him, and he just grunts. She half expects to see how he dies but it’s her skin against his sweat-stained lemon-yellow shirt, and she is spared seeing him dying on a toilet or having his heart explode or whatever other indignity awaits him during his final hours.
A quick, clumsy pirouette and there’s a nameplate outside the cubicle.
L. Quintero.
Another metal desk. Nobody behind it.
Good. Miriam works fast. She scoots over to the other side of the desk, opens the top file drawer— no, not in this one. The one below it is pay dirt. She flips through the second half of the alphabet, to the S folder—
There. Mary Stitch. She starts to tug the sheet up. Sees her name, her birthdate—11/7/1962. She starts to slide it out—
“Hey!”
She reflexively lets go, and the paper slides back into its folder.
There, standing at the cubicle entrance, is a woman with dark, inelegant curls. She stares out from underneath a pair of dark, tented brows. Her mouth is a scowl. Her eyes are a scowl. Everything about her is a scowl.
“Hi,” Miriam says. Bright and shiny and faking it all.
“Get away from there. That’s not your business.”
“Oh, I was just trying to find out information on one of your . . . people? Mary Stitch? If I could just get her sheet so I can contact her—”
The woman sighs, then points to a non-spinny, non-rolly chair in the corner. “Sit. What’s this about?”
Miriam winces, then wanders around the side of the desk, feeling like the opportunity is so close, and yet so far. Slipping farther away with every step. But maybe she can make hay out of this yet. She plasters that fake smile on her face as she hovers near the chair. “Yeah, it’s just— I’m her employer, and she has not been showing up for work. So.”
“Down at the Cluck Bucket,” the woman says as she passes Miriam and takes a seat behind her desk.
“Y . . . yes.”
“The one on 9th.”
“The Cluck Bucket on 9th, yeah, yep. I’m the manager. Well. Assistant manager, but between you and me, the real manager, Dan, is a little—” And here she mimics him snorting coke. “He’s busy, if you know what I mean.”
Wink, wink.
“Mary doesn’t work at the Cluck Bucket,” Quintero says.
“Huh?”
“I just made it up. The Cluck Bucket. It’s not a real place. You wanna tell me what this is really about?”
“Whoa, holy shit, you are hyper-aggro, lady.” Miriam conjures an incredulous laugh. “Super-distrusting. That is . . . that’s no way to be.”
The parole officer plants her hands on the edge of the desk and leans forward like a puma poised to leap. Her face darkens—it’s like watching all the streetlights down the block go black one by one. “You think people don’t come up in here all the time, lying to me to get information on parolees? We keep tabs on all types: gang-bangers, thieves, snitches, dealers, hookers. Every week, someone comes creeping in here, some pimp wants to know whe
re his bitch went, some thug wants to know where that informing-ass traitor-ass motherfucker is working, and so you come up in here looking like a prossie—”
“Hey, I am no prostitute, not that I judge prostitutes—”
“— who gives five-dollar handies to truck drivers—”
“Whoa. That seems cheap. Too cheap, if I’m being honest.”
“And you think I’m gonna give you the goods on Mary? Not a chance. Only chance I’m gonna give you is to get up out of that chair and get out of here right now before I call the police and they can see what you’re really about.”
Miriam freezes. A cold wave skims the back of her neck. She can’t lose this chance. This is all she has. “Please,” she says. “I need to speak with Mary. Even if you just . . . tell me when she comes here, or, or, or maybe you could pass her a message for me, just a note—”
“Get out.”
“A Post-it note! A few words. A phone number. Something.”
The woman reaches across the desk and grabs Miriam’s wrist—
TWENTY-ONE
THE FIRST DOMINO
Rare drops of rain streaking the window behind her desk. It’s twenty-one days from now, and Lela Quintero is standing there in her office, hair pulled over her face like a curtain threatening to close, and she’s stabbing one finger down on some papers sitting there in an open manila folder. Her other finger is thrusting hard against a woman’s breastbone— a woman named Mary Stitch, a woman whose face is sallow and lean, whose gray hair is poorly tamed by a ponytail, and Lela is saying, This is it; this is the last straw—
Then somewhere, gunshots.
Pop, pop, pop. And Mary, her eyes go closed, and she clasps her hands together as if in prayer, hands flat that then go to fists as if the prayer becomes all the more desperate, less an entreaty to a merciful God and more an angry accusation to an uncaring one.
People screaming now, heads popping up over cubicle walls like prairie dogs hearing a train-whistle.
Lela says to Mary, “Sit down; stay here.”
But Mary, she just stays standing. Rocking back and forth, heel to toe, heel to toe, mumbling something.
