Prey 25 - Gathering Prey

by John Sandford

  “What the fuck are you doing?” a man asked. He was on his hands and knees, looking out at the Gathering grounds. “There are people all over the place.” He looked at Skye and said, “Shit, she looks like she’s dead.”

  “Not yet,” the woman said. “This is that Skye chick. She didn’t recognize me, but I recognized her and her voice. She was looking for Pilate. I bet she’s got a gun.”

  Skye was on her side, her breathing rough, bubbly. The woman patted her down, found the REI knife in her leg pocket. “Gonna cut him,” she said. “Gonna kill him. Richie: go get Pilate.”

  Richie got unsteadily to his feet, but started down toward the bonfire, found some momentum, and went off at a trot. The woman said to the other man, “Let’s get her over in those trees across the road. Pick her up, put your arms under her armpits, like she’s drunk and you’re trying to help her out.”

  “Jesus, she’s hurt bad,” the guy said. Skye’s head swung around, loose.

  “Not as bad as she’s gonna be, if I know Pilate,” the woman said. She looked out at the field: “Nobody’s watching. Let’s go.”

  • • •

  LETTY WAS AT THE BACK of the music crowd, twenty-five yards from the stage, turning, looking for Skye. A priest in a clown face went by, and a moment later, somebody called, “Pilate! Pilate!”

  Pilate turned, stepped around Letty, and called back, “What?”

  “Gotta come back, man.” He poked his thumb back over his shoulder, back toward the ring of cars.

  “What?”

  “Just . . . you gotta come, man, like right now.”

  Pilate could see he didn’t want to say why, but could feel the urgency in his voice. He nodded and started after him.

  So did Letty.

  • • •

  SHE LET THEM get twenty yards ahead, then took out her cell phone, called Lucas, and asked, “Where are you?”

  “I’m half an hour out. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the Gathering. I found Pilate.”

  “What? Get the fuck away from there. Letty—”

  “He doesn’t know I found him,” Letty said. “I heard somebody call him that. I mean, how many can there be?”

  “Stay away from him. I’m coming. I called Stern, he’s talking to the sheriff up there, about getting some people together. We’re hooking up in Hayward, we’re coming out in a convoy. You see any cops there now?”

  “I saw a guy who I thought was a cop, but there aren’t any uniforms or squad cars around . . . I could look for that guy.” She was on her tiptoes, trying to follow Pilate as he pushed through the swirling crowd.

  “If you can find a cop, it’ll probably be a sheriff’s deputy. Tell him we’re coming. He’ll have a radio, have him get in touch with the sheriff. And stay the hell away from those people.”

  • • •

  LETTY RANG OFF. Pilate and the man who’d come for him were now thirty or forty yards away and headed behind the stage, and she jogged in that direction. Somebody yelled, “Show your tits,” but not at her, though it was about the two hundredth time she’d heard it that day, and from the round of applause, she suspected that whoever yelled had gotten his wish.

  She lost track of Pilate and the second man in the scrum around the stage, where the rap was getting better and hotter; the enormous fat man in the John Deere went by again, wearing a shirt now, still passing out bottles of Faygo. Somebody ran past and shouted, “Fart-lighting contest . . . Follow me!”

  Letty stayed on track; the urgency of the man’s call to Pilate suggested that they’d go wherever they were going in a straight line. From one of the parking lots, looking over the hoods of parked cars, she saw them again, at the far end of the parking area. The priest and five or six other people were walking past a circle of cars into a stand of trees. There was some light from the stage, and various other sources, including headlights of cars coming and going, but the strobes broke everything up, and she couldn’t get close enough to see what Pilate and the disciples were actually doing, until they seemed to break into an odd dance.

  She muttered to herself, “What the heck?” and edged closer, but worried about breaking out of the parking lot. The dancing stopped and they drifted out of the trees, back toward their cars, where they stood around talking.

  Letty watched for another five minutes.

  Then, afraid they could spot her if she stood in one spot too long, she faded back into the cars and looked around for a cop, or a cop car. She didn’t see one immediately. Where was Skye? Had she found Pilate? Did they have her?

  Her phone rang, and she looked at the screen: Lucas.

  “Yeah, Dad?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Uh, in a parking area . . . When you come into the field, I’m in the parking area that’s to the left of the entrance.”

  “Are you leaving? Are you getting out?”

  “Not yet. I think Skye . . . I don’t know, I think Skye was looking for Pilate. I don’t know if she found him, but I can’t find her.”

  “Don’t look! Don’t look! Get out of there!”

  “Okay, I’m backing off. When you come in, Pilate’s in a circle of cars at the far end of the field, off to the left of the stage and a little behind it. I can’t see him now, I’m too far away.”

  “Get out of there!”

  • • •

  HAD SKYE GONE BACK to the other travelers? It was possible, Letty thought—and they were directly across the field from where she was. She looked back toward the circle of cars. Pilate’s people were talking, Pilate was gesturing, and a fire was burning hot in the middle of the circle. Looked like they’d be there for a while. Even if they broke up, and moved into the crowd, she’d seen only one person with a priest costume, so finding him again shouldn’t be too hard.

  She looked toward the spot where the Juggalos had been, and decided she had time to run across the field. She did that, jogging past a group of people with a circular blanket; they were using it to throw a half-naked woman up in the air, the woman laughing, kicking and screaming as she went up. There were only two travelers where Skye’s friends had been. No sign of Skye.

  Lucy was there: “Where’s Skye? Did she come back?” Letty asked.

  The girl shook her head. “Didn’t see her after you guys left.”

  Letty turned and looked back toward the circle of cars. She couldn’t see it from where she was, thought about it for a moment, jogged back that way, detoured around the growing crowd at the stage, pushed past a couple of drunks, one of whom grabbed her ass. She slapped him away and kept going, out to the side of the crowd, and then back toward the circle of cars.

  The priest was there, pointing his finger at his various disciples, snapping out orders. The disciples were scrambling around, dragging stuff into cars and the RV. Getting ready to move. Fire still going hard.

  Letty pushed past the last of the dancing Juggalos—not so much dancing, she thought, as bouncing up and down in place—and walked up to Pilate, who saw her coming, tipped his painted face toward her.

  “Where’s Skye?” Letty asked.

  “What?”

  “I saw her coming over here—”

  He was so fast. She never saw the fist coming and it hit her like a meteor, below her right eye, to the right of her nose. She went down, dazed, and Pilate kicked her in the ribs and she felt a knifelike pain and he tried to kick her again but she managed to push away and caught the blow on her arm and rolled and tried to get up but he kicked at her again and she couldn’t see very well and then somebody screamed, “Hey-Hey-Hey quit that shit, quit that shit . . .”

  Pilate shouted, “She tried to stick me with a knife . . .”

  And the other person shouted, “Quit that shit, quit that shit . . .”

  Pilate shouted back, “Fuck it, get the fuck out of here.”

  He picked up one of the fire logs and waved it in the face of the fat Juggalo in the John Deere, who threw a bottle of Faygo at Pilate’s face and at the same
time screamed, “Help a Juggalo!”

  A group of Juggalos turned and broke off from the dance crowd and started toward them and Pilate went away.

  Letty was on her hands and knees, the pain rippling up her side, and she thought that maybe Pilate had hit her harder than she thought, but she got to her knees. The rap music was so loud she could barely hear anything, but she did hear the fat man shout, “Get in here,” and he pulled her into the back of the John Deere and shouted, “Roll it,” to the driver and they rolled away down the field and Letty shouted, “Wait, wait.”

  The fat man shouted to the driver, “Keep going,” and took her to the middle of the field, where the crowd was thinnest, and told the driver to stop, and said, “Babe, you got a bloody nose, your nose is really . . .” Then he turned to the driver and said, “Dave, we got to get her to the med tent.”

  They started driving again and after a dozen bumps that sent pain screaming up Letty’s rib cage, they got to a med tent where a Juggalo in full makeup, but with a fingerwide Red Cross on his forehead, said, “That’s gotta hurt. Let me get you a gauze pad.”

  He pressed the pad to Letty’s nose, and he said, “Might help to tilt your head back,” and she did that, and said, “I gotta go back there.”

  “That’s not the brightest idea I’ve heard tonight,” the fat man said.

  “They might’ve hurt a friend of mine,” Letty said.

  The fat man wouldn’t move until she’d thrown away the first gauze pad, now soaked with blood, and the medic had given her another. “Should stop now,” the medic said. “Where else did you get hit?”

  “Kicked me in the side . . .”

  The medic asked her to lift her arms above her head, but when she did, the pain shot through her, and she jerked her arms back down and leaned forward to groan.

  “You got some busted ribs,” the medic said. “You need to get into town, go to the hospital.”

  “Gotta go find my friend,” Letty said. The second nose pad was now soaked with blood, and the medic gave her a whole pack of them. “Keep pressing them against the side of your nose.”

  “Gotta find my friend . . .”

  “Dave and me’ll give you a ride down there,” the fat man said. And, “My name is Randy. I’m your friendly fat guy.”

  • • •

  WHEN LETTY WAS taken out of Pilate’s circle, a number of Juggalos stood around looking at them, and one of them, maybe drunk, asked, “What’d you hit the chick for, asshole?”

  “Caught her fuckin’ around on me,” Pilate improvised. He turned away—no place to get in a real fight, not with Juggalos, they’d swarm you—and he said to Kristen, “Keep moving, we gotta get out of here. Too many people here. The cops could be coming.”

  They started moving and Bell slipped off into the stand of trees where they’d left Skye, half buried in brush. He gathered up as many downed tree limbs as he could easily find, threw them on top of her, broke a few more off the evergreens and added those. When he was done, he thought Skye’s grave looked like an ordinary pile of brush. Somebody might find her eventually, but not until they were long gone. He hurried back to the circle, where they were throwing stuff in his car.

  Pilate pulled Raleigh aside; Raleigh was in full Juggalo dress. “You got Colorado license plates, so nobody will be looking at you. I want you to hang out here, see what happens. Stay all the way to the end. Anything too weird happens, call me.”

  “Got it.”

  Pilate said, “You can have Linda to ride with you.”

  Raleigh gave him a thumbs-up: “Most excellent. I will pound her like a fuckin’ big bass drum.”

  Pilate patted him on the cheek, then pulled the others together for one last-minute pep talk: “This isn’t working out as well as we thought. That fuckin’ Skye might have fucked us up—we don’t know what she told the cops after Bony got killed. Let’s meet up next week at the Gathering in Sault Ste. Marie. Kristen’s dividing up the money, giving some to everybody. Save as much as you can. We can’t go in a convoy, because Skye probably told them that’s how we travel, and that we’re from California, and we’ve all got California plates. So when we head out, split up. Everybody go their own way. Go to town and get maps, and, you know . . . stay out of sight. See you at the Gathering next week. Remember, we rule.”

  Everybody muttered, “We rule,” and a minute later Pilate rolled out in his Pontiac, followed by the RV, and then the others.

  • • •

  THE FAT MAN and his driver took Letty to where Pilate had been, but when they got back behind the stage, the circle of cars was gone.

  She unconsciously grabbed the hair above her ears and squeezed her fingers tight: “Oh my God, I let them go . . .”

  She stood up in the back of the cart, turned and looked down the length of the parking area, hoping to catch sight of the convoy before it got out to the highway. If she could get a tag number, any tag number . . . She saw taillights of cars turning onto the highway, but they were too far away to read any tag numbers and even if she had been able to see them, she couldn’t be sure they were the right cars.

  She got on the phone and Lucas answered instantly: “Dad, I found them, Pilate—and then I lost them. I think they’re on the road.”

  “Are they in one tight convoy?”

  “I don’t know. There are all kinds of cars coming and going,” she said.

  “You okay?”

  “Not exactly,” she said, pressing the gauze pad to her nose.

  • • •

  LUCAS GOT THERE fifteen minutes later, along with three sheriff’s cars and six deputies, all in plain clothes. Letty was waiting at the entrance to the parking lot, and when he got out of his car, Lucas said, “Aw, Jesus Christ, Letty . . .”

  He reached for her, to hug her, but she flinched away and said, “Don’t do that—I might have a cracked rib or something. Pilate kicked me. It hurts.”

  “Need to get you to the hospital, need to get you going.”

  Lucas looked frightened, something she really hadn’t seen before. Frantic, yes; frightened, no.

  Letty said, “I’m not gonna die, I just don’t want to be squeezed.”

  “Let me see your face.”

  After they did all the father-daughter stuff, Letty told Lucas and the ring of cops, “They were parked right here.”

  She told her story, about the disappearance of Skye and the attack by Pilate, and how the man in the John Deere saved her, and how just before they left, Pilate and his disciples had been in the trees across the entry road. She pointed past the parking area, to the straggly stand of pine and aspen. “. . . and they did a little dance, jumping up and down.”

  By the end of the story, she was shouting at them. The music had stepped up another notch, now as loud as a jet plane at takeoff, loud enough to feel it scratching at your face. The group onstage had set off whirling green laser lights that flashed up into the trees around the field, and made the branches seem to sparkle with thousands of emeralds.

  Lucas took a moment to walk away to the fat man in the John Deere and say something to him, and then slap him on the back, and say something else, and then he walked back to Letty and the deputies and said, “I’ll talk to that guy again. Now, where were they parked exactly? And you say there was another RV?”

  Before she could answer, he said to one of the deputies, “And I need one of you guys to run Letty into the clinic.”

  “Not yet, not yet,” Letty protested. “In a minute.”

  “Yet!” Lucas said. There was a copper taste in the back of his mouth, like blood. Letty was still bleeding from her nose and would have a major black eye: he could see it already.

  “In a minute,” she said again.

  Another cop car had come in and a seventh deputy joined them, this one in a uniform. They all had flashlights and they walked across the circular parking area inch by inch, and dumped out a plastic trash bin that sat at the edge of the parking lot, thirty or forty yards away, checking the contents
under the flashlights.

  As the deputies were doing that, Lucas scuffed around the fire, his own flashlight probing the dirt, looking for something, anything—a charge slip would be good, something with a credit card number—that might tell them something about Pilate’s group, and at the same time lecturing Letty. “Goddamnit, Letty, I know you’re grown up and all of that . . .”

  Letty pointed to the clump of trees. “I’m going over there, where they were dancing.”

  “You’re going back to town.”

  “In a minute.”

  He followed her and rolled on through the lecture as they got into the trees. Nothing there but a pile of brush, and some scuffed-up dirt. The strobe from the stage was flickering off the tree branches and aspen leaves and made it hard to focus on anything.

  Lucas walked back until the brush got dense enough to drag at his jeans, then shone his light deeper into the trees, saw nothing interesting, and walked back toward Letty. To get to her, he had to circle the edge of the pile of tree limbs, and caught a flash of yellow-white: the stump end of one of the tree limbs was fresh, recently ripped off a tree. He stopped and shone the light into the pile, and saw more fresh breaks.

  Letty asked, “What?”

  “These branches. Looks like somebody just broke them off the trees.” He shone the flash around the clump of evergreens and spotted a couple of places where the limbs had been pulled off, leaving a white gash in the bark. They moved the smaller branches and Letty, one arm clutched to her injured side, tugged away a bigger one. As she dragged it out, she spotted a streak of deep pumpkin orange, in the light of the flash. Her hands went to her mouth and she said, “Oh, no. No.”

  “What?”

  “Skye bought some orange socks at REI. We joked about it.”

  Lucas shone the light deeper into the pile, caught the flash of orange. “Okay. Get back. Get out of the trees.” Letty backed away and Lucas shouted at the deputies, who hurried over.

  Lucas said, “We might have something here. We don’t want to move any more stuff than we have to, if it turns out to be a crime scene. But there’s an orange . . . something . . . under these tree limbs. Might be a sock. Somebody hold the light.”